rather than pious exhortation, the specific problems and experiences of working-class as well as middle-class women and of women engaged in revolutionary struggle have to be studied and understood. If this is to be done with honesty it means learning from the women themselves. All too often the words ‘worker’ or ‘revolutionary’ are used in the sense of male worker or male revolutionary. Now while women shared some of the experiences of their men, they also found themselves in new situations which were peculiar to women. The sameness and the separateness are so integrally bound together that sometimes they were scarcely aware of the conflict which was going on. Women found themselves, like men, in Europe and in America, confronting the new forms of alienation and exploitation produced by the factory and large-scale machinery. They reacted like men with a hatred of the factories, ‘Bastilles’, and with a persistent hankering after the old days of domestic work and peasant economy, which seemed in retrospect golden. In the 1830s girls in Lowell, Massachusetts, fresh from the countryside, paraded boldly through the streets singing:
Oh isn’t it a pity that such a pretty girl as I
Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die.
Oh I cannot be a slave
For I’m so fond of liberty
That I cannot be a slave. 16
The early nineteenth-century English folk song nostalgically takes up the same theme:
Where are the girls? I’ll tell you plain,
The girls have gone to weave by steam,
And if you’d find ’em you must rise at dawn
And trudge to the factory in the early morn.
The women responded like the men not only with moral protest but with strikes and the organization of unions. In the early nineteenth century these sprang up and collapsed only to start again a few years later. The economic organization of the family was based on the woman’s labour as much as the man’s; sometimes, with unemployment, it was the women’s and children’s earnings alone which saw a family through. At the same time as the French women were involved in associations and schemes for federation, Englishwomen were forming their own friendly societies and associations, like the Female Gardeners and Ancient Virgins, or the Female Political Union, or taking part in the attempt at a union of the whole working class in the short-lived and ill-fated Grand National Consolidated Union. Nor did they play a passive part. The paper The Union (1842–3) gives an account of the women’s part in the strikes of that year in Lancashire, Staffordshire and Yorkshire:
It is a singular fact that women were in many instances the directors of the strike – women held their meetings, sent their delegates and drew up their terms – and women accompanied the turnouts in immense numbers, in all their marchings and counter-marchings throughout the manufacturing districts.… At Halifax these women headed the mob, on some occasions seizing the soldiers’ bayonets and turning them aside with the words ‘We want not bayonets but bread.’ 17
Women were beginning to be involved in activity which demanded a sustained organizing effort and in which they discovered their own powers, an essential political experience for the oppressed. They started now to keep collective accounts. They were no longer organizing only the household. This large-scale organization at the place of work, at the point of production, was a new way of fighting. It had implications far beyond the bread riot. Women learned to put their own case. In America in 1841 the Lowell factory girls started to producea paper called the Factory Girls’ Album in which they complained of long hours, low pay, speed up and store order wage payments (truck). From this the Female Labour Reform Association was formed. While the effort to keep these early trade unions together was often beyond both male and female workers, they formed an essential stage towards the much more solid defensive structures which
Oh isn’t it a pity that such a pretty girl as I
Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die.
Oh I cannot be a slave
For I’m so fond of liberty
That I cannot be a slave. 16
The early nineteenth-century English folk song nostalgically takes up the same theme:
Where are the girls? I’ll tell you plain,
The girls have gone to weave by steam,
And if you’d find ’em you must rise at dawn
And trudge to the factory in the early morn.
The women responded like the men not only with moral protest but with strikes and the organization of unions. In the early nineteenth century these sprang up and collapsed only to start again a few years later. The economic organization of the family was based on the woman’s labour as much as the man’s; sometimes, with unemployment, it was the women’s and children’s earnings alone which saw a family through. At the same time as the French women were involved in associations and schemes for federation, Englishwomen were forming their own friendly societies and associations, like the Female Gardeners and Ancient Virgins, or the Female Political Union, or taking part in the attempt at a union of the whole working class in the short-lived and ill-fated Grand National Consolidated Union. Nor did they play a passive part. The paper The Union (1842–3) gives an account of the women’s part in the strikes of that year in Lancashire, Staffordshire and Yorkshire:
It is a singular fact that women were in many instances the directors of the strike – women held their meetings, sent their delegates and drew up their terms – and women accompanied the turnouts in immense numbers, in all their marchings and counter-marchings throughout the manufacturing districts.… At Halifax these women headed the mob, on some occasions seizing the soldiers’ bayonets and turning them aside with the words ‘We want not bayonets but bread.’ 17
Women were beginning to be involved in activity which demanded a sustained organizing effort and in which they discovered their own powers, an essential political experience for the oppressed. They started now to keep collective accounts. They were no longer organizing only the household. This large-scale organization at the place of work, at the point of production, was a new way of fighting. It had implications far beyond the bread riot. Women learned to put their own case. In America in 1841 the Lowell factory girls started to producea paper called the Factory Girls’ Album in which they complained of long hours, low pay, speed up and store order wage payments (truck). From this the Female Labour Reform Association was formed. While the effort to keep these early trade unions together was often beyond both male and female workers, they formed an essential stage towards the much more solid defensive structures which
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