ALL BED AND WORK: looking at lives of Lancashire textile workers: Burnley 1975

by Christine Slater

This book tells stories of textile workers, recorded in Burnley, in the heart of the traditional cotton industry in Lancashire, in 1975. It was a time when the industry was going through final revolution before its demise. Married women still formed the backbone of the labour force of weavers. They had not worn clogs and shawls for several decades. What did they think of themselves and their jobs? How did they manage to combine their several roles as mothers, weavers, kin and wives? How did women and men relate to each other on the shed floor and in their homes. What did they value? What did they gossip about? What made them proud or anxious? What were they striving for and aspiring to? Gossip and tales from the factory floor give an inside view of their lives. And stories stretching in time over more than half a century indicate the rapidity and extent of socio-cultural and economic changes taking place.

258 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 23, 2013