Women Workers and Gender Identities 1835-1913

<p><em>Women Workers and Gender Identities 1835 - 1913</em> examines the experiences of women workers in the cotton and small metals industries and the discourses surrounding their labour. It demonstrates how ideas of womanhood often clashed with the harsh realities of working-class life that forced women into such unfeminine trades as chain-making and brass polishing. Thus discourses constructing women as wives and mothers or associating women's work with distinctly feminine attributes were often undercut and subverted.</p>