What Role Did Women Play In The Industrial Revolution

The industrial revolution that transformed western Europe and the United States during the course of the nineteenth century had its origins in the introduction of power-driven machinery in the English and Scottish textile industries in the second half of the eighteenth century. But far more than the cotton textile industry was transformed in the course of that revolution. Non-industrial wage labor increased; urban centers grew; and in farming areas, outwork occupations and commercial agriculture transformed the rural labor market. Finally, these economic developments coincided with dramatic changes in family life, particularly declining family size and increasing life expectancy. A greater role for women in the labor force, contemporary politics,
The mills ran for seventy-three hours a week in this period, averaging slightly more than twelve hours a day. As the pace of work in the mills increased without any wage gains, millworkers came to demand a ten-hour workday, giving them time to relax, attend meetings and lectures, and participate in the urban cultural scene around them. These protests built on earlier strikes, known as “turn-outs” in the language of the time, reveal much about the sensibility that New England women brought to the mill experience. In October 1836, on the occasion of the second turn-out in Lowell, women founded the Lowell Factory Girls Association to organize their protest. The preamble to the association’s constitution reveals mill women’s sense of themselves as “daughters of freemen” and their connection to the young nation’s republican tradition. The mill women, some 2,500 in number, left the mills to protest an increase in charges at company boardinghouses unaccompanied by a corresponding increase in their wages. The women held out for several months and displayed a keen sense of tactics in their struggle with the mill agents. In the end, the companies reduced boardinghouse charges for a good proportion of their workers, and the mill women returned to
Anti-slavery was strong in Lowell and mill women sent several petitions to Washington opposing slavery in the District of Columbia and opposing war with Mexico, which might contribute to an expansion of slavery into the Southwest. Woman reformers came to see opposition to black slavery and wage slavery as related causes. Some also participated in the women’s rights conventions that mushroomed after the first one was held in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. Mary Emerson, a leader in Lowell’s ten-hour movement, attended a women’s rights convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, in October 1851. She shared the broad reform perspective that launched woman mill workers into labor protest in these two decades and contributed to the widening perspectives of American women in politics and social reform in the mid-nineteenth