In the nineteenth century, what had been a sexual division of labor between spinning (performed by women) and weaving (performed by men) became a geographical division of labor. Spinning moved from the center of the Caux to its borders, where it concentrated along the tributaries of the Seine. By 1823, there were 121 spinning mills in the Seine-Inférieure. Only ten were on small streams in the interior of the Caux, and most of these would not survive for long. Ninety-five were in the valleys near Rouen, nine were near Le Havre (the entry point of raw cotton), and seven were near Dieppe. The yarn produced in these mills continued to be put out into the villages of the Caux for weaving, however, and much of the cloth produced for the Rouen merchants continued to come from looms set up in the homes of the cauchois peasants. Now, however, both men and women worked at these looms.

The rise of cottage weaving

It is impossible to tell exactly how quickly spinning disappeared as a cottage occupation in Auffay because the recording of female occupations in the civil registers is almost nonexistent for the quarter century between 1803 and 1828. After that period, however, female marriage occupations are recorded more systematically, and it is clear that by the 1830s cottage spinning was dead in Auffay and the other cauchois villages.