ABSTRACT
The course of industrial change is clearly a factor of the greatest importance in the history of food rioting, as it is indeed for the whole history of women's involvement in social and political protest of all kinds, and recent studies of food riots contain an important lesson for the study of women's involvement. Scholars have also suggested that food riots occurred particularly when food prices rose sharply rather than when they were at their highest and that short-term price movements and shortages were more important than long-term trends capable of inducing famine or starvation. The numerous occasions on which women were prominent tend to suggest an impression that food rioting was essentially a woman's activity, but that is almost certainly so, and it is the unusually large number of occasions of female activism in the manufacturing area and the industrial area, which contrasts with female quiescence and passivity in so many others, that gives a misleading impression.
