ABSTRACT
Woman, so it has been said, was man’s first beast of burden. Women have always worked, in household duties and in husbandry, and also, under the Domestic System, at the spinning-wheel and the cottage loom. But with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, for the first time large numbers of women and girls were employed away from their homes, under the direction of men with whom their relationship was that of paid worker. It is true that for centuries women had had a place in the coal workings, but even there as a rule they worked beside and for their menfolk. Now it was a stranger who gave them their orders, regulated their working lives, paid them their wages. The manufacturers could never get a sufficient number of ‘hands’, not even when the legions of children had been impressed into service, and they were quick to appreciate the potentialities of female labour. Young women and girls, they found, might be easily induced to undertake the routine jobs of the factory employment; they were cheap, they were (usually) submissive, and they could be easily trained and soon became quite expert.
