Through The Mill: Girls and Women in the Quebec Cotton Textile Industry 1881-1951

Girls and women played an important role in the industrialization of Canada—particularly in the cotton textile industry concentrated in Quebec. Until the end of World War I, they accounted for more than half of the workers who toiled in the province's cotton mills. Contrary to conventional wisdom that women were most often quiescent, short-term workers who undercut unions' organizing efforts, female cotton workers demonstrated remarkable levels of labor activism and militancy across time. T...