ABSTRACT
In the early phases of industrialisation in India, women constituted an important source of labour for textile factories, jute mills and mines. Almost a quarter of the workforce of the Bombay cotton textile factories, for example, were women, from the mid to late nineteenth century, when the factories multiplied, until the 1920s, when rationalisation and retrenchment set in. Women had traditionally been employed in textiles in domestic or handicraft forms of production. This work had consisted largely of preparatory processes: cleaning and sorting cotton, processing it for spinning, or spinning it itself. Women weavers were a rarity. The factory system adopted this traditional division of labour and added to it. Because the first factories in Bombay were spinning factories, spinning itself became the kind of skilled
occupation which was reserved for men. Though by the early twentieth century the Bombay cotton textile industry expanded into weaving as well as spinning, this division of labour persisted, and there were neither women weavers nor women spinners in the Bombay mills.
