Women and Children in the Machine-Made Lace Industry in Britain and France (1810–60)

Abstract

This article addresses the part played by women and children in the machine-made lace industry in Britain and France (1810–60). Following Heathcoat’s 1809 bobbin-net invention, the formation of a machine-made lace industry in the East Midlands and elsewhere was driven by the men who operated the machines, the “twisthands.” But they were assisted by boy, who were expected to replace and refill the bobbins, and by women and girls who did most of the mending, embroidery, finishing, dressing, bleaching, and dyeing of the lace, much of it in the dark and damp rooms of houses. Working hours were long and toil was exhausting from a very early age. Although female lace workers featured prominently in local struggles, and were often highly skilled, they were nevertheless restricted to low-paid positions in the trade because of gendered notions of skill and occupation. When in 1841 Parliament discussed child labor, the regulation of hours was rejected for lace because of its domestic nature and because of competition from across the Channel. In the Calais area, British lace-makers had developed an industry much like that in Britain. But France was a different country, with a smaller-scale economy, and as a result was characterized less by the separation between home and work and the male breadwinner model. This article examines machine-made lace in view of the historical literature on the part played by women and children in industrialization in both countries. It focuses on the gendered segregation of the work and the respective wages of men, women, and children on both sides of the Channel.

Keywords:

• lace-making
• child labor
• female labor
• Calais
• Nottingham
• migrants
• wages

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Anaïs Albert, Julie Botticello, Stanley Chapman, David Hopkin, Jane Humphries, and Béatrice Robic for commenting upon earlier versions of this article, and to Dawn Whatman for finding out and transcribing the rare piece by Mary Bailey from the Local Studies Library in Nottingham.

Notes

Notes

1 Among the 700 or so lace machine owners who signed (including a tiny proportion of ±5% for whom sex cannot be determined), owning some 4000 machines, five women owning six machines can be strictly identified: Eliza Barrett (one machine in New Radford); Ann Palfreman (one machine in Sneinton); Elizabeth Slack (two machines in Hyson Green, Nottingham); Harriett Haughton (one machine in Castle Alley, Nottingham); Mary Wells (one machine in Sussex Street, Nottingham). Humpries and Schneider 2019.

2 Factory Commission 1833, xx, C1, 187, C2, 24 (Power’s Report).

3 One text suggests there were 603 machines in Calais in January 1851.

4 Report (1861, vol. 56, 6).

5 Le sous-préfet de Saint-Quentin au Directeur général de la police, September 25, 1825. Archives nationales, F7 /9786.3.

6 Papers relating to the turnout, quoted in Children’s Employment Commission 1843, xiv, 43–44. Pinchbeck had noted this turnout (Pinchbeck 1930, 213–214).

7 Mémoire et extraits de délibérations des Chambres de commerce et es chambres consultatives des arts et manufactures (1834, 396); also see Chambre de commerce et d’industrie de Paris (1851, 354).

8 The 1835 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française mentioned the word in its female form (blanchisseuse de dentelle). On poisoning, see L’Atelier. Organe spécial des ouvriers, April 12, 1848, 122.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fabrice Bensimon

Fabrice Bensimon is a historian at Sorbonne Université, currently researching nineteenth-century labour migration from Britain to the European continent. He has recently edited Les Sentiers de l’ouvrier. Le Paris des artisans britanniques (autobiographies, 1815–1850) (Paris, 2017).