[7] The Factory System, Tenth Census, II., 533-537.
[8] A. E. Kennelly, “Electricity in the Household,” Scribner’s Magazine, January, 1890; E. M. H. Merrill, “Electricity in the Kitchen,” American Kitchen Magazine, November, 1895.
[9] In Massachusetts, in 1885, the number of women employed in manufacturing industries exceeded the number of men in eight towns. These were Dalton, Dudley, Easthampton, Hingham, Ipswich, Lowell, Tisbury, and Upton. Census of Massachusetts, II., 176-187.
A weaver in Lawrence, Massachusetts, reported in 1882: “One of the evils existing in this city is the gradual extinction of the male operative.” Fall River, Lowell, and Lawrence, p. 10. Reprinted from Thirteenth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, p. 202.
In Massachusetts, in 1875, women predominated in fifteen occupations, eleven of them manufacturing industries. In 1885 there were also fifteen occupations in which women exceeded men in numbers, twelve of them manufacturing. These were manufacturers of buttons and dress-trimmings, carpetings, clothing, cotton goods, fancy articles, hair work, hosiery and knit goods, linen, mixed textiles, silk and silk goods, straw and palm-leaf goods, and worsted goods. Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor, 1889, pp. 556-557.
[10] George Eliot in Felix Holt speaks of Mrs. Transome as engaged in “a little daily embroidery—that soothing occupation of taking stitches to produce what neither she nor any one else wanted was then the resource of many a well-born and unhappy woman.”
[11] Eddis, p. 63.
[12] DeFoe, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack; Mrs. Alpha Behn, The Widow Ranter.
[13] Sir Joshua Child, pp. 183-184.
[14] Charles Davenant, II., 3. Velasco, the minister of Spain to England, writes to Philip III. from London, March 22, 1611: “Their principal reason for colonizing these parts is to give an outlet to so many idle and wretched people as they have in England, and thus to prevent the dangers that might be feared from them.” Brown, p. 456.