Unpicking Gender: The Social Construction of Gender in the Lancashire Cotton Weaving Industry, 1880-1914
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004
Jutta Schwarzkopf
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. The book will not be easily accessible for many interested in this subject, although the Lancashire County Library does have two copies to borrow. To make the Preston material more accessible, I have extracted the passages dealing with the Preston cotton industry and reproduced them below.
Jutta also wrote Women in the Chartist Movement (Studies in Gender History), but I have not been able to find a copy; neither the Lancashire County Library nor the University of Lancashire (formerly UCLan) has one.
Note:
Michael Savage, cited several times here, is the author of ‘The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics: The Labour Movement in Preston, 1880-1940’.
Elizabeth Roberts, also cited several times here, collected reports from Preston cotton industry workers for her Lancaster University oral history project.
The preponderance of women employed in the Preston cotton industry had implications for the men of the town: Victorian Preston’s Men from the Pru
About This Book
The Lancashire cotton industry doubtless counts among the most thoroughly researched industries in Britain. Cotton processing has attracted attention both as the pioneer of industrialization and the harbinger of industrial decline, in many ways typifying the development of the British economy from unchallenged global leader to the demise of large sectors of its manufacturing industry. Yet among the spate of book and articles published about the industry, there is a conspicuous lacuna. Gender, though rarely addressed specifically, permeates the industry’s historiography nonetheless. 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. Their experience of equality in the labour process both sensitized them to inequality elsewhere and empowered them to fight against it by showing it to be a product of society rather than nature. ‘Drawing on the examples provided by disenfranchized working-class men and middle-class women alike, they accounted for inequality in terms of their exclusion from the polity. In the process of holding their own against male co-workers, supervisory staff, employers, labour activists, politicians, and even many middle-class women, they evolved their own version of working-class femininity, which differed in important ways from the female domesticity that had a vibrant existence in labour rhetoric, but rarely beyond.
Chapter 1
This study is concerned with unravelling gender in a way not dissimilar to the weaver who, unpicking a fault in the cloth, neatly has to disentangle warp from weft. The legitimacy of, if not the need for, placing gender at the centre of this investigation derives from the fact that, along with class and ethnicity, gender is one of the chief axes along which inequalities of power are organized. Despite the wide variety of forms which it has assumed over time and across cultures, gender as a principle of classifying human beings is a universal, all-pervasive characteristic of society, in fact so much so that referring to human beings obscures the fact that they are always perceived as gendered. Consequently, history is understood as a series of events shaped by groups of gendered beings over time.
Chapter 2
In Preston, the cotton industry was predominantly female, as shown by the figures in this table relating to 1907.
This table shows the percentage of married or widowed women in the cotton industry:
Footnote 125:
In Blackburn, Ashton, Oldham, Burnley, Chorley, Haslingden and Preston, the proportion of married women operatives (not all of them necessarily weavers) with children under one year of age ranged in 1851 from 14.95 per cent to 27.45 per cent, the average being 21.03 per cent; see Hewitt (1953, pp.136-7). In Preston more specifically, 23 per cent of all wives with children worked, and 20 per cent of all wives with children under the age of 10 worked away from home in 1851; see Anderson (1971, p.71).
Chapter 3
The large number of females employed in the weaving sheds of Lancashire diligently attended their looms in order to make a contribution to family income that, as they knew only too well, greatly helped first their parents and subsequently themselves as mothers of a family to make ends meet. Although the need for females to carry on in paid employment for the best part of their lives was generally acknowledged by the cotton community, the tenacity with which women weavers clung to their jobs cannot be attributed to penury alone. They uniformly considered themselves to be performing a skilled trade that took considerable time to master. Their self-perception, however, clashed with the comparatively low esteem in which they were held by outsiders, including many historians, who regarded weaving as semi-skilled. As one engineer, who had been working in a weaving mill for some considerable time asserted, one of the big troubles about weaving is that it has never been recognized as the skilled job which it undoubtedly is’.
In 1886, one Preston mill was reported as making its tenters undergo a kind of apprenticeship before being allowed to manage a pair of looms of their own. Six young girls were put on a 12-loom range with a young man acting as a tutor, whom each of them had to pay 3s. out of her weekly earnings. The indignant tone of the report is presumably accounted for by the element of extra exploitation involved in this set-up, which would have been deeply resented by parents waiting for the extra income brought home by their children.
Although the family units to be found on the shopfloor need not be gender-homogeneous, in places with a majority of females among the weaving workforce, such as Preston, they often were. Given that the process of schooling newcomers in the rules of the shopfloor was part and parcel of the instruction youngsters received from their elders, and that solidarity and mutual support were salient features of women’s experience of work in the mill, Savage’s emphasis on patriarchal control exerted by tacklers in collusion with husbands and fathers over female weavers in Preston appears exaggerated. The examples of interventions in the labour process by male kin on behalf of female relatives, culled from the records of the Preston Weavers’ Association, need to be balanced against the examples, at least equally numerous, of mothers intervening on behalf of daughters. Moreover, it was mothers, rather than tacklers, whom daughters referred to as the ultimate authority on matters of work discipline.
Chapter 4
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.1 In the words of Patrick Joyce, in the cotton communities, ‘Work got under the skin of everyday life.’ The term ‘driving’, however, was reserved by cotton operatives and their unions for ways of pressurizing over and above the method of payment. The association with slave-driving that the term evoked only served to underline its pejorative meaning. In Lancashire, the person identified as the slave-driver was the overlooker or tackier. Occasionally, the similarity between tacklers and slave-drivers was made explicit when a group of weavers would present a particularly authoritarian overlooker with a whip.
… the secretary of the Blackburn Weavers’ Association was reported as saying at an anti-driving meeting in that town that ‘the system had sent hundreds of young lads to the army, and it caused hundreds of young girls to throw themselves away, body and soul, rather than contend with the conditions which prevailed’.
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.
[Quote from Preston union official]
‘When women and girls get home after the factory’s loosed they are so exhausted that they are not fit for much, and we are not likely to have a strong race of operatives in the coming generation.’
Chapter 5
In the Lancashire cotton weaving industry, the opening of the twentieth century saw the harbinger of potentially momentous change in the shape of a new piece of essential production technology, the Northrop loom. Though expensive to acquire, it held out the promise of enhancing the performance of the industry in Lancashire, which had come increasingly to feel the pinch of international competition, as argued in Chapter 2. Yet this did not make adoption of the loom a foregone conclusion. Manufacturers and trade unions, as well as male and female weavers, judged the machine variously to present a great opportunity, a grave danger or a total irrelevance. These judgments and the actions they set in motion were shaped by economic calculations, political considerations of the distribution of power between employers and unions and the constraints imposed by the specific organization of the industry. In all of these areas, the gender division of labour and power was central to the conditions of the industry as they had evolved since the onset of mechanization. As a consequence, gender played a crucial role in the ways in which the implementation of change was both attempted and resisted.
If the new loom allegedly did not represent a revolution, the proposed manner of working it most certainly did. Put into place, it would amount to the eventual defeminization of the weaving workforce. This was presented as both an individual and a national advantage, in that the relegation of married women weavers to the home would significantly reduce infant mortality. Coming as it did at a time of mounting national concern about population decline,20 the scheme proposed in the article could be sure to meet with widespread approval. National fears aroused by contemporary levels of infant mortality were carefully interwoven with working-class men’s status anxiety in the following issue of the Textile Mercury, which ran an article exposing Preston as the textile town with the highest death rate and attributing this to the ‘near exclusive employment of women’ in the local weaving sheds. Playing on male fears, the article depicted Preston men as unemployed in large numbers and dependent on the earnings of their wives, who in turn farmed their children out to unfit child-minders.
In order to combat the high rate of infant mortality, the local council, opting for the remedy commonly adopted elsewhere, had appointed two female inspectors who were to instruct working-class mothers on matters of infant hygiene. Without wishing to denigrate the course taken by the council, the journal
look[ed] with much more hope … to a coming change in the weaving industry – the introduction of the ‘automatic loom’ on an extensive scale … By men becoming weavers and earning more money at the work than is possible at present, 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.
By thus invoking the inversion of the gender division of labour and power with its adverse implications for masculinity, the Textile Mercury attempted to enlist male weavers’ support for the introduction of the Northrop.
This was not the first time that Preston had been portrayed as epitomizing the pernicious effects of conditions in the industry on both infant welfare and male authority in the family. During the mass strike of 1878, when 100 000 North Lancashire operatives stayed out for two months in an abortive attempt to ward off a reduction in wages, Thomas Banks, at that time president of the Preston weavers’ association, was reported as saying at a solidarity meeting in Ashton:
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.
This speech was highly reminiscent of the way in which, around 1840, J.R. Stephens, the Ashton-based Wesleyan minister and Chartist, had exhorted his male listeners to prevent their wives from going to the mill. While he had portrayed men’s dependence on their wives’ earnings as a contravention of God’s will and hence an indictment of the factory system,26 40 years later, concern about the threat posed to male authority by wage-earning wives was passed off as solicitude for the well-being of their offspring.
Preston labour politicians’ rhetoric, too, as Savage has shown, revolved around this theme. They would denounce wives’ employment in the local weaving sheds by presenting it as a result of male weavers’ pay failing to amount to a family wage, only to blame the absence of a bread-winner wage in a circular argument on the predominance of women in the industry’s workforce. J.T. Macpherson, Preston’s Labour MP from 1906 to 1910, soon after his election even suggested that he might have to ‘challenge’ women mill workers, asserting that ‘he made bold to say that wages and conditions would have been higher had the labour been confined to the [male] operatives’. The ultimate indictment of large-scale factory employment of married women was implied in the latter’s portrayal as the cause of women’s neglect of their duties as housewives and mothers, put forward by local labour activists in a bid to further their cause by inserting themselves in the continuing debate about the ‘future of the race’.
Middle-class observers searching for the causes of infant mortality were prone to scapegoating mothers working away from home. Their focus on female behaviour in breach of middle-class conceptions of femininity spared them the discomfort engendered by the recognition that their own unwillingness to improve conditions detrimental to people’s well-being might lie at the root of the evil. Yet the causal link they believed to have established between mothers’ factory work and infant mortality was refuted by contemporaries, and more recently by Carol Dyhouse. She has pointed out the lack of any clear link between levels of factory employment and infant mortality rates and the crucial difference made to the family’s level of comfort by mothers’ earnings, which enhanced infants’ chances of surviving. With particular regard to Preston, Elizabeth Roberts has shown that, over the period 1901 to 1911, although the proportion of married women in employment rose (from 30.5 per cent to 35 per cent), infant mortality actually declined (from an average of 236 per 1000 live births for the five-year period 1896-1900 to 161 for 1906-10).
Moreover, whilst infant mortality was undeniably high in Preston, and, though declining, consistently above the average for England and Wales, it was Burnley which topped the league of infant mortality rates. Here the local economy was virtually monopolized by cotton weaving and the town had among the highest rate of married women’s factory employment. The reasons for labour activists focusing concern on Preston must therefore be sought elsewhere, and are more likely to be found in the conditions of the local labour market characterized by a specific gender division of labour.
According to Savage, in the first half of the nineteenth century men had found employment in mule spinning and engineering, while women had been working in weaving. The subsequent decline in mule spinning, combined with failures in engineering, placed male workers in a precarious position, while the steadily expanding weaving sector provided stable employment opportunities for women. Savage has explained men’s failure to enter weaving upon the contraction of the male labour market by pointing to tacklers’ predilection for hiring female workers in order to safeguard their own position of authority on the shopfloor, while omitting to consider the loss of status entailed by any shift to weaving from male occupations regarded as skilled and commanding corresponding wage rates.
While May Abraham, one of the first female factory inspectors, who investigated the employment of women in the cotton industry, found only rare instances of women being preferred over men, the so-called ‘boycotting’ of male weavers did arouse a great deal of concern for its repercussions on the male headship of the family where, as at Preston, little alternative employment was available for men locally.
As resentment of the need for wives’ earnings to ensure family survival was not confined to the labour activists of Preston, employers could be certain that the prospect of a bread-winner wage would strike the right chord at least among union officials, if not their rank and file. Enmeshed as they were in the world of labour organizations with its strict code of masculinity, weavers’ representatives smarted under the inability of their membership to maintain their families without recourse to the earnings of kin, usually their own wives.
Chapter 6
‘Weaving Fair And Weaving Free – England’s Web of Destiny’ read the motto on a banner woven and carried by weavers1 who in 1908 had joined women from all over the country in London to demonstrate for their right to vote. The ability to divert, to purposes of their own, labour, material and machinery intended for generating mill owners’ profit derived from weavers’ mastery of the labour process, enabling them, within limits, to manipulate conditions of work to their own ends. They used their work-related skills to produce an item the object of which was to proclaim to the public at large the extent to which they saw themselves as determining how their country fared economically. Being employed in one of Britain’s key industries, they regarded her economic destiny as hinging upon both the volume and the quality of the produce of their labour. Yet their participation in the big London rally at the same time demonstrates that they felt their crucial role for their country’s economy to be at odds with the recognition denied them as citizens. Significantly, on that march, they adopted a stand, not only as disenfranchised women, but also, in a marked display of self-confidence, as female weavers claiming the recognition they felt was due to them in their double role of skilled workers and women.
True, representations of working women played an important role in the imagery deployed by the suffrage movement. While vigorously asserting women’s contribution to the productive work of the world, suffragists also, as Lisa Tickner has argued, enforced the representation of working-class women as victims by focusing on the sweated and oppressed worker. Nor was the use made by middleclass suffrage artists of working women’s oppression to further the progress of their own campaign free of an element of exploitation. Furthermore, it was common practice for suffragists to march the streets behind occupational banners demonstrating women’s ability successfully to operate outside the home. Yet most of these banners bore the emblems of careers that had newly opened up to middleclass women. The outstanding feature of the weavers’ banner was therefore its celebration of working women’s pride in their contribution to the well-being of the country articulated by the women themselves.’
Her comparative study of working-class women’s condition in Barrow, Lancaster and Preston, the only town in her sample with a sizeable cotton industry, has led Elizabeth Roberts to conclude that ‘patterns of women’s employment cannot be ignored in the study of role-relationships within marriage’. She thus echoes Thompson who, in his oral history study of the Edwardian period, has concluded that husband and wife quite commonly shared household work where an unusually high proportion of women were engaged in waged labour away from home, as in the textile districts and the Potteries. Conversely, he believes that the most rigid separation of roles occurred in regions dominated by heavy industry, such as mining, where men’s work was entirely segregated and physically exhausting. Those tended also to be areas with few employment opportunities for women, who were therefore expected to devote themselves full-time to servicing their menfolk. Accordingly, the importance attached by women to housework varied with their own involvement in waged work.
The mill was appreciated as a source of information not available elsewhere. Two weavers interviewed by Elizabeth Roberts stated that they learnt about ‘the facts of life’ at the mill, where they mixed with girls older, and presumably more sexually experienced, than themselves. While one of them maintained that ‘you grew up more at work than anywhere’, the other one emphasized that sex was talked about jokingly, which would also imply a certain degree of openness. It is not at all clear how, in the face of these statements, Elizabeth Roberts can conclude that ‘There is no evidence that women discussed sexual topics in the mill.’ Yet at the same time there was a high degree of localism even in a seemingly homogeneous region like the cotton district. Localism may account for Preston, which had an exceptionally high fertility rate in spite of large-scale employment of married women in the cotton mills. Savage has shown that the majority of the married female cotton workers had husbands in well-paid jobs in cotton or metal production. In these families there was a marked discrepancy in income between husband and wife, and spouse relations were less egalitarian. At least equally relevant may have been the sizeable Anglo-Catholic community with a peculiar fertility regime of its own that Preston boasted in contrast to other Lancashire weaving towns.
Yet when their opponents seized upon male dominance to denounce trade union activities, the Cotton Factory Times was quick to repudiate them. Thus, when some ‘middle-class people’ complained that strikes in the cardroom and the weaving shed had been solely instigated by union secretaries, who ‘had the women and girls in “leading strings”, and that the latter could not reason out the merits of a dispute like men’, the paper’s commentator made the following rejoinder: ‘The idea that the weaver and tenter do not understand their own grievances is not an uncommon one among a certain class; but the initiated will smile at the absurdity of the idea.’ What started off as apparent praise of women’s own ability to assess conditions at work swiftly turned into the reassurance of middle-class opponents that male trade unionists kept a close check on women. No strike, they were assured, could be called without the consent of either the local committee or the Amalgamation’s Executive, both exclusively male. Clearly, this emphasis on male dominance was aimed at enhancing trade unions’ respectability in the eyes of their opponents.
On occasion, the recalcitrance of female workers had to be acknowledged. In 1886, one Albert Simpson, a spinner, manufacturer and merchant at Preston, had appeared as a witness before the Commission on the Depression of Trade and Industry. He had taken the opportunity to complain about disputes, from which trade was suffering badly. As a solution he proposed that the settling of disputes be left to heads of families who, he believed, behaved more responsibly. When asked by the commissioners how he would deal with it if the women and children employed in the industry preferred not to leave the settling of disputes to heads of families, he replied: ‘Then it would have to go on as it is’, thereby implying a significant degree of influence on the part of juvenile and female labour.
At Preston, where 73.5 per cent of the weaving union membership was female, until the 1890s the local union had organized only about a quarter of the industry’s workforce, representing mainly the interests of male weavers. Initially, the union had tried to erect craft barriers around weaving. Having failed, it embarked upon a recruiting drive deliberately aimed at women in order to ensure that they received full rates and were not given preference over men.161 As women figured only as pawns in men’s union strategy, the first woman was nominated for the committee only prior to the First World War. Yet the men flatly refused to have her.162 Only after 1918 did the union become more open to women.163Although this is a particularly blatant example, women were generally not made welcome.
[Roberts 1981 respondent C1P, pp.13, 16,20]
A striking display of male solidarity with a party comrade and militant suffragette occurred in Preston. This local weaver had been sent to prison for insisting on seeing the MP for the town. On returning to her job in the mill, she found herself ostracized by her co-workers, who thoroughly disapproved of her militancy. Presumably through her acquaintance with a tackier and fellow-member of the Independent Labour Party, she managed to obtain work at another mill. What is more, this tackier put her on four looms to ensure good weekly wages for her.
For the proliferation of fish-and-chip shops in Preston, where in 1892 there was one shop to 1530 people, while by 1936 the ratio had increased to one to 345, see Roberts (1982b, p.162).