[...] The twenty years between 1815 and 1835 see also the first indications of independent trade union action among women workers. John Wade, commenting upon a strike of 1,500 female card-setters in the West Riding in 1835, pointed the moral: ‘Alarmists may view these indications of female independence as more menacing to established institutions than the “education of the lower orders”.’

But there is a paradox of feeling even in this advance. The Radicalism of northern working women was compounded of nostalgia for lost status and the assertion of new-found rights. According to conventions which were deeply felt, the woman’s status turned upon her success as a housewife in the family economy, in domestic management and forethought, baking and brewing, cleanliness and child-care. The new independence, in the mill or full-time at the loom, which made new claims possible, was felt simultaneously as a loss in status and in personal independence. Women became more dependent upon the employer or labour market, and they looked back to a ‘golden’ past in which home earnings from spinning, poultry, and the like, could be gained around their own door. In good times the domestic economy, like the peasant economy, supported a way of life centred upon the home, in which inner whims and compulsions were more obvious than external discipline. Each stage in industrial differentiation and specialization struck also at the family economy, disturbing customary relations between man and wife, parents and children, and differentiating more sharply between ‘work’ and ‘life’. It was to be a full hundred years before this differentiation was to bring returns, in the form of labour-saving devices, back into the working woman’s home. Meanwhile, the family was roughly torn apart each morning by the factory bell, and the mother who was also a wage-earner often felt herself to have the worst of both the domestic and the industrial worlds.