Other Industries.—If information respecting the traditional employments of women in the linen and woollen trades is sparse and unsatisfactory, much more is it difficult to trace out their conditions in other industries of a less “womanly” character. Yet even in such callings it is sufficiently evident that women were employed. Traill’s Social England tells us of women making ropes as early as the thirteenth century. Women are known to have worked in the Derbyshire lead mines, temp. Edward II. They washed and cleaned the ore at 1d. a day, and were assisted by four girls at ¾d. a day, men being employed at the same time at 1½d. a day. Mr. Lapsley, in his account of a fifteenth-century ironworks, records that two women, wives of the smith and foreman respectively, performed miscellaneous tasks, from breaking up the iron-stone to blowing the bellows. In 1652 a Parliamentary commission found that many of the surface workers employed in dressing the ore (i.e. freeing it from the earth and spar with which it was mixed) were women and children. An Account of Mines, dated 1707, tells us that vast numbers of poor people at that time were employed in “working of mines, the very women and children employed therein, as well as the men, especially in the mines of lead.” Women worked in coal-mining at Winterton, “for lack of men,” in 1581, and with children were employed in the “great coal-works and workhouses” started by Sir Humphrey Mackworth at Neath. They evidently worked underground, as several deaths of women in mine explosions are recorded. In 1770 Arthur Young found women working in lead mines and earning as much as 1s. a day, a man earning 1s. 3d.
In Birmingham trades, especially the making of buttons and other small articles, women were employed as far back as we can find any records. At Burslem, Young found women working in the potteries, earning 5s. to 8s. a week. Near Bristol he found women and girls employed in a copper works for melting copper ore, and making the metal into pins, pans, etc. At Gloucester he found great numbers of women working in the pin manufacture. In the Sheffield plated ware trade he found girls working, but does not mention women. Of the Sheffield trades generally he says that women and girls earn very good wages, “much more than by spinning wool in any part of the kingdom.”
It is unfortunate that we have, so far, very little information in regard to women’s work in non-textile trades previous to the industrial revolution. It is tolerably safe to infer that the above scattered hints indicate a state of things neither new nor exceptional. There can be little doubt that women constantly worked in these trades, either assisting the head of the family, or as a wage-worker for an outside employer. But we know so little that we cannot attempt to enlarge on the subject.
CHAPTER II.
WOMEN AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.
| He! an die Arbeit! Alle von hinnen! Hurtig hinab! Aus den neuen Schachten schafft mir das Gold! Euch grüsst die Geissel, grabt ihr nicht rasch! Das keiner mir müssig bürge mir Mime, sonst birgt er sich schwer meines Armes Schwunge: ···· Zögert ihr noch? Zaudert wohl gar? Zittre und zage, gezähmtes Heer! Wagner, Das Rheingold. |
The cotton trade is the industry most conspicuously identified with the series of complex changes that we call the Industrial Revolution. Its history before that period is comparatively unimportant; we have therefore left it over from the previous chapter to the present.
Cottons are mentioned as a Manchester trade in the sixteenth century, but it seems probable that these were really a coarse kind of woollen stuff, and not cotton at all. Cotton wool had, it is true, been imported from the East for some time, but was used only for candle wicks and such small articles, not for cloth. In the Poor Law of Elizabeth, cotton is not included among the articles that might be provided by overseers to “set the poor on work.” The first authoritative mention of the cotton manufacture of Manchester occurs in Lewis Roberts’ Treasure of Traffike. It appears from this tract, which was published in 1641, that the Levant Company used to bring cotton wool to London, which was afterwards taken to Manchester and worked up into “fustians, vermilions, dimities, and other such stuffs.” The manufacture had therefore become an established fact by the middle of the seventeenth century, but its growth was not rapid for some time. Owing to the rudeness of the spinning implements used fine yarn could not be spun and fine goods could not be woven. In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, however, Manchester and the cotton manufacture began to increase very markedly in size and activity, and the resulting demand for yarn served to stimulate the invention of machinery. “The weaver was continually pressing upon the spinner. The processes of spinning and weaving were generally performed in the same cottage, but the weaver’s own family could not supply him with a sufficient quantity of weft, and he had with much pains to collect it from neighbouring spinsters. Thus his time was wasted, and he was often subjected to high demands for an article on which, as the demand exceeded the supply, the spinner could put her own price.” Guest says it was no uncommon thing for a weaver to walk three or four miles in a morning, and call on five or six spinners, before he could collect weft to serve him for the remainder of the day, and when he wished to weave a piece in a shorter time than usual, a new ribbon or a gown was necessary to quicken the exertions of the spinner. The difficulty was intensified in 1738 by Kay’s invention of the fly-shuttle, which enabled the weaver to do twice as much work with a given effort, and consequently of course to use up yarn in a similar proportion. John Hargreaves, a Blackburn weaver, contrived a spinning machine which multiplied eightfold the productive power of one spinner, and was, moreover, simple enough to be worked by a child. Subsequent developments and improvements were effected by Paul Wyatt and Arkwright, and the latter being a good business man, unlike some other inventors, made money out of his ideas.