In studying British history, I’ve come across female British historians of the early twentieth century who helped develop economic history as a discipline. They were intellectuals; we’d call them “blue-stockings” in the United States (a few were also elegant), and they tended to delve deeply into regional archives.
Julia Mann, for example, was the expert on Britain’s pre-industrial textile industry; Ivy Pinchbeck wrote a pioneering volume about how women’s lives were changed by the Industrial Revolution; and Pat Hudson practically owned the history of woolen textiles, Britain’s largest industry before the Industrial Revolution.
I recently read a 1992 essay by Maxine Berg indicating that these historians, while well-regarded, were not taken as seriously as they should have been. [1] Berg suggests that such inattention may distort our understanding of the historiography of Britain.
I realize that historiography—the study of what historians write—may not appeal much to my readers, but that is what my master’s thesis is about. Specifically, I’m looking at what historians have said about labor conditions in the Industrial Revolution (1750-1850) and how their views changed over the years. Thus I need to know which historians helped paint the picture accurately.
And I see that some may have been left out.
In 1984 a prominent British professor, David Cannadine, wrote an ingenious and much-admired article in the journal Past & Present. [2] He argued that economic writing about the Industrial Revolution fell into four major periods, all reflecting economic concerns at the time of writing. The first occurred around the beginning of the twentieth century, when labor conflict was rife. Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb were hostile to capitalism and that led them, as historians, to feature oppressed children and destitute weavers.
Maxine Berg observed that Beatrice Webb and Barbara Hammond were the only women historians Cannadine mentioned in his overview. (Like Webb, Hammond was part of a husband-and-wife team that was antagonistic to the Industrial Revolution and capitalism generally.) But other women were writing at the same time, some of whom were more upbeat.
Ivy Pinchbeck was at the London School of Economics. That was the school founded by the Webbs, but her line was a bit different. In her 1930 book about women in the Industrial Revolution, Pinchbeck said that industrialization had increased women’s opportunities. “The great demand for labour following the expansion of trade, the loss of spinning as an occupation for women, improved machine-spun yarns, and the situation created by the war [against France], all, therefore, helped to increase the opportunities for women in the weaving trade at the end of the eighteenth century.”[2]
Her voice was not included in Cannadine’s summary. She didn’t quite fit the narrative. If the Industrial Revolution was a gloomy time of oppression, how could it have benefited women? Or if it benefited only women, how great could it have been?
Thirty-five years after Pinchbeck wrote, similar words were heard, this time from a female Cambridge historian, Phyllis Deane. “The factories gave full-time gainful employment not only to men but also to women and children, groups which had rarely enjoyed more than seasonal or part-time work for pay in the domestic industry.” Traditional at-home weaving and spinning continued, but where factories appeared, “on balance both the range and the number of economic opportunities were enlarged . . . . “[4]
Deane wasn’t mentioned, either, in Cannadine’s article, even though by the 1960s, when she wrote, the tables had turned and there was greater enthusiasm for the Industrial Revolution. Historians thought of it as a template for developing countries around the world as they followed their own “industrial revolutions.” Indeed, Deane’s book was called The First Industrial Revolution. But she wasn’t mentioned.
So, looking at the grand scheme of things, my question is: Were opportunities for women in the factories unimportant, or were women historians unimportant?
Notes
*On March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams, who was at the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia. She asked that the legislators “remember the ladies” in the new law codes they would be writing and be “more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.”
[1] Maxine Berg, “The First Women Economic Historians.” Economic History Review New Series 45, no. 2 (May 1992): 308-29.
[2] David Cannadine, “The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution, 1880-1980.” Past and Present 103 (May 1984): 131-172.
[3] Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (London: Taylor and Franklin [1930, 1969] 2004). Republished with a new preface in 1969 and digitally posted 11/11/2004.
[4] Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1965), 139.
The image is from the British Library collection of flickr.com.
In my studies on the history of stewardship, the very earliest named steward was a woman, “The Great Steward Ninigara.” Circa 5400 BCE. All temples to male gods in Sumaria had female stewards. Their contributions to the management of the first known cities were paramount to the economy of those cities. Lacking money, they used grains as a means of exchange and the stewards of the granaries were usually women who were also in charge of cooks, brewers, butchers and weavers.