Women, Migration and Textile Work in West Yorkshire, 1800–1851

Abstract

Between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century, the West Yorkshire woollen industry was one of the heartbeats of the Industrial Revolution and British prosperity on the international stage. At least until the 1830 s, much of this woollen cloth production was undertaken in a domestic or small workshop context and with a significant use of family labour. The communities that were at the heart of this industry thickened and grew. At the same time they retained a remarkable contemporary reputation for insularity and a distrust of strangers. This reputation sits at odds with the certainty that migration into, out of and around these manufacturing districts was significant. My article seeks to reconcile these two observations. Employing a large scale family reconstitution based upon parish registers, nonconformist registers, and census data (in turn linked to poor law accounts, landholding data, apprenticeship registers, manor court documents, family papers and antiquarian publications), the article argues that migrant women are the key to resolving the two different perspectives. For themselves, husbands, daughters, sons, grandchildren, brothers and sisters, the work, connections and cultural and economic networking of migrant women facilitated the integration of ‘strangers’ in these dynamic areas of proto-industrial production.