Connecting Threads: Women's Lives in the Industrial North 1808-1909 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798750629763)

In the 1930s when Phyllis Bentley's book The Pennine Weaver was published, the impression given, at least by the title, was of a lone heroic figure struggling to make a living amid the grimness of life in the Pennines. Heroic he may have been, but he was certainly not alone. The cloth he carried on his shoulders to the Cloth Hall was not made just by him. It was a joint effort by all the family, wife, children and probably mothers-in-law as well. Their story went untold in the 1930s. But not now.

This book plots not only the move from this domestic setting of cloth production to the factory system and beyond. It aims to show how women coped with the uncertainties of life, and as the century progressed, how, for many of them, their lives widened beyond the narrow confines of the Pennine valleys. Sometimes their stories are difficult to see, at others sometimes gloriously, sometimes painfully evident, as they moved through an expanding education system and the political realities of their times.

The men who recognised their worth are part of that journey and are celebrated alongside the women they valued. Their part in the elaborate interplay of power politics deserves to be recorded and acknowledged.