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0 DON SCHOOL OF 
ECONOMICS AND 
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Fabian Tract No. 67. 


WOMEN AND THE FACTORY 


ACTS. 


BY 

MRS. SIDNEY WEBB. 

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"A MASTERLY PIECE OF WOH.K,"-Tz'mes. 

Post 8vo, 574 pp., cloth, with colored Map ... I~s. 

THE 

HISTORY oF TRADE UNIONISM 

BY 

SIDNEY and BEATRICE WEBB. 

"A history of something far more important than Trade Unionism-that is to 
say, of the attitude of the State towards Labor in Great Britain at various stages, and 
of the effect which each attitude produced."-National Observer, 2nd June, 1894. 

"An admirably lucid presentation of a great mass of complicated facts. 
Every page is of value, and nearly every sentence contains a fact."-Speaker, 5th .\lay, 
1894· 

"This is no dry-as-dust record; it reads almost like a romance."-Lzva·poolDaily Post, 23rd May, 1894. 

" Readable, every word of it. There is plenty 01 excitement and plenty of 
romance in the book."-Quem, 12th May, 1894. 

"The book is itself a literary curiosity, as the joint product of husband and wife. 
Effective literary partnerships are very rare; and though there are many examples of 
husband and wife being both authors, it is not easy to recall an instance of an 
elaborate work produced jointly by husband and wife with such perfect unity of 
method that their intimate friends cannot pretend to trace a separate hand in any part.
Both are accomplished writers on economic subjects; both are indefatigable students; 
aud each of them is known to be amply capable of collecting the material or of fusingit into a work of art. They are both of them well fitted by convictions, training, and 
circumstances, for the task they have undertaken. One of them has come from a 
family of capitalists, who have had the control of great industrial concerns; one of 
them has filled public offices and had experience of political and municipal life ; both 
of them have personally studied every phase of industrial life, and have enjoyed the 
intimacy and confidence of almost every active worker in the industrial mo,·ement. 

Few persons living have seen the entire industrial field so exhaustively, from the offices 

of the great industrial magnate down to the sweaters' dens of \VhitechapeL . . . . 

This is an authentic and real history of English Labor, and desen·es to become a 

classic monument of sympathetic industry."-MR. FREDERICK IIARRI~O:\ in 

.Vnulu11th Ce11tury, June, 1894. 

LONGMA S, GREEN & CO., LONDON AND NEW YORK. 


WOMEN AND THE FACTORY 
ACTS.* 

THE discussions on the Factory Act of 1895t raised once more all 
the old arguments about Factory legislation, but with a significant 
new cleavage. This time legal regulation was demanded, not onlyby all the organizations of working women whose labor was affected,t 
but also by, practically, all those actively engaged in Factory Act 
administration. The four women Factory Inspectors unanimouslyconfirmed the opinion of their male colleagues. Of all the classes§ 
having any practical experience of Factory legislation, only one-
that of the employers-was ranged against the Bill, and that not 
unanimously. But the employers had the powerful aid of most of 
the able and devoted ladies who have usually led the cause of 
women's enfranchisement, and whose strong theoretic objection to 
Factory legislation caused many of the most important clauses in the 

Bill to be rejected. 

The ladies who resist further legal regulation of women's labor 
usually declare that their objection is to special legislation applying 
·only to women. They regard it as unfair, they say, that women's 
power to compete in the labor market should be " hampered" by 
any regulation from which men are free. Any such restriction, theyassert, results in the lowering of women's wages, and in diminishingthe aggregate demand for women's work. I shall, later on, have 
something to say about this assumed competition between men and 
women. But it is curious that we seldom find these objectors to 
unequal laws coming forward to support even those regulationswhich apply equally to men and to women. Nearly all the clauses 
of the I 895 Bill, for instance, and nearly all the amendments proposed 
to it, applied to men and women alike. The sanitary provisions ; 
the regulations about fire-escapes ; the pre-eminently importantclause making the giver-out of work responsible for the places 

• Reproduced, with some additions, from papers read at the Nottingham Conference 
of the 1ational Union of Women Workers (October, 1895), and the Fahian 
Society (January, I 896). 
t Factory and Workshop Act, 1895 {58 and 59 Viet. ch. 37). 
t Petitions were sent in, and meetings held in support of the Bill by, I believe, 
all the Trade Unions of Women, as well as by the Women's Co-operative Guild, 
which is mainly composed of women textile workers, whose hours of labor have, for 
nearly forty years, been rigidly fixed by law. 
§See the Report of the Chiif Inspector of Factol"its for 189+, C. 7745, price 5s. 3d.; 
also the Opinions on Overtime, published by the Women's Trade Union League (ClubUnion Buildings, Clerkenwell Road, London). The evidence before the Royal Commission 
on Labor was decidedly in favor of an extension of, and the more rigidenforcement of Factory legislation : see, in particular, the Minority Report (publishedseparately, price 2d., by the Manchester Labor Press, Tib Street, Manchester). 


4 

where his work is done ; the power to regulate unhealthy trades or 
processes: all these made no distinction between the sexes. Yet 
the ladies who declared that they objected only to inequality of 
legislation, gave no effective aid to the impartial sections of the 
Bill. If we believe that legal regulation of the hours and conditions 
of labor is found, in practice, to promote the economic independence 
and positively to add to the industrial efficiency of the 
workers concerned, why should we not help women workers in 
unregulated trades to gain this superior economic position, even 
if Parliament persists in denying it to the men? It is clear that 
there lurks behind the objection of inequality an inveterate scepticism 
as to the positive advantages of Factory legislation. Indeed, 
the most energetic and prominent opponents of women's FactoryActs openly avow as much. Mrs. Henry Fawcett and Miss Ada 
H eather-Bigg, for instance, usually speak of legal regulation as 
something which, whether for men or for women, decreases personal 
freedom, diminishes productive capacity, and handicaps the worker 
in the struggle for existence. I need not recall how firmly and 
conscientiously this view was held by men like Nassau Senior and 
John Bright in the generation gone by. To-day there are evidently 
many ladies of education and position superstitiously clinging to the 
same belief. Therefore before discussing whether any particularFactory Act is good for women or not, we had better make up our 
minds on the general question. Does State regulation of the hours 
and conditions of labor increase or decrease the economic independence 
and industrial efficiency of the workers concerned? 

Now those who object to further Factory legislation are right in 
asserting that the issue cannot be decided by harrowing accounts of 
factory tyranny, or particular cases of cruelty or hardship. I shall 
not trouble you with the long list of calamities in the unregulatedtrades, on which the official report of the Chief Inspector of Factories 
lays so much stress-the constitutions ruined by long hours in dressmakers' 
workrooms or insanitary laundries, the undermining of 
family life by the degradation of the home into a workshop, the 
diseases and deaths caused by white lead and lucifer matches. And, 
I hope, no one in the discussion will think it any argument againstFactory Acts that some poor widow might find it more difficult to 
get bread for her starving children if she were forbidden to work at 
the white lead factory ; that some sick man's daughter would not 
be allowed to earn the doctor's fee by taking extra work home after 
her factory day; or that some struggling laundress might find it 
impossible to make a living if she could not employ her girls for 
unlimited hours. Either way there must be hard cases, and individual 
grievances. The question is whether, taking the whole population 
and all considerations into account, the evils will be greaterunder regulation or under free competition.

Let us concede to the opponents of Factory legislation that we 
must do nothing to impair or limit the growing sense of personalresponsibility in women ; that we must seek, in every way, to increase 
their economic independence, and their efficiency as workers 


5 


and citizens, not less than as wives and mothers; and that the best 
and only real means of attaining these ends is the safeguarding and 
promoting of women's freedom. The only question at issue is how 
best to obtain this freedom. When we are concerned with the 
propertied classes-when, for instance, it is sought to open up to 
women higher education or the learned professions-it is easy to 
see that freedom is secured by abolishing restrictions. But when 
we come to the relations between capital and labor an entirely new 
set of considerations come into play. In the life of the wage-earningclass, absence of regulation does not mean personal freedom. Fiftyyears' experience shows that Factory legislation, far from diminishing 
individual liberty, greatly increases the personal freedom of the 
workers who are subject to it. Everyone knows that the Lancashire 
woman weaver, whose hours of labor and conditions of work are 
rigidly fixed by law, enjoys, for this very reason, more personal libertythan the unregulated laundry-woman in Notting Hill. She is not 
only a more efficient producer, and more capable of associating with 
her fellows in Trade Unions, Friendly Societies, and Co-operativeStores, but an enormously more independent and self.reliant citizen. 
It is the law, in fact, which is the mother of freedom.• 

To understand the position fully we must realize how our longseries of Factory Acts, Truck Acts, Mines Regulation Acts, and ShopHours Acts, have come into existence.t All these are based upon 
a fundamental economic fact which has slowly forced itself into 
the minds of economists and social reformers-the essential and 
permanent inequality between the individual wage-earner and the 
capitalist employer. When the conditions of the workman's life 
are settled, without any collective regulation, by absolutely free contract 
between man and man, the workman's freedom is entirelydelusive. Where he bargains, he bargains at a hopeless disadvantage;
and on many of the points most vital to his health, efficiency, and 
personal comfort, he is unable to bargain at all. 

Let us see how this comes about. I will not, to prove my point,
take a time of bad trade, when five workmen are competing for one 
situation : I will assume that the whole labor market is in a state of 
perfect equilibrium ; that there is only one workman wanting work, 
and only one situation vacant. Now, watch the process of bargaining 
between the employer and the workman. If the capitalistrefuses to accept the workman's terms, he will, no doubt, suffer some 
inconvenience as an employer. To fulfil his orders he will have to 
•• speed up" some of his machinery, or insist on his workpeopleworking longer hours. Failing these expedients he may have to 
delay the delivery of his goods, and may even find his profits, at the 
end of the year, fractionally less than before. But, meanwhile, he 
goes on eating and drinking, his wife and family go on living,
just as before. His physical comfort is not affected: he can afford to 

*This was pointed out by the Duke of Argyll, in the final chapter of his Reign of 
Law, which deals with Factory legislation. 
t See W. C. Taylor, The .lfodern Factory System; Von Plener's English Factory 
Legtslatton; and Miss Victorine Jeans' Factory Act Legislation. 


6 

wait until the laborer comes back in a humbler frame of mind. And 
that is just what the laborer must presently do. For he, meanwhile, 
has lost his day. His very subsistence depends on his promptlycoming to an agreement. If he stands out, he has no money to meet 
his weekly rent, or to buy food for his family. If he is obstinate, 
consumption of his little hoard, or the pawning of his furniture, may 
put off the catastrophe; but sooner or later slow starvation forces him 
to come to terms. This is no real freedom of contract. The alternative 
on one side is inconvenience; on the other it is starvation. 
I need not remind you that the fallacy of free and equal contract 
between capital and labor has been long since given up by the 
economists. If you read, for instance, our foremost economist, Professor 
Marshall, he will tell you that the employer is a combination in 
himself, with whom the individual wage-earner is seriously at a disadvantage." 
No competent authority would now deny that unfettered 
individual bargaining between capitalist and workman inevitablytends to result, not in the highest wage that the industry can afford, 
but in the lowest on which the workman and his family can subsist. 

Here, then, we have the first justification for something more: than 
unfettered bargaining between man and man. But this is not aiL 
We often forget that the contract between employer and workman 
is to the employer simply a question of the number of shillings to be 
paid at the end of the week. To the workman it is much more 
than that. The wage-earner does not, like the shopkeeper, merelysell a piece of goods which is carried away. It is his whole life 
which, for the stated term, he places at the disposal of his employer. 
What hours he shall work, when and where he shall gethis meals, the sanitary conditions of his employment, the safety of 
the machinery, the atmosphere and temperature to which he is 
subjected, the fatigue or strains which he endures, the risks of 
accident or disease which he has to incur: all these are involved in 
the workman's contract and not in his employer's. Yet about the 
majority of these vital conditions he cannot bargain at all. Imaginea weaver, before accepting employment in a Lancashire cotton mill, 
examining the quantity of steam in the shed, the strength of the 
shuttle-guards, and the soundness of the belts of the shafting ; an 
engineer prying into the security of the hoists and cranes, or the 
safety of the lathes and steam hammers among which he must 
move ; a dressmaker's assistant computing the cubic space which 
will be her share of the workroom, criticising the ventilation, warmth 
and lighting, or examining the decency of the sanitary accommodation 
; think of the woman who wants a job at the white lead 
works, testing the poisonous influence in the particular proce~s 
employed, and reckoning, in terms of shillings and pence, the exact 
degree of injury to her health which she is consenting to incur. No 
sensible person can really assert that the individual operative seeking 
a job has either the knowledge or the opportunity to ascertain what 
the conditions are, or to determine what they should be, even if he 
could bargain about them at all. On these matters, at any rate, 

• See, for instance, the Elemmts o.fthe E conomics o.f fndusb:J· Lr 8g2], p. 382. 

7 

I 
I 
there can be no question of free contract. We may, indeed, leave 
them to be determined by the employer himself: that is to say, bythe competition between employers as to who can most reduce the 
expenses of production. What this means, we know from the ghastlyexperience of the early factory system ; when whole generations of 
our factory hands were stunted and maimed, diseased and demora


llized, hurried into early graves by the progressive degeneration of 
of conditions imposed on even the best employers by the reckless 
competition of the worst."' The only alternative to this disastrous 
reliance on a delusive freedom is the settlement, by expert advice, of 
standard conditions of health, safety, and convenience, to which all 
employers, good and bad alike, are compelled by law to conform. 

We see, therefore, that many of the most vital conditions of 
employment cannot be made subjects of bargain at all, whilst, even 
about wages, unfettered freedom of individual bargaining places the 
operative at a serious disadvantage. But there is one important 
matter which stands midway between the two. In manual work it 
is seldom that an individual can bargain as to when he shall begin or 
leave off work. In the most typical ·processes of modern industry,
individual choice as to the length of the working day is absolutely 
impossible. The most philanthropic or easy-going builder or manufacturer 
could not possibly make separate arrangements with each of 
his workpeople as to the times at which they should come and go,
the particular intervals for meals, or what days they should take as 
holidays. Directly we get machinery and division of labor-directly 
we have more than one person working at the production of an 
article, all the persons concerned are compelled, by the very nature 
of their occupation, to work in concert. This means that there must 
be one uniform rule for the whole establishment. Every workman 
must come when the bell rings, and stay as long as the works are 
open; indiYidual choice there can be none. The hours at which the 
bell shall ring must either be left to the autocratic decision of the 
employer, or else settled by collective regulation to which everyworkman is compelled to conform. 

We can now understand why it is that the representative wage-
earner declares, to the astonishment of the professional man or the 
journalist, that a rule fixing his hours of labor, or defining conditions 
of sanitation or safety, is not a restriction on his personal liberty. 
The workman knows by experience that there is no question of his 
e\·er settling these matters for himself. There are only two alternatives 
to their decision by the employer. One is their settlement 
by a conference between the representatives of the employers and 
the representatives of the organized workmen; both sides, of course, 
acting through their expert salaried officials. This is the method of 
collective bargaining-in short, Trade Unionism. The other method 
is the settlement by the whole community of questions which affect 
the health and industrial efficiency of the race. Then we get expert 

• Some account of this development is given in the first chapter of my Co-operativeMovemmt in Great Britain. See also Engels' Condition of tht English Working Classes 
i1l r814, or Arnold Toynbee's Tht Industrial Revolutio1l. 

8 

investigation as to the proper conditions, which are enforced bytlaws binding on all. This is the method of Factory legislation. • 

No greater mistake can be made in comparing these two methods ,> 
than to assume that Trade Unionism sacrifices the imaginary per-t 
sonal liberty of the individual workman to make his own bargain . 
any less than Factory legislation. Take, for instance, the Oldham 
weaver. Here we see both methods at work. The rate of wages is 
determined entirely by Trade Unionism; the hours of labor and 
sanitary conditions are fixed by law. But there is no more individual 
choice in the one than in the other. I do not hesitate to say,
indeed, that an employer or a weaver would find it easier and less 
costly to defy the Factory Inspector and work overtime, than to defythe Trade Union official and evade the Piecework List of Prices. 
Or, take the Northumberland coal-miner. He, for particular reasons, 
objects to have his hours fixed by law. But we need be under no 
delusion as to his views ori "personal liberty." If any inhabitant of 
a Northumberland village offered to hew coal below the rate fixed 
by the Trade Union for the whole county, or if he proposed to work 
two shifts instead of one, the whole village would rise against him, 
and he would find it abwlutely impossible to descend the mine, or 
to get work anywhere in the county. It is not my business to-dayeither to defend or to criticise Trade Union action. But we cannot 
understand this question without fully realizing that Trade Unionism, 
in substituting for the despotism of the employer or the individual 
choice of the workman a general rule binding on all concerned, is 
just as much founded on the subordination of the individual whim 
to the deliberate decision of the majority as any law can be. IfI had 
the time I could show you, by elaborate technical arguments, how 
the one method of over-riding the individual will is best for certain 
matters, and the other method more expedient in regard to other 
matters. Rates of wages, for instance, are best settled by collective 
bargaining ; and sanitation, safety, and the prevention of overwork 
by fixed hours of labor are best secured by legal enactment. 

But this question of the relative advantages of legislative regulation 
and Trade Unionism has unhappily no bearing on the women 
employed in the sweated industries. Before we can have Trade 
Union regulation we must build up strong Trade Unions ; and 
the unfortunate women workers whose overtime it was proposed to 
curtail, and whose health and vigor it was proposed to improve, byMr. Asquith's Bill of 1895, are without any effective organization.
The Lancashire women weavers and card-room hands were in the 
same predicament before the Factory Acts. It was only when theywere saved from the unhealthy conditions and excessive hours of the 
cotton mills of that time that they began to combine in Trade 
Unions, to join Friendly Societies, and to form Co·operative Stores. 
This, too, is the constant experience of the men's trades. Where 
effective Trade Unions have grown up, legal protection of one kind 
or another has led the way." And it is easy to see why this is so. 

• For proof of this see Tht History of Tradt Unionism, by Sidney and Beatrice 
Webb, particularly the first chapter. 

r 
9 

Before wage-earners can exercise the intelligence, the deliberation, 
and the self-denial that are necessary for Trade Unionism, they must 
enjoy a certain standard of physical health, a certain surplus of 
energy, and a reasonable amount of leisure. It is cruel mockery to 
preach Trade Unionism, and Trade Unionism alone, to the sempstresssewing day and night in her garret for a bare subsistence ; to the 
laundrywoman standing at the tub eighteen hours at a stretch; or to 
the woman whose health is undermined with "Wrist-drop,"" Potter'srot," 
or " Phossy-jaw." If we are really in earnest in wanting Trade 
Unions for women, the way is unmistakable. If we wish to see the 
<:apacity for organization, the self-reliance, and the personal independence 
of the Lancashire cotton weaver spread to other trades, we 
must give the women workers in these trades the same legal fixing 
of hours, the same effective prohibition of overtime, the same legalsecurity against accident and disease, the same legal standard of 
sanitation and health as is now enjoyed by the women in the 
Lancashire cotton mills. 

So much for the general theory of Factory legislation. We have 
still to deal with the special arguments directed against those clauses 
of the 1895 Bill which sought to restrict the overtime worked by 
women in the sweated trades. If, however, we have fully realized 
the advantages, both direct and indirect, which the workers obtain 
from the legal regulation of their labor, we shall regard with a gooddeal of suspicion any special arguments alleged in opposition to anyparticular Factory Acts. The student of past Factory agitations 
sees the same old bogeys come up again and again. Among these 
bogeys the commonest and most obstructive-has always been that of 

' 
foreign competition, that is to say, the risk that the regulated workers 
will be supplanted by "free labor "-whether of other countries or of 
other classes at home. At every step forward in legal regulation the 
miner and the textile worker have been solemnly warned that the 
result of any raising of their standard of sanitation, safety, education 
or leisure would be the transference of British capital to China or 
Peru. And to my mind it is only another form of the same fallacywhen capitalists' wives and daughters seek to alarm working women 
by prophesying, as the result of further Factory legislation, the 
dismissal of women and girls from employment, and their replacement 
by men. The opposition to Factory legislation never comes 
from workers who have any practical experience of it. Every existing 
organization of working women in the kingdom has declared 
itself in favor of Factory legislation. Unfortunately, working 
women have less power to obtain legislation than middle-class 
women have to obstruct it. Unfortunately, too, not a few middledass 
women have allowed their democratic sympathies and Collec.:
tivist principles to be overborne by this fear of handicapping 
women in their struggle for employment. Let us, therefore, consider, 
as seriously as we can, this terror lest the capitalist employing 
women and girls at from five to twelve shillings a week, should, on 
the passage of a new Factory Act, replace them by men at twenty 
or thirty shillings. 


10 

First let us realize the exact amount of the inequality between 
the sexes in our Factory Acts. All the regulations with respect to 
safety, sanitation, employers' liability, and age apply to men and 
women alike. The only restriction of any importance in our Labor 
Code which bears unequally on men and women is that relating to 
the hours of labor.• Up to now there has been sufficient influence 
among the employers, and sufficient prejudice and misunderstanding 
among legislators, to prevent them expressly legislating, in so manywords, about the hours of labor of adult men. That better counsels 
are now prevailing is shown by the fact that Parliament in 1892 gave 
power to the Board of Trade to prevent excessive hours of work 
among railway servants, and that the Home Secretary has now a 
similar power in respect of any kind of manual labor which is in-
iuriuus to health or dangerous to life and limb. I need hardly saythat I am heartily in favor of regulating, by law, the hours of adult 
men, wherever and whenever possible.t But although the prejudiceis breaking down, it is not likely that the men in the great stapleindustries will be able to secure for themselves the same legallimitation of hours and prohibition of overtime that the women 
in the textile manufactures have enjoyed for nearly forty years. 
And thus it comes about that some of the most practical proposals 
for raising the condition of the women in the sweated trades must 
take the form of regulations applying to women only.

It is frequently asserted as self-evident that any special limitation 
of women's labor must militate against their employment. If employers 
are not allowed to make their women work overtime, or 
during the night, they will, it is said, inevitably prefer to have men. 
Thus, it is urged, any extension of Factory legislation to trades at 
present unregulated must diminish the demand for women's labor. 
But this conclusion, which seems so obvious, really rests on a series 
of assumptions which are not borne out by facts. 

The first assumption is, that in British industry to-day, men and 
women are actively competing for the same employment. I doubt 
whether any one here has any conception of the infinitesimal extent 
to which this is true. We are so accustomed, in the middle-class, to 
see men and women engaged in identical work, as teachers, journalists, 
authors, painters, sculptors, comedians, singers, music::ians, 

• The Law relating to Factories and Wor-kshops, by May Abraham and A. Llewelyn 
Davies (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1896, S/-), contains a convenient summary of all the 
Acts. With regard to hours, the main provisions are as follow : Textile factories 
employing women or children, may work only between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. (or 7 a.m. 
and 7 p.m.), only 56~ hours net per week, and overtime is absolutely prohibited. In 
non-textile factories and in ordinary workshops, women may be worked 6o hours perweek, overtime is (usually) permitted under certain conditions, and the day's work 
may (except on Saturdays) range over a period from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., or, if no children 
or young persons are employed, even from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. This absence of a precisely 
determined legal working-day makes it practically impossible to enforce the law. 
In " dome<•ic workshops " there is no restriction on women's hours, and in laundries 
the only limit is a general one of sixty hours per week (or fourteen in any one day), 
without regulation of the hours of beginning or ending, or of meal-times. This is 
quite illusory. 
t See Fabian Tract, ~o. +8, Eight Hours ~1' law : a P•·acticab/e Solutio11. 


l I 

medical practitioners, clerks, or what not, that we almost inevitably 
assume the same state of things to exist in manual labor and manufacturing 
industry. But this is very far from being the case. To 
begin with, in over nine-tenths of the industrial field there is no such 
thing as competition between men and women : the men do one 
thing, and the women do another. There is no more chance of our 
having our houses built by women than of our getting our floors 
scrubbed by men. And even in those industries which employ both 
men and women, we find them sharply divided in different departments, 
working at different processes, and performing different 
operations. In the tailoring trade, for instance, it is often assumed 
that men and women are competitors. But in a detailed investigation 
of that trade I discovered that men were working at entirely separatebranches to those pursued by the women. And when my husband, 
as an economist, lately tried to demonstrate the oft-repeated statement 
that women are paid at a lower rate than men, he found it 
very difficult to discover any trade whatever in which men and 
women did the same work." As a matter of fact, the employment of 
men or women in any particular industry is almost always determined 
by the character of the process. In many cases the physical strength 
or endurance required, or the exposure involved, puts the work 
absolutely out of the power of the average woman. No law has 
hindered employers from engaging women as blacksmiths, steel-
smelters, masons, or omnibus-drivers. The great mass of extractive, 
constructive, and transport industries must always fall to men. On 
the other hand, the women of the wage-earning class have hitherto 
been distinguished by certain qualities not possessed by the averageworking man. For good or for evil they eat little, despise tobacco, 
and seldom get drunk ; they rarely strike or disobey orders ; and 
they are in many other ways easier for an employer to deal with. 
Hence, where women can really perform a given task with anythinglike the efficiency of a man, they have, owing to their lower standard 
of expenditure, a far better chance than the man of getting work. 
The men, in short, enjoy what may be called a " rent" of superiorstrength and endurance ; the women, on their side, in this preference 
for certain employments, what may be called a "rent" of 
abstemiousness. 

I do not wish to imply that there are absolutely no cases in 
British industry in which men and women are really competingwith each other. It is, I believe, easy to pick out an instance here 
and there in which it might be prophesied that the removal of an 
existing legal restriction might, in the first instance, lead to some 
women being taken on in place of men. In the book and printingtrade of London, for instance, it has been said that if women were 
allowed by law to work all through the night, a certain number of 

* " The Alleged Difference between the \Vages of Men and vVomen," Economic 
Jounwl, December, r8gr ; see, on the general question, Economic Studies, by Professor 
W. Smart, and the valuable report by Miss Clara Collet, on the Statistics of Employ"'""' 
of ~Vonun and Gids, published by the Labor Department of the Board of Trade 
(C-7564), price 8d. 

12 

exceptionally strong women might oust some men in book-folding 
and even in compositors' work." We must not overlook these cases; 
but we must learn to view them in their proper proportion to the 
whole field of industry. It would clearly be a calamity to the cause 
of women's advancement if we were to sacrifice the personal libertyand economic independence of three or four millions of wage-earning 
women in order to enable a few hundreds or a few thousands to 
supplant men in certain minor spheres of industry.t

The second assumption is, that in the few cases in which men and 
women may be supposed really to compete with each other for employment, 
the effect of any regulation of women's hours is pure loss to 
them, and wholly in favor of their assumed competitors who are unrestricted. 
This, I believe, is simply a delusion. Any investigator of 
women's work knows full well that what most handicaps women is 
their general deficiency in industrial capacity and technical skill. 
Where the average woman fails is in being too much of an amateur 
at her work, and too little of a professional. Doubtless it maybe said that the men are to blame here : it is they who induce 
women to marry, and thus divert their attention from professional 
life. But though we cannot cut at the root of this, by insisting, as I 
once heard it gravely suggested, on " three generations of unmarried 
women," we can do a great deal to encourage the growth of professional 
spirit and professional capacity among women workers, if 
we take care to develop our industrial organization along the properlines. The first necessity is the exclusion of illegitimate competitors. 
The real enemies of the working woman are not the men, who 
always insist on higher wages, but the " amateurs" of her own sex. 
So long as there are women, married or unmarried, eager and able 
to take work home, and do it in the intervals of another profession,
domestic service, we shall never disentangle ourselves from that vicious 
circle in which low wages lead to bad work, and bad work compels 
low wages. The one practical remedy for this disastrous competitionis the extension of Factory legislation, with its strict limitation of 
women's hours, to all manufacturing work wherever carried on.! It 
is no mere coincidence that the only great industry in which women 
get the same wages as men-Lancashire cotton weaving-is the one 
in which precise legal regulation of women's hours has involYed the 
absolute exclusion of the casual amateur. No woman will be taken 
on at a cotton mill unless she is prepared to work the full factory 
hours, to come regularly every day, and put her whole energy into 
her task. In a Lancashire village a woman must decide whether she 
will earn her maintenance by working in the mill or by tending the 

• With regard to the employment of women as compositors, an article by Amy 
Linnett, in the Economic Review for January, 1892, should be referred to. 
t Looked at from the point of view of the whole community, and not merely from 
that of one sex, it would, of course, be a matter for further consideration whether, and 
in what directions, it is socially desirable that men should be replaced by women as 
industrial operatives. Throughout this paper I have abstained from discussing this 
consideration. 

! See Fabian Tract, No. 50, Swealtng: its Cause and Remedv. 


·home : there is no " betwixt and between." The result is a class of 

women wage-earners who are capable of working side by side with 

men at identical tasks ; who can earn as high wages as their male 

competitors; who display the same economic independence and pro


fessional spirit as the men; and who are, in fact, in technical skill 

and industrial capacity, far in advance of any other class of women 

workers in the kingdom.* If we want to bring the women wage-

earners all over England up to the level of the Lancashire cotton 

weavers, we must subject them to the same conditions of exclusively 

professior.1l work. 

There is another way in which the extension of the FactoryActs to the unregulated trades is certain to advance women's industrial 
position. We have said that the choice of men or women 
as workers is really determined by the nature of the industrial 
process. Now these processes are constantly changing; new inventions 
bring in new methods of work, and often new kinds of machinery.
This usually means an entire revolution in the character of the labor 
required. What to-day needs the physical strength or the life-longapprenticeship of the skilled handicraftsman may, to-morrow, by a 
new machine, or the use of motive power, be suddenly broughtwithin the capacity of the nimble fingers of a girl from the Board 
School. It is in this substitution of one process for another that we 
discover the real competition between different classes or different 
sexes in industry. The tailoring trade, for instance, once carried on 
exclusively by skilled handicraftsmen, is now rapidly slipping out of 
their hands. But it is not the woman free to work all the night in 
her garret who is ousting the male operative. What is happening is 
that the individual tailor, man or woman, is being superseded by the 
great clothing factories established at Leeds,t or elsewhere, where 
highly-paid skilled designers prepare work for the costly " cutting-
out'' guillotines, and hundreds of women guide the pieces throughself-acting sewing and button-holing machines, to be finally pressed 
by steam power into the "smart new suit" of the City clerk. 

Now this evolution of industry leads inevitably to an increased 
demand for women's labor. Immediately we substitute the factory,
with its use of steam power, and production on a large scale, for the 
sweater's den or the domestic workshop, we get that division of labor 
and application of machinery which is directly favorable to the 
employment of women. It is to "the factory system, and the consequent 
growth of the ready-made trade," declares Miss Collet, that 
must " be traced the great increase in the number of girls employed 
in the tailoring trade."t The same change is going on in other 
occupations. Miss Collet notices that the employment of female 
labor has specially increased in the great industry of boot and shoe 
making.§ But, as in the analogous case of the tailoring trade, the 

* See the introduction, by Mr. A.]. Mundella, to Von Plener's English Factory 
Legislatzon. 
t See "Women's vVork in Leeds," by Miss Clara Collet (Economic Jounzal, 
September, 
r8gr , pp. 467-72). 
t Statistics of Employment of Women and Girls, C-7564, p. I I. § Ibid, P· 73



increase has not been in the number of the unregulated women 
workers in the sweaters' dens. Formerly we had a man working in 
his own room, and employing his wife and daughter to help him at 
all hours. Some people might have argue::d that anything which 
struck at the root of this system would deprive women of employment. 
As a matter of fact, the result has been, by division of labor 
in the rapidly growing great boot factories, to substitute for these 
few hundreds of unpaid assistants, many thousands of independentand regularly employed women operatives. For we must remember 
that when these changes take place, they take place on a large scale. 
Whilst the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women is 
proud to secure new openings for a few scores or a few hundreds, the 
industrial evolution which I have described has been silently absorbing, 
in one trade or another, hundreds of thousands of women of all 
classes. It is therefore infinitely more important for the friends of 
women's employment to enquire how an extension of the Factory 
Acts would influence our progress towards the factory system, than 
how it would affect, say, the few hundred women who might be 
engaged in night-work book-folding. 

If there is one result more clearly proved by experience than 
another, it is that the legal fixing of definite hours of labor, the 
requirement of a high standard of sanitation, and the prohibition of 
overtime, all favor production on a large scale. It has been the 
employers' constant complaint against the Factory Acts that theyinevitably tend to squeeze out the " little master." The evidence 
taken by the House of Lords' Committee on Sweating conclusivelyproved that any effective application of factory regulations to the 
workplaces of East London and the Black Country would quickly 
lead to the substitution of large factories. Factory legislation is, 
therefore, strenuously resisted by the "little masters," who carry on 
their workshops in the back slums; by the Jewish and other sub-
contractors who make a living by organizing helpless labor ; and by 
all who cherish a sentimental yearning for domestic industries. But 
this sentiment must not blind us to the arithmetical fact that it is 
the factory system which provides the great market for women's 
labor. Those w~ll-meaning ladies who, by resisting the extension of 
Factory legislation, are keeping alive the domestic workshop and 
the sweaters' den, are thus positively curtailing the sphere of women's 
employment. The "freedom" of the poor widow to work, in her 
own bedroom, "all the hours that God made"; and the wife's privilege 
to supplement a drunken hu band's wages by doing work at her 
own fire ide, are, in sober truth, being purchased at the price of the 
exclusion from regular factory employment of thousands of "independent 
women." 

We can now sum up the whole argument. The case for Factorylegislation does not rest on harrowing tales of exceptional tyranny,
though plenty of these can be furnished in support of it. It is ba ed 
on the broad facts of the capitalist system, and the inevitable results 
of the Industrial Revolution. A whole century of experience proves 

*See Fabian Tract ~o. 23, The CnStfo•· an Eight Hom·s Bill. 


15 

that where the conditions of the wage-earner's life are left to be 
settled by " free competition" and individual bargaining between 
master and man, the worker's "freedom" is delusive. Where he 
bargains, he bargains at a serious disadvantage, and on many of the 
points most vital to himself and to the community he cannot bargain.at all. The common middle-class objection to Factory legislation-
that it interferes with the individual liberty of the operative-springsfrom ignorance of the economic position of the wage-earner. Far 
from diminishin~ personal freedom, Factory legislation positively in-
creases the ind vidual liberty and economic independence of the 
workers subject to it. No one who knows what life is among the 
people in Lancashire textile villages on the one hand, and among

the East End or Black Country unregulated trades on the other, can 
ever doubt this. 

All these general considerations apply more forcibly to women 
wage-earners than to men. Women are far more helpless in the 
labor market, and much less able to enforce their own common rule 
by Trade Unionism. The only chance of getting Trade Unions 
.among women workers lies through the Factory .Acts. We have 
before us nearly forty years' actual experience of the precise limitation 
of hours and the absolute prohibition of overtime for women 
workers in the cotton manufacture ; and they teach us nothing that 
justifies us in refusing to extend the like protection to the women 
slaving for irregular and excessive hours in laundries, dressmakers' 
workrooms, and all the thousand and one trades in which women's 
hours of work are practically unlimited. 

Finally, we ~ave seen that the fear of women's exclusion from 
industrial employment is wholly unfounded. The uniform effect of 
Factory legislation in the past has been, by encouraging machinery,
division of labor, and production on a large scale, to increase the 
employment of women, and largely to raise their status in the labor 
market. At this very moment the neglect to apply the FactoryActs effectively to the domestic workshop is positively restricting the 
demand for women workers in the clothing trades. And what is 
even more important, we see that it is only by strict regulation of 
the conditions of women's employment that we can hope for anygeneral rise in the leYel of their industrial efficiency. The real 
enemy of the woman worker is not the skilled male operative, but 
the unskilled and half-hearted female "amateur" who simultaneously 
blacklegs both the workshop and the home. The legal regulation of 
women's labor is required to protect the independent professional 
woman worker against these enemies of her own sex. \Vithout this 
regulation it,is futile to talk to her of the equality of men and women. 
With this regulation, experience teaches us that women can work 
their way in certain occupations to a man's skill, a man's wages, and 
.a man's sense of personal dignity and independence. 

G. ST~NDRING, Printer, 7 and 9 Finsbury Street, London, E.C. 

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