Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/482

 WOMEN'S WORK IN LEEDS I IN 1832 the cloth power loom was first introduced into Leeds, and with its use a demand arose for skilled work from women in factories. Hitherto female labour had only been in request for filling the scribbling and carding machines, for'billy piecing' and 'mule piecing,' and to some extent for 'burling' and 'drawing.' The power loom had been used in the worsted stuff trade since 1826, but the stuff weavers did not need such skill as the cloth weavers. Until 1832 even adult women rarely earned over seven shillings a week, and yet Messrs. Gott and Son, who employed women at the cloth power loom and paid them nine shillings a week, stated in 1835 that they found difficulty in getting hands. Four other firms were also running power looms in that year, and reported themselves as paying from 11s. to 13s. a week, and as having no ditticty in obtaining weavers, but there is nothing to show that they employed women, and it is ' most probable that they did not. Altogether there were then only 213 cloth power looms in Leeds. Nine shillings a week was an abnormally high rate of wage for women at that time; and women of the class necessary for such skilled work as cloth weaving would with difficulty be persuaded to work in the factories, which were detested by the domestic manufacturers and weavers, and which, being largely recruited from the lowest strata and frequently from the parish paupers, had hitherto borne an unenviable reputation. Until this period girls in the flax mills were as well paid as those employed in any other trle. Ireland was only just beginning to use the flax spinning machinery which John Marshall had laid down -forty years before, and these were the palmy days of the Leeds flax trade. Nor did the cloth power loom for some time open out any wide