Spinning women revisited. Work and life before industrialisation

This project will study the role of women’s and children’s labour in the early stages of Swedish industrialisation. While the work of gender historians shows a large participation of women and children in early industrialization processes, the narrow focus on men in quantitative literature has biased conclusions on the forces and outcomes of industrialization.

How does this change when all workers are properly included? We focus on three relationships: the role of the state, the role of relative wages, and the shift in labour supply in poor rural households. We do this by focusing on commercial home-based spinning in Sweden 1767–1797, the decades before mechanisation. We compile a completely novel dataset of individual observations on wages, individual characteristics, and output of home-based spinners from “Spinneriberättelserna”, part of the statistics on factories and manufactories.

There are over 130,000 individual observations from all parts of Sweden, allowing us to create a unique longitudinal micro-level dataset. By linking individual spinners to other sources we will illuminate women’s working careers and industriousness on a household level. The outcomes of the study will expand our knowledge on women’s and children’s work and during industrialization, and will contribute to debates on how industrialisation begins: the importance of wages on mechanization, if an “industrious revolution” precedes industrialisation, and the role placed by state manufacturies.