1853 年プレストン・ストライキにおける女性労働者について

－女性の参加と自己認識についての考察－

抄録

The primary aim of this paper is to re‒evaluate female labourers' participation in the Preston strike of 1853. This paper also explores how and why those female labourers came to demand the withdrawal of married women from the labour market, despite the fact that they had been obvious participants in labour movements. Much of the research on the Preston strike of 1853 has not give sufficient attention to women’s roles in the strike, so this study seeks to compensate for that neglect through an examination of local newspapers such as the Preston Chronicle and contemporary pamphlets. The investigation shows that women were important supporters of the strike through their attendance at operatives’ meetings, subscription to strike funds, and criticism of blacklegs.

This paper discusses the fact that the demand by females that married women leave the factories was the result of the influence of the Chartist and factory reform movements of the 1830s. Female labourers actively participated in the 1853 strike having already forged their identity as wage labourers, but they were affected by the shared perspective of the two movements regarding female wage labour, and especially the view that married women’s wage labor constituted a social problem and that women’s duty as wives and mothers should be emphaslzed. The evidence suggests that by expressing sympathy with the resolution calling on all married women to withdraw from the labour market, female labourers expected the following results : first, an increase in wages

(especially for males) due to the restricted supply of labour ; second, the alleviation of the double burden on married women who were responsible for both wage labour and housework ; and finally, maintenance of the economic independence of single women labourers.

The agreement with the prohibition of married women's wage labour shows that married and unmarried women had different identities, and that they differed not only in social status but also in their own awareness of themselves. This paper concludes that this divergence in identities was a product of the gap between the working‒class ideal of family‒wage/male breadwinner ideology and the reality of English society, which relied on a female labour force. Nevertheless, though confronted with opposition to women’s wage labour, female labourers maintained their position as wage‒earners and did not cease to support labour movements in the nineteenth century. And their experiences as important actors in labour agitations can be understood as a pard of the prehistory of the female labour movements that flourished after the 1870s.