Women, Children and Industrialisation

The Industrial Revolution was a time of important changes in the way that children and women worked. Children of the rural poor had always worked at home or in the farm at jobs that varied during the day or between seasons, under the watchful eye of parents or relatives. Likewise, in villages women were actively involved in farm work; they reared livestock, gathered firewood and spun yarn on spinning wheels in their homes. Work in the factories, with long, unbroken hours of the same kind of work, under strict discipline and sharp forms of punishment, was completely different.

The earnings of women and children were necessary to supplement men’s meagre wages. As the use of machinery spread, and fewer workers were needed, industrialists preferred to employ women and children who would be less agitated about their poor working conditions and work for lower wages than men. They were employed in large numbers in the cotton textile industry in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Women were also the main workers in the silk, Woman in gilt-button factory, Birmingham.

In the 1850s, two- thirds of the workforce in the button trade were women and children. Men received shillings a week, women shillings and children one shilling each, for the same hours of work. lace-making and knitting industries, as well as (along with children) in the metal industries of Birmingham. Machinery like the cotton spinning jenny was designed to be used by child workers with their small build and nimble fingers.

Children were often employed in textile factories because they were small enough to move between tightly packed machinery. The long hours of work, including cleaning the machines on Sundays, allowed them little fresh air or exercise. Children caught their hair in machines or crushed their hands, while some died when they fell into machines as they dropped off to sleep from exhaustion. Coal mines were also dangerous places to work in.

Roofs caved in or there could be an explosion, and injuries were therefore common. The owners of coal mines used children to reach deep coal faces or those where the approach path was too narrow for adults. Younger children worked as ‘trappers’ who opened and shut doors as the coal wagons travelled through mines, or carried heavy loads of coal on their backs as ‘coal bearers.’ Factory managers considered child labour to be important training for future factory work. The evidence from British factory records reveals that about half of the factory workers had started work when they were less than ten years old and per cent when they were under .

Women may well have gained increased financial independence and self-esteem from their jobs; but this was more than offset by the humiliating terms of work they endured, the children they lost at birth or in early childhood and the squalid urban slums that industrial work compelled them to live in.