How Did Working Class Women Articulate Their Demands for Equality and Rights?

Feminism and Industrial Revolution

Professor: Ruth Percy

Student: Zheng Yue

5 November 2015

How did working class women articulate their demands for equality and rights?

Working class women are always neglected from feminism history because they were considered to be very conservative and obedient to the rules. The initiative of feminism was from the emergence of middle class women, who had education, extra money, and leisure time, but did not have independent social status and civil rights. Unlike middle class women, working class women barely had leisure time because they had to work intensively to survive in society. In addition, they generally lacked education and knowledge about civil rights. How could they participate in the feminism movement? Generally speaking, middle class women were the agents, teachers, and leaders of working class women before the mid 20th century. Middle class women mobilized and organized working class women. Furthermore, middle class women educated and advocated the rights of working class women for the working class women. In other words, working class women articulated their rights by affiliating with and providing their support for middle class women. In this paper, I will first examine the boycotting and suffrage movement and then a few feminism societies as well as feminist groups to show that feminism development brought in increasingly broad social context and became gradually diverse.  

Before we can identify the way in which working class women articulated their demand for both equality and rights, we need to first confirm that whether working class women had ever articulated rights for themselves. And moreover, we probably wonder when they started participating in those feminist campaigns for women’s rights and gender equality, as well. When we say that most working class women took a passive role in feminism movement, we tended to justify it by showing that there is limited evidence of contributions working class women made to the feminism movement, since their actions and thoughts were rarely recorded. In fact, working women’s collective participation in social campaign can be traced back to abolition movement. At the end of the 18th century, a large number of women, who were the decision makers of their household consumption, joined the boycotting of goods, the production of which involved slave labour. Before this period, we can hardly find any social movement that included a group of working class women with clear intention and purpose. However, it is still too early to assert that the boycotting movement symbolizes the fact that working women were aware of social inequality and injustice. The reason why they participated in such boycotting has multilayered. It could be the sympathy they had for slaves, or simply the feeling of conformity with other women, especially at the end of the movement. There is no decisive evidence showing that those working class women had done those out of the need to advocate for their equality or rights.