It took me a while to read this book but only because I kept getting interrupted by classes and homework. This book was a great history of labor. The title is a bit misleading because it covers more than just factory girls... such as chimney sweeps and those who worked in the home textile business outside of factories. There was some information that I was aware of and some that I wasn't. Although there are a lot of statistics in this book, it isn't a dry or boring read. It was great to see the statistics paired with accounts from those who had these experiences. I would recommend this book for anyone interested in history in general or the history of labor.

Oh my goodness, but this book made for grim reading!!! How enough people survived the industrial revolution, in particular, long enough to make the next generation, amazes me. Sheer numbers of babies born, I suspect.

Don't get me wrong, this was a meticulously researched book and there were many facts here that I had no idea about and I now consider myself a little better educated but wow, my heart broke for those poor girls and boys (and women too) who suffered so badly.

What happens to a society who treat their members as disposable? Well, read this book and find out. In the days before we had any kind of income support from the government, people starved if they didn't work, children included. No birth control, obviously, so lots of mouths to feed and so it was every member of the family to work. The ages of the children who started working was distressing - my granddaughter is 4 years old and the thought of her working in a cotton mill makes me shudder. Of course, the Victorians were very prudish and so women who were forced to become prostitutes in order to feed themselves and their children (as women were so very badly paid and their wages were set at a fraction of the mens, even if they were the sole breadwinner) were looked down upon and so it continued. Children were bought and sold. White slavery, indeed.

When I read some of the chapters, it struck me that the events described herein are not all that long ago, which is kind of scary. My own grandmothers were only 12 years old when they left school for good, one of them went into "service" until she got married. She was certainly a very hardworking woman all of her life and passed away at the age of 92, having only obtained a fridge and a washing machine when she was already into her 70's. Until then, she walked to the market every, single, day to buy fresh food.

So happy that we are living in a day and age where we have Unions and legislation to protect us and enough money (most of the time) to get our basic needs met. Although, in many parts of the world, the kinds of conditions that this book talks about during the Industrial Revolution are well and truly part of their present.....

Anyway, this book was very much worth reading, although it is not an easy read by any means.

4.5 stars from me, rounded up to 5. Ending is a bit abrupt!

Thank you to NetGalley and Pen & Sword.

If there was ever a book I needed to read the moment I saw it, it was this one. I found this to be exceptionally well-researched, and I agree with other reviewers who've noted this isn't an enjoyable read, at least in the sense of how cruel some of the working conditions were. It 100% gave me much more insight into my female ancestors, their lives often glanced over, their contributions minimised. This is yet another book I plan on purchasing to keep on hand as reference and to refresh my memory.

This is an informative and well researched look into the rise of working women and children in the 17th-20th centuries from farmer wives to independent working women and the end of child labor.

This is such a well-researched, well-crafted book about the, quite frankly, hecking horrible conditions of working of women and children in the industrial, and pre-industrial era. The title fooled me and I thought I was going into the tales of actual factory work, but this is so much more. You’ll get everything from the children sweeping chimneys and the ways an entire family would work day in day out to sustain themselves to the employers who created entire self-sustained villages for their employees and the ladies who wanted unions for all.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Thanks to Netgalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
A well-researched and intelligent book, full of historical facts about women working in bygone times. Highly recommended.

This was a very insightful book of woman and child labor through history. Would be useful for a high school history class, maybe even college. I'm of an age that I can recall being told I wouldn't be paid as much as a man doing my job, because they had a family to support (really, women with families to care for, or various reasons, didn't count?). We still, as a society, have long way to go for toward equal pay for equal work. But Mr. Chrystal offers much in the way of how both men and women worked to not only improve working conditiond and pay for all, but also how children were removed from inhumane conditions. Kudos on a well researched book!

Factory Girls by Paul Chrystal isn’t just about girls or factories. That’s just a neat succinct title. As the author writes in the introduction, it’s actually about women and children at work. Don’t get me wrong – this is a really interesting book, but the subject matter is far wider than the title suggests and some potential readers may not realise what it covers. The chapter titles give a better guide to the content:
1. Before the Factory: Women and Child Labour in Early Civilisations
2. Women at Work in the Middle Ages
3. The Factory System & the Industrial Revolution: Women and Children in those Dark, Satanic Mills
4. Women and Children at the Coal Face
5. Child Labour
6. Climbing Boys: Up the Chimney
7. The Factory Acts and Other Legislation
8. Philanthropy and The Industrial Village
9. Philanthropy: The Reformers
10. Early Feminism and Activism
11. Industrial Disease and Occupational Health
12. Factory Girls and Climbing Boys in the Arts
The book is 200 pages, plus notes, impressive bibliography (including 24 references to other books by the same author) and index.

As we might expect, a large proportion of women’s work over the last 2,000 years has related to textiles but Chrystal is good on the other pre-Industrial Revolution occupations. Although I knew that most brewers were female in medieval times, I wasn’t aware of women working as builders or apprenticed as butchers. Agnes Sadeler was a ‘rebellious English serf’ in the 1380s and was declared an outlaw after she encouraged the villagers of Ramsley to refuse to work for their feudal lord. Yayyy! Go, Agnes!

Home-working or “putting-out” started in the 1400s and peaked in the 1600s and 1700s. Merchants would issue cottage workers with raw wool. These workers (both women and men) would then use their own equipment at home to process (card, spin, etc.) the wool. This enabled women to look after children while working and thus contribute to the family’s income. As work migrated into factories, child-care became a problem. Mothers often delegated supervision to the eldest child, who might only be ten years old. The resultant density of population in towns and cities meant there were always more workers than available jobs and so employers could reduce wages or increase hours but still fully staff the factories. This resulted in women working ridiculous hours for a pittance.

Chrystal does a very good job of showing us the awful conditions in which women and children worked: in factories, down mines and as outworkers at home. This forms the bulk of the book and it’s heartbreaking, it really is. He also shows us the good guys: factory owners (often Quakers such as the Cadburys and the Rowntrees) who built factories in the countryside and villages close by, so that their workers and their families had healthy homes where they could have dignity, rather than damp airless slums. They also build schools and arranged for workers to have classes during work hours, thus ensuring a better-educated workforce. The Cadburys didn’t even restrict the village and its amenities to their workers: anyone could live there; attend evening classes; and join the sporting / social clubs.

The book also pays tribute to the male and female reformers who wanted to end poverty and industrial disease. This is a much longer list than I expected, as Chrystal has done a lot of research. He also lists the many industrial / occupational diseases and accidents that could kill people or at least render them unable to work (which was the same thing, as no money = no food). I confess that I tended to skip over some of the lists of gruesome symptoms.

The book isn’t perfect: there are a couple of careless errors about dates (at least in the pre-publication review copy I read); and the book ends very abruptly, without a conclusion, but it’s still a tremendous read. Just don’t expect to enjoy it – how women and children were treated; and the section on diseases are educational; they’re interesting; but they’re not enjoyable.

#FactoryGirls #NetGalley

An excellent book full of great details and research which I found fascinating. There should be more books like this to teach the future generations of what women went through in the past.

This book was a fascinating look at the true history of women and girls who worked in factories in American in the early 1900s. While it lays bare the truly atrocious conditions and expectations these females faced, it also explores the rise of feminism, and how these experiences contributed to where we are today. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in history, especially feminist history.

What a book! I was fascinated from start to finish - it really was interesting and insightful. This is a really great book for anyone interested in history and I'd definitely recommend it.

We should lean more about life of working women in the past century. This well researched and informative book did an excellent job in making learn more.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

I loved learning more about factory women and girls. As well as how horrible the conditions were for the workers. As it wasn't something that was talked about in any of my history classes in high school or college.

This book was very informative. Well researched and well written. I loved seeing the progression from then to now.

Factory Girls by Paul Chrystal is a thoroughly researched book about factory life in England during the 17 and 1800s. Children and women were not treated equally back then even more so than nowadays. Mr. Chrystal examines and reveals to the reader what conditions were like inside the places of employment, impacts on the entire family structure, and what home life was comprised of. Statistics are readily available as Paul discusses disease, fatalities, and percentages of women and children workers for different occupations amongst other facts of the jobs discussed.

One part I found fascinating, although grim, was when Mr. Chrystal spoke of the young chimney sweeps. I had no idea children were sent up into 9x9 chimneys to sweep them clean, and the saying “light a fire under” someone came from the this time period and what master chimney sweeps would sometimes do to hurry their young apprentices up to complete a job. It amazes me still that someone would allow their 4-year-old to 12=year-old child to participate in this dangerous occupation.

I was impressed with the vastness of knowledge acquired by reading this non=fiction piece of writing. Mr. Chrystal not only discusses the types of jobs women and children held during this time period, but also included information on laws that were developed during this time period, how the professions were to live in infamy by listed writers and artists, labor unionizing attempts, and social responses to workers and their plights.

I feel well educated after reading Factory Girls, and look forward to searching for other topics of interest Paul Chrystal has already written about or will write about in the future. Although I teach elementary students and assigning this book as an assignment is unrealistic, I plan on integrating some of the knowledge I have gained by reading this book into my curriculum, as the small city I teach in is a former mill town.

Wow. I had not yet read a book written by Paul Chrystal and did not know what to expect from Factory Girls. What I found was a detailed looked at the working lives of women and children throughout history that was well-written and included a multitude of primary sources. This book doesn't shy away from the hard truths of the working lives of those living in England and goes into great detail about the job, it's impact on the health and well being of the person and the family unit overall. I was blown away by the research and empathy included in each and every page. As a historian I loved the detailed footnotes and images included at the end of the book as well as the rich and varied primary sources throughout the book.

4 out of 5 stars

Informative, centred on women's and children's experiences, and detailed but concise research analyses. When learning about the Industrial Revolution, the voices of women often go unheard, but this book puts their stories/experiences/hardships right in front of us. This book delves into the lived realities of what it meant to be in the informal and formal sectors of the economy as a woman.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about the Industrial Revolution, women and the economy in the early twentieth century.

“Factory girls “by Paul Crystal the history goes back so far we even learn why “traditional“ women’s work was was considered to be in the home. It’s packed full of the different work women did throughout early history and even into World War II. In the back of the book they have photos actually showing the different women in the different roles. It talks about how women’s work has changed throughout the years and how in someways it stayed the same. It explains how modern inventions affected the work women did in the many different opportunities it gave them. I truly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it. I love history in this book totally entertain me I think it was well researched and with the personal stories and poems the author put in the book also made it very entertaining. Please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review but all opinions are totally my own. I was given this book by Ned Galli but I am leaving this review voluntarily. #FactoryGirls, #PaulCrystal, #NetGally

After reading what must be dozens of fictional books on this subject I had to give this non fiction historical book a try. And wow! well worth it!
This book is a really detailed and informative read about the significant part women and minors of both sexes played in the Industrial Revolution. How, indeed the so called revolution would not have come to be without both women and children playing a part.
Book outlines how both groups were usually on the bottom of the ladder in regard to work, pay, safety etc and how a ‘woman’s work was never done’ with them then having no to go home to look after there families.
This is not a happy tale but a necessary one to tell of the lives and fates of the factory girls who helped shape the future of many industries.
Well researched and well written.

4 stars
This is an utterly fascinating look at "women's work" and the long history of women work a huge variety of jobs.