Social Consequences of Industrial Revolution in Europe
Overview
Overview of the Social Consequences of the Industrial Revolution
The social consequences of the Industrial Revolution grew out of a myriad of technological and organizational changes. These social consequences involved various waves of migration and demographic dislocations, changes in class structures, new forms of interaction among members of different classes, and the emergence of a new set of consumer cultures fed by the mass production of the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution generated a number of new economic, political, and social developments and trends that dramatically changed the industrialized world beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. These new developments and trends manifested themselves in various social consequences, including new issues discussed and debated, urbanization, the working classes, poverty, and the cult of domesticity. And these consequences helped affect the world in which we live today.
Learning Objectives
- Analyze the human and environmental consequences of Industrialization and the factory system in England.
- Compare the lives of factory owners and workers in England during Industrialization.
- Compare the new political and labor organizations with governmental responses to worker unrest.
- Identify, explain, and assess the historic significance and impact of the new developments and trends in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
The Condition of the Working Class in England: 1844 sociological study of industrializing and urbanizing England from the perspectives of the industrial working class
Friedrich Engels: sociologist and author of The Condition of the Working Class in England
factory system: a method of manufacturing that employs machinery and division of labor, which was first adopted in Britain at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (late 18th century) and later spread around the world, reducing the required skill level of workers and increasing output per worker
One of the best-known accounts of factory workers’ living conditions during the Industrial Revolution is Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. In it, Engels described backstreet sections of Manchester and other mill towns where people lived in crude shanties and shacks, some not completely enclosed, some with dirt floors. These shanty towns had narrow walkways between irregularly shaped lots and dwellings. There were no sanitary facilities. The population density was extremely high. Eight to ten unrelated mill workers often shared a room with no furniture and slept on a pile of straw or sawdust. Disease spread through a contaminated water supply. By the late 1880s, Engels noted that the extreme poverty and lack of sanitation he wrote about in 1844 had largely disappeared. Since then, the historical debate on the question of the living conditions of factory workers has been very controversial. While some have pointed out that living conditions of the poor workers were tragic everywhere and industrialization, in fact, slowly improved the living standards of a steadily increasing number of workers, others have concluded that living standards for the majority of the population did not grow meaningfully until the late 19th and 20th centuries and that in many ways workers’ living standards declined under early capitalism.
Industrialization and Urbanization
Industrialization and emergence of the factory system triggered rural-to-urban migration and thus led to a rapid growth of cities, where during the Industrial Revolution workers faced the challenge of dire conditions and developed new ways of living.
Although initially inefficient, the arrival of steam power signified the beginning of the mechanization that would enhance the burgeoning textile industries in Manchester into the world’s first center of mass production. As textile manufacture switched from the home to factories, Manchester and towns in south and east Lancashire became the largest and most productive cotton spinning center in the world in 1871, with 32% of global cotton production.
Industrialization led to the creation of the factory and the factory system contributed to the growth of urban areas, as large numbers of workers migrated into the cities in search of work in the factories. Nowhere was this better illustrated than in Manchester, the world’s first industrial city, nicknamed Cottonopolis because of its mills and associated industries that made it the global center of the textile industry. Manchester experienced a six-fold increase in its population between 1771 and 1831; it had a population of 10,000 in 1717, but by 1911 it had burgeoned to 2.3 million. Bradford grew by 50% every ten years between 1811 and 1851, and by 1851 only 50% of the population of Bradford was actually born there. In England and Wales, the proportion of the population living in cities jumped from 17% in 1801 to 72% in 1891.
Poverty and the Working Classes in the Aftermath of the Industrial Revolution
Industrialization changed living and working standards dramatically, reducing many to poverty. People in the working classes had new opportunities for employment and faced new challenges. A new culture of consumption grew out of the mass production of a growing number of inexpensive consumer goods. Members of the working classes enjoyed only limited access to these goods, along with only crowded, substandard, even unhealthy, housing in the growing industrial cities of England, Europe, and the United States. Such conditions effectively consigned many in the industrial working classes to an effective state of poverty. These conditions and the responses of people in these working classes to these conditions changed the economic, political, and social landscapes of the industrializing world.
Conditions improved over the course of the 19th century due to new public health acts that regulated things like sewage, hygiene, and home construction. In the introduction of his 1892 edition, Engels notes that most of the conditions he wrote about in 1844 had been greatly improved.
Working-Class Women
Over time, more men than women would find industrial employment, and industrial wages provided a higher level of material security than agricultural employment. Consequently, women, who were traditionally involved in all agricultural labor, would be left behind in less-profitable agriculture. By the late 1860s, very low wages in agricultural work turned women to industrial employment.
In industrialized areas, women could find employment on assembly lines, providing industrial laundry services, and in the textile mills that sprang up during the Industrial Revolution, in such cities as Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham. Spinning and winding wool, silk, and other types of piecework were a common way of earning income by working from home, but wages were very low and hours long. Often 14 hours per day were needed to earn enough to survive. Needlework was the single highest-paid occupation for women working from home, but the work paid little and women often had to rent sewing machines that they could not afford to buy. These home manufacturing industries became known as “sweated industries” (think of today’s sweat shops). The Select Committee of the British House of Commons defined sweated industries in 1890 as “work carried on for inadequate wages and for excessive hours in unsanitary conditions.” By 1906, such workers earned about a penny an hour. Women were never paid the same wage as a man for the same work, despite the fact that they were as likely as men to be married and supporting children.
Organizational Changes and Developments generated by the Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution gave rise to a wide range of organizational changes and developments. These changes and developments were part of the larger rationalization of industrializing societies. Such changes and developments include new manufacturing structures, new ways of organizing workers, and new organizations representing the new groups which emerged with the Industrial Revolution. These organizational changes and developments were part of industrial societies becoming more systematic, more compartmentalized, and more professionalized.
Learning Objectives
- Analyze the human and environmental consequences of Industrialization and the factory system in England.
- Compare the lives of factory owners and workers in England during Industrialization.
- Identify, explain, and assess the historic significance and impact of the new developments and trends in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
factory system: a method of manufacturing that employs machinery and division of labor, which was first adopted in Britain at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (late 18th century) and later spread around the world, reducing the required skill level of workers and increasing output per worker
Luddites: organized, English textile workers who often protested labor conditions by destroying machinery
The Factory System
The factory system, fueled by technological progress, made production much faster, cheaper, and more uniform, but it also disconnected the workers from the means of production and placed them under the control of powerful industrialists. Consequently, their roles in manufacturing and their status in their countries changed. They went from being artisans to wage workers who mind machines, to members of a new industrial working class.
Between 1820 and 1850, mechanized factories supplanted traditional artisan shops as the predominant form of manufacturing institution, because the larger-scale factories enjoyed a significant technological advantage over the small artisan shops. The earliest factories under this system developed in the cotton and wool textiles industry. Later generations of factories included mechanized shoe production and manufacturing of machinery, including machine tools. Factories that supplied the railroad industry included rolling mills, foundries, and locomotive works. Agricultural-equipment factories produced cast-steel plows and reapers. Bicycles were mass-produced beginning in the 1880s.
The factory system was a new way of organizing labor made necessary by the development of machines, which were too large to house in a worker’s cottage. Working hours were as long as they had been for the farmer: from dawn to dusk, six days per week. Factories also essentially reduced skilled and unskilled workers to replaceable commodities. At the farm or in the cottage industry, each family member and worker was indispensable to a given operation and workers had to possess knowledge and often advanced skills that resulted from years of learning through practice. Conversely, under the factory system, workers were easily replaceable as skills required to operate machines could be acquired very quickly.
Factory workers typically lived within walking distance to work until the introduction of bicycles and electric street railways in the 1890s. Thus, the factory system was largely responsible for the rise of urban living, as large numbers of workers migrated into the towns in search of employment in the factories. Many mills had to provide dormitories for workers, especially for girls and women.
Opposition to the Industrialization of Manufacturing
Much manufacturing in the 18th century had been carried out in homes under the domestic or putting-out system, especially the weaving of cloth and spinning of thread and yarn, which was often done with just a single loom or spinning wheel. As these devices were mechanized, machine-made goods were able to underprice the cottagers, leaving them unable to earn enough to make their efforts worthwhile.
The transition to industrialization was not without difficulty. For example, a group of English textile workers known as Luddites protested against industrialization and sometimes sabotaged factories. They continued an already established tradition of workers opposing labor-saving machinery. Numerous inventors in the textile industry suffered harassment when developing their machines or devices. However, in many industries the transition to factory production was not so divisive.
Machine-breaking was criminalized by the Parliament of the United Kingdom as early as 1721. Parliament subsequently made “machine breaking” (i.e. industrial sabotage) a capital crime with the Frame Breaking Act of 1812 and the Malicious Damage Act of 1861. Lord Byron—the famous British Romantic poet—opposed this legislation, becoming one of the few prominent defenders of the Luddites.
Debate arose concerning the morality of the factory system, as workers complained about unfair working conditions. One of the problems concerned women’s labor; women were always paid less than men and, in many cases, as little as a quarter of what men made. Child labor was also a major part of the system; in the early 19th century, education was not compulsory and, in working families, children’s wages were seen as a necessary contribution to the family budget. Additionally, there were major concerns about the number of hours employees were forced to work, as well as the dangerous or unhealthy conditions of factories themselves.
Some of the unfair working conditions seemed to be addressed with inherent changes in society and the development of technology. For instance, automation in the late 19th century is credited with ending child labor and according to many historians, it was more effective than gradually changing child labor laws. Additionally, years of schooling began to increase sharply from the end of the 19th century, when elementary state-provided education for all became a viable concept (with the Prussian and Austrian empires as pioneers of obligatory education laws), which led to the assumption that children should be in school (although not for as many years as is currently required).
Some industrialists themselves tried to improve factory and living conditions for their workers. One of the earliest such reformers was Robert Owen, known for his pioneering efforts in improving conditions for workers at the New Lanark mills and often regarded as one of the key thinkers of the early socialist movement.
Early Reform Efforts
A number of new problems grew out of industrialization, including exploitive and abusive child labor practices, unsafe working conditions, overcrowding, among other unsanitary living conditions, and the centralization of economic and political power in new elites. These problems quickly spawned reforms to correct them. These early reforms marked the beginning of a new age of industrial and urban reform.
Learning Objectives
- Analyze the human and environmental consequences of Industrialization and the factory system in England.
- Compare the lives of factory owners and workers in England during Industrialization.
- Identify, explain, and assess the historic significance and impact of the new developments and trends in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
factory acts - reform legislation enacted by the British Parliament during the nineteenth century toward the end of improving working conditions in new industrial factors
Charles Dickens - English author who chronicled the impact of industrialization on England during the first half of the nineteenth century
During the nineteenth century various European legislatures, U.S. state legislatures, and the Japanese legislature enacted a number or reform laws to improve working conditions in the new manufacturing factories. The British Parliament passed a series of factory acts as part of these efforts. The first legislation in response to the abuses experienced by child laborers did not even attempt to ban child labor but merely to improve working conditions for some child workers. The Health and Morals of Apprentices Act 1802, sometimes known as the Factory Act 1802, was designed to improve conditions for apprentices working in cotton mills. The Act was introduced by Sir Robert Peel, who became concerned after a 1784 outbreak of a “malignant fever” at one of his cotton mills, which he later blamed on “gross mismanagement” by his subordinates. The Act required that cotton mills and factories be properly ventilated and basic requirements on cleanliness be met. Apprentices in these premises were to be given a basic education and attend a religious service at least once a month. They were to be provided with clothing and their working hours were limited to no more than twelve hours a day (excluding meal breaks). They were not to work at night.
Despite its modest provisions, the 1802 Act was not effectively enforced and did not address the working conditions of free children, who were not apprentices and who rapidly came to heavily outnumber the apprentices in mills. Regulating the way masters treated their apprentices was a recognized responsibility of Parliament and hence the Act itself was non-contentious, but coming between employer and employee to specify on what terms a person might sell their labor (or that of their children) was highly contentious. Hence it was not until 1819 that an Act to limit the hours of work (and set a minimum age) for free children working in cotton mills was piloted through Parliament by Peel and his son Robert (the future Prime Minister). Strictly speaking, Peel’s Cotton Mills and Factories Act of 1819 paved the way for subsequent Factory Acts and set up effective means of industry regulation.
These 1802 and 1819 Acts were largely ineffective. For instance, in 1824 Charles Dickens, British author of Oliver Twist, was a child-laborer, forced to work in a blacking factory at the age of twelve in order to help pay off his father’s growing debts; as many note, his bad experiences as a child-laborer colored his future compositions. After radical agitation by child labor opponents, a Royal Commission recommended in 1833 that children aged 11 – 18 should work a maximum of 12 hours per day, children aged 9 – 11 a maximum of eight hours, and children under the age of nine were no longer permitted to work. This act, however, only applied to the textile industry, and further agitation led to another act in 1847 limiting both adults and children to 10-hour working days.
In 1841, about 216,000 people were employed in the mines. Women and children worked underground for 11 or 12 hours a day for smaller wages than men. The public became aware of conditions in the country’s collieries in 1838 after an accident at Huskar Colliery in Silkstone, near Barnsley. A stream overflowed into the ventilation drift after violent thunderstorms causing the death of 26 children, 11 girls ages 8 to 16 and 15 boys between 9 and 12 years of age. The disaster came to the attention of Queen Victoria, who ordered an inquiry. Lord Ashley headed the royal commission of inquiry that investigated the conditions of workers, especially children, in the coal mines in 1840. Commissioners visited collieries and mining communities gathering information, sometimes against the mine owners’ wishes. The report, illustrated by engraved illustrations and the personal accounts of mine workers, was published in 1842. Victorian society was shocked to discover that children as young as five or six worked as trappers, opening and shutting ventilation doors down the mine before becoming hurriers, pushing and pulling coal tubs and corfs. As a result, the Mines and Collieries Act 1842, commonly known as the Mines Act of 1842, was passed. It prohibited all girls and boys under ten years old from working underground in coal mines.
The Factories Act 1844 banned women and young adults from working more than 12-hour days and children from the ages 9 to 13 from working 9-hour days. The Factories Act 1847, also known as the Ten Hours Act, made it illegal for women and young people (13 – 18) to work more than 10 hours and a maximum 63 hours a week in textile mills. The last two major factory acts of the Industrial Revolution were introduced in 1850 and 1856. Factories could no longer dictate work hours for women and children, who were to work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the summer and 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the winter. These acts deprived the manufacturers of a significant amount of power and authority, which was deemed a necessity so as to ensure more ethical working conditions. They also constituted the beginning of a new period of reform.
Changes in Family Structure
In the laboring class at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, women traditionally married men of the same social status (e.g., a shoemaker’s daughter would marry a shoemaker’s son). Marriage outside this norm was not common. During the Industrial Revolution, marriage shifted from this tradition to a more sociable union between wife and husband in the laboring class. Women and men tended to marry someone from the same job, geographical location, or social group. Miners remained an exception to this trend and a coal miner’s daughter still tended to marry a coal miner’s son.
Learning Objectives
- Analyze the human and environmental consequences of Industrialization and the factory system in England.
- Compare the lives of factory owners and workers in England during Industrialization.
- Identify, explain, and assess the historic significance and impact of the new developments and trends in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution.
The rural pre-industrial work sphere was usually shaped by the father, who controlled the pace of work for his family. However, factories and mills undermined the old patriarchal authority to a certain extent. Factories put husbands, wives, and children under the same conditions and authority of the manufacturer masters. In the latter half of the Industrial Revolution, women could find employment on assembly lines, providing industrial laundry services, and in the textile mills that sprang up during the Industrial Revolution in such cities as Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham. Spinning and winding wool, silk, and other types of piecework were a common way of earning income by working from home, but wages were very low and hours long. Often 14 hours per day were needed to earn enough to survive. Needlework was the single highest-paid occupation for women working from home, but the work paid little and women often had to rent sewing machines that they could not afford to buy. These home manufacturing industries became known as “sweated industries” (think of today’s sweat shops). The Select Committee of the House of Commons defined sweated industries in 1890 as “work carried on for inadequate wages and for excessive hours in unsanitary conditions.” By 1906, such workers earned about a penny an hour. Women were never paid the same wage as a man for the same work, despite the fact that they were as likely as men to be married and supporting children.
Industrialization and Labor Organization
The concentration of workers in factories, mines, and mills inspired the development of labor unions during the Industrial Revolution. After the initial decades of political hostility towards organized labor, skilled male workers emerged as the early beneficiaries of the labor movement. The rapid expansion of industrial society during the Industrial Revolution drew women, children, rural workers, and immigrants into the industrial work force in large numbers and in new roles. This pool of unskilled and semi-skilled labor spontaneously organized in fits and starts throughout the early phases of industrialization and would later provide an important arena for the development of trade unions. Trade unions have sometimes been seen as successors to the guilds of medieval Europe, although the relationship between the two is disputed as the masters of the guilds employed workers (apprentices and journeymen) who were not allowed to organize. The concentration of labor in mills, factories, and mines facilitated the organization of workers to help advance the interests of working people. A union could demand better terms by withdrawing all labor and causing a consequent cessation of production. Employers had to decide between giving in to the union demands at a cost to themselves or suffering the cost of the lost production. Skilled workers were hard to replace, and these were the first groups to successfully advance their conditions through this kind of bargaining.
Learning Objectives
- Analyze the human and environmental consequences of Industrialization and the factory system in England.
- Compare the lives of factory owners and workers in England during Industrialization.
- Identify, explain, and assess the historic significance and impact of the new developments and trends in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution.
Trade unions and collective bargaining were outlawed from no later than the middle of the 14th century when the Ordinance of Laborers was enacted in the Kingdom of England. As collective bargaining and early worker unions grew with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the government began to clamp down on what it saw as the danger of popular unrest at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1799, the Combination Act was passed, which banned trade unions and collective bargaining by British workers. Although the unions were subject to often severe repression until 1824, they were already widespread in some cities.
Workplace militancy manifested itself in many different ways. For example, Luddites were a group of English textile workers and self-employed weavers who in the 19th century destroyed weaving machinery as a form of protest. The group was protesting the use of machinery to get around standard labor practices, fearing that the years they had spent learning the craft would go to waste and unskilled machine operators would rob them of their livelihoods. One of the first mass work strikes emerged in 1820 in Scotland, an event known today as the Radical War. 60,000 workers went on a general strike. Their demands went far beyond labor regulations and included a general call for reforms. The strike was quickly crushed by soldiers and police.
Early Trade Unions
By the 1810s, the first labor organizations to bring together workers of divergent occupations were formed. Possibly the first such union was the General Union of Trades, also known as the Philanthropic Society, founded in 1818 in Manchester. The latter name was to hide the organization’s real purpose in a time when trade unions were still illegal.
Under the pressure of both workers and the middle- and upper-class activists sympathetic of the workers’ repeal, the law banning unions was repealed in 1824. However, the Combinations of Workmen Act 1825 severely restricted their activity. It prohibited trade unions from attempting to collectively bargain for better terms and conditions at work and suppressed the right to strike. That did not stop the fledgling labor movements and unions began forming rapidly.
The first attempts at setting up a national general union were made in the 1820s and 1830s. The National Association for the Protection of Labor was established in 1830 by John Doherty, after an apparently unsuccessful attempt to create a similar national presence with the National Union of Cotton Spinners. The Association quickly enrolled approximately 150 unions, consisting mostly of textile workers, but also including mechanics, blacksmiths, and various others. Membership rose to between 10,000 and 20,000 individuals spread across the five counties of Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Leicestershire within a year. To establish awareness and legitimacy, the union started the weekly Voice of the People publication, with the declared intention “to unite the productive classes of the community in one common bond of union.”
In England, the members of the Friendly Society of Agricultural laborers became popular heroes, and 800,000 signatures were collected for their release. Their supporters organized a political march, one of the first successful marches in the UK, and all were pardoned on condition of good conduct in 1836.
In 1834, Welsh socialist Robert Owen established the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union. The organization attracted a range of socialists from Owenites to revolutionaries and played a part in the protests after the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ case. In 1833, six men from Tolpuddle in Dorset founded the Friendly Society of Agricultural Laborers to protest against the gradual lowering of agricultural wages. The Tolpuddle laborers refused to work for less than 10 shillings a week; by this time wages had been reduced to seven shillings and would be further reduced to six. In 1834, James Frampton, a local landowner and magistrate, wrote to Home Secretary Lord Melbourne to complain about the union. As a result of obscure law that prohibited the swearing of secret oaths, six men were arrested, tried, found guilty, and transported to Australia—which treated as a penal colony. Owen’s union collapsed shortly afterwards.
Early Political Developments
Industrialization also contributed to political democratization in the industrializing West. This political democratization had begun in the West with the Enlightenment, with roots going back to the Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation. Britain led the way with a succession of reforms which incrementally increased the number of men during the nineteenth century and women in the early twentieth century. Other industrial Western nations closely followed the British examples. Notably and remarkably the dominant European American political and economic elites in the United States denied the vote, among other rights of citizenship to African Americans to the late nineteenth century.
Learning Objectives
- Analyze the human and environmental consequences of Industrialization and the factory system in England.
- Identify, explain, and assess the historic significance and impact of the new developments and trends in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution.
- Compare the new political and labor organizations with governmental responses to worker unrest.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
Chartism - organized movement led by English workers who advocated for improved labor conditions during the Industrial Revolution
First, Second, and Third Reform Acts - a succession of British parliamentary electoral reforms during the nineteenth century that incrementally increased the number of men in England who were allowed to vote
Cult of Domesticity - term for nineteenth-century system of gender subordination imposed on women, mostly in the middle and upper classes, in industrializing nations
Chartism
In the later 1830s and 1840s, trade unionism was overshadowed by political activity. Of particular importance was Chartism—a working-class movement for political reform in Britain that existed from 1838 to 1858. It took its name from the People’s Charter of 1838 and was a national protest movement, with particular strongholds of support in Northern England, the East Midlands, the Staffordshire Potteries, the Black Country, and the South Wales Valleys. Support for the movement was at its highest in 1839, 1842, and 1848, when petitions signed by millions of working people were presented to Parliament. The strategy used the scale of support demonstrated these petitions and the accompanying mass meetings to put pressure on politicians to concede manhood suffrage. Chartism thus relied on constitutional methods to secure its aims, although there were some who became involved in radical activities, notably in south Wales and Yorkshire. The government did not yield to any of the demands and suffrage had to wait another two decades. Chartism was popular among some trade unions, especially London’s tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, and masons. One reason was the fear of the influx of unskilled labor, especially in tailoring and shoe making. In Manchester and Glasgow, engineers were deeply involved in Chartist activities. Many trade unions were active in the general strike of 1842, which spread to 15 counties in England and Wales and eight in Scotland. Chartism taught techniques and political skills that inspired trade union leadership.
Chartists saw themselves fighting against political corruption and for democracy in an industrial society, but they attracted support beyond the radical political groups for economic reasons, such as opposing wage cuts and unemployment.
The First, Second, and Third Reform Acts
The British Parliament led the way in industrial political democratization with three acts which progressively the number of men who could vote in British elections. The first act, passed in 1832, extended the vote to men in the middle classes and redistributed parliamentary seats on the basis of population changes that had occurred with industrial urbanization. The second act, passed in 1867, granted the vote to men in the urban working classes. These acts also gave rise to modern political parties in Britain which actively sought the support of voters by tayloring their policies and priorities to these voters. The third act, passed in 1884, extended the vote to men in the rural working classes.
Other Western industrial nations similarly proceeded with political democratization. The United States, as a notable exception, denied the vote to African Americans in the U.S. until the late twentieth century, through statute and violence. The 1861-5 Confederate Rebellion in the southern states of the U.S. from Texas through Virginia sought to construct a new nation on the foundation of the chattel enslavement of African Americans.
Connection to Women’s Rights Movements
Women's rights advocates of the late 18th and early 19th centuries—such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Wright, and Harriet Martineau in Britain—were widely accused of disrupting the natural order of things and condemned as unfeminine. “They are only semi-women, mental hermaphrodites,” wrote Henry F. Harrington in the Ladies' Companion. However, after the Jacksonian era (1812 to 1850) saw the expansion of voting rights to virtually all white males in the United States, many women believed it was their opportunity for increased civil liberties.
Early feminist opposition to many of the values promoted by the Cult of Domesticity (especially concerning women's suffrage, political activism, and legal independence) culminated in the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. This convention was the first national effort in the U.S. and one of the early national efforts in the West to contest the discrimination that underlay the Cult of Domesticity. The slow progress that women have had to endure in their efforts to end gender discrimination and repudiate the Cult of Domesticity since the Industrial Revolution illustrate the resilience of both.
Attributions
The 1851 image of the Crystal Palace in London is a lithograph produced by J. McNeven.
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