Female Labour Power: Women Workers' Influence on Business Practices in the British and American Cotton Industries, 1780–1860

Janet Greenlees

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351936736
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Britain and America were the first two countries with mechanised cotton manufacturing industries, the first major factory systems of production and the first major employers of women outside of the domestic environment. The combination of being new wage earners in the first trans-national industry and their public prominence as workers makes these women's role as employees significant; they set the early standard for women as waged labour, to which later female workers were compared. This book analyses how women workers influenced patterns of industrial organization and offers a new perspective on relationships between gender and work and on industrial development. The primary theme of the study is the attempt to control the work process through co-operation, coercion and conflict between women workers, their male counterparts and manufacturers. Drawing upon examples of women's subversive activities and attitudes toward the discourses of labour, the book emphasizes the variety of women's work experiences. By using this diversity of experience in a comparative way, the book reaches conclusions that challenge a variety of historical concepts, including separate spheres of influence for men and women and related economic theories, for example that women were passive players in the workplace, evolutionary theories with respect to industrial development, and business culture within and between the two industries. Overall it provides the fresh approach that highlights and explains women's agency as operatives and paid workers during industrialization.

Chapter 1
Women, Work and Cotton Manufacturing

This book analyses the impact that women cotton workers had on industrial development in Great Britain and the United States between 1780 and 1860. It argues that a broader framework than those currently offered by historians is needed to explain and understand women’s role in the industrial process of both Great Britain and the United States – one that allows for the complications of work and business and includes many definitions of ‘best practice’. Current historiography about the women cotton workers of both Britain and America emphasizes social concerns and defining how women’s lives and those of their families were changed by their waged labour outside the domestic environment. Explaining women’s employment patterns with a single cause, such as patriarchy, occupational segregation, or simplistic notions of choice does not allow for the complex determinants involved. This book reverses these debates and examines how these women sought to control their working lives. It is not intended to be an obviously feminist history, although I believe it will contribute to that literature. Rather, this book should change some views about women’s experiences of waged work through its examination of the variety of encounters women had working in the cotton mills. It highlights and explains the differences in women’s agency as operatives and workers in the process of industrialization and developing perceptions of women’s work. Furthermore, it sheds light on the development of relations between labour and management, male and female workers, and government and industry.

During the transition from domestic manufacturing to the factory production of thread and cloth there were no established factory managerial styles, gender divisions of labour, patterns for organizing workers, wage rates, working hours or working conditions. Consequently, workers must have influenced the patterns of industrial development. Working arrangements developed alongside the growth of factory manufacturing. There were no standards of best practice. Rather, best practice was created by both workers and manufacturers in areas of technology and managerial knowhow, improvements to technology and work efficiency learned by trial and error, and workers’ acquisition of job specific skills. Moreover, best practice could also incorporate gender and perceptions of ability. Consequently, there were many methods and rates of achieving what individual firms believed to be best practice. Simply by participating in this early factory workforce, women played a critical role in the development of managerial style and best practice. The combination of being new wage earners in the first transnational industry and the women’s public prominence as workers in both countries makes these women’s role as employees significant. They set the early standard for women as waged labour, to which later female workers were compared.

The comparative framework has been adopted to highlight the extent to which women’s influence on manufacturing was shaped by peculiarly regional or national characteristics. This approach allows for analysis of both continuities and changes in women’s role as workers during the process of industrial development under divergent types of government systems, cultural and commercial environments. The latter includes technological choices that affected both the organization of workers and the skill requirements, market orientation and the current state of the labour market. It is therefore misleading to generalize about women cotton workers in and within the two industries, since location and firm size necessitated that manufacturers faced different challenges regarding the available labour and natural resources, transport and financial reserves. Hence, this study does not aim to view American women mill workers through the British perspective or vice versa. Rather, it will highlight and explain women’s varied agency as operatives and workers in the process of industrialization and the developing perceptions of women’s work by placing them within their appropriate economic, social, historical and political contexts. Therefore, this book explores the importance of gender in the formation of factory decision-making in its historical context. However, path dependency, whereby organizational and technical choices were determined by internal factors, must be counterbalanced with the changing social environment of the early nineteenth century. By the end of this period, industrialization was spreading internationally and the process of urbanization was well under way in both countries. Consequently, this book will address the continuities and changes of both manufacturing and women’s work throughout this period, as well as consider how external pressures influenced managers and workers’ decisions. Thus, this comparative study will help to explain both business and workers’ behaviour in light of rapidly changing economic and social structures.

In both countries, cotton manufacturers specifically recruited women to work in their factories, but for different reasons. In America, women were initially considered surplus to agriculture which formed the foundation of the country’s economy. Hence, they provided an available labour source for the mills. In Britain, the working class family economy regularly required the contributions of more than one member and the cotton factories were one of the few and better paid options available to women. Women’s entry into the American and British waged labour markets as independent earners provided them with an economic autonomy that they had not previously encountered. This meant that employers and society had to reconsider women’s role within the family economy, the community and the workforce. The newness of both the factories and the workforce meant that effective methods of organizing employees were learned through trial and error. Traditional gender divisions of labour influenced managers’ early decision-making to help convince workers to enter the factory. Once in the mills, workers and bosses continually debated their relationships, with the manufacturer seeking complete control over all aspects of the production-processes, while workers’ sought to determine their terms and conditions of service. Women’s position in this decision-making process varied from simple acceptance of manufacturers’ decisions, to vocal protest, collective strike action, individual acts of resistance, exiting the firm, and sabotage. Yet, a common thread ran through all their experiences – a desire to influence the ‘rules of the game’.

Regional idiosyncrasies directly affected the development of the cotton manufacturing industry, as well as women workers’ influence within these regions. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, contemporaries commented on the differences between British and American cotton manufacturing and within America, on the different directions taken by the New England and mid-Atlantic industries. Observers initially focused on technological choice and the related social consequences in the two countries, but soon came to include the divergent economic structures within America. The fertility of the middle states allowed them to develop market agriculture that the hostile fertility of New England would not allow on the same scale. As a result, textile production evolved very differently in the two regions, with domestic production continuing in Pennsylvania on a much greater scale than in New England, making the relative importance of the factories and factory labour choices more important than technological choice.¹ In many ways, the comparative labour intensity and relatively decentralized structure of Philadelphia manufacturing were similar to those found in Lancashire and formed a stark contrast to the corporate New England mills. Yet, small rural firms in all regions of the two countries were similar in that owners generally worked on the shop floor and followed a partnership management style with families comprising much of the labour force. While firms with large financial reserves naturally had greater choices of technology and labour, all manufacturers were dependent on the available labour. Therefore, women had many and varied experiences of textile manufacturing as local circumstances dominated factory management and hence, workers’ potential influence. While these many stories demonstrate diversity in the process of industrialization, they also create a new story that allows for the complications associated with change.

Gender, Work and Industrialization

The British and American historiography of women and work during industrialization is vast. It has highlighted the changes and continuities to family life when women were earning an independent wage and looked at the social impact of their waged labour. While many different industries and localities have been examined, two dominant themes emerge from the literature: either that women’s waged work was a positive change because economic independence gave women more influence within the family, as well as an independent identity; or, that women’s waged labour was detrimental to their social standing. In this view, employers sought female labour because it was cheap, flexible and easily exploited. As a result, women became firmly established at the bottom of a patriarchal society. While this book does not engage with the debates surrounding the advantages and disadvantages of women working for wages, the historiography of the impact waged work had on women’s lives provides a necessary background from which to build the story of women’s influence on industry. The extensive nature of women’s work has been influential on our understandings of industrialization, but particularly about women’s experiences of work. The objective of the following section is to identify the main themes from the recent historiography about women, work and industrialization that are significant for exploring women’s relationships with and influence on employers.

Gender is relational because masculinity and femininity cannot be defined without the other. Hence, gender is also reciprocal. Men and women must know what to expect of the other and what the other expects. When one group breaks the bounds of conformity, whether social, political or economic, each group must readjust their thinking and expectations to either incorporate the other on a new level or to try and re-impose the old views by force or persuasion. Women’s entry into the waged labour market during industrialization fits centrally into this definition of gender. As wage earners, they were breaking gendered expectations of economic and social behaviour. When seeking to assert their agency within the workplace, women broke other expectations of gender, place and hierarchy. All involved had to fit these changes into their norms of gendered relationships. This book engages with this process, the people involved, and the associated relational problems of combining gender with work.

People’s experiences of work during the process of industrialization are no longer viewed as homogenous.² Instead, discourses about work highlight the variations within and between different industries, regions and nations. Within these narratives, gender is increasingly highlighted as a factor in creating different cultures of work and business. For example, Kathleen Canning has highlighted how women interpreted, subverted and internalized the ‘discourses of labour’ and the ‘ideologies of work’ to create their own work culture in the Rhineland and Westphalia during the latter half of the nineteenth century.³ However, data deficiencies and methodological problems hinder the complete mainstreaming of this gender history with labour and economic history. Both British and America statistical data have been shown to marginalize the economic contributions of women and children.⁴ By implication, this makes the process of industrialization purely an economic process, which it was not. Instead, industrialization incorporated social, cultural, economic, political and personal dimensions.

Women’s and labour historians have reinterpreted the period of the Industrial Revolution. They have concentrated on women’s contributions to the family budget and their importance to the process of industrialization, rather than their influence on this process. Historians on both sides of the Atlantic have proffered theories about the continuities and changes in women’s lives that challenge the notion that men and women had separate spheres of influence, the public and private.⁵ While these studies reveal the complexities of the issues, the social approach restricts the definitions of female economic activity and adopts a pervading assumption about women’s passive role in the workplace. As Katrina Honeyman has argued, the historiography of British industrialization provides an example of how economic historians tend to marginalize women by falling into two broad categories. The quantitative version of events has demonstrated the slower growth in manufacturing than was previously assumed and which is ill equipped to incorporate the subtleties of gender or regional or structural variation within the national economy. The qualitative strand incorporates elements of social and cultural theory. These interpretations are more subtle and inclusive and they tend to incorporate the varied experiences and processes of industrialization, but assume the gender economic imbalance in the workplace. Labour was central to the process of industrialization and as women constituted part of the labour force, by implication they influenced the nature of industrial transformation.⁶ Even within this interpretation, women remain marginalized and undervalued except for their cheapness and flexibility. Again, women are ascribed a passive role in the transformation of the economy. Their primary importance was their entrance into the waged labour market. Yet, industrialization was not only a gendered process, rather gender helped to define and determine the process. Workers did not simply respond to industrialization, they helped to shape it. Nowhere is this clearer than in cotton manufacturing, where in many towns women constituted large proportions of the mill workforce and provided vital contributions to the family, industry and the local economy. Despite this, little research has focused specifically on women in British cotton manufacturing. Female operatives tend to be incorporated as one example of women’s experiences of work.⁷

While American historiography includes case studies of women’s role in specific industries, including cotton manufacturing, the theories adopt similar approaches to those of their British counterparts, with women gradually pervading men’s world of work and their increasing subordination in the workplace. These ideas are then applied to women’s experiences of work.⁸ Alternatively, women’s passive role in the industrial process has been emphasized through the continuities in their working lives as the work culture was transferred to the new industrial order.⁹ Similarly, women were passive players in the advancement of textile technology, rather than active contributors to this process.¹⁰ Yet, economic development cannot occur without the contributions of all the players: manufacturer, worker, politician and consumer.

Both British and America historians have acknowledged the fruitlessness of preserving the divide about the impact industrialization had on women’s lives. Instead, attention has turned to the impact female labour had on their families and how they created a domestic culture.¹¹ This book takes a new direction and examines how women created a work culture and how each female cotton worker, in her own way, sought to establish her own place w...