Abstract
From around the middle of the seventeenth century, the guild-dominated urban industries increasingly failed to provide for the growing demands of expanding markets, whether at home or abroad. Merchant capital therefore began to extend into the countryside, putting out to rural dwellers the raw material for the production of a great number of consumer goods, and textiles in particular. This development centred on rural districts with poor soils and a marked seasonality of agricultural activity, where there existed a workforce who, though living off the land, depended upon supplementing their income by non-agricultural labour. Their consequent ability to survive on less than subsistence wages rendered their employment particularly profitable. As a result of growing demand, earnings obtainable from handicraft production increased, and what had started off as a source of supplementary income gradually became a full-time employment. In the course of this process, peasants turned into fully fledged waged labourers, who went about their trades in their own homes.
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Notes
L. A. Tilly and J. W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (New York, 1978) p. 12.
The latter is maintained by H. Medick, ‘The Proto-industrial Family Economy: The Structural Function of Household and Family in the Transition from Peasant Society to Industrial Capitalism’, Social History, IX (1976) n. 312.
M. Hewitt, ‘The Effect of Married Women’s Employment in the Cotton Textile Districts on the Organization and Structure of the Home in Lancashire, 1840–1880’, Ph.D. London University (1953) p. 55.
G. N. Gandy, ‘Illegitimacy in a Handloom Weaving Community: Fertility Patterns in Culcheth, Lancs, 1781–1860’, D.Phil. Oxford (1978) pp. 196, 232, 245.
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These calculations are based on the list of estimated average weekly earnings of various classes of cotton operatives in Lancashire and Cheshire in G. H. Wood, The History of Wages in the Cotton Trade During the Past Hundred Years (1910) p. 131.
B. R. Mitchell and P. Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1962) p. 187.
P. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (Brighton, 1980) p. 60, for his refutation of Smelser’s belief that the spinning family was broken up as a productive unit between the 1820s and 1840s (cf. N. J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (Chicago, 1959) p. 224).
Hewitt (1953) p. 18; M. Hewitt, Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry (1958) pp. 14, 102;
R. B. Lichfield, ‘The Family and the Mill: Cotton Mill Work, Family Work Patterns and Fertility in Mid-Victorian Stockport’, in A. S. Wohl (ed.), The Victorian Family: Structure and Stresses (1978) pp. 183, 185.
O. Banks, Faces of Feminism (Oxford, 1981) p. 29.
Cf. movements of infant workhouse inmates in Rochdale charted in J. Cole, Down Poorhouse Lane: The Diary of a Rochdale Workhouse (Littleborough, 1984) p. 80.
For example, W. Cooke Taylor, Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire, 2nd edn (1842) p. 199.
M. Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth-century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971) pp. 71, 72–3.
For example, R. Heywood, Private Minutes of the Magistrates’ Court (Bolton Central Library) 22 October 1835.
J. Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution: Early Industrial Capitalism in Three English Towns (1974) p. 92.
R. Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century, 3rd edn (Harmondsworth, 1977) pp. 53–4.
For example, J. R. Coulthart, A Report on the Sanatory Condition of the Town of Ashton-under-Lyne; With Remarks on the Existing Evils, and Suggestions for Improving the Health, Comfort, and Longevity of the Inhabitants (Ashton-under-Lyne, 1844) p. 21.
W. Dodd, The Factory System Illustrated in a Series of Letters to the Right Hon. Lord Ashley (repr. 1968) p. 64.
D. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-century Working Class Autobiography (1981) pp. 79ff.
M. W. Dupree, ‘Family Structure in the Staffordshire Potteries, 1840–1880’, D.Phil. Oxford (1981) p. 416.
L. Faucher, Manchester in 1844: Its Present Condition and Future Prospects (1844) pp. 27, 63, 65.
J. J. Bezer, ‘The Autobiography of One of the Chartist Rebels of 1848’, in D. Vincent (ed.), Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working-Class Politicians, 1790–1885 (1977) p. 164.
J. Liddington and J. Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us (1978) p. 100.
For example, P. Gaskell, Artisans and Machinery: The Moral and Physical Condition of the Manufacturing Population (1836) p. 105.
E. Ross, ‘“Fierce Questions and Taunts”: Married Life in Working-class London, 1870–1914’, Feminist Studies, VIII (1982) p. 594.
A. Clark, ‘Rape or Seduction? A Controversy over Sexual Violence in the Nineteenth Century’, in The London Feminist History Group, The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men’s Power, Women’s Resistance (1983) p. 19.
N. Tomes, ‘“A Torrent of Abuse”: Crimes of Violence between Working-class Men and Women in London, 1840–1875’, Journal of Social History, XI (1978) p. 334.
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© 1991 Jutta Schwarzkopf
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Schwarzkopf, J. (1991). Changes in Plebeian Women’s Living Conditions. In: Women in the Chartist Movement. Studies in Gender History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379619_2
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