Women’s Roles in the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution had a profound effect on the lives of women. In the pre-industrial economy, most women worked in the home, producing goods for their own families or for sale in the local market. With the rise of the factory system, many women moved into wage labor, working in the new textile mills, in the clothing trades, and in other industries.

Women in the New Factories

The rise of the factory system created a new role for women as industrial workers. The textile mills, in particular, employed large numbers of women, since the new machines were particularly suited to the dexterity and patience of female workers. The article on women in textile mills describes the experience of women in the mills in more detail. The article on the Lowell girls describes the distinctive experience of women in the American textile industry.

Women in the Clothing Trades

In addition to the textile mills, women were also heavily represented in the clothing trades, which were among the most important industries of the new industrial economy. The clothing trades employed millions of women, both in factories and in the home, and they produced the clothes that clothed the new industrial working class.

Women in the New Professions

The Industrial Revolution also created new opportunities for women in the professions. As the industrial economy grew, it created a demand for teachers, nurses, secretaries, and other professional workers, and many of these positions were filled by women. The growth of the women’s colleges in the late nineteenth century, including Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, and Bryn Mawr in the United States, and Newnham and Girton in Britain, opened up new opportunities for women to receive higher education and to enter the professions.

The Family and the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution had important effects on the family and on the position of women within it. The rise of the wage economy and the factory system drew women out of the home and into the workplace, and it created new tensions within the family about the role of women, the division of labor, and the authority of the male head of household.

The Women’s Rights Movement

The changing position of women in the industrial economy contributed to the development of the women’s rights movement. The movement, which grew out of the anti-slavery movement and the campaign for women’s suffrage, demanded equal rights for women in education, employment, and politics.

The Numbers: Women in the Industrial Workforce

The number of women in the British industrial workforce grew rapidly in the early nineteenth century, and by 1851 the Census recorded 2.4 million women in work, of whom perhaps 850,000 were in manufacturing, with 550,000 in the textile industry alone. The 1901 Census recorded 4.0 million women in work, of whom 1.4 million were in manufacturing and 700,000 in the textile industry. The female labor force participation rate rose from 21 percent in 1851 to 32 percent in 1901 and 35 percent in 1911. The American figures are similar: the 1870 Census recorded 1.8 million women in manufacturing, 18 percent of the manufacturing workforce; the 1900 Census recorded 2.3 million women, 20 percent. The largest single employer of women in the United States was the textile industry, with 250,000 female workers in 1900, followed by the clothing trades, with 400,000 women in 1900. The 1900 Census also recorded 1.1 million women in domestic service, the largest single occupation for American women. The female labor force was concentrated in a small number of industries — textiles, clothing, shoes, food processing, printing, and teaching — and the entry of women into the professions (medicine, law, accounting, journalism) did not begin in significant numbers until the late nineteenth century. The history of women’s work in the Industrial Revolution is the subject of Ivy Pinchbeck’s Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (1930) and of Louise Tilly and Joan Scott’s Women, Work, and Family (1978).

The Lowell Girls and the “Mill Girls”

The most famous single group of women workers in the American Industrial Revolution were the “Lowell girls,” the young unmarried women from the surrounding New England farms who worked in the mills of the Waltham-Lowell system from the 1820s to the 1850s. The Lowell system, organized by the Boston Associates (Patrick Tracy Jackson, Nathan Appleton, and others), employed perhaps 8,000 women at its peak in the late 1840s, and the women worked for two to four years before returning to their home communities to marry. The conditions of the Lowell system — the boarding houses, the churches, the libraries, the literary magazines, the wage of $2-3 per week — were distinctive and have been the subject of intense historical debate. The “mill girls” published the Lowell Offering (1840-1845) and the New England Offering (1847-1850), the second of which was the first literary magazine published by women workers in the United States. The Lowell girls organized the first major strike of female factory workers in the United States in February 1834, when more than 1,200 women walked off the job to protest a wage cut. The system began to break down in the 1840s, as the mill companies replaced the native-born women with Irish immigrant labor, and by 1860 the boarding-house system had largely disappeared. The history of the Lowell girls is the subject of Harriet Robinson’s Loom and Spindle (1898) and of Thomas Dublin’s Women at Work (1979).

The “Sweated Trades” and Homework

The clothing trades were the largest single employer of women in the British and American economies of the late nineteenth century, and they were organized on a basis very different from the factory. The “sweated trades” — the tailoring, dressmaking, and shirt-making trades — were based on a putting-out system in which the contractor supplied the materials, the homeworker did the work in her own home, and the contractor collected the finished goods for delivery. The conditions of the homeworkers were notoriously bad: long hours, low pay, no job security, no protection from the weather or the landlord, and no right to organize. The 1888 Bryant and May strike and the 1889 London dock strike were the first major labor actions of the sweated trades, and they were the precursors of the more general unionization of the late 1880s and 1890s. The 1907 Trade Boards Act, which set minimum wages in four sweated trades, was the first major piece of legislation to address the problem. The American counterpart was the system of “industrial homework” in the New York garment industry, famously documented in the 1909 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory strike and the 1911 Triangle fire, which killed 146 workers and led to the establishment of the New York Factory Investigating Commission.

The Campaign for Women’s Suffrage

The Industrial Revolution created the conditions for the women’s suffrage movement by bringing large numbers of women into the industrial workforce and by giving them a public voice in the workplace and in the political campaigns of the period. The first major petition for women’s suffrage in Britain was presented to Parliament in 1866 by John Stuart Mill, and the first women’s suffrage committee, the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage, was founded in 1867. The American movement, founded at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, was closely tied to the abolitionist movement, and the two campaigns were linked by the political activism of women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The British movement split in the early 1900s between the suffragists, led by Millicent Fawcett, who favored constitutional methods, and the suffragettes, led by Emmeline Pankhurst, who favored direct action. The British Representation of the People Act of 1918 gave the vote to women over 30 who met certain property qualifications; the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 gave the vote to women on the same terms as men (at 21). The American 19th Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920, gave the vote to American women on the same terms as men.

The Historiography: Gender and Industrialization

The interpretation of women’s role in the Industrial Revolution has been a major site of historical debate since the publication of Ivy Pinchbeck’s Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution (1930). The standard account, derived from the work of Pinchbeck and of the Hammonds, treated the entry of women into the factory as a major rupture in the older domestic economy. The revisionist case, associated with Maxine Berg’s The Age of Manufactures (1985) and with Pat Hudson’s The Genesis of Industrial Capital (1986), argued that the standard account overstated the rupture and that women’s work in the pre-industrial economy was more important than the older historians had allowed. The most recent literature, including Anna Clark’s The Struggle for the Breeches (1995) and Lynn Hunt’s The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992), has emphasized the multiplicity of women’s experience in the period and the way in which gender, class, and region interacted. The debate matters because it shapes our understanding of the relationship between industrialization and the family, and it has implications for the larger question of how we measure the costs and benefits of economic change.

The Long-Term Effect on the Family and the Household

The Industrial Revolution had profound and lasting effects on the family and the household, and the debate about the effect is one of the most enduring in the field. The traditional view, derived from the work of Philippe Ariès’s L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (1960) and the older family-history literature, was that the Industrial Revolution produced the “modern” family: a small, nuclear, emotionally intensive family, with strong distinctions between the male breadwinner and the female homemaker. The revisionist view, advanced by Edward Shorter in The Making of the Modern Family (1975) and by Lawrence Stone in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977), argued that the modern family was already emerging in the 17th and 18th centuries, and that the Industrial Revolution accelerated rather than initiated the change. The more recent literature, including Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes (1987) and E. P. Thompson’s essays on the working-class family, has emphasized the multiplicity of family forms in the 19th century and the way in which class, region, and religion shaped the experience of the family. The debate matters because it shapes our understanding of the relationship between economic change and social change, and it has implications for the larger question of how we measure the costs and benefits of economic change.

The Contemporary World: Women, Work, and the Global Economy

The Industrial Revolution, in the longer view, was the beginning of a long process of change in the position of women in the economy. The global female labor force participation rate has been rising for two centuries: from perhaps 20 percent in 1800, to 30 percent in 1900, to 40 percent in 1950, to about 47 percent in 2020. The 2020 figure, while still well below the male rate of 72 percent, is the highest in recorded history, and the long-run trend is one of steady increase. The increase has been driven by the decline of the agricultural sector, the rise of the service sector, the expansion of the public sector, the rise of the modern welfare state, the expansion of higher education for women, and the development of the contraceptive technologies that have allowed women to control their fertility. The 2019 World Bank data on women’s economic participation show that the highest female labor force participation rates are in sub-Saharan Africa (about 65 percent), where the agricultural sector is still dominant, and the lowest are in the Arab states (about 20 percent). The question of how to increase female labor force participation, and how to reduce the gender pay gap, is one of the central questions of the 21st-century global economy, and it is a direct descendant of the question that was first posed by the industrial cities of the 1830s. The contemporary literature, including the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law reports and the UN’s Gender Inequality Index, is the modern version of the older feminist analysis of the Industrial Revolution.

Women’s Rights and the Industrial Revolution

The women’s rights movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a direct consequence of the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution. The first International Women’s Congress was held in Paris in 1878, and the International Council of Women, founded in 1888 by May Wright Sewall, brought together the women’s organizations of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and other countries. The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), founded in 1890 by the merger of the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association, was the principal American suffrage organization, and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), founded in 1897 by Millicent Fawcett, was the principal British organization. The British suffragettes, led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, adopted the strategy of direct action, including the famous 1913 Derby Day protest at Epsom, the 1914 window-smashing campaign, and the policy of arson attacks on unoccupied buildings. The British suffragettes suspended their campaign during the First World War, and the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which gave the vote to women over 30 who met certain property qualifications, was a reward for the wartime contribution of the women’s movement. The American 19th Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920, gave the vote to American women on the same terms as men. The 20th-century women’s movement, including the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s and the #MeToo movement of 2017, are the direct descendants of the long campaign that began with the Industrial Revolution.

Conclusion: A Long Revolution

The transformation of women’s role in the economy that began with the Industrial Revolution has continued into the 21st century. The factory work of the 19th century, the office work of the 20th century, and the service work of the 21st century have successively expanded the range of occupations open to women, and the educational reforms of the late 19th and 20th centuries have given women access to the professions. The 21st-century debates about equal pay, parental leave, child care, sexual harassment, and the representation of women in politics and business are the latest chapter in a long story that began in the cotton mills of 18th-century England. The story is, in the end, a story of a long revolution: the slow, uneven, and contested transformation of women’s role in the family, the workplace, and the public sphere. The Industrial Revolution, in the long view, was the beginning of that long revolution, and the experience of the women workers of the 19th century is the first chapter of the modern history of women’s work.

Key Dates in Women’s Industrial History

A short chronology of the principal dates in women’s industrial history:

1840s — Peak of the Lowell girls’ system, with 8,000 women in the mills
1848 — Seneca Falls Convention, the first women’s rights convention
1850 — Women’s labor force participation in Britain reaches 21 percent
1870 — First woman to vote in a U.S. election (in Wyoming territory)
1888 — Matchgirls’ strike in London
1900 — 1.4 million British women in manufacturing
1911 — Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York
1914 — Ford’s $5 daily wage, indirectly raising men’s wages
1918 — British Representation of the People Act gives the vote to some women
1920 — U.S. 19th Amendment gives the vote to women
1928 — British Equal Franchise Act gives the vote to women on equal terms
2020 — Global female labor force participation reaches 47 percent

In this section

The Lowell Girls The story of the Lowell girls, the young women who worked in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, and their distinctive experience in the American Industrial Revolution. Women in the Textile Mills The experience of women in the new textile mills of the Industrial Revolution, the conditions of their work, and the impact of factory work on their lives and families.