Professor Katrina Honeyman dies at 61
“It remains an inconvenient truth,” she observed in 2010, “that most working-class children (and therefore most children) in 18th- and 19th-century Britain did not enjoy the freedom to develop physically and mentally through play and education. From an early age they laboured, contributing crucially to the fragile family budget and to wider manufacturing expansion.”
However, in Child Workers in England, 1780-1820: Parish Apprentices and the Making of the Early Industrial Labour Force (2007), Katrina Honeyman showed that the life of the child labourer was not uniformly bleak. Many of them were able to use the skills and opportunities they acquired to advance themselves in adult life. Indeed, by early adolescence, most apprentices enjoyed greater earning capacity than their mothers and were jostling with their fathers for the position of main breadwinner.
This rise was all the more revolutionary as the majority of parish apprentices to the burgeoning textile sector were girls. In Women, Gender and Industrialisation in England, 1700-1870 (2000), Katrina Honeyman stressed the vital role played by women workers in early industrialisation, then documented the process by which their opportunities were restricted in the Victorian era by an increasingly censorious public and official view of working women....