ABSTRACT
Historians have sought to clarify gender roles during industrialization by examining relationships between gender and work, the family economy and trade unions. They emphasize the significant male-female wage gap, particularly in the textile industries and relate this partly to the gender division of tasks. 1 However, textile historians have relied on the Parliamentary Papers and contemporary observers, including Ure, Baines, Wood and Bowley for statistics. Of the textile industries, cotton manufacturing provides an ideal case study for examining gender-wage ratios because it was the fastest growing industry between 1770 and 1831 and relied on a majority female and childlabour force for this growth.2 It was also the first major factory manufacturing employer of women. First, this chapter will discuss how historians have viewed the gender wage debate. Then it will analyse gender-wage relationships during industrial development by examining business records from cotton firms between 1790 and 1855, during the transition from predominantly domestic manufacturing to the factory system of manufactures. This study reveals very diversified gender-earnings ratios in the cotton industry. It therefore questions both the validity of the factory returns and the reliability of the contemporary observers.
