On September 27, 1875, striking textile workers in Fall River, Massachusetts, engaged in a bread riot as the workers were forced to return to their job or face shipment to the state's poor farm. This strike and incident were signs of transitioning gender roles among the British immigrant workers who had come to Fall River, and of the cultural divides between workers and management that marked the era.

After the US Civil War, British trade unionists sponsored a massive emigration from Lancashire to Fall River. The idea was to find new opportunities for skilled unionists by sending them somewhere else, taking both British skill and British militancy with them, while maintaining high wages at home by reducing the oversupply of workers and avoiding industrial strife.

But life in Fall River was no paradise. The textile factory owners did not see skilled workers. They saw insubordinate unionists. Fall River was an especially awful place to work. The owners there used the cheapest possible cotton and paid the lowest wages in New England. They also sought to break down their workers by forcing them into ever more strenuous work, producing huge amounts of highly inferior cloth with lots of flaws that the printing process would conceal. For the English men who had moved there, textile work came with manly pride in a job well done. In their vision, workers and masters had well-established duties that included employers being willing to negotiate with reasonable unions. That view was, uh, not shared by the Fall River employers. Moreover, the duties of employees, in the British system, included a daily deference to the bosses that reflected the British class system. So they would doff their caps and the like. But the Fall River employers, having no idea what this meant, assumed these were extra docile workers.