Top left: Workers at a power loom in England, 1835. Top right: Two young women working in a spinning mill in Japan, 1900. Bottom left; A young girl working in a cotton mill in North Carolina, 1909. Bottom right; Two young women working in a cotton mill in Bangladesh, 2018. Click for a higher-resolution version.
When I wrote my self-published book about the yuri manga Sweet Blue Flowers, I not only included some chapters about the history of yuri and its predecessor genre, “class S” stories, I also wrote an entire chapter about the fate of the “factory girls” who worked in the textile mills of Meiji and Taishō era Japan. If I were writing a real book with a real publisher, the very first thing my real editor would tell me to do would be to remove that chapter: it’s overly-long and almost totally disconnected from the rest of the book, including the chapters that precede and follow it. So why did I leave it in?
First, because I was tired of yuri works that featured rich girls attending expensive private schools. Where are the less fortunate girls, I thought, those who lived and live in poverty—what about their lives and their loves? I wondered where if anywhere I could find their stories, and I went looking for them.
Why did I focus on the factory girls specifically? Because they play a special role in the history of the yuri genre and the world in which it arose. We can better understand Sweet Blue Flowers if we know something about Maria Watches Over Us, the work whose tropes Sweet Blue Flowers both echoes and interrogates. We can in turn better understand Maria Watches Over Us if we know something about the girls’ literature of early 20th century Japan and its focus on “S” relationships between schoolgirls.
Why did that literature appear at that particular time, and in that particular form? Because in the Meiji era, Japan for the first time had a critical mass of middle-class girls and young women. They were educated to be literate in Japanese, able to afford subscriptions to magazines targeted at them, and provided the freedom to leave the family home, to go to school, and there—in the brief time before they were coerced into arranged marriages—to enter in relations of “passionate friendship” (and sometimes more than friendship) with other girls.
That growing middle class was made possible by the national wealth produced by Japan’s rapid industrialization, and that industrialization in turn depended on another equally-large but less-heralded group of girls and young women, those who toiled day and night in the many factories producing silk and cotton thread for export.
I strongly felt that the story I was telling in my book would not be complete without also telling the story of the factory girls: without them, no girls’ magazines and S stories, no Nobuko Yoshiya, no postwar Japanese “economic miracle,” no shōjo manga, no Maria Watches Over Us, and no Sweet Blue Flowers.
When I wrote that chapter, I was also making a larger point about our own lives, lives built upon the bones of the millions of human beings, and in particular girls and young women, without whose work—and whose suffering—our present-day world would not exist.
Why textile workers in particular? Those of us who are American are also aware (or should be aware) of other historic injustices that occurred in the creation and expansion of the United States, most notably the enslavement of millions of Africans and the wars against Native Americans. Their suffering far outweighs that of the factory girls, the vast majority of whom lived to leave the mills and return to their families.
However, slavery and genocide are nothing new in human history. The oppression of African Americans and the extermination of Native Americans loom large in our imagination because they were relatively recent in historical terms. But the conquest of one population by another, and the subsequent enslavement or killing of the conquered, is a constant theme over the thousands of years since complex societies and states first arose.
On the other hand, the plight of the factory girls is relatively recent, a key episode in the industrial revolution that kicked off the subsequent scientific and technological revolutions that have improved the lives of billions of people worldwide since the late 19th century. Textile workers are the shock troops of the industrial revolution: thread, cloth, and clothing are easy to export to international markets, textile production is supercharged by introducing machinery to the process of spinning thread and weaving cloth, and those machines need to be tended and fed by an army of workers newly arrived from the farm to the factory. They are typically predominantly young and predominantly women, like those shown in the pictures above.
This process has repeated—and is still repeating—in every country transitioning from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing and (later) services economy. The wealth it produces supports a growing middle class, whose spending and leisure time in turn give rise to a thriving cultural scene. Behind Nobuko Yoshiya were the girls who crossed Nomugi pass to work in the silk mills of Okaya. The comfortable life of Emily Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts, was made possible in part by the labor of the “mill girls” of Lowell. And the England of Jane Austen and the Brönte sisters was also the England of the cotton mills of Manchester.
Charlotte Brönte herself wrote a novel, Shirley, about the early stages of the English industrial revolution and the Luddite uprisings; it languishes in obscurity compared to Jane Eyre or even Villette. Similarly, we tend to forget the existence of the factory girls except in times of exceptional tragedy: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, or the collapse of Rana Plaza.
The lesser injuries—the overwork, dangerous conditions, wage theft, abuse and sexual harassment, and so on—pass beneath our notice. We simply take for granted our ability to go into a mall, or surf to a online store, and buy a wide range of relatively cheap and fashionable clothes—a situation impossible to imagine before the industrial revolution, when the typical person had only a few items of clothing, purchased dearly and patched until no longer wearable.
As I did the research for my book I came across the term “factory girls” and wondered who they were and how they lived. The result of my reading was an intense desire to tell their story, even in an out-of-place chapter in a book destined to be little-read. To quote from the final lines of that chapter, “in writing about the Class S stories of yesteryear and the yuri manga of today and tomorrow, I would be remiss if I did not take the opportunity to honor the memory of the girls and women whose work helped make that literature possible, but who rarely if ever grace its pages”—or, indeed, many pages at all.