Introduction

Max Hartwell once suggested that among the major beneficial long-term consequences of ‘the Industrial Revolution’ was its positive contribution to ‘the emancipation of women’ (Hartwell 1961, 416). He has not elaborated on the point, but he would no doubt agree with Ivy Pinchbeck who saw in the mill girls of the mid-nineteenth century a shining pointer to the future. The single young women who now went out from the parental home to earn their living in the textile factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire had, she maintained, made ‘a distinct gain in social and economic independence … working the shortest hours and receiving the same rate of wages as men where they were employed in the same kinds of work’; the example of their ‘economic emancipation’ was ‘at once manifested in its influence on better class [sic] women and their demands for a wider sphere and the right to individual independence’ (Pinchbeck 1930, 313–16).

Pinchbeck's optimistic views have not gone unchallenged. Perhaps the clearest statement of the pessimistic case has come from Eric Richards. Arguing that ‘before the Industrial Revolution (as conventionally dated) the utilization of women in the economy was close to a notional maximum’, he was struck by the way in which women's job opportunities actually contracted, so that ‘the female participation rate in the British economy seems to have reached its social [sic] nadir in the third quarter of the nineteenth century’.