IR Women - Socratic Seminar Readings (History II) PDF

Textile Workers in the Industrial Revolution: Sources Source 1: Courtauld Silk Mill Workforce Before the Industrial Revolution, Halstead was an agricultural...

Textile Workers in the Industrial Revolution: Sources Source 1: Courtauld Silk Mill Workforce Before the Industrial Revolution, Halstead was an agricultural community with a cottage industry producing woolen cloth. In Halstead, as elsewhere in England, unemployment among depressed farming households and former wool workers forced people to find work outside the home. Because their labor was cheap, women more than men were recruited into the textile factories that sprang up all over Britain in the 19th century. In 1825, Samuel Courtauld built a silk mill in Halstead, Essex (South East England). Here is a chart of his workforce in 1860. Wages are paid in British shillings (s). The questions that follow ask you to interpret information from the chart. Numbe Weekly Wages MALES r 1000 pounds per 1 Mill Manager (Also got 3 per cent of the profits) year 26 15s-32s Overseers and clerks 6 17s-25s Mechanics and engine drivers 3 14s-21s Carpenters and blacksmiths 1 15s Lodgekeeper Power loom machinery attendants and 16 14s-15s steamers 18 10s-15s Mill machinery attendants and loom cleaners Spindle cleaners, bobbin stampers and packers, 5 5s-12s messengers, sweepers - 7s-10s Watchmen - 5s-10s Coachmen, grooms and van driver 38 2s-4s Winders 114 Total Males Numbe Weekly Wages FEMALES r 4 10s-11s Gauze examiners 4 9s-10s Female assistant overseers 16 7s-10s Warpers 9 7s-10s Twisters 4 6s-9s Wasters 589 5s-8s Weavers 2 6s-7s Plugwinders 83 4s-6s Drawers and doublers 188 2s-4s Winders 899 Total Females 1013 GRAND TOTAL WORKFORCE 1 Figure 1. Courtauld Silk Mill Workforce, 1860. Wages in British schillings (s) Source: For Courtland silk factory wages: Carol Adams, Paula Bartley, Judy Lown, Cathy Loxton, Under Control: Life in a nineteenth-century Silk Factory, Cambridge University Source 2: Testimony of Textile Workers in Wilson's Mill, Nottingham Hannah Goode: "I work at Mr. Wilson's mill. I think the youngest child is about 7. I daresay there are 20 under 9 years. It is about half past five by our clock at home when we go in....We come out at seven by the mill. We never stop to take our meals, except at dinner. William Crookes is overlooker in our room. He is cross-tempered sometimes. He does not beat me; he beats the little children if they do not do their work right....I have sometimes seen the little children drop asleep or so, but not lately. If they are catched asleep they get the strap. They are always very tired at night....I can read a little; I can't write. I used to go to school before I went to the mill; I have since I am sixteen." Mrs. Smith: "I have three children working in Wilson's mill; one 11, one 13, and the other 14. They work regular hours there. We don't complain. If they go to drop the hours, I don't know what poor people will do. We have hard work to live as it is....My husband is of the same mind about it...last summer my husband was 6 weeks ill; we pledged almost all our things to live; the things are not all out of pawn yet....We complain of nothing but short wages...My children have been in the mill three years. I have no complaint to make of their being beaten...I would rather they were beaten than fined." 2  Source 3: Plight of Women in the Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution in part was fueled by the economic necessity of many women, single and married, to find waged work outside their home. Women mostly found jobs in domestic service, textile factories, and piece workshops. They also worked in the coal mines. For some, the Industrial Revolution provided independent wages, mobility and a better standard of living. For the majority, however, factory work in the early years of the 19th century resulted in a life of hardship. Source 4:Coal Mines: Industrial Revolution Women and children at first worked alongside men in the coal mines, although there were differences in jobs they did. Before 1842, there were no protection laws, nor limits for the age of child labor. Hurriers: people who moved coal from the face (where the coal was cut) to the horses-ways. Horse-ways: main passages where horses could be used for hauling. Sometimes they used a pulley system to wind up the trams. Level: tunnel into sloping ground, like a cave. The coal was mined without having to dig a shaft. Source 5:Illustrating Mine Work Illustrations like these were used to solicit outrage against the use of women and children in mine work.Women engaged in heavy labor in agricultural work as well, 3 Source 6: Testimonies from South Wales Mines [Source: Children Working Underground Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru National Museum of Wales, 1979.] The following selections are testimonies from England and Wales collected by Parliamentary commissions who began to investigate the industrial employment of women and children in the early 1840s. Inspectors visited mills, mines and shops taking evidence from workers to see ways in which the Industrial Revolution affected women and families. The sources, along with illustrations and a workforce chart, reveal the following points: Working conditions were often unsanitary and the work dangerous. Education suffered because of the demands of work. Home life suffered as women were faced with the double burden of factory work followed by domestic chores and child care. Men assumed supervisory roles over women and received higher wages. Unsupervised young women away from home generated societal fears over their fate. As a result of the need for wages in the growing cash economy, families became dependent on the wages of women and children There was some worker opposition to proposals that child and female labor should be abolished from certain jobs. Six year old girl: "I have been down six weeks and make 10 to 14 rakes a day; I carry a full 56 lbs. of coal in a wooden bucket. I work with sister Jesse and mother. It is dark the time we go." Jane Peacock Watson: "I have wrought in the bowels of the earth 33 years. I have been married 23 years and had nine children, six are alive and three died of typhus a few years since. Have had two dead born. Horse-work ruins the women; it crushes their haunches, bends their ankles and makes them old women at 40. " Maria Gooder: "I hurry for a man with my sister Anne who is going 18. He is good to us. I don't like being in the pit. I am tired and afraid. I go at 4:30 after having porridge for breakfast. I start hurrying at 5. We have dinner at noon. We have dry bread and nothing else. There is water in the pit but we don't sup it. " Mary and Rachell Enock (ages 11 and 12 years): "We are door-keepers in the four foot level. We leave the house before six each morning and are in the level until seven o'clock and sometimes later. We get 2p a day and our light costs us 2 1/2 p. a week. Rachel was in a day school and she can read a little. She was run over by a tram a while ago and was home ill a long time, but she has got over it." Isabel Wilson (38 years old): "I have been married 19 years and have had 10 bairns [children]:...My last child was born on Saturday morning, and I was at work on the Friday night... None of the children read, as the work is no regular..When I go below my lassie 10 years of age keeps house..." 4 Source 7: Book Review Essay by Joyce Burnette Department of Economics, Wabash College A Pioneer in Women's History: Ivy Pinchbeck's Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 Table 1: Occupational Distribution in the 1851 Census of Great Britain Males Females Percent Occupational Category (thousands) (thousands) Female Public Administration 64 3 4.5 Armed Forces 63 0 0.0 Professions 162 103 38.9 Domestic Services 193 1135 85.5 Commercial 91 0 0.0 Transportation & Communications 433 13 2.9 Agriculture 1788 229 11.4 Fishing 36 1 2.7 Mining 383 11 2.8 Metal Manufactures 536 36 6.3 Building & Construction 496 1 0.2 Wood & Furniture 152 8 5.0 Bricks, Cement, Pottery, Glass 75 15 16.7 Chemicals 42 4 8.7 Leather & Skins 55 5 8.3 Paper & Printing 62 16 20.5 Textiles 661 635 49.0 Clothing 418 491 54.0 Food, Drink, Lodging 348 53 13.2 Other 445 75 14.4 Total Occupied 6545 2832 30.2 Total Unoccupied 1060 5294 83.3 Figure 4. Source: B.R. Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962, p. 60. Domestic Service Domestic work - cooking, cleaning, caring for children and the sick, fetching water, making and mending clothing - took up the bulk of women's time during the Industrial Revolution period. Most of this work was unpaid. Some families were well-off enough that they could employ other women to do this work, as live-in servants, as charring women, or as service providers. Live-in servants were fairly common; even middle-class families had maids to help with the domestic chores. Charring women did housework on a daily basis. In London women were paid 2s.6d. per day for washing, which was more than three times the 8d. typically paid for agricultural labor in the country. However, a "day's work" in washing could last 20 hours, more than twice as long as a day's work in agriculture.6 Other women worked as laundresses, doing the washing in their own homes. 5 Cottage Industry Before factories appeared, most textile manufacture (including the main processes of spinning and weaving) was carried out under the "putting-out" system. Since raw materials were expensive, textile workers rarely had enough capital to be self-employed, but would take raw materials from a merchant, spin or weave the materials in their homes, and then return the finished product and receive a piece-rate wage. This system disappeared during the Industrial Revolution as new machinery requiring water or steam power appeared, and work moved from the home to the factory. Before the Industrial Revolution, hand spinning had been a widespread female employment. It could take as many as ten spinners to provide one hand-loom weaver with yarn, and men did not spin, so most of the workers in the textile industry were women. The new textile machines of the Industrial Revolution changed that. Wages for hand-spinning fell, and many rural women who had previously spun found themselves unemployed. In a few locations, new cottage industries such as straw-plaiting and lace-making grew and took the place of spinning, but in other locations women remained unemployed. Another important cottage industry was the pillow-lace industry, so called because women wove the lace on pins stuck in a pillow. In the late-eighteenth century women in Bedford could earn 6s. a week making lace, which was about 50 percent more than women earned in agriculture. However, this industry too disappeared due to mechanization. Following Heathcote's invention of the bobbinet machine (1809), cheaper lace could be made by embroidering patterns on machine-made lace net. This new type of lace created a new cottage industry, that of "lace-runners" who embroidered patterns on the lace. The straw-plaiting industry employed women braiding straw into bands used for making hats and bonnets. The industry prospered around the turn of the century due to the invention of a simple tool for splitting the straw and war, which cut off competition from Italy. At this time women could earn 4s. to 6s. per week plaiting straw. This industry also declined, though, following the increase in free trade with the Continent in the 1820s. Factories A defining feature of the Industrial Revolution was the rise of factories, particularly textile factories. Work moved out of the home and into a factory, which used a central power source to run its machines. Water power was used in most of the early factories, but improvements in the steam engine made steam power possible as well. The most dramatic productivity growth occurred in the cotton industry. The invention of James Hargreaves' spinning jenny (1764), Richard Arkwright's "throstle" or "water frame" (1769), and Samuel Crompton's spinning mule (1779, so named because it combined features of the two earlier machines) revolutionized spinning. Britain began to manufacture cotton cloth, and declining prices for the cloth encouraged both domestic consumption and export. Machines also appeared for other parts of the cloth-making process, the most important of which was Edmund Cartwright's powerloom, which was adopted slowly because of imperfections in the early designs, but was widely used by the 1830s. While cotton was the most important textile of the Industrial Revolution, there were advances in machinery for silk, flax, and wool production as well.7 6 7  The advent of new machinery changed the gender division of labor in textile production. Before the Industrial Revolution, women spun yarn using a spinning wheel (or occasionally a distaff and spindle). Men didn't spin, and this division of labor made sense because women were trained to have more dexterity than men, and because men's greater strength made them more valuable in other occupations. In contrast to spinning, handloom weaving was done by both sexes, but men outnumbered women. Men monopolized highly skilled preparation and finishing processes such as wool combing and cloth-dressing. With mechanization, the gender division of labor changed. Women used the spinning jenny and water frame, but mule spinning was almost exclusively a male occupation because it required more strength, and because the male mule-spinners actively opposed the employment of female mule-spinners. Women mule-spinners in Glasgow, and their employers, were the victims of violent attacks by male spinners trying to reduce the competition in their occupation. While they moved out of spinning, women seem to have increased their employment in weaving (both in handloom weaving and eventually in powerloom factories). Both sexes were employed as powerloom operators. Table 2: Factory Workers in 1833: Females as a Percent of Workforce Industry Ages 12 and under Ages 13-20 Ages 21+ All Ages Cotton 51.8 65.0 52.2 58.0 Wool 38.6 46.2 37.7 40.9 Flax 54.8 77.3 59.5 67.4 Silk 74.3 84.3 71.3 78.1 Lace 38.7 57.4 16.6 36.5 Potteries 38.1 46.9 27.1 29.4 Dyehouse 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 Glass 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 Paper - 100.0 39.2 53.6 Whole Sample 52.8 66.4 48.0 56.8 Source: "Report from Dr. James Mitchell to the Central Board of Commissioners, respecting the Returns made from the Factories, and the Results obtained from them." British Parliamentary Papers, 1834 (167) XIX. Mitchell collected data from 82 cotton factories, 65 wool factories, 73 flax factories, 29 silk factories, 7 potteries, 11 lace factories, one dyehouse, one "glass works", and 2 paper mills throughout Great Britain. While the highly skilled and highly paid task of mule-spinning was a male occupation, many women and girls were engaged in other tasks in textile factories. For example, the wet-spinning of flax, introduced in Leeds in 1825, employed mainly teenage girls. Girls often worked as assistants to mule-spinners, piecing together broken threads. In fact, females were a majority of the factory labor force. Table Two shows that 57 percent of factory workers were female, most of them under age 20. Women were widely employed in all the textile industries, and constituted the majority of workers in cotton, flax, and silk. Outside of textiles, women were employed in potteries and paper factories, but not in dye or glass manufacture. Of the women who worked in factories, 16 percent were under age 13, 51 percent were between the ages of 13 and 20, and 33 percent were age 21 and over. On average, girls earned the same wages as boys. Children's wages rose from about 1s.6d. per week at age 7 to about 5s. per week at age 15. Beginning at age 16, and a large gap between male and female wages appeared. At age 30, women factory workers earned only one-third as much as men. Non-Wage-Earners During the eighteenth century there were many opportunities for women to be productively employed in farm work on their own account, whether they were wives of farmers on large holdings, or wives of landless laborers. 8 In the early nineteenth century, however, many of these opportunities disappeared, and women's participation in agricultural production fell. In a village that had a commons, even if the family merely rented a cottage the wife could be self-employed in agriculture because she could keep a cow, or other animals, on the commons. By careful management of her stock, a woman might earn as much during the year as her husband earned as a laborer. Women also gathered fuel from the commons, saving the family considerable expense. The enclosure of the commons, though, eliminated these opportunities. In an enclosure, land was reassigned so as to eliminate the commons and consolidate holdings. Even when the poor had clear legal rights to use the commons, these rights were not always compensated in the enclosure agreement. While enclosure occurred at different times for different locations, the largest waves of enclosures occurred in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, meaning that, for many, opportunities for self-employment in agriculture declined as the same time as employment in cottage industry declined. 17 Only a few opportunities for agricultural production remained for the landless laboring family. In some locations landlords permitted landless laborers to rent small allotments, on which they could still grow some of their own food. The right to glean on fields after harvest seems to have been maintained at least through the middle of the nineteenth century, by which time it had become one of the few agricultural activities available to women in some areas. Gleaning was a valuable right; the value of the grain gleaned was often between 5 and 10 percent of the family's total annual income.18 In the eighteenth century it was common for farmers' wives to be actively involved in farm work, particularly in managing the dairy, pigs, and poultry. The diary was an important source of income for many farms, and its success depended on the skill of the mistress, who usually ran the operation with no help from men. In the nineteenth century, however, farmer's wives were more likely to withdraw from farm management, leaving the dairy to the management of dairymen who paid a fixed fee for the use of the cows.19 While poor women withdrew from self-employment in agriculture because of lost opportunities, farmer's wives seem to have withdraw because greater prosperity allowed them to enjoy more leisure. It was less common for women to manage their own farms, but not unknown. Commercial directories list numerous women farmers. For example, the 1829 Directory of the County of Derby lists 3354 farmers, of which 162, or 4.8%, were clearly female.20 While the commercial directories themselves do not indicate to what extent these women were actively involved in their farms, other evidence suggests that at least some women farmers were actively involved in the work of the farm.21 Other Occupations The occupations listed above are by no means a complete listing of the occupations of women during the Industrial Revolution. Women made buttons, nails, screws, and pins. They worked in the tin plate, silver plate, pottery and Birmingham "toy" trades (which made small articles like snuff boxes). Women worked in the mines until The Mines Act of 1842 prohibited them from working underground, but afterwards women continued to pursue above-ground mining tasks. Married Women in the Labor Market While there are no comprehensive sources of information on the labor force participation of married women, household budgets reported by contemporary authors give us some information on women's participation.30 For the period 1787 to 1815, 66 percent of married women in working-class households had either a recorded occupation or positive earnings. For the period 1816-20 the rate fell to 49 percent, but in 1821-40 it recovered to 62 percent. Table Eight gives participation rates of women by date and occupation of the husband. 9 Table 8: Participation Rates of Married Women High-Wage Low-Wage Agriculture Agriculture Mining Factory Outwork Trades All 1787-1815 55 85 40 37 46 63 66 1816-1820 34 NA 28 4 42 30 49 1821-1840 22 85 33 86 54 63 62 Source: Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries, "Women's Labour Force Participation and the Transition to the male-Breadwinner Family, 1790-1865," Economic History Review 48 (February 1995): 89-117 While many wives worked, the amount of their earnings was small relative to their husband's earnings. Annual earnings of married women who did work averaged only about 28 percent of their husband's earnings. Because not all women worked, and because children usually contributed more to the family budget than their mothers, for the average family the wife contributed only around seven percent of total family income. Childcare Women workers used a variety of methods to care for their children. Sometimes childcare and work were compatible, and women took their children with them to the fields or shops where they worked.31 Sometimes women working at home would give their infants opiates such as "Godfrey's Cordial" in order to keep the children quiet while their mothers worked.32 The movement of work into factories increased the difficulty of combining work and childcare. In most factory work the hours were rigidly set, and women who took the jobs had to accept the twelve or thirteen hour days. Work in the factories was very disciplined, so the women could not bring their children to the factory, and could not take breaks at will. However, these difficulties did not prevent women with small children from working. Nineteenth-century mothers used older siblings, other relatives, neighbors, and dame schools to provide child care while they worked.33 Occasionally mothers would leave young children home alone, but this was dangerous enough that only a few did so.34 Children as young as two might be sent to dame schools, in which women would take children into their home and provide child care, as well as some basic literacy instruction.35 In areas where lace-making or straw-plaiting thrived, children were sent from about age seven to "schools" where they learned the trade.36 Mothers might use a combination of different types of childcare. Elizabeth Wells, who worked in a Leicester worsted factory, had five children, ages 10, 8, 6, 2, and four months. The eldest, a daughter, stayed home to tend the house and care for the infant. The second child worked, and the six-year-old and two-year-old were sent to "an infant school."37 Mary Wright, an "over-looker" in the rag-cutting room of a Buckinghamshire paper factory, had five children. The eldest worked in the rag-cutting room with her, the youngest was cared for at home, and the middle three were sent to a school; "for taking care of an infant she pays 1s.6d. a-week, and 3d. a-week for the three others. They go to a school, where they are taken care of and taught to read."38 The cost of childcare was substantial. At the end of the eighteenth century the price of child-care was about 1s. a week, which was about a quarter of a woman's weekly earnings in agriculture.39 In the 1840s mothers paid anywhere from 9d. to 2s.6d. per week for child care, out of a wage of around 7s. per week.40 10 Source 8:"Slaves of the Needle:" The Seamstress in the 1840s Beth Harris, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York In the early 1840s, lower middle-class, middle-class, and even upper-class women ("distressed gentlewomen") were increasingly put in the position of having to support themselves. Mrs. Jameson noted that if one considers the widows or daughters of "attorneys and apothecaries, tradesmen and shopkeepers, banker's clerks &c, in this class more than two-thirds of the women are now obliged to earn their own bread" ("Condition of the Women and the Female Children," The Athenaeum, 16 (March 18, 1843), 258). Unlike painting or writing, which some middle-class women were taking up as professions, needlework and teaching were seen as "natural" professions for women, and so would have been appropriate for those from the middle- and upper-classes. Whereas only some women had the education to be a governess, virtually all women had the necessary experience for needlework. Anna Elizabeth Blunden (Mrs. Martino), 1830-1915, The Seamstress (A Song of the Shirt), 1854. Millinery and dressmaking constituted the higher end of female employment with the needle; they were "respectable" occupations for young women from middle-class or lower middle-class families. The number of women involved in dressmaking alone in the early 1840s was estimated to be 15,000 (House of Commons, Reports from Commissioners: Children's Employment, Trade and Manufactures, Sessional Papers XIV (1843) 555). Milliners and dressmakers came from families who had enough money to pay for them to be apprenticed to learn the trade. This type of employment was part of an old, established apprenticeship system (like tailoring among men), and it was one of only a few occupations open to women which offered a skill and a sense of belonging to a trade, and which promised, at least after the apprenticeship period was served, a decent and respectable living. Dressmakers were involved in an old type of commerce the business of producing women's clothes made to order. However, in the 1830s and 1840s, the growing middle class created a new demand for cheap ready-made men's clothing (the work of the bespoke tailor was simply not affordable). Like many trades in the 1830s and 1840s, tailoring had therefore shifted from the unionized labor of skilled male artisans to the cheaper labor of women. To serve this growing market for cheap clothing, many women worked at home sewing ready-made clothing (also called "slop" and "slop-work") for very low piece-rates. The women who sewed slop could be young, but they were sometimes older and widowed with children and other relatives to support. 11 Sewing men's shirts, even for starvation wages, was often preferable to the only other option, domestic service, because it allowed one to remain independent (an important factor for middle-class women and distressed gentlewomen). In the spring of 1843, the Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission shocked the public with horror stories of the cruel and heartless exploitation of needlewomen in the backrooms and garrets of London. The public was appalled to learn that so many "delicate" young women lived, worked, and died, in such miserable conditions, and what was worse for Victorian sensibilities, that some resorted to or succumbed to prostitution. Soon after the publication of the Second Report, the distressed seamstress became something of a cause celebre. The public was barraged with newspaper articles, pamphlets, novels, short stories, poetry (the most famous of which is Thomas Hood's "Song of the Shirt"), and plays, many of which utilized the information on needlewomen "uncovered" by the government's commissioners (often quoting it verbatim and at length). In October of 1843, a report in The Times about a needlewoman who had illegally pawned the clothing she was given to sew, because she and her child were starving, escalated the concern for seamstresses into something of hysteria. Two months later, in December 1843, another scandal (also reported in The Times) erupted when a shirt-maker tried to kill herself and her child. Together, these cases (and a handful of others) shaped public opinion about the condition of all needlewomen in London. They became the symbol of how poor, helpless English women were driven to criminal activity and even infanticide by unfeeling and (significantly) Jewish merchants. Jewish slop-sellers were frequently blamed by The Times and Punch for what was really simply the unheeding and often cruel progress of capitalism. The Times also used seamstress stories as part of their longstanding (and sometimes scandal-mongering) campaign to discredit the New Poor Law of 1834. Given the vast amount of literature on seamstresses produced during this period, it seems remarkable at first that virtually every source one consults tells the same story: a story in which a happy, healthy and virtuous young woman leaves her home in the countryside to become a seamstress in the big city where she encounters an evil employer and/or seducer, and begins an irreversible decline leading to death and/or prostitution. Even the evidence in the Second Report offered this narrative, although in a professional, semi-detached manner and format. Writers of fiction, motivated to bring the "facts" of the parliamentary report before a wider audience, created engrossing narratives by pitting sympathetic, young, blameless, and virtuous seamstress characters against cruel, evil (and often Jewish) employers. Like the narrative that was constructed of the prostitute, the downward progression of the seamstress in these stories was nearly irreversible. In most stories, the seamstresses' only choice was to succumb to vice (prostitution), or to retain her "virtue" and die. Authors often used two protagonists to demonstrate the inevitability of these two fates. The sense of urgency evident in the constant repetition of the seamstress's decline, the use of one-dimensional characters and a melodramatic plot, indicate that the 12 narrative was being called on to negotiate, and find solutions for, the question on everyone's mind – who or what was to blame for (and what ought to be done about) the volatile, angry, impoverished, and potentially revolutionary working class. Whenever the question grew pressing, as it did in 1843-1844 (and then again in 1848-1850), due to fears of working-class unrest, the distressed seamstress reappeared as the focus of public concern and outrage. Why the seamstress though, and not some other type of laborer? The answer to this question is complex. The people who wrote about the seamstress all had political agendas of one kind or another. England, many people felt in the decade of the "hungry forties," was facing a crisis, and the seamstress fit perfectly into almost every way the problem was analyzed. The problem involved (depending on who was asked): a lack of communication between the rich and the poor (Disraeli's "two nations"), unemployment among men while women were working in increasing numbers, and the related breakdown of the working-class family, the New Poor Law of 1834, and not enough decently paid work for women. Sewing was, in many ways, the ultimate sign of femininity. It was sedentary and passive, and it was traditionally done by women only for the care and maintenance of the family and home. In the literature of the period the needle itself often stood for women's "natural" place in the home, and carried powerful associations of domestic bliss and maternal devotion. Where other female workers were seen to develop masculine characteristics, the seamstress remained a "woman." It is no wonder then that needlework performed by women for the marketplace, for strangers (not unlike prostitution), became a source of intense anxiety. Ideological notions of motherhood, home, morality and national stability all became dislocated when the needle moved from the home to the garret. On the other hand, for those women who yearned for a place in the world outside the home, the dull, repetitious act of plying the needle represented their unfair confinement to the domestic sphere (see Charlotte Brontë's Shirley). The impoverished seamstress became, for early feminists, a symbol of the consequences of a hypocritical society that circumscribed women's lives, preached that they should not work (and consequently made almost no occupations open to them), while forcing them, at the same time, to work. The hardships of teaching and being a seamstress were elaborated by Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Jameson and others to demonstrate the necessity of widening women's education and opportunities. In the 1840s, the figure of the distressed seamstress appeared in the work of Charles Kingsley (Alton Locke and Cheap Clothes and Nasty), Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna (The Perils of the Nation and The Wrongs of Woman), Friedrich Engels (The Condition of the Working Class in England), Thomas Carlyle (The n----- Question) and Charles Dickens (The Chimes), among others. For more information on the distressed seamstress in the 1840s, including visual images and her relationship to the political issues of the day, see Beth Harris, "The Works of Women are Symbolical" The Victorian Seamstress in the 1840s, Ph.D. Dissertation, City University of New York, 1 13 Source 9: The Victims of Jack the Ripper 14 15