In the nineteenth-century mill towns of Preston, England; Lowell, Massachusetts; and Paisley, Scotland, there were specific demands for migrant and female labor, and potential employers provided the necessary respectable conditions in order to attract them. Using individual accounts, this innovative and comparative study examines the migrants' lives by addressing their reasons for migration, their relationship to their families, the roles they played in the cities to which they moved, and the dangers they met as a result of their youth, gender, and separation from family. Gordon details both the similarities and differences in the women's migration experiences, and somewhat surprisingly concludes that they became financially independent, rather than primarily contributors to a family economy.

Investigating the enormous contribution made by female textile workers to early industrialization in Meiji Japan, Patricia Tsurumi vividly documents not only their hardships but also their triumphs. While their skills and long hours created profits for factory owners that in turn benefited the state, the labor of these women and girls enabled their tenant farming families to continue paying high rents in the countryside. Tsurumi shows that through their experiences as Japan's first modern factory workers, these "factory girls" developed an identity that played a crucial role in the history of the Japanese working class. Much of this story is based on records the factory girls themselves left behind, including their songs. "It is a delight to receive a meticulous and comprehensive volume on the plight of women who pioneered [assembly plant] employment in Asia a century ago...."--L. L. Cornell, The Journal of Asian Studies "Tsurumi writes of these rural women with compassion and treats them as sentient, valuable individuals.... [Many] readers will find these pages informative and thought provoking."--Sally Ann Hastings, Monumenta Niponica

By taking on a long-term perspective, a large geographical scope and moving beyond the homogeneous treatment of single people, this book fleshes out the particularities of urban singles and allows for a better understanding of the attitudes and values underlying this lifestyle in the European past.

WINNER OF THE CWA ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION 'Brilliantly summons up one girl's life, dreams and suffering. It's ingenious history writing' Mail on Sunday 'A gripping, unputdownable masterpiece' - Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five 'Extraordinary' - Guardian 'Historical writing does not get any better than this' Matt Houlbrook, author of The Prince of Tricksters 1910, Wellington, New Zealand. Lydia Harvey is sixteen, working long hours for low pay, when a glamorous couple invite her to Buenos Aires. She accepts - and disappears. 1910, London, England. Amid a global panic about sex trafficking, detectives are tracking a ring of international criminals when they find a young woman on the streets of Soho who might be the key to cracking the whole case. As more people are drawn into Lydia's life and the trial at the Old Bailey, the world is being reshaped into a new, global era. Choices are being made - about who gets to cross borders, whose stories matter and what justice looks like - that will shape the next century. In this immersive account, historian Julia Laite traces Lydia Harvey through the fragments she left behind to build an extraordinary story of aspiration, exploitation and survival - and one woman trying to build a life among the forces of history.

The book is underpinned by philosophical, social and cultural studies and it draws specifically on radical adult education practices related to social movements and to liberating knowledge ‘from below’.

Aspirations and Anxieties is a working class intellectual history of early factory operatives in antebellum New England. The book focuses on the operatives' perceptions of technological and socio-economic changes in the mechanized workplace. The study uncovers a complex debate over many facets of the factory system--the machines and factory buildings, wages and hours, relations between managers and workers, and the content and character of protest. Finally, the book argues that the roots of this debate lie in the struggle to define the meaning of work itself in a period of profound social change.