The predominance of women’s labour in the textile trades makes their history specially significant in tracing the evolution of women’s industrial position under the influences of capitalism; for the woollen trade was one of the first fields in which capitalistic organization achieved conspicuous success. The importance of the woollen trade as a source of revenue to the Crown drew to it so much attention that many details have been preserved concerning its development; showing with a greater distinctness than in other and more obscure trades, the steps by which Capitalistic Organization ousted Family Industry and the Domestic Arts. It is surely not altogether accidental that Industrialism developed so remarkably in two trades where the labour of women predominated—in the woollen trade which in the seventeenth century was already organized on capitalistic lines, and, one hundred years later, in the cotton trade. Some characteristic features of modern Industrialism were absent from the woollen trade in the seventeenth century. The work of men and women alike was carried on chiefly at home, and thus the employment of married women and children was unimpeded; nor are there any signs of industrial jealousy between men and women, who on the contrary, stand by each other during this period in all trade disputes. Nevertheless, the position of the woman wage-earner in the textile trades was extraordinarily bad, and this in spite of the fact that the demand for her labour appears nearly always to have exceeded the supply. The evidence contained in the following chapter shows that the wages paid to women in the seventeenth century for spinning linen were insufficient, and those paid for spinning wool, barely sufficient, for their individual maintenance, and yet out of them women were expected to support, or partly support, their children. Possibly the persistence of such low wages throughout the country was due in a measure to the convenience of spinning as a tertiary occupation for married women. She who was employed by day in the intervals of household duties with her husband’s business or her dairy and garden, could spin through the long winter evenings when the light was too bad for other work. The mechanical character of the movements, and the small demand they make on eye or thought, renders spinning wonderfully adapted to women whose serious attention is engrossed by the care or training of their children. A comparison of spinster’s wages with those of agricultural labourers, which were also below subsistence level, will show however that such an explanation does not altogether meet the case.