THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

activism. Between 1815 and 1819, wages for framework knitters steadily declined
reaching a low of four shillings a week for sixteen to eighteen hours of daily labor. Since
1811, the knitters and leading working-class radicals had attempted to set a minimum
wage, criticizing Parliament for maintaining the price of corn but not the price of labor. 87
In her pamphlet, Heyrick linked rights at home and rights in the colonies. “The Rights of
Man – The Rights of Woman – The Rights of Brutes – have been boldly advanced; but
the Rights of the Poor still remain unadvocated,” she claimed. Heyrick compared the free
and the enslaved laborer and noted that both lived and worked in a “state of wretchedness
and despair” because the “spirit of the slave-trade” — “the lust of wealth” — continued
to frame the relationship between worker and employer. 88 She called on employers to
raise wages claiming that the interests of the manufacturer and the employer were not
mutually exclusive. 89 In a significant break from the traditional philanthropic approach
to poverty, Heyrick insisted the claims of the poor be examined. “[W]e may discover,”
she wrote, “that, so far from having obeyed the requisitions of charity, we have not yet
discharged the demands of justice.” 90
Two years later, in 1819, Heyrick published a second pamphlet advocating for the
poor laborer using the language of rights rather than philanthropy. The oppressive
87 William Felkin, A History of the Machine-Wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures (London:
Longmans, Green, and Company, 1867), 441-442; Corfield, “Elizabeth Heyrick,” 56.
88 Elizabeth Heyrick, Exposition of One of the Principal Causes of the National Distress (London:
Darton, Harvey and Darton, 1817), as quoted in Midgley, Feminism and Empire, 59.
89 Midgley, Feminism and Empire, 59; Corfield, “Elizabeth Heyrick,” 54.
90
Heyrick, Exposition of One of the Principal Causes of the National Distress, as quoted in
Midgley, Feminism and Empire, 59.
83