Feminist contributions to labor history tell us that the first wage laborers at the beginning of the "industrial revolution" in the most crucial industry were often predominantly female, not male, textile workers. (Even mining was not the all male or predominantly male industry either.) For instance, see E. Patricia Tsurumi, _Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan_, Princeton: New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1990:
***** Begun initially as largely government enterprises that received government support and encouragement after they were in private hands, the machine silk-reeling and cotton-spinning industries of Meiji were the first in Japan to develop extensive factory production. Their work forces, heavily female, formed a large proportion of the labor force during the first period of Japan's industrialization. This pattern would remain long after the Meiji era had ended.
Although throughout the Meiji period some cotton-mill hands came from urban homes, the vast majority of the silk-reeling and cotton-spinning operatives were women and girls from a rural background. During the first decade of the new era, daughters of debt-free and even well-to-do farming families went to work in the new silk mills, but thereafter the female workers in both silk and cotton plants tended to be from poor peasant families. By the turn of the century these kojo [factory girls] came from some of the poorest tenant-farmer villages in the entire country. The women and girls who became textile factory workers, including those from independent cultivator or prosperous farming homes, were no strangers to hard work. They knew that many generations of country women had contributed to the well-being of their families by laboring both at home and away from home. Like their mothers and grandmothers before them in pre-Meiji times, they had routinely seen female as well as male offspring of peasant families "going out to work" (dekasegi) in a place beyond commuting distance....
During the Edo era (1600-1867), female offspring of peasant families were sent away to labor as dekasegi workers, usually in a local village or town. This immediately reduced the number of mouths that had to be fed, and the girls might gain valuable skills and experience, eventually bringing in some remuneration. The ones who remained at home were essential workers within the peasant family economy, producing and processing food and other items for the family subsistence, caring for the young and the incapacitated, and playing key roles in the production of marketable commodities, including silk and cotton thread. (9-10) *****
This knowledge challenges a commonly accepted notion that "the working class used to be predominantly male, and female workers were brought in to keep male workers' wages down." The working class became predominantly male only in the course of industrial development & working-class struggles within it. What were short-term achievements for the survival of working-class families -- "family wages" for men, "protective" legislations for women, etc. -- in the long run undermined the formation of solidaristic, not gender-hierarchic, working-class culture & movement.
Why were early industrial workers so often more female than male? I speculate that's in part because more women than men were often excluded from inheriting family properties by the law of primogeniture (and other laws that govern inheritance in countries without primogeniture) & customs. Here, the residual patriarchal practice (the feudal need to prevent excessive parcellization & alienation of land -- recall Carrol's comment that in premodern societies place determines merit, not vice versa as under capitalism) determined the particular gender cast that wage labor took at the take-off moment of industrialization.
Typical faces of industrial workers changed from female & colored to male & white to female & colored. The prevalence of the nuclear family idealized by conservatives now -- male breadwinner, female housewife, & biological children -- was merely a blip in history that coincided with the post-WW2 economic boom (say, from the Korean War to the Vietnam War & oil shock).
Yoshie