Introduction
In the 1830s and 1840s, social conflict over the nature and development of the emerging industrial order reached a peak of intensity. The Ten Hours Movement (THM) was one component of this contestation. Over a twenty-five year period, from 1831 to 1855, it waged a prolonged struggle to achieve a ten-hour working day for workers in the cotton, woolen, and worsted textile industries of the north of England and parts of Scotland. Initially, this demand related only to the working hours of children and young people. Women were included later, and their hours became regulated through the Factory Act of 1844, but from the very beginning the THM made it clear that it desired shorter hours for all adults and assumed that this would come through the interdependence of children, young people, and adults in the labor process. It achieved this goal with the Factory Act of 1847, although supplementary legislation was required to close loopholes that had allowed employers to evade its provisions.
The THM has been interpreted by historians in a variety of ways. It has been seen as a religiously-inspired humanitarian movement, as a challenge to the dominance of laissez-faire beliefs, as a politically-significant Tory-Radical alliance, as contributing to the gendering of the labor force, as laying the foundations for the male-breadwinner family, as articulating claims for working-class citizenship, and as a focus for debates about the cultural significance of the industrial order.Footnote 1 However, despite this range of interpretations, the discourse of the THM on family life, although central to the its demands, has been badly neglected. J. T. Ward's classic study hardly touches on this issue, and while Cecil Driver's biography of Richard Oastler draws attention to his exaltation of “home” he fails to explore the wider analysis of family in his and the THM's campaigning.Footnote 2
More recently, however, interest in the implications of the THM on gender relations has led to the suggestion that it played an important part in the construction of the male-breadwinner family. The male-breadwinner family has been seen by many feminist scholars as one of the foundation stones of women's subordination in capitalist societies. Explanations of its emergence have been diverse but there is increasing consensus, in contrast to earlier approaches which emphasized a single or relatively restricted range of causes, that there was no single route to this family form, and that it “came about in different ways and over varied timescales for families facing heterogeneous local conditions.”Footnote 3 It is therefore necessary to examine the structural constraints, and interests of competing groups, in each particular historical situation.
There has also been reassessment of the extent to which male dominance necessarily inheres in this family form. Several studies of working-class families in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Britain have indicated that women's monopoly over household management and the value of their contribution to the well-being of the family, even as full-time housewives, gave them considerable power.Footnote 4 Ranging further back in time, studies of marriage in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century England have indicated that women's control of household affairs, despite their economic dependence, made husbands highly reliant on their wives, and that this gave women a degree of power that did much to offset the authority that law and custom bestowed on their husbands.Footnote 5
The literature on the role of the THM in constructing the male-breadwinner family has focused partly on the significance of its demand for protective legislation for women, since such legislation has been widely seen as contributing to the marginalization of women in the labor market and to their subordination within the family as a result of their consequent economic dependence.Footnote 6 It has further placed the THM within the context of wide-ranging gender conflicts in the workplace that characterized the process of industrialization and became particularly acute in the period under study. Male workers, faced with employers’ attempts to use cheaper and more docile female labor to erode pay and skill levels, battled to exclude women from their trades (and unions, where these existed), or to segregate employment by gender. The Lancashire cotton mule spinners, who were amongst the core supporters of the THM, were significant participants in these struggles.
In analyzing these tactics, various feminist scholars have asked why men adopted them, rather than incorporate women into their organizations and struggle for equal pay, and have responded by referring to the pursuit by male workers of their interests as men.Footnote 7 This approach has been applied in various ways to the THM. Marianne Valverde considers that the campaign, by “helping to designate female workers as a threat to male unionized jobs . . . contributed to the development of the ideal of working-class domesticity in which the male breadwinner benevolently reigned over women and children.”Footnote 8 Sylvia Walby emphasizes the concern of the male operatives with the diminution of their “authority and comfort in the home” and argues that their objective was “to re-establish the patriarchal form of the family, which they saw as being under threat by women's employment in the factories.”Footnote 9 Sonya O. Rose, in contrast, focuses on the desire to revitalize a traditional notion of masculinity, rather than simply to dominate wives and children.Footnote 10
Robert Gray has provided a more nuanced interpretation, arguing while the THM provided a platform for the domestic ideal, the result was not to confine women to domesticity so much as to modify the balance between the claims of domestic and waged work and to “establish adult men as the principal but not necessarily the sole breadwinner.”Footnote 11 Carol Morgan has gone further, to argue that women became increasingly active over time in the struggle for shorter working hours, welcomed the additional time provided for domestic duties, and refused to see their domestic roles in opposition to their work experience.Footnote 12
An alternative perspective has been offered by Jane Humphries who suggests that working-class action in this period was motivated primarily by the desire to defend the integrity of the working-class family against the pressures to undermine it and stressed the mutual interest of men and women in this endeavor. While she does not specifically mention the THM, her approach is undoubtedly applicable to its struggle. However, she does not explore the nature of family relationships to which the working class aspired and their strategies for reconciling the family with the capitalist order.Footnote 13
Although the more recent scholarship has drawn attention to the THM's concerns with family organization, there are several lacunae in its treatment of this issue. Firstly, it has failed to engage more than tangentially with the rich material on issues relating to the family in the literature of the THM. Secondly, it has failed to appreciate the centrality of the rights of children, and of the impoverishment of relations between the generations, to the concerns of the THM. Thirdly, it underestimates the significance of the demand for shorter hours to the THM's desire to protect the domestic economy of the working class. Fourthly, discussion needs to be situated more firmly within the THM's critique of the underlying dynamics of industrial society.
Background
The THM had multiple roots. Operatives in Lancashire, led by the cotton spinners, had campaigned intermittently, throughout the 1820s, on behalf of child workers, but to little avail.Footnote 14 A fresh impetus came in 1830, in response to the outraged letters that Richard Oastler, a local Tory land agent and philanthropist, whose attention had been drawn to the appalling condition of children employed by a local textile manufacturer in the woolen and worsted mills of the West Riding, sent to Leeds newspapers. The intense debate this sparked led to John Cam Hobhouse, the radical Whig Member for Westminster, agreeing to sponsor a parliamentary bill to secure improvements on his earlier and ineffective Act of 1825.Footnote 15
Independently of Oastler, Short-time Committees (STCs) were established in the West Riding to support Hobhouse's bill. After a period of separate campaigning, the operatives of Huddersfield approached Oastler to discuss cooperation. The result was the Fixby Compact of June 1831. With this, the THM was born and was soon joined by the STCs from Lancashire.Footnote 16
The THM was characterized by considerable ideological diversity, for it brought together two very different groups. The largest comprised factory workers, artisans, handloom weavers, and popular radicals who might also be found supporting causes such as co-operation and universal manhood suffrage. The other consisted of a small number of Church-and-King Tory humanitarian reformers, the most prominent of whom were Oastler himself, Michael Sadler, the ultra-tory M. P. for Newark, and the Reverend George Stringer Bull, the evangelical curate of Byerley, all of whom were suspicious of the effects of laissez-faire industrialization upon the traditional social order.Footnote 17 The sharply contrasted socio-political philosophies of the Tories and the radicals might suggest fragility, but despite their divergent views the two groups held together, united by their opposition to child labor, their hostility to the consequences of unrestrained economic competition, and their agreement to exclude divisive issues from the campaign.Footnote 18
The initial objective of the new movement was support for the legislative efforts of Hobhouse. His bill was passed in 1831, but so pared down as to make it virtually worthless. This setback led to an agreement about a more radical demand—a legislative reduction in working hours for children and young persons to ten a day. A new bill was prepared on this basis, and Michael Sadler agreed to present it.Footnote 19
A vigorous campaign developed in support of this bill, conducted by the network of STCs established in communities throughout Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. Their tactics were impressively diverse: they organized public meetings and mass demonstrations, presented petitions to parliament, lobbied MPs and ministers, participated in parliamentary elections, published pamphlets and the occasional journal, and produced leaflets, handbills, and posters in large quantities. Their propaganda was directed at two distinct audiences. One was the local working population, to rally support and convince them that shorter hours would be an effective and achievable way of improving their situation. The other was wider public opinion, to raise awareness of the shocking conditions in the factory districts, and thus put maximum pressure on MPs and government. The emphasis placed on different components of the THM's case varied somewhat according to the audience being addressed, but there was no divergence of content—the core arguments of the THM were remarkably consistent.Footnote 20
Despite this extensive extra-parliamentary pressure, Sadler's efforts were stalled by the Whig government, which established a parliamentary Committee of Inquiry, under his chairmanship, to investigate the matter further. The ensuing report, with its dramatic accounts from textile workers of conditions in the industries, supported by medical opinion on the effects of long hours of work, had a profound impact on public opinion. Legislation seemed inevitable, but the government stalled the THM yet again by agreeing to the demand of employers, who had not had the opportunity to appear before the committee, for another inquiry, and appointed a Royal Commission to conduct it.Footnote 21
The report of this commission formed the basis of the Factory Act of 1833, which banned the employment of children under nine years of age, restricted those between nine and thirteen to eight hours a day and those between thirteen and eighteen to sixty-nine hours a week. This the THM found profoundly unsatisfactory for it assumed that one set of children would work in the morning and another set in the afternoon, thereby giving employers the ability to extend adult working hours. Disheartened and confused, it was not until 1836 that the THM resumed campaigning on a wide scale.Footnote 22
While the initial phase of activity produced results far more limited than the THM aspired to, its campaign had considerable significance as the first collective effort in Britain to challenge the pressures that capitalism places on home life and on the allocation of time between work and family. In relating the tribulations of family life to the factory system and the wider processes of competition intrinsic to commercial society, it posed a significant intellectual challenge to the ability of industrial capitalism to support the essentials of family life as well as a practical challenge to prevailing social and economic policies.
The effects on relations between parents and children
The THM's critique of the factory system had four main elements. The first was the pressure that competition and the introduction of machinery placed on wages, skills, and job security. The second was the detrimental effect of long hours and harsh conditions of work upon factory workers in general, but more particularly upon the health, physical growth, moral development, and general well-being of children. The third was the destructive impact of long hours upon family life. The fourth was the oppressive nature of a system that reduced individuals to the status of machines—“mere tools to produce wealth”—denying their humanity and dignity.Footnote 23
In the early years of the campaign, the central focus was on the need to protect children against hours and conditions of work that overtaxed their strength and stamina, undermined their health, crippled their bodies, exposed them to accidents which could maim and kill, gave no protection against the brutality of overlookers, deprived them of a caring family life, and restricted their opportunities for education and recreation. In this way the campaign widened discussion beyond the damaging effects of the workplace to encompass a range of conditions necessary for the healthy physical and emotional development of the young. Significantly, the campaign was not simply a humanitarian attempt to protect the defenseless young, for it claimed that children had specific rights, grounded in the laws of nature, which should be recognized by society.Footnote 24 These comprised the right to health and healthy bodily development, the right to physical protection, the right to life, the right to education and moral instruction, the right to play and recreation, the right to a caring family life, and the right for childhood to be a “happy” time.Footnote 25 Since the realization of each of these rights was obstructed by the factory system, its transformation was a moral necessity.
The THM's conception of the care that children should receive in the family was rooted in the model of parenting which had crystallized toward the end of the eighteenth century. Joanne Bailey has provided a clear account of this. The most fundamental parental responsibility was provisioning, ensuring that children's necessary and appropriate material needs were met. But hardly less important was the child's emotional welfare. Children should be given a happy childhood and parents could secure this by treating them with affection, intimacy, and tenderness. Children should also be raised in the paths of virtue, so that they would become good neighbors and citizens, a goal most effectively accomplished in an atmosphere of love. These tasks were not the sole responsibility of women for fathers were expected to be actively involved, both physically and emotionally. “Tender” fatherhood had become a significant component of personal male identity.Footnote 26
The THM continually stressed the need for childhood to be happy and contrasted the unhappiness of factory children to the true nature of childhood. As John Hanson, a fancy-weaver and member of the Huddersfield STC, protested, “that season of life, which ought to be hilarity and joy, is to them privation and disease.”Footnote 27 The factory system was accused of undermining the ability of parents to care adequately for their children and to provide conditions conducive to happiness. A fundamental criticism was that it inverted proper generational relations since adults were being replaced by children in the labor force, leaving parents without work. Hanson charged that “[w]ith the assistance of machinery, you . . . have dared to drive the parents out of ‘the market of labour’; you have hired the infants for your work-MEN,” a development that was simultaneously a threat to men's self-respect, masculine identity, and conceptions of good fatherhood.Footnote 28 Furthermore, this substitution was seen as an inexorable process that would eventually deprive all adults of employment if measures were not taken to stem it.Footnote 29
Parents expected to be able to protect their children from hardship and harm, and their inability to shield them from early factory employment, and the injuries and mistreatment that they often sustained there, was a further source of despair.Footnote 30 Oastler referred frequently to the agonies suffered by parents.Footnote 31 Various witnesses to Sadler's committee spoke of the heartbreak involved. Allett said, “I cannot bear it; I have thought I had rather almost have seen them starve to death, than to be used in that manner.”Footnote 32
The pressure on families to send children into the mill led to a profound estrangement between parents and children. Oastler asked,
when children are separated from their parents, and thus constrained by the dire necessities of this hateful system, to consider their parents only as taskmasters, how can they feel filial reverence and affection towards them, and how can a parent feel that doating [sic] fondness for a child whom he is compelled to treat as a slave . . . to grind its bones down for a little money, and scarcely feed its overworked and emaciated frame?Footnote 33
The detrimental effects of this situation were exacerbated by the lack of time parents and children could spend together, so that the development of normal, loving familial ties was almost impossible. Bull calculated that a factory child and its parents could have interaction for only four and a quarter hours a week, consequently “the intercourse between parents and children is too limited in duration, to allow of the cultivation of mutual affection.”Footnote 34 Operatives echoed this complaint.Footnote 35
Sorrow about the weakening of affectionate ties was conjoined with the fear that parental authority was being undermined, particularly in relation to teenage children. As Doherty commented, “[i]f the practice were to become general, of employing girls and boys instead of men, it could place the son and daughter of fifteen, at the head of the family, to whose whims and caprices the father must bend and succumb, or in many cases starve.”Footnote 36
This fear was articulated particularly strongly in reaction to the judgement of the Royal Commissioners, in the Report of 1833, that children became free agents at the age of fourteen.Footnote 37 Typical responses came from operatives in Preston and in Glasgow who accused the factory commissioners of resolving “to destroy your Natural Authority” and “directly invading the sacred province of parental Authority, which is already most lamentably weakened.”Footnote 38
Education and moral guidance
The weakening of authority, combined with long hours of work, diminished the ability of parents to carry out their fundamental duty of providing moral training. This responsibility rested on the conviction that a sound home life was a necessary bulwark against the acquisitiveness and social fragmentation of an expanding, commercially-oriented society, being central to the formation of character, the development of individual conscience, and the inculcation of virtuous behavior. These qualities could not be nourished by formal advice and good example alone; they required relationships of love and tenderness, which the factory system was obstructing.Footnote 39 Cavie Richardson, a Leeds activist, devoted much of his pamphlet Factory Children to the issue of moral guidance, expressing his worry that, “[b]eing so little with their Parents . . . their conduct cannot be watched by them, and there is no check to their evil propensities and sinful courses.”Footnote 40
The task of providing moral guidance was rendered more difficult, yet even more necessary, by the immorality which, the THM charged, embedded in factory employment. Particular resentment was generated by the conduct of overseers and owners who were accused of being instigators of sexual immorality.Footnote 41 A less fraught but more widespread complaint was the indecent language of the children and young persons.Footnote 42 Drinking was a further target and attributed in large measure to the arduous nature of factory work and the need for effortless stimulation to which it gave rise.Footnote 43
Operatives attributed immorality in part to the direct influence of the factory but even more to the ignorance and lack of education which the factory system did so much to promote.Footnote 44 The lack of opportunities for education was a constant refrain of the THM and its supporters. An early appeal complained that “[i]n an age which boasts of the great advancement of knowledge, we and our hapless children are shut out from any due share of its advantages.”Footnote 45 To John Hanson, the woeful “lack of opportunities for education [is] more grievous, if possible, than damage to bodies.”Footnote 46
The THM activists shared the general belief that education should start within the home, but parents found it very difficult to provide this. Abraham Wildman recalled that his sisters were too tired to have proper instruction at home despite the efforts of their father, “a very religious and moral character; he is of the ‘Society of Friends’.”Footnote 47
Long hours also made it difficult for children to receive more than a minimum of formal schooling. Few children went to night schools and many parents were reluctant to force them, even when they valued education.Footnote 48 Even when children did go, they received little benefit for, as Oastler pointed out, “The clergy and the schoolmasters had to work on minds weakened by excessive toil.”Footnote 49
The situation in relation to Sunday schools was similar. Many did not attend, or went irregularly, and those who did attend were generally too fatigued to learn much.Footnote 50 Moreover, most THM supporters considered, as did Oastler himself, that Sunday should be a day of rest, not confinement to learn how to read.Footnote 51 Parents were thus torn between the desire for their sons and daughters to acquire at least the rudiments of literacy and recognition of their need for relaxation.
Lack of domestic comfort
Another major theme in the THM's discourse was the difficulty of creating a comfortable home. Within the THM, love of home was depicted as a characteristic shared by all groups of laboring men and women.Footnote 52 Their right to a decent, comfortable living at home was stressed repeatedly by the THM's spokesmen. Joseph Rayner Stephens, the independent Methodist minister from Ashton,Footnote 53 declared that “[e]very man who is without a home and whose home is not all God meant it to be, IS ROBBED,” and went on to provide a description of a decent home.
And what do I mean by home? I do not mean the tumble-down hovel, containing as many families as rooms . . . by HOME I mean a place with rooms fit for men to live in—I mean a HAPPY home.Footnote 54
A comfortable home could not be created without a sufficient income and the THM never lost sight of the importance of adequate wages for the support of the family. One appeal cited the results of an inquiry that showed that the average daily income for 203,000 people in thirty-five townships was “about equal to the value of one pound of coarse bread, and is not enough of the material of food to preserve life, otherwise than in pining misery.”Footnote 55
Witnesses to Sadler's committee made a similar point. William Kenworthy, a manufacturer from Blackburn, and the Leeds surgeon, Samuel Smith, both affirmed that wages were not sufficient to obtain proper nourishment.Footnote 56 Many believed that things were getting worse. Joshua Drake, a fifty-six year-old factory woolen-weaver, told Sadler that “I consider that the wages I received then [some 30 years previously] were worth double the amount they are at present.”Footnote 57 Sadler, Bull, and Fielden all confirmed this trend.Footnote 58
Adequate wages were vital to domestic comfort, but they were not enough in themselves. The skills of a competent housewife were also necessary. Wages had to be spent with care, or else, in Cavie Richardson's words, “it all goes and we've nowt for it.”Footnote 59
Housewives had also to be proficient in a multitude of tasks if the family was to be well-cared for. Bull itemized them as follows: “If you work eleven hours [rather than ten] this leaves only Ten hours for Reading, Writing, Counting, Sewing, Seaming, Stitching, Basting, Herringboning, Backstitching, Patching, Knitting, Darning stockings, Marking, Baking, Cooking, Cleaning, Play and Sleep.”Footnote 60
Many wives lacked these skills since the long hours spent in the factory from early childhood gave them little opportunity of acquiring them. Sheer exhaustion was one factor, as Hanson related to Sadler's committee: “I can observe that my children, when they have been working these long hours, have no inclination to do anything in the house . . . they want to rest, and go to bed.”Footnote 61 This was reinforced by parental reluctance. James Turner, a spinner and Sunday School teacher, testified that “parents generally . . . cannot find in their heart to set their children to do any work afterwards . . . knowing they have worked so long in the factory.”Footnote 62
Domestic comfort was essential for satisfactory family life but “home” had wider connotations than this, for it was seen as the arena for fostering the intimate relationships that made family life worthwhile. Domesticity provided emotional fulfilment for husband and wife as a married couple and, even more so, as parents. These themes were stressed repeatedly by Stephens who consistently praised “the joys of wedlock, the joys of children, and the domestic pleasures” and stated that “[a] wife and children were the greatest blessing a man could have.”Footnote 63
Stephens similarly proclaimed the need for a secure and happy home where parents could enjoy their children's company and where children would be loved and well cared for.Footnote 64 Parenthood, that “great and important office,”Footnote 65 was, as Bailey has pointed out, a desired and respected status and fundamental to people's sense of self. Enshrined at the heart of representations of home and family, it was seen as the pinnacle of married life, and as confirming the love of husband and wife for each other and bringing them even closer together.Footnote 66 The presence of children completed the home. Stephens declared that, “Home, sweet home was a man's heaven on earth and the babes God gave were the cherubs that made it ring with joy and gladness.”Footnote 67 When the Ashton-under Lyne activist, William Aitken, was in prison, dreaming of home, he wrote “My children both sat on my knee/And said we've waited long for thee;/Fond little tales of mirth they told, /More precious far than mines of gold.”Footnote 68
Economic and social critique
The struggle to protect the family formed part of wider economic and political projects pursued by the THM and its supporters. It was this that made the THM's campaign such a significant challenge, not only to the textile manufacturers, or even to the factory system more generally, but to the fundamental assumptions of the expanding industrial economy. Drawing on ideas elaborated during the 1820s by both Tory and radical critics of the prevailing economic orthodoxies, the THM argued that the evils they analyzed were not confined to the factory system but were the product of a deeper, underlying malaise, which was the nature of commercial society, the operations of “the competitive system,” and the direction that industrial capitalism was taking.Footnote 69
In the THM's diagnosis a central problem was the overstocking of the labor market, which led to fierce competition between workers for jobs, thus keeping wages low. The excess of labor was amplified in certain economic sectors, and most dramatically in textiles, by the introduction of machinery, which also increased output faster than consumption, giving rise to glutted markets, intense competition between employers, further downward pressure on wages, and depreciation of prices and profits, leading in turn to recession and bankruptcies. The fragility of current arrangements was intensified by the pursuit of inherently unreliable foreign markets and the accompanying neglect of home consumption. The THM believed that if hours were cut, the demand for labor would increase and wages would rise, alleviating the material pressures on families and benefiting the wider economy by increasing aggregate purchasing power.Footnote 70
The malign effects of competition were not confined to the factory system but were seen as pervasive throughout the British economy. Competition affected many trades and encouraged deskilling, wage reductions, and the lengthening of hours of work. Nor was the rural economy exempt from the impact of commercial change and Sadler deplored the impact of the agricultural revolution upon laborers and their families.Footnote 71 The critique of competition thus linked the experiences of the factory workers with those of such groups as northern handloom weavers, East Midland hosiery workers, London tailors, and agricultural laborers.
Nevertheless, it was the factory system that came under especial attack, not only because it seemed to display the problems of commercial society in a concentrated form but also because of the dehumanizing effects of factory employment and the loss of liberty that it entailed. As one address charged, “the system of our boasted mechanical improvement . . . was calculated to engross almost every moment of his existence, which was not demanded for sleep, and to make him into a mere machine.”Footnote 72
While this analysis was shared by the two main groups within the THM, it was embedded in very different perspectives on the broader nature and direction of British society. For the evangelical-tory wing, it was a component of the wide-ranging critique of free trade, liberalism, and the waning influence of the aristocracy. Sadler and Oastler were particularly strong proponents of this viewpoint and envisaged a proactive role for the state, in which government would carry out many of the traditional social responsibilities of the governing class.Footnote 73 The Tories wished in this way to defend the existing social order, and an important element of their strategy was the stabilization of the family, since they considered parental authority to be an essential component of the prevailing social hierarchy. As Oastler declaimed,
Recollect, gentlemen, disorganization begins in the cottage, disaffection rises from the huts of the poor . . . when you have set the poor child against the poor parent, you have destroyed the “balance of power” in their little circle, and have laid the foundation for the ruin of all order in society.Footnote 74
The working-class activists, in contrast, many of whom participated in a range of radical movements, from Owenism to Chartism, aspired to wider changes in existing social relationships. Their defense of the family was situated in a framework that envisioned the collective advancement of the working class, articulated claims for citizenship rights, and rejected paternalism in any of its forms.Footnote 75
Furthermore, while sharing the ambition of curbing the excesses of unrestrained competition, they wished to achieve this, as far as possible, by working-class self-organization and action, most particularly through the channels of trade unionism and co-operation. The attraction of relying on their own resources was demonstrated particularly strongly in the attempt of the National Regeneration Society, which emerged from the radical wing of the THM in 1833, to bring about an eight-hour day by strike action.Footnote 76
The differences between the groups were not without consequences for the campaign. The most notable (but short-lived) breach came when Bull and Oastler declined to support the initiatives of the National Regeneration Society.Footnote 77 However, such divisions as did occur were soon resolved, were almost always about tactics rather than objectives, and did not affect the analysis of the factory/family relationship or the continuing focus upon the demand for a ten-hour day.
The THM was united, moreover, in rejecting the theories of political economy associated with the advance of commercial society. There was particular abhorrence of Malthusian ideas and their threats to family life. These had long been assailed in the working-class press. Sadler had likewise been a long-standing vocal critic.Footnote 78 Activists similarly attacked utilitarian philosophy, which they saw as providing further rationalization for privileging market forces over human concerns. “The law-makers of the present age,” charged Oastler, “whether Whig or Conservative, have imbibed the utilitarian notion that men are mere things, without rights or feelings … in this system of strange Philosophy, wealth, not man is the object of regard.”Footnote 79 Nor was this philosophy confined to the factory and marketplace, for it had started to penetrate the family itself, thus violating its ethical foundations. “We saw in fact the cold and calculating selfish principle . . . rapidly insinuating itself among the Operative Population, even robbing the maternal breast of tenderness and stifling the fondest affections of infancy and youth.”Footnote 80
Against the tenets of political economy and utilitarianism, the THM counterposed the Word of God, and the theories of natural rights, and associated conceptions of the social contract, developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It subscribed to the contention that people possessed certain inalienable rights through their nature as human beings. These included the rights to “liberty and life,” protection, and sustenance in times of hardship, together with the rights to a reasonable reward from one's labor and a decent, comfortable living at home. These rights were seen as enshrined, historically, in the British constitution, and the THM vigorously asserted the continuing relevance of the traditional moral economy to an industrializing nation.Footnote 81
The grounding of rights in religion and natural law meant that they should underpin the actions of governments and override materialistic considerations.Footnote 82 This directly opposed both pragmatic justifications of the iniquities of the factory system in terms of the need to be competitive and to retain foreign trade, and theoretical arguments appealing to the laws of political economy.
Family and gender relations
While it is possible to identify a relatively unified discourse within the THM on childhood, generational relationships, and the impact of the factory system on family life, it is less easy to do so for gender relations. There was considerable diversity of opinion over this issue, not only by ideology but also by occupational group, and since agreement was not necessary for the aims and conduct of the campaign, discussion of this issue was diffuse, and the theory and practice of the THM were replete with ambiguities and contradictions.
It is nevertheless the case, as various authors have argued, that the THM's discourse was highly gendered and overtly promoted the ideology of domesticity. However, the meaning of this ideology to participants, their motives for embracing it, and its implications for the development of the ideology and practice of the male-breadwinner family, all need further exploration. The main weakness of current interpretations is their failure to situate gender relations within the context of the THM's two overriding concerns, viz., to provide children with security and happiness, and to defend home and family from the forces undermining them. The ideology of domesticity has been read, until now, too exclusively through the lens of gender relations, and this needs to be balanced by that of parent-child relations and the needs of children.
The THM's priorities in relation to the family were, as we have seen, to create conditions for building a stable and emotionally satisfying home life and providing children with a secure and happy childhood. These desires were expressed most often in terms of the need for domestic comfort, a phrase that encompassed both the material and emotional components of family life. The effect of this objective was to enhance women's accepted role of managing the household,Footnote 83 a consequence that was inevitable since few thinkers in this period, even among feminists and radicals, challenged the primacy of women's domestic, and especially maternal, duties.Footnote 84
It is important to recognize, however, that the pursuit of domesticity had consequences for men as well as women. Men's participation in domestic affairs had a long history. In the eighteenth century, this had been deepened by an emphasis upon involved, loving, and tender parenthood. Fathers had a particular duty to provide moral instruction and to act as exemplars of good behavior.Footnote 85 The THM bemoaned, as described earlier, the obstacles that long hours of work placed in the way of fulfilling these responsibilities. So husbands and fathers were urged to involve themselves more fully in home life, resist the lure of drinking establishments, devote their resources to the welfare of their family, and direct their energies to the nurture and guidance of their offspring.Footnote 86
These considerations would suggest that the motivation for the call for women to have more time for domestic duties cannot be equated too simply with men's desire for their own comforts, much as these were anticipated.Footnote 87 Male workers did not separate their own needs from those of other members of the family. The quality of domestic life was to be raised for the benefit of all, and most especially for children. It is similarly necessary to qualify Anna Clark's contention that the central place of domesticity in the discourse of the Factory Movement was due largely to its rhetorical power in addressing some of the sexual tensions and economic insecurities of the working-class and in waging political struggles with the state.Footnote 88 Once again, this interpretation overlooks the prominence, in the THM's discourse, of the needs of children and the quality of relations between parents and children. Furthermore, the significance of domesticity lay not only at the level of rhetoric, important though this was. It spoke more fundamentally to the desperate yearning for a decent home and family life, reflecting the hardships that families were undergoing and their hopes for amelioration.
We can also question the extent to which the longing for domesticity was synonymous with pursuit of the ideal of the male-breadwinner family for the two were by no means the same. The former denoted a particular, home-centered vision of family life while the latter was simply one way, among others, of achieving this objective. There was certainly universal detestation within the THM of the situation where men, unable to find work, were supported by their wives and/or children. To remedy this was an overriding concern but protest against this reversal of roles, which lay behind much of the denunciation of women's employment in the factories, does not, in itself, indicate that activists were rejecting the pattern of joint provisioning, as practiced widely in the eighteenth century, in favor of the husband as sole breadwinner.Footnote 89
Nor can the exclusionary language and tactics that emerged from time to time necessarily be seen as an attempt by the THM to pursue the male-breadwinner ideal. The most consistent application of exclusionary tactics came from the Lancashire mule-spinners.Footnote 90 However, as Katrina Honeyman has argued, they were not trying to exclude women completely from the industry but rather to restrict them to less skilled and subsidiary positions.Footnote 91 Furthermore, the mule-spinners pursued this policy independently of the THM; other occupational groups within the textile industry developed alternative tactics, fitted to their own particular circumstances.Footnote 92 We should take care not to conflate sectional demands with those of the THM as a whole, nor occupational defensiveness with broader attitudes to women and their social roles.
Exclusionary language was more widespread than exclusionary actions. Exclusionary sentiments emerged more strongly in the early 1840s than in the 1830s, in response to a constellation of factors including the widespread unemployment created by the worst depression of the nineteenth century, and the increasing indications that Parliament would respond to rhetoric about the need to protect women.Footnote 93
The spread of exclusionary rhetoric did not, however, alter the main objective of securing shorter hours for all workers, which continued to be pursued with great determination; nor were there any concrete attempts to withdraw females from the factories. Furthermore, complaints about the employment of married women diminished in the following two decades, even though their numbers grew, since the reduction in working hours had facilitated the accommodation of factory labor to family life.Footnote 94
We can also query the extent to which a major goal of the campaign can be seen, as Walby suggests, as the restoration of male dominance in the home.Footnote 95 Some individuals and groups did aspire to this, most especially the Tory paternalists, among whom patriarchal views were pronounced. As Oastler made clear in his later writings, he regarded women's domestic role as part of the divinely-ordained natural order and that while a wife's exertions were essential to the well-being of the family, this did not give her equal jurisdiction with her spouse. Families, like the state, required acceptance of authority and this should be vested, as enjoined in the Bible, in the husband.Footnote 96 Yet even members of this group placed more emphasis upon preserving the authority of parents over children than of husbands over wives.
Among working-class activists, who rejected Oastler's conception of the role of the family in supporting the existing order, there was a much wider spread of opinion about domestic authority. This is not to deny that patriarchal views, and a more generalized misogyny, were widespread among the working class and penetrated the rhetoric of the THM,Footnote 97 but many activists were also influenced by more radical ideas, including those of Owenism. These currents of thought questioned the belief that the primacy of women's domestic duties had to entail inequality between husbands and wives, and contended that women were as rational as men and should have access to a fuller and more intellectually challenging education than they generally received. Footnote 98
This was the perspective that encouraged men such as the Blackburn activist George Cowell to embrace the virtues of intellectual companionship between spouses.Footnote 99 It was similarly reflected in the Herald to the Trades’ Advocate, where a leading article argued for “a better mode of female education” and deplored the current situation where “the females of our class . . . have been taught to consider themselves mere domestic animals.”Footnote 100 It also informed the aims of the National Regeneration Society, which insisted that as well as household arts, females should be given a sound education and “to be taught Reading, writing, accounts, and other branches of Useful Knowledge.”Footnote 101
There is no evidence that women objected to the THM's pursuit of domesticity. Indeed, as both Rose and Morgan have pointed out, it actually promoted working-class solidarity in the movement.Footnote 102 While there is need for caution here, since opportunities for women's voices to be heard were limited, it would appear that women supported the campaign and positively welcomed the opportunity to care for their family more adequately.Footnote 103
Support came in spite of women's marginal position in the organization of the THM. They were never represented on the STCs or carried out autonomous campaigning, in contrast to the earlier political unions, the anti-Poor Law movement and the Chartist movement.Footnote 104 Nevertheless, from the outset women attended meetings and joined demonstrations in large numbers, motivated by concern for the welfare of children and the family.Footnote 105 Their support for shorter hours increased over time, particularly after the passage of the 1844 Act, which reduced their own hours of work, and they were militant in defending the 1847 Ten Hours Act against the attempts of employers to subvert its intentions.Footnote 106
Evidence of women's appreciation of greater time for domestic duties is provided by investigations conducted for the Morning Chronicle in 1849. Women interviewed reported that they were in better health, able to keep their homes cleaner and more comfortable, make their own clothes, and spend more time with their children. Significantly, time was also being spent on measures of self-improvement including learning to read and write at night school. These advantages were confirmed by short-time delegates and the chief factory inspector, Leonard Horner.Footnote 107
It does not appear that women in the textile districts in this period believed that an enhanced domestic role would intensify their subordination, and this assumption was not without foundation. In the first place, the authority of the husband did not require the status of sole breadwinner, only that he should be the main earner. As a result, even higher-paid workers in Lancashire, were often content for their wives to continue in paid employment.Footnote 108 Secondly, as mentioned earlier, recent investigations into the realities of marriage among the laboring classes throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries have demonstrated that women's control of household affairs gave them a significant degree of de facto power and moral authority.
The later evolution of the textile workforce demonstrates that support for domesticity did not come at the expense of women's working role. Both the practice and ideology of the male breadwinner continued to have a particularly weak hold in the Lancashire cotton industry, especially in the weaving towns. A relatively high proportion of married women remained in paid employment and domestic labor was allocated more equally than elsewhere.Footnote 109
The rhetoric and the policies of the THM were not always in alignment. The campaign undoubtedly gave an opportunity for voices to be raised in support of the male-breadwinner ideal, but its actual policies did not support this. By calling for shorter hours for all, the THM created conditions that, by providing women with more time, made it easier for them to combine domestic responsibilities with paid work outside the home. Decisions about married women's factory employment were thus left to future negotiation at the level of the family and local community.Footnote 110
Hence, the desire to provide women with more time for domestic duties should be seen less as a tactic in gender struggle, or as driven by patriarchal motives, than as a pragmatic response to circumstances, fueled by the desire for improved child care and a better family life for parents and children alike. This did undoubtedly rest upon acceptance of a gendered division of labor, and in turn served to heighten it. But the legislation for which the THM struggled for so long, by reducing tensions between home and workplace, made it easier for women to continue in paid employment if they chose to do so. In this way, the THM can be said to have pioneered an alternative path of development to the male-breadwinner family
Conclusion
The THM was the first mass campaign to confront the consequences for family life of the split between home and work entailed by the expansion of waged work outside the household, and the first to prioritize a cut in working hours as a partial solution to the problems this created, succeeding, after a prolonged struggle, in winning its principal demand—the ten-hour working day.
While the contest between working and nonworking time is endemic in capitalist societies, the Ten Hours campaign was molded by the specific labor market conditions of the textile industries in the 1830s and 1840s, which involved exceptionally long working days and the widespread use of child labor. The THM argued that long hours and poor conditions of work had devastating consequences for children and for families.
The demands of the THM went beyond a simple plea for improved working conditions and shorter hours since they were embedded in a broader critique of the factory system and of commercial society more generally, condemning the effects of unregulated competition upon work, wages, job security, the balance between production and consumption, and the relation between different sectors of the economy. The critique also assailed the doctrines of political economy, the theories of Malthus, and the philosophy of utilitarianism, which provided the intellectual underpinnings for prevailing economic and social policies. Protesting against the way these doctrines prioritized the cash nexus over human need, the THM asserted a morality based on religious teaching, theories of natural rights, and the historic provisions of the British constitution. The THM was not simply insisting that the protections it demanded should be regarded as an exception to laissez-faire, it was questioning the economic and social logic of laissez-faire itself.
Moreover, the THM maintained that the dynamics of the system would lead inevitably to further deterioration. Far from accepting the bourgeois assumption that any problems currently besetting the family would be overcome as capitalism developed further, the THM contended that they would be exacerbated if market forces were not restrained, to the point that the very reproduction of the working-class was imperiled. But its most devastating indictment was the claim that there was a fundamental contradiction between two core middle-class beliefs: on the one hand, the importance of laissez-faire for economic prosperity, and on the other, the centrality of the family for the inculcation of civic virtue and the preservation of social order. The charge that the institutions of market and family were in conflict struck at the heart of bourgeois conceptions of the progressive nature of commercial society.
Supporters of the THM were determined to create conditions that would allow working people to continue to practice the family values and models of parenting that had become widely accepted by the end of the eighteenth century, and which the factory system was impeding. A cut in working hours was the essential prerequisite that would make this possible. Only this would reduce the tensions between the needs of families and the imperatives of capitalist production.
For gender relations in the family, the implications of the campaign were ambiguous. As we have seen, the THM did not attempt to create a unified view on this issue, beyond the necessity of providing women with the time, skills, and resources for effective household management. Moreover, the question of gender relations was overshadowed by other concerns. In particular, the salience of the THM's anxiety about the ability of parents to provide adequately for the physical, emotional, and moral welfare of their offspring suggests strongly that it was the impact of the factory system upon generational, rather than gender relations, which was most keenly felt by contemporaries. Patriarchal interests were therefore always subordinated to the common interests of husbands and wives in parenthood, and their overriding desire to promote the well-being of children and the family unit.
That the campaign reinforced women's domestic responsibilities is incontrovertible. However, the emphasis upon domesticity did not necessarily come at the expense of the ability of married women to continue to work if they so chose, or if the exigencies of the family economy required it. Since the objective of the THM, from the beginning of the campaign to its successful outcome, was shorter hours for all, the achievement of this goal, far from encouraging married women to leave the labor force, could make it easier for them to carry out the double task of earning money and looking after the home. At the same time, the domestic ideal was intended to restore men to family life and to strengthen the partnership between spouses. So while the THM's discourse in certain respects opened the way for future elaboration of the ideology of the male breadwinner family, it did not further it directly. Indeed, in contrast, its actual achievements may be said to have demonstrated the possibility of an alternative mode of familial adjustment to industrial capitalism, albeit one that was most feasible in communities where there was abundant, relatively well-paid work for women.
