Women played a peripheral, but critically supportive, role in Luddism. In subsequent agitations, their presence became essential to sustaining the momentum of working-class radicalism. At the Manchester march of the Blanketeers in 1817 the ‘women of the lower class’ were noteworthy for their militancy, raising ‘a very general and undisguised cry’ that ‘the gentry (p.239) had had the upper hand long enough and that their turn was now come’.83 In the following year, they were drawn into the strike wave that swept across the cotton district, not only as factory workers who were prepared to turn out in protest against wage cuts, but as members of an industrial community who denounced the harsh exploitation of wage-earners by ‘overgrown capitalists’ and their refusal to countenance a further statutory regulation of factory hours and conditions.
Women were very influential in supporting workers movements, even if not directly involved