Surviving the industrial city: the female poor and the workhouse in late nineteenth-century Belfast

Abstract

In common with many British cities, but unlike the rest of Ireland, late nineteenth-century Belfast experienced rapid industrialization and physical expansion. Women formed a significant proportion of the city's workforce, attracted by the employment opportunities represented in the burgeoning textile industry.Many of them were economically vulnerable, however, and could find themselves destitute for a number of reasons. This article sets Belfast's Poor Law workhouse in the landscape of welfare in the city, exploring how its use reflected the development of the city and the ways in which the female poor engaged with it in order to survive.In May 2010, a life-sized cast bronze statue of a young female millworker was unveiled on the corner of Cambrai Street and Crumlin Road in north Belfast. The statue, affectionately known as 'Millie', was deliberately located just off the Crumlin Road in what was one of the poorest parts of the city next to the Brookfield Mill and close to where three other major spinning mills once stood, and has been billed as a 'celebration of the contribution that Belfast's female mill-workers made to the city's success'. 1 Several years earlier, a statute of two bronze female figures, Monument to the Unknown Female Worker, was erected in Belfast city centre as a tribute to the city's poorest workers, those women whose grinding labour had contributed so much to the city's economic prosperity but yet had been forced to draw on a range of strategies in order to survive. 2 2 Each of these pieces of public art stands as a permanent reminder of the reality of the economic precariousness, poverty and destitution faced by the tens of thousands of women who flocked to Belfast in search of work during the late nineteenth century. Most found employment in the city's linen mills; others resorted to a wide variety of strategies for survival. All were vulnerable to poverty, sickness and destitution, many struggled and sometimes failed to achieve economic independence and often existed on the margins of society. Even for those in employment, there was no guarantee that work would continue to be available and often no economic safety net if it did not. The development of welfare in the city was, therefore, of crucial importance to those who sought relief, in some cases, providing short-term shelter in a crisis, in others, providing a more long-term solution. While, in common with most Irish and British cities, philanthropic organizations proliferated throughout the nineteenth century, the landscape of welfare provision was dominated by the workhouse set up under the Irish Poor Law of 1838. In a city facing the social challenges presented by rapid industrialization and inward migration, overlaid with communal tensions and sectarian division, the provision of welfare presented particular challenges. This article will examine the ways in which the particular growth of Belfast contributed to social problems and shaped its welfare provision before going on to explore the importance of the workhouse fo...

‘It Gives Great Relief to My Mind’ – Family Involvement at Children's Committal to the Sister of Mercy run Irish Industrial Schools, 1868–1936

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