Struggle and Suffrage in Leeds: Women's Lives and the Fight for Equality

By Tina Jackson

The story of Leeds is bound up in the stories of its women workers. But what were conditions like for ordinary women, and how did their lives change in the hundred years between 1850 and 1950? Who were the women who toiled in the mills, factories and sweatshops that transformed the city’s landscape? Where and how did they live? What did they do in their leisure time? What happened to them when they needed medical care? What did the campaign for suffrage mean in real-life terms for the women who had no vote and whose voices have rarely been heard? In Leeds, the campaign for suffrage was set against a backdrop of industry that relied on women workers for whom hardship was a fact of life. As the campaign for votes for women gained traction from the 1860s, social and political reformers and activists worked to improve conditions not just in industry, but in schools, hospitals and in the opportunities available to women and girls. Some of the women, like the prominent suffragette Leonora Cohen and Leeds’ first female MP, Alice Bacon, are still talked about, but the city’s history is full of the stories of exceptional, inspirational women who in their own ways did their bit, broke the mould, and refused to fit into proscribed roles. In doing so, they opened the door for women to achieve some of the freedoms we now take for granted. This new, fully illustrated book brings them back from obscurity and lets their voices to heard.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526716859

Tina Jackson

Tina Jackson is dedicated to informing people of the love of God. She is the editor, producer, and host of U Beautiful Creation LLC, a Christian-based talk show located in Michigan and available to view on YouTube. Tina desires to see the Body of Christ come together in one accord and understand the mysteries of God's ways. Taking the media mountain back for our Lord Jesus Christ is the key to the days ahead. Tina travels to do speaking engagements at conferences and events. She is also the author of "Mysteries Revealed on Speaking in Tongues", understanding the purpose of praying in tongues to get breakthrough and to partner with God, He needs our voice.

Book preview

Introduction

Amelia Crewe was born in Morley around 1878. Her father was a stonemason and her husband, Walter Brown, was a miner. When they married, Amelia and Walter moved into 8 Broadfoot Street, off York Road. The house had a long garden, used to grow fruit and vegetables, and a front room set up as a shop. In a mining community, accidents and hardship were common, and Amelia was lenient about letting women in her neighbourhood buy things on ‘tick’, knowing it was unlikely her neighbours would be able to pay their bills.

Amelia gave birth thirteen times. Five boys died. The eight children who survived were Elsie, born in 1900, Nellie, Millie, Hilda, Florrie, Edith, Dolly and Phyllis, the baby, born in 1918. To make ends meet, Amelia went charring at St James Hospital, and when they got home from school, the eldest daughters served in the shop, cleaned the house and the lavatory at the bottom of the long garden, and looked after their younger sisters. When they were 13, they went to work in nearby mills and factories.

Amelia was my great-grandmother. Her second daughter, Nellie, was my grandmother. Her first job, at 13, was in a toffee factory, but most of her working life was spent in textile factories, where she became a skilled and valued tailoress. Nellie was strong, kind, resilient, beautiful, and always up for fun and a laugh. A glamorous flapper in her youth, she adored clothes, and like many Leeds women, took great pride in being fashionable.

The lives of Amelia and Nellie are just two of the stories woven into the fabric of Leeds’ history. The story of the city is bound up with the story of its women workers: women like Nellie and her sisters, working in the textile mills, sweatshops and factories that transformed the city’s landscape.

In 1851, there were 131,259 women living in Leeds. A century later, there were 367,199. The industries that accounted for the growth of the city relied on a vast workforce of women and girls. But who were these women, and what were their lives like?

There is little information widely available about them; during their lifetimes, their stories were not regarded as being of much consequence, and therefore were little documented. It has been realised only recently that the lives of everyday people are as fascinating a part of history as those who were used to their voices being heard.

The stories of hardships and inequalities faced by the women of Leeds, the ways that their lives improved, the formidable women who battled for advances in women’s healthcare and education, and the free-spirited women who refused to be bound by conventional expectations, are bound up in the story of the fight, at grassroots level, for emancipation, equality and the right for women to vote.

Over the course of a century the story of the lives of women in Leeds is a not just a tale of struggle and suffrage, but of survival and success. At a time when, more than 100 years after some women in this country first got the right to vote, women’s voices are still raised in protest, it has been a privilege to discover some of the realities of their lives and give their voices, so often unheard, a chance to be aired.

CHAPTER ONE

Women at Work

In June 1832, Elizabeth Bentley, a flax-mill worker from Leeds, was interviewed by Michael Sadler, a Leeds politician and campaigner against child labour, and his House of Commons Committee. Elizabeth, born in 1809, started work in a flax mill when she was 6. ‘As a child I worked from five in the morning to nine at night,’ she said; there was a 40-minute break for lunch, but no other breaks, and if the children flagged in their work or were late, they were ‘strapped’.

Conditions for women textile workers in the middle of the nineteenth century were harsh; the hours long, the work demanding, and the pay insufficient to keep most out of poverty. Child labour was an everyday occurrence.

Later, Elizabeth worked as a weigher in the carding room. ‘You cannot see each other for dust,’ she said. ‘It was so dusty, the dust got up my lungs, and the work was so hard. I got so bad in health, that when I pulled the baskets down, I pulled my bones out of their places.’ Elizabeth was so physically damaged by the work she did as a child and young woman that she could no longer work in the factories, or support her widowed mother; she told Michael Sadler that she was now living in the poor house.

Mill and factory girls, for all their hard lives, had freedoms unavailable to more affluent women; they could walk in the streets unaccompanied and unchaperoned for example, and laugh and chat freely with their friends. Their practical clothing was less restrictive than the garments worn by middle-class women. They were regarded by some of the middle classes as morally loose and an affront to respectability. When he was a curate at St Saviour’s in The Bank during the 1840s, the Reverend Pollen described ‘troops’ of women and girls leaving the mill, ‘defiling the streets, clothed in long canvas aprons, their heads covered with a loose handkerchief – the neck and arms uncovered, and adorned with gaudy trinkets – coarse and immodest in voice, looks and expression.’

In 1849, investigative journalist Angus Bethune Reach visited Leeds. In ‘Labour and the Poor’, published in the Morning Chronicle in December 1849, he described two ‘slop workers’: female casual workers in the textile trade. One made fustian and corduroy trousers, jackets and waistcoats. She was paid 10d for a pair of trousers, which she could make in a day, starting at 7 a.m. and finishing at 10 p.m. For drawers, with buttons and button holes, she was paid 4d, but couldn’t make two pairs in a day.

Another ‘slop worker’ made boy’s dresses. The smallest size could be made in a day and would earn her 1s 4d. She worked from 7 a.m. to between 10 p.m. and midnight, and had to provide her own thread.

Flax spinning was the harshest and most ill-paid textile work, done largely by immigrant women who worked for whatever pittance they could get.

The flax industry in Leeds employed 9,500 people as flax spinners, many of them Irish women. By 1851 the flax industry was declining and a third of Leeds workers laboured in the woollen and textile industries. The main textiles were broadcloth and fancy woollens, but by the early years of the twentieth century, the demand had changed and suit fabrics, serge and shoddy cloth were the principal textiles coming out of Leeds factories.

Working women’s lives were transformed between 1881 and 1914, through working in the factory system. At this time, women made up a third of the total labour force in Leeds, where staple industries were wool and worsted cloth and ready-made goods.

A quarter of women workers were employed in the textile industry by 1911, out of a total workforce of 30,000, employed either in big factories or tiny, cramped sweatshops. Two-thirds of tailoring workers in Leeds were women, and for many, that meant sweated casual labour.

Going to Work

Girls started working in early adolescence, with 13 being the usual age in the nineteenth century. Young girls usually worked full-time until they married, and then might work irregularly, or do piece work at home to bring in ‘a bit extra’. At 25, their employment declined, although a quarter of female workers carried on working into their mid-50s. The 1911 census reveals that sixty-four per cent of unmarried women, thirteen per cent of married women and nearly thirty per cent of widowed women in Leeds all worked. For most working-class families, a single wage was not enough to support a family.

The male-dominated trades union movement held that women should not have to work, and because women workers were assumed to give up work on marriage, there was no investment in training them into skilled workers. Most women’s jobs were unskilled, low-paid, dull, repetitive and involved toiling for long hours in unhealthy conditions. The worst-paid textile jobs were rag-sorting and mangling – the nastiest, dirtiest work of all.

The largest proportion of women workers were in manufacturing. Other jobs included domestic service (nearly one-fifth of female workers in 1911), retail work and for middle-class women, clerical work and some professional work. Shop workers in working-class districts could work eighty hours a week.

Unlike towns and cities based around a single industry, i.e. cotton, boots and shoes, Leeds offered a variety of types of employment, and factory work available to women included: paper-bag and box making, printing, light engineering and food production. Factories with household names included Brownhill & Sons and Yorkshire Relish manufacturers Goodall, Backhouse & Co. Women were employed in boot and shoe factories to machine the uppers together.

There was also printing, including Crown Point printing works and Whitehall Printeries, which specialised in fashion posters, catalogues and other material generated by the cloth and clothing industries. Women in printing works were employed to feed machines or as packers, sorters and folders of printed material.

In an era before health and safety standards were introduced, factory work could be exceedingly dangerous, and industrial accidents were common. In 1870, a fire broke out at Messrs G Mann & Co, a hat factory in New Wortley employing 200 workers, two-thirds of whom were young women. A hundred ‘hands’ worked in the top room of the three-storey building; paper waste was kept in a special room and the staircases were made of wood.

Highly flammable naptha was used in the hat-varnishing process. Elizabeth Laird, who worked in the varnish room, noticed a small piece of burning paper on the floor and stamped on it to put it out. The flame was evidently not extinguished though, and when Elizabeth Ellen Blomerley went to the waste room for a hat box, she saw three dozen hat boxes were on fire.

In the hot, dry conditions, the fire spread out of control, razing the building to the ground. Three women perished in the fire: 23-year-old Agnes Steel, who died as the result of a fall, and both 22-year-old Grace Rosendale and 13-year-old Jane Spence, who burned to death.

A different, but equally terrifying, kind of industrial accident claimed more lives in July 1885. A headline in the Dundee Courier & Argus and Northern Warder read: ‘Terrible Accident at Leeds: Six Women Killed’. At Hunslet Rolling Works of Messrs Ingham, the top storey of the three-storey building collapsed under the weight of bags of nails and the vibration of the machines. Six women working on the top storey were unharmed, but ten women on the ground floor were buried under falling masonry, machinery and nail bags. Six bodies were recovered, and three injured women taken to the infirmary. The dead were Emily T. Sheldon, married; Mrs Lowther, widow; Polly Scott, married; Mrs Lovett Thwaite; Mrs Lilian Whyte and Mrs Polly Fawcett.

Working in ready-mades

The clothing industry in Leeds was revolutionised by John Barran, who invented a band-knife that could cut up to 100 thicknesses of fabric. In 1852 he opened his first factory in Alfred Street employing twenty female workers and providing three sewing machines. They made ready-made clothing for men and boys, which Barran sold through drapers’ shops.

In her 1984 PhD thesis The Employment of Working Class Women in Leeds, 1880–1914, feminist historian June Hannam describes how Barran used a combination of factory and outside workers; in 1851 there were twenty-nine tailoresses in Leeds but by 1871, to satisfy the demands of the growing community of white-collar workers, craftsmen and factory workers who wanted clothes that showed off their status, 483 tailoresses were employed.

As the centre of excellence for producing woollens and worsteds, winter coats were always a leading Leeds product. New lifestyle trends would also influence the production of particular goods; for instance, when motoring became fashionable, Leeds factories produced car coats and travelling clothes.

In the big factories, women workers outnumbered men. John Barran employed 320 men and 1,120 women in 1890; Bainbridge’s had 60 men and 240 women, and Gaunt & Hudson, 50 men and 450 women. Women were employed mainly as machinists or finishers, including making pockets, seaming and binding. Some women also worked as packers, labellers, or in the offices.

Many young women preferred to work in the new factories rather than as domestics. The new ‘ready-mades’ factories were admired as ‘palaces of industry’, with better ventilation and sanitary conditions, and shorter working hours than sweatshops. They were seen as a much more desirable option than sweatshops or doing piecework at home. The new factories were light and airy. Some had rest rooms, bathrooms, and dining rooms for male and female workers. One factory even had a piano. Barran’s female employees were expected to behave respectably, and wear bonnets as they were leaving the factory. Male employees could be dismissed for using bad language or behaving suggestively to women workers. Barran even organised concerts, parties and an annual works outing to the seaside.

The hours were shorter, too. Women were allowed by law to work for up to sixty hours a week. In the 1880s women employed in the ready-mades factories worked 52½ hours. John Barran claimed of his factory that: ‘Everything has been done to remove from the firm the stigma of sweating and to place workers