768
CHAPTER 24 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
The Sexual Division of Labor
The era of the Industrial Revolution witnessed major
changes in the sexual division of labor. In preindustrial
Europe certain jobs were traditionally defined by sexwomen and girls for milking and spinning, men and
boys for plowing and weaving. But many tasks might go
to either sex because particular circumstances dictated a
Cotton Mill Workers Family members often worked side by side in early British factories.
The child on the left is quite possibly the daughter of the woman nearby. They are combing
raw cotton and drawing it into loose strands called rovings, which will be spun into fine
thread on the machines to the right. (Mary Evans Picture Library)
CAPITAL AND LABOR
family's response in its battle for economic survival.
' Plus pattern of family employment carried over into
early factories and subcontracting, but it collapsed as
child labor was restricted and new attitudes emerged. A
different sexual division of labor gradually arose to take
its place. The man emerged as the family's primary
wage earner, and the woman found only limited job opportunities. Generally denied good jobs at good wages
in the growing urban economy, women were expected
to concentrate on unpaid housework, child care, and
craftwork at home.
This new pattern of "separate spheres" had several aspects. First, all studies agree that married women were
much less likely to work full-time for wages outside the
house after the first child arrived, although they often
earned small amounts doing putting-out handicrafts at
home and taking in boarders. Second, married women
who did work for wages outside the house usually came
from the poorest, most desperate families, where the
husbands were poorly paid, sick, unemployed, or missing. Third, these poor married (or widowed) women
were joined by legions of young unmarried women,
who worked full-time but only in certain jobs. Fourth,
all women were generally confined to low-paying,
dead-end jobs. Virtually no occupation open to women
paid a wage sufficient for a person to live independently.
Evolving gradually as family labor declined, but largely
in place in the urban sector of the British economy by
1850, the new sexual division of labor constituted a major development in the history of women and of the
family.
Although the reorganization of paid work along gender lines is widely recognized, there is as yet no agreement on its causes. One school of scholars sees little
connection with industrialization and finds the answer
in the deeply ingrained sexist attitudes of a "patriarchal
tradition," which predated the economic transformation. These scholars stress the role of male-dominated
craft unions in denying women access to good jobs
and in reducing them to unpaid maids dependent
on their husbands. Other scholars, believing that
the gender roles of women and men can vary enormously with time and culture, look more to a combination of economic and biological factors in order to
explain the emergence of a sex-segregated division of
labor.
Three ideas stand out in this more recent interpretation. First, the new and unfamiliar discipline of the
clock and the machine was especially hard on married
women. Above all, relentless factory discipline conflicted with child care in a way that labor on the farm or
in the cottage had not done. A woman operating ear-
769
splitting spinning machinery could mind a child of
seven or eight working beside her (until such work was
outlawed), but she could no longer pace herself
through pregnancy, even though overwork during
pregnancy heightened the already high risks of childbirth. Nor could a woman breast-feed her baby on the
job, although breast-feeding saved lives. Thus a working-class woman had strong incentives to concentrate
on child care within her home if her family could afford
for her to do so.
Second, running a household in conditions of primitive urban poverty was an extremely demanding job in
its own right. There were no supermarkets or discount
department stores, no running water or public transportation. Everything had to be done on foot. As in the
poor sections of many inner cities today, shopping and
feeding the family constituted a never-ending challenge. The woman marched from one tiny shop to another, dragging her tired children (for who was to
watch them?) and struggling valiantly with heavy sacks,
tricky shopkeepers, and walkup apartments. Yet another
brutal job outside the house-a "second shift"-had
limited appeal for the average married woman. Thus
women might well have accepted the emerging division
of labor as the best available strategy for family survival
in the industrializing society. 12
Third, why were the women who did work for wages
outside the home segregated and confined to certain
"women's jobs"? No doubt the desire of men to monopolize the best opportunities and hold women down
provides part of the answer. But as some feminist scholars have argued, sex-segregated employment was also a
collective response to the new industrial system. The
growth of factories and mines brought unheard-of opportunities for girls and boys to mix on the job, free of
familial supervision. Continuing to mix after work, they
were "more likely to form liaisons, initiate courtships,
and respond to advances." 13 Such intimacy also led to
more unplanned pregnancies and fueled the illegitimacy
explosion that had begun in the late eighteenth century
and that gathered force until at least 1850. Thus segregation of jobs by gender was partly an effort by older
people to help control the sexuality of working-class
youths.
Investigations into the British coal industry before
1842 provide a graphic example of this concern (see
pages 774-775). The middle-class men leading the inquiry often failed to appreciate the physical effort of the
girls and women who dragged the carts of coal along
narrow underground passages. But they professed horror at the sight of girls and women working without
shirts, which was a common practice because of the
7
70
CHAPTER 24
THE TNoUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
I
Girl Dragging a Coal Wagon Published by reformers in Parliament as part of a multivolume investigation into child labor in coal mines, this picture was one of several that shocked
the public and contributed to the Mines Act of 1842. Stripped to the waist and harnessed to
the wagon with belt and chain, this underground worker is "hurrying" coal from the face of
the seam to the mine shaft. (The British Library)
heat, and they quickly assumed the prevalence of licentious sex with the male miners, who also wore very little clothing. In fact, most girls and married women
worked for related males in a family unit that provided
considerable protection and restraint. Yet many witnesses from the working class believed that "blackguardism and debauchery" were common and that
"they are best out of the pits, the lasses." Some miners
stressed particularly the sexual danger of letting girls
work past puberty. As one explained, "I consider it a
scandal for girls to work in the pits. Till they are 12 or
14 they may work very well but after that it's an abomination.... The work of the pit does not hurt them, it
is the effect on their morals that I complain of." 14 The
Mines Act of 1842 prohibited underground work for all
women as well as for boys under ten.
Some women who had to support themselves
protested against being excluded from coal mining,
which paid higher wages than most other jobs open to
women. But the girls and the women who had worked
underground were generally pleased with the law if they
were part of families that could manage economically.
In explaining her satisfaction in 1844, one mother of
four provided a real insight into why many women accepted the emerging sexual division of labor:
While working in the pit I was worth to my [miner] husband seven shillings a week, out of which we had to pay 2%
shillings to a woman for looking after the younger children. I used to take them to her house at 4 o'clock in the
morning, out of their own beds, to put them into hers. Then
there was one shilling a week for washing; besides, there
was mending to pay for, and other things. The house was
not guided. The other children broke things; they did not go
to school when they were sent; they would be playing
about, and get ill-used by other children, and their clothes
torn. Then when I came home in the evening, everything
was to do after the day's labor, and I was so tired I had no
heart for it; no fire lit, nothing cooked, no water fetched,
the house dirty, and nothing comfortable for my husband.
It is all far better now, and I wouldn't go do
gain. 15
Many ki
anged slowly during and
after the
ution in Great Britain. In
1850 more B
le still worked on farms than in
any other occup
The second largest occupation
was domestic s 1 with more than a million household servant
0 per
were women. Thus
many old amiliar to
outside industry lived on
and pro ed alternatives
individual workers. This
helpe
ust ial civilization.
se the transition to i in industry itself the pat
of small-scale proion with handicraft skills rema
unchanged it
750
Enlightenment and Revolution
and rotected conditions than traditional artisans.
This
uation made it much more difficult for
urban l
neymen ever to hope to become masters
with the own workshops in which they would be
in charge.
creasingly, these artisans became lifetime wage 1 orers whose skills were simply bou
and sold in t
marketplace.
By the middle of t
ans, proud of
their skills and frust
e al expectations,
became the most r
element in the
European working cla
east the 1830s onward, these artisans t
ead in one country
after another in attempt
t ormulate new ways of
protecting their social an
onomic interests.
By the late 1830s, si
t numbers of people in
the British working clas
ed the solution of their
economic plight to a rogr
of political reform
known as Chartism.
1836,
illiam Lovett (18001877) and other Lo on radic
tisans formed the
London Working
en's Associ ion. In 1838, the
group issued the i arter, deman
g six specific reforms. The Six P
is of the Chart
cluded universal male suffra
annual election
the House of
Commons, the cret ballot, equal el toral districts,
the abolition
property qualification for members
of the House
Commons, and paym t of salaries
to members
the House of Commons.
For more
an ten years, the Chartists
never tight
organized, agitated for the'
On three
casions the Charter was pre
Parliamen which refused to pass it. Petiti e
millions
signatures were presented to the
of Com
ns. Strikes were called. The Ch
publishe a newspaper, the Northern Star. Fe
O'Conn
( 1794-1855), the most important Ch
de speeches acro
Britain. Despite this
tivity, Chartism
national movement
Its ranks were s
between those who fad violence and th
who wanted to use peaceful
cs. On the to
evel, however, the Chartists
scored
eral su , - sses and controlled the city
councils
eed
d Sheffield.
As prospe
eturned after the depression of the
late 1830s
rly 1840s, many working people
abandoned
e
ement. Chartists' demonstrations in 1 . . fizzle
Nevertheless, Chartism was
the first
ge-scale E
pean working-class political mo
ent. It had
ecific goals and largely
wor
class leadership.
ritually, several of the
Six
is were enacted
law. Continental
wor
g-class observers saw in hartism the kind
of
ass movement that workers
ust eventually
t if they were to improve their situation.
Family Structures
and the Industrial Revolution
in-
It is more difficult to generalize about the European
working-class family structure in the age of early
dustrialism than under the Old Regime. Industrialism developed at such different rates across the
Continent, and the impact of industrialism cannot
be separated from that of migration and urbanization. Furthermore, industrialism did not touch all
families directly; the structures and customs of
many peasant families changed little for much o
the nineteenth century.
Much more is known about the relationships of
the new industry to the family in Great Britain than
elsewhere. Many of the British developments fore-
shadowed those in other countries as the factory
system spread.
In the 1830s and 1840s, the Chartists
circulated petitions throughout
Britain demanding political reform.
Here the petitions are being taken
to Parliament in a vast ceremonious
procession. Museum of London
THE
SYS-
Cont
serve
and f
class
oluti,
indiv
unit
venti
that:
chin(
spin
ing tl
came
facto
home
chan
whet
early
serve
had(
In
the f
dren
train
horn
life
setti:
have
hush
mitt
his a
coull
factc
who.
the f
mod
any]
disci
disci
factc
had A bega
more
ning
of fi
The;
tors,
relat
worl
own
wags
forn
Chapter 22 / Economic Advance and Social Unrest (1830-1850) 751
'THE FAMILY IN THE EARLY FACTORY
SYSTEM
-Contrary to the opinion historians and other ob-servers once held, the adoption of new machinery
and factory production did not destroy the workingc ass family. Before the late-eighteenth-century revtdution in textile production in England, the
:individual family involved in textiles was the chief
unit of production. The earliest textile-related inventions, such as the spinning jenny, did not change
hat situation. As noted in Chapter 16, the new machine was initially simply brought into the home to
spin the thread. It was the mechanization of weav- Ing that led to the major change. The father who became a machine weaver was then employed in a
factory. His work was thus separated from his
borne. Although one should not underestimate the
changes and pressures in family life that occurred
when the father left for the factory, the structure of
early English factories allowed the father to preserve certain of his traditional family roles as they
had existed before the factory system.
in the domestic system of the family economy,
he father and mother had worked with their children in textile production as a family unit. They had
trained and disciplined the children within the
home setting. Their home life and their economic
if e were largely the same. Moreover, in the home
setting, the wife who worked as a spinner might
ave earned as much or even more income than her
husband. Early factory owners and supervisors permitted the father to employ his wife and children as
his assistants. Thus parental training and discipline
could be transferred from the home into the early
factory. In some cases, in both Britain and France,
whole families would move near a new factory so
he family as a unit could work there. Those accommodations to family life nonetheless did not relieve
any family members of having to face the new work
discipline of the factory setting. Moroever, as we
discuss later, women assisting their husbands in the
factory often undertook less skilled work than they
had pursued in their homes.
A major shift in this family and factory structure
began in the mid-1820s in England and had been
more or less completed by the mid-1830s. As spinning and weaving were put under one roof, the size
)f factories and of the machinery became larger.
hese newer machines required fewer skilled operators, but many relatively unskilled attendants. This
relatively unskilled machine tending became the
work of unmarried women and of children. Factory
Owners found these workers would accept lower
wages and were less likely than adult men to try to
form worker or union organizations.
Factory wages for the more skilled adult males,
however, became sufficiently high to allow some fathers to remove their children from the factory and
to send them to school. The children who were left
working in the factories as assistants were often the
children of the economically depressed hand-loom
weavers. The wives of the skilled operatives also
usually no longer worked in the factories. So the
original links of the family in the British textile factory that had existed for well over a quarter century
largely disappeared. Men were supervising women
and children who did not belong to their families.
Concern for Child Labor it was at this point in the
1830s that workers became concerned about the
plight of child laborers because parents were no
longer exercising discipline over their own children
in the factories. The English Factory Act of 1833 forbade the employment of children under age nine,
limited the workday of children aged nine to thirteen to nine hours, and required that these children
be given two hours of education a day, paid for by
the factory owner. The effect was further to divide
work and home life. The workday for adults and
older teenagers remained twelve hours. Younger
children often worked in relays of four or six hours.
Consequently, the parental link was thoroughly
broken. The education requirement began the
process of removing nurturing and training from the
home and family to a school, where a teacher rather
than the parents was in charge of education.
After passage of the English Factory Act, many of
the British working class demanded shorter workdays for adults. They desired to reunite, in some
manner, the workday of adults with that of their
children or at least to allow adults to spend more
time with their children. In 1847, Parliament mandated a ten-hour workday. By present standards, this
was long. At that time, however, it allowed parents
and children more hours together as a domestic
unit, since their relationship as a work or production unit had ceased wherever the factory system
prevailed. By the middle of the 1840s, in the lives of
industrial workers, the roles of men as breadwinners and as fathers and husbands had become distinct in the British textile industry. Furthermore,
the concerns raised by reformers about the working
conditions of women in factories and in mines arose
in part from the relatively new view that the place
of women was in the home rather than in either an
industrial or even agrarian workplace.
Changing Economic Role for the Family What occurred in Britain presents a general pattern for what
would happen elsewhere with the spread of industrial capitalism and public education. The European
family was passing from being the chief unit of both
752 Enlightenment and Revolution
production and consumption to becoming the chief
unit of consumption alone. This development did
not mean the end of the family as an economic unit.
Parents and children, however, now came to depend
on sharing wages often derived from several sources,
rather than on sharing work in the home or factory.
Ultimately, the wage economy meant that families were less closely bound together than in the
past. Because wages could be sent over long distances to parents, children might now move farther
away from home. Once they moved far away, the
economic link was, in time, often broken. In contrast, when a family settled in an industrial city, the
wage economy might, in that or the next generation, actually discourage children from leaving
home as early as they had in the past. Children
could find wage employment in the same city and
then live at home until they had accumulated
enough savings to marry and begin their own household. That situation meant children often remained
with their parents longer than in the past.
Women in the Early Industrial
Revolution
As we noted in Chapter 16, the industrial economy
ultimately produced an immense impact on the
home and family life of women. First, it eventually
took most productive work out of the home and allowed many families to live on the wages of the
male spouse. That transformation prepared the way
for a new concept of gender-determined roles in the
home and in domestic life generally. Women came
to be associated with domestic duties, such as
housekeeping, food preparation, child rearing and
nurturing, and household management, or with
very poorly paid, largely unskilled cottage industries. Men came to be associated almost exclusively
with supporting the family. Children were raised to
conform to these expected gender patterns. Previously, this domestic division of labor into separate
male and female spheres had prevailed only among
the relatively small middle class and the gentry.
During the nineteenth century, that division came
to characterize the working class as well.
OPPORTUNITIES AND EXPLOITATION
IN EMPLOYMENT
Because the early Industrial Revolution had begun
in textile production, women and their labor were
deeply involved from the start. Although both spinning and weaving were still domestic industries,
women usually worked in all stages of production.
Hand spinning was virtually always a woman's
task. At first, when spinning was moved into factories and involved large machines, women often
were displaced by men. Furthermore, the higher
wages commanded by male cotton-factory workers
allowed many married women not to work or t
work only to supplement their husbands' wages.
Women in Factories With the next generation o
machines in the 1820s, however, unmarried women=
rapidly became employed in the factories, where they
often constituted the majority of workers. But their
new jobs often demanded fewer skills than those they
had previously exercised in the home production of
textiles. Women's factory work also required fewer
skills than most work done by men. Tending a nia
chine required less skill than actually spinning or
weaving or acting as forewoman. There was thus a
certain paradox in the impact of the factory on
women: Many new jobs were opened to them, but
the level of skills was lowered. The supervisors of
women were almost invariably men.
Moreover, almost always, the women in the factories were young single women or widows. Upon
marriage or perhaps after the birth of the first child
young women usually found their husbands earned
enough money for them to leave the factory. Or
they found themselves unwanted by the factory
owners, who disliked employing married women
because of the likelihood of pregnancy, the influence of their husbands, and the duties of child rearing. Widows might return to factory work because
they lacked their husbands' former income.
Work on the Land and in the Home In Britain and,
elsewhere by midcentury, industrial factory work'
still accounted for less than half of all employmcn
for women. The largest group of employed women
in France continued to work on the land. In England, they were domestic servants. Throughout
western Europe, domestic cottage industries, such
as lace making, glove making, garment making,
and other kinds of needlework, employed a vast
number of women. In almost all such cases, their
conditions of labor were harsh, whether they
worked in their homes or in sweatshops. It cannot
be overemphasized that all work by women coin- -,
manded low wages and involved low skills. They
had virtually no effective modes of protecting
themselves from exploitation. The charwoman,
common sight across the Continent, symbolize
the plight of working women.
The low wages of female workers in all areas o
employment sometimes led to their becoming prostitutes to supplement their wage income. This situation prevailed across Europe throughout the
century. In 1844, Louise Aston (1814-1871), a Ger
man political radical, portrayed this situation in a
poe:
as s
dy c
The
An(
I kn
Are
So i
For
See
It's
Suc
to I
the
ski]
may
„W
is S
CICL
Mo
gav
hat
ent
the
wo
ria~
wo
we:
uat
or i
the
l
pra
viv
car
ma
Th
wo
col
for
reF
en(
ma
a f,
vis
yo
eni
Chapter 22 / Economic Advance and Social Unrest (1830-1850) 753
poem looking at the experience of a Silesian weaver
as she confronts a factory owner on whom her family depends to purchase the cloth they have woven:
The factory owner has come,
And he says to me: "My darling child,
I know your people
Are living in misery and sorrow;
So if you want to lie with me
For three or four nights,
See this shiny gold coin!
It's yours immediately." l
Such sexual exploitation of women was hardly new
to European society, but the particular pressures of
the transformation of the economy from one of
skilled artisans to that of unskilled factory workers
made many women especially vulnerable. (See
"Women Industrial Workers Explain Their Economic Situation.")
CHANGING EXPECTATIONS IN WORKINGCLASS MARRIAGE
Moving to cities and entering the wage economy
gave women wider opportunities for marriage. Cohabitation before marriage was not uncommon. Parents had less to do with arranging marriages than in
the past. (See "A Young Middle-Class Frenchwoman Writes to Her Father about Marriage.") Marriage now usually meant a woman would leave the
work force to live on her husband's earnings. If all
went well, that arrangement might improve her situation. If the husband became ill or died, however,
or if he deserted his wife, she would have to reenter
the market for unskilled labor at an advanced age.
Despite these changes, many of the traditional
practices associated with the family economy survived into the industrial era. As a young woman
came of age, both family needs and her desire to
marry still directed what she would do with her life.
The most likely early occupation for a young
woman was domestic service. A girl born in the
country normally migrated to a nearby town or city
for such employment, often living initially with a
relative. As in the past, she would try to earn
enough in wages to give her a dowry, so she might
marry and set up her own household. If she became
a factory worker, she would probably live in a supervised dormitory. These dormitories helped attract
young women into their employ by convincing parents their daughters would be safe.
'As quoted in Lia Secci, "German Women Writers and the Revolution of 1848," in John C. Fout, ed., German Women in the
Nineteenth Century: A Social History ( New York: Holmes &
Meier, 1984), p. 162.
As textile production became increasingly automated
in the nineteenth century, textile factories required fewer
skilled workers and more unskilled attendants. To fill
these unskilled positions, factory owners turned increasingly to unmarried women and widows, who worked
for lower wages than men and were less likely to form
labor organizations. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz
The life of young women in the cities was more
precarious than earlier. There were fewer family and
community ties. There were also perhaps more
available young men. These men, who worked for
wages rather than in the older apprenticeship structures, were more mobile, so relationships between
men and women often were more fleeting. In any
case, illegitimate births increased; fewer women
who became pregnant before marriage found the father willing to marry them.
Marriage in the wage industrial economy was
also different in certain respects from marriage in
earlier times. It still involved the starting of a separate household, but the structure of gender relationships within the household was different. Marriage
was less an economic partnership. The husband's
wages might well be able to support the entire family. The wage economy and the industrialization
separating workplace from home made it difficult
for women to combine domestic duties with work.
When married women worked, it was usually in the
nonindustrial sector of the economy. More often
than not, it was the children rather than the wife
who were sent to work. This may help explain the
increase in the number of births within marriages,
as children in the wage economy usually were an
economic asset. Married women worked outside
the home only when family needs, illness, or the
death of a spouse forced them to do so.
In the home, working-class women were by no
means idle. Their domestic duties were an essential
factor in the family wage economy. If work took ∎
place elsewhere, someone had to be directly in
charge of maintaining the home front. Homemaking came to the fore when a life at home had to be
organized separately from the place of work. Wives
were concerned primarily with food and cooking,
but they often also were in charge of the family's finances. The role of the mother expanded when the
children still living at home became wage earners.
She was now providing home support for her entire
wage-earning family. She created the environment
to which the family members returned after work.
The longer period of home life of working children
may also have increased and strengthened familial
bonds of affection between those children and their
hardworking homebound mothers. In all these
respects, the culture of the working-class marriage
and family tended to imitate the family patterns of
the middle and upper classes, whose members had
often accepted the view of separate gender spheres
set forth by Rousseau and popularized in hundreds
'of novels, journals, and newspapers.