ABSTRACT
The sexual division of labour in spinning is one of the most interesting in the textile industry because it had been a female speciality which, after mechanisation, came to be divided into two distinct types. One performed by young girls and boys and described as “unskilled”, and one carried on by adult men and described as “skilled”. Sorting was one of the few occupations in the wool textile industry in the nineteenth century which required an apprenticeship. Mending, the only all-female occupation in the textile industry to be regularly described as “skilled”, was one of the last operations to be carried out on a finished piece of cloth. In the nineteenth century informal, on-the-job training was the most important way of acquiring skill in the textile industry. Many textile workers entered the industry as half-timers at the age of 11 when they usually worked as “doffers”, exchanging the full bobbins of yarn for empty ones on the spinning frames.
