Unpicking gender in Preston’s cotton mills

Unpicking Gender: The Social Construction of Gender in the Lancashire Cotton Weaving Industry, 1880-1914 is the title of a book by Jutta Schwarzkopf that draws a lot of its evidence from Preston.

I read this book when gathering material about women workers in the Preston cotton mills earlier in the 19th century. While outside my period, I found its focus on the role of women in the cotton industry both useful and enlightening.

Jutta makes considerable use of evidence about the Preston cotton industry that should also be of interest to anyone studying Preston’s suffragette history. She sees the working-class women’s awareness of the gross inequalities in their working and home lives as spurring them to engage with the suffragette cause:

‘This study tackles head-on the notion of gender within the cotton industry during the period 1880-1914, not so much to trace its effects on the industry itself, but instead concentrating on the ways gender radicalized particularly the female workers in the Lancashire mills.

‘In so doing, it promotes the view that it was women weavers’ experience of the way in which gender inequality in the labour process clashed with varying degrees of inequality in the other spheres of their lives that caused many of them to organize for the franchise.’

In total, there are some 4,000 words relating to Preston’s female textile workers. Here’s a flavour of what’s included:

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‘The Driving Evil
‘Driving was the term employed in Lancashire cotton weaving to denote methods of bringing extra pressure to bear on workers to increase output. Given that weavers were paid by the piece, there was a strong incentive to drive themselves as hard as they could to maximize earnings. The need to do so became so deeply ingrained that not even in old age would they slacken their efforts to produce more than the average amount of cloth per week.

A case of suicide in Darwen highlighted what could happen when ‘driving’ took its toll:

‘That this implied not only suicide but also prostitution was made clear by a statement from a leading official of the Preston weavers’ union. The allegation that the factory system was driving women into prostitution harked back to the 1840s, when the Chartists had used it as an indictment of industrialization.’

Then there was the notion that female employment was depriving men of their proper role, with the hope that if men became weavers:

‘… they will be able to take their proper place as the bread-winners of the family and keep their wives at home, which is their proper sphere. It has long been a reproach among the operatives in Lancashire that in Preston the natural duties of the sexes have been inverted, the men staying at home ‘to mind the baby’, while the women go to the mill to keep the family.’

This was what a leading Preston trade unionist, Thomas Banks, had to say in 1878:

‘A great deal of misery at home and over-production in the mills was caused by weavers allowing their wives to go to the mill, and … if it were at all possible … [they should] keep the wives out of the mill. Let them suckle their infants at home, for a great deal of infant mortality was caused by the neglect of the mothers who had to attend their work at the mill and could not give their children the attention they required … [because] the husbands could not earn enough money in the mill to keep their wives and children.’

There’s a great deal more in this vein (Preston’s male trade unionists seem to have been an extremely misogynistic bunch).

A couple of tables from the book show how important the employment of women (married, widowed and single) was to Preston’s cotton mills

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The book is not easily accessible, although the Lancashire County Library does have two copies. To make the Preston material more accessible, I have extracted the passages dealing with the Preston cotton industry and added them to the Preston History Library: Unpicking gender in Preston’s cotton mills