Female Labour Power: Women Workers’ Influence on Business Practices in the British and American Cotton Industries, 1780–1860

The cotton industry was the first large-scale factory system to emerge during the industrial revolution, and as such there were no set business practices for employers or employees to follow in the organisation of the shop floor. In this book, Janet Greenlees argues that this situation provided workers in both Britain and the United States with a unique opportunity to influence decisions about work patterns and conditions of labour, and to set the precedent for industries that were to follow. Furthermore, data relating to the mass employment of women in the cotton industries, is used to challenge many of the tacit assumptions of women's passivity as workers that pervade the current literature.