The Domestic Image and Factory Culture: The Cotton District in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England

Abstract

What role did the domestic image of women play in English working-class during the mid-nineteenth century? To what extent was the demand for a family wage supported and pursued by working men and women? How was women's work perceived? How did women identify themselves and shape and conceptualize their roles in relation to home and work? I will address these questions below in light of current scholarly discussion, arguing, with reference to the cotton industry, that the domestic image does not reflect the diversity of women's experience, nor does it suggest the extent to which women's dual roles found expression in the culture. In recent discussions, scholars have often emphasized the emergence of the male breadwinner norm as an ideal within English working-class over the course of the nineteenth century. In the face of mechaniza tion and its accompanying disruptions of working-class life, they have ar gued, a male-dominated world of work was constructed which served to marginalize women as workers and position them in the domestic realm.1 Male artisans gathered in constitutional societies, trade unions, and educa tional groups, forging an identity of interest and building a common culture that served to exclude women, as home and work were increas ingly separated.2 At the same time, industrialists structured work on the basis of ideas about gender according to Sonya Rose, thereby transposing] hierarchical and gendered family relations onto class rela tions.3 The association between skill and masculinity was thereby rein forced, enabling men to gain a sense of independence as workers while women were increasingly considered dependents, subsumed within the family as wives and mothers. Relying primarily on a discursive analysis, some scholars have thus concluded that a natural division of labor, based upon assumptions about sexual difference, came to be widely accepted within working-class culture.4 Consequently, Jane Lewis has contended, the family wage became an ideal shared by both men and women as women accepted the primary responsibility for the home and children.5 Despite the predominance of this approach in current scholarship, it has not gone entirely uncontested. Directly challenging the view put for ward by Lewis, Harold Benenson has pointed to the acceptance of wives' nondomestic orientation in the cotton district.6 In such areas as Nelson and Burnley, where men and women were employed alongside each other