Women in the Textile Mills: The New Industrial Working Woman

The textile mills of the Industrial Revolution created a new role for women as industrial workers. Hundreds of thousands of women worked in the new mills, performing a variety of tasks alongside men and children.

The Entry of Women into the Mills

The entry of women into the textile mills was driven by several factors. The new machines, particularly the spinning jenny and the power loom, were particularly well suited to the dexterity and patience of female workers, and they could be operated effectively by workers with relatively little training. The mill owners, who were looking for cheap labor, found that women would work for lower wages than men, and they hired women in large numbers.

The Work of Women in the Mills

The work that women did in the mills varied depending on the type of mill and the kind of machinery. In the cotton mills, women were often employed as weavers, operating the power loom, or as spinners, operating the spinning mules. They were also employed as carders, drawing out the raw cotton, and as doffers, replacing the full bobbins on the spinning machines with empty ones.

The work in the mills was demanding, both physically and mentally. The machines were loud and dangerous, and the women had to keep up with the pace of the machines, often for twelve to fourteen hours a day. The air in the mills was often thick with dust and lint, and many women developed respiratory diseases as a result.

The Conditions in the Mills

The conditions in the early textile mills were often brutal. The working day was long, typically twelve to sixteen hours, and the work was physically demanding and often dangerous. The machines had no safety guards, and accidents were common, with women losing fingers, hands, and sometimes their lives.

The Resistance of Women Workers

Women workers in the mills did not accept their conditions passively. They organized strikes, petitions, and other forms of protest, and they played an important role in the development of the British and American labor movements.

In Britain, women textile workers were among the most active trade unionists in the early nineteenth century. The spinners’ unions of Lancashire, for example, organized a number of important strikes.

In the United States, women textile workers were also active in the labor movement. The Lowell girls, the young women who worked in the mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, organized several strikes in the 1830s and 1840s.

The Continuing Question

The unresolved question about women in the textile mills is the one that has been raised about every other category of 19th-century industrial worker: did the factory work liberate women, or did it exploit them? The traditional answer, going back to the 1840s’ Lowell Offering and given its modern form in the work of Anna Clark’s The Struggle for the Breeches (1995), is closer to the first: factory work gave women wages, gave them independence from the family economy, and gave them an entry into the public sphere that the pre-industrial domestic system had not. The revisionist answer, developed in the work of feminist historian Ivy Pinchbeck and given a more pointed form in the recent comparative literature on women and industrial work, is closer to the second: the wage work was poorly paid, the working conditions were bad, and the independence that the wage work offered was largely absorbed by the obligations of the working-class family economy. The interesting current question, raised in the work of economic historian Jane Humphries and developed in the recent literature on the gender pay gap, is whether the 19th-century factory work was a net positive for women’s economic position (because it gave them an independent income) or a net negative (because it created a low-paid, gender-segregated labor market that has been difficult to break out of). The honest answer, given the comparative data, is probably: both, in different proportions in different periods. The 1820s-1840s factory work was probably a net positive (because the wage was a substantial share of household income and the alternatives were worse); the 1860s-1890s factory work was probably a net negative (because the wage was a small share of household income, the working conditions were deteriorating, and the gender-segregated labor market was solidifying). The long-term legacy of the 19th-century factory work for women, in other words, is more complicated than either the optimistic or the pessimistic reading suggests.

Selected Sources

Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 (1930).
Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (1995).
Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (1979).
Mary Blewett, Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780–1910 (1988).