Spinning the Web

Women workers have never had complete equality with male workers because feminine labour has always been considered of a secondary nature. Before and during the early part of the Industrial Revolution the main occupation for men was in agriculture, for women in domestic service. By 1830 this was still the case with working in cotton mills a joint second most common occupation for both sexes. A third of all cotton mill workers were children because their labour was so cheap. Of the rest a large number were women because their labour was cheaper than that of a man. However, women were not considered suitable for book keeping, administrative, technical, supervisory or managerial posts.

'We visited one of the biggest cotton mills. A steam engine in the basement powers almost all the innumerable wheels and spindles which are fitted on many floors built one above the other like a tower...in all of them we saw some women knotting together the yarns which rarely tore off from the constantly turning spindles, putting nappies on children and winding the yarn which had been spun. In one hall the still unspun cotton was cleaned; it lay on large tables in big square pieces looking like cotton wool; a number of women and girls armed with a thin stick in each hand were happily thrashing it...'
(Schopenhauer, Johanna. Sammmtliche Schriften. Frankfurt, 1830)

In the days when the textile industry was cottage based, women did the spinning (hence the term 'spinster' which is still in use for an unmarried woman), children carded and wound the yarn while the man of the house did the weaving. In the cotton mills the job of the spinner was given to the men since it was now seen as one of the most responsible jobs and many of the other mechanical and repetitive tasks were considered beneath him. The foreman of each shed or department was always a man, many of whom were prepared to use physical threats or violence towards their workers in order to achieve targets.

Women worked the same hours in the mills that men did but when they got home they could not relax. Men expected to go to the pub or the music hall or perhaps to a union meeting or an evening class. Sharing the household chores was not on their agenda and male leisure was bought at female expense. Women were expected to take sole responsibility for cooking, cleaning, washing and caring for their family. They would do a ten or twelve hour day in the mill, come home, bake bread, pies and cakes, prepare an evening meal, tend to their children, tidy their home. Activities such as ironing and sewing were viewed as relaxation.

In the mills women workers had no privacy. There were no rest rooms or wash rooms set aside for females. They got no special treatment even when they were pregnant. Paid maternity leave was still in the future. Women were expected to just have their babies and go straight back to work, a fact graphically illustrated by The Factory Act of 1891 which had to prohibit employers from employing women workers within four weeks of giving birth. Many working women survived the harsh conditions and hard work meted out to them by male management through female bonding and friendships, and a shared sense of humour, all of which remained evident until the final decline of the cotton industry in the 1960s.

It wasn't until after the 1893 Married Women's Property Act was passed that married working women actually had control over their own earnings. Women still did not have equal opportunities or education and they still had no vote. Equal pay for equal jobs was also still very much in the future. Women's' rights organisations and the suffrage movement were supported by thousands of women workers who had suffered discrimination on account of their sex. Ironically it was the ability of women workers to take over men's jobs during the years of the Great War (1914-1918) while the men were away, and to carry them out successfully and conscientiously, that earned women the right to vote.

GG

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