Rural Industry and Uneven Development: The Significance of Gender in the Irish Linen Industry

From the middle of the eighteenth century, the Irish linen industry grew on the basis of unequal relations of exchange between spinning and weaving households. This regional division of labour in turn depended on unequal relations of production between women and men within rural industrial households. The 'proto-industrialization' thesis has tended to obscure this process by focussing on the household as a bounded entity, and by failing to recognize the significance of inequalities within the household production unit. Once gender relations are made central to the thesis, it can be expanded to explain regional differences in rural industrialization and deindustrialization. Introduction In his account of the Irish linen industry, John Horner (1920: 50-51) quotes, on facing pages, two commentaries on the management of time in domestic production, without any apparent sense that they are contradictory. The first is from Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Principles of Trade’: There can be no doubt but all kinds of employment that can be followed without prejudice from interruption; work that can be taken up and laid down often in a day without damage, such as spinning, knitting, weaving, etc., are highly advantageous to a community, because in them may be collected all the produce of these fragments of time, that occur in family business, between the constant and necessary parts of it that usually occupy females, as the time between rising and preparing for breakfast, between breakfast and preparing for dinner, etc. The amount of all these fragments is, in the course of a year, very considerable to a single family; to a state, proportionally highly profitable; therefore it is wise, in this case also, to follow that divine direction, 'gather up the fragments, that nothing may be lost'. The second quotation is from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations: The advantage which is gained by saving the time commonly lost in passing from one sort of work to another, is much greater than we should at first view be apt to imagine. It is impossible to pass very quickly from one kind of work to another that is carried on in a