Industrialization and Its Significance

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During the period of 1750 up until about the 1920’s, industrialization changed all of Europe, even while some aspects stayed the same. Industrialization not only changed historically, but it also changed politically, socially and economically as well. The roles of women changed exponentially, as did production techniques, and the growth of the cities in Europe. Before industrialization, Europe was mostly agricultural which meant that they mostly worked off the land to earn and make a living. Once industrialization began, all, if not most, of the physical labor that was once performed manually, became automated and done by machines. From this, industrial production would grow exponentially in several European countries. Particularly England, bringing national economic prosperity, access to new and cheaper products, and rising standards of living and real wages. However, not all of these benefits were immediately visible for all members of the population, and rightfully so. For many, the age of industrialization, at least initially, meant unemployment, overcrowded cities, disease and squalor. This was a time of change and progression, and like all change, it had its positives and negatives.

In the early stages of industrialization, government regulation was slow to catch up to the changes in production and the labor force. Because no laws prevented it, and because factory machinery had reduced the need for physical strength or trained skill, owners could employ children in factories and mines, Women and children could be easily intimidated or threatened by supervisors and could be paid a negligible wage, often one-third of an adult male’s wage. Moreover, they often replaced male heads of household who expected wages that could support a family. Machinery also eliminated jobs by mass-producing products and automating tasks previously done by hand, contributing further to the levels of poverty due to unemployment.

As factories moved to cities, so did the rural population was seeking employment, and overcrowding became an issue for even the best-provisioned cities. Access to clean water, sewage systems, housing, healthy food, and medical care was lacking for many and disease was the foreseeable result. Reform for workers was slow to come, in part because voting, even in England, was restricted to the propertied classes and because the political philosophies of liberalism and capitalism promoted unbridled competition and pursuit of profit. Workers also had little bargaining power since they were easily replaced by the migration of unskilled laborers to the cities. Workers suffered from long hours, as many as fourteen a day, lower wages than they had earned before machinery was introduced, and dangerous working conditions that led to constant workplace accidents. By 1834, England introduced the Poor Laws that provided state-run workhouses for the destitute and in 1832 the Sadler Report provoked demands for reform of child labor conditions and hours. But even with government intervention, it would be many decades before the industrial revolution’s promise to provide progress and prosperity reached all levels of society.

The conditions of which many men, women and children worked at the beginning of Industrialization were hazardous to their overall health and well-being. Long hours and days led to mental anguish, exhaustion, illnesses, and disease. They were crammed into small spaces; air quality was poor and their surroundings were filthy and polluted. This not only affected the workers, but it also affected the surrounding population. As stated in Friedrich Engels’ ‘Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)’, “All putrefying vegetable and animal substances give off gasses decidedly injurious to health, and if these gasses have no free way of escape, they inevitably poison the atmosphere. The filth and stagnant pools of the working-people’s quarters in the great cities have, therefore, the worst effect upon the public health, because they produce precisely those gasses which engender disease; so too, the exhalations from condemned streams”. Engels went on to explain how this type of environment affected not only their physical well-being, but their emotional and mental well-being. “They are exposed to the most exciting changes of mental condition, the most violent vibrations between hope and fear; they are hunted like game, and not permitted to attain peace of mind and quiet enjoyment of life. They are deprived of all enjoyments except that of sexual indulgence and drunkenness, are worked every day to the point of complete exhaustion of their mental and physical energies, and are thus constantly spurred on to the oddest excess in the only two enjoyments at their command. How is it possible, under such conditions, for the lower class to be healthy and long lived?”.

Women in particular faced an uphill battle when it came to entering the workforce. Women in these times had their set roles, such as, tending to children and household chores – the basic domesticated list. But now, doors were opening that were once locked. Opportunities came knocking and change was happening at lightning speed. But this change brought new competition for women as well as men in the workforce; a new change that could potentially switch-up the roles and threaten manhood (at least in this era) as they knew it. Women competed for places in the workforce as well as money. Female factory workers only made one-third as much as men, and women began leading reforms to change this. As women became more involved in the workforce, they became more involved in politics, which then led to women demanding suffrage and the right to vote. This led to the passing of the 19th Amendment. This abrupt, but very necessary change continued to ruffle many men’s feathers. In ‘Condition of the Working Class in England’ (1845), Friedrich Engels really brought to light the man’s way of thinking about a woman and her place in this world, as well as the ‘threat’ this type of disruption would bring to the traditional family dynamic as they knew it. He thought that if a woman were to enter the workforce, the mother’s bond with her children would diminish or become nonexistent, she would additionally have no time to raise the children, therefore leaving the child ‘ruined’ and unable to cope with family life or social settings, leading them to isolate and become recluse.

In addition to the mother and child’s bond being broken, the next relationship to be disrupted by this change would be that of the husband and the wife. Engels states: “In many cases, the family is not wholly dissolved by the employment of the wife, but turned upside-down. The wife supports the family, the husband sits at home, tends the children, sweeps the room and cooks. This case happens very frequently; in Manchester alone, many hundred such men could be cited condemned to domestic occupations”. Engels viewed women in the workplace as degrading in the workplace not only to women, but to men more so because it threatened their traditional way of living.

I believe with this change, and uproar from men/husbands, mothers were given no other choice but to bring their children with them to work; but due to no major laws being put into place until the Sadler Report in 1832 and the Poor Laws in 1834, women and their children were forced into long days of hard labor. The child worker was a central if pitiful figure in both contemporary and classic accounts of the British industrial revolution, but in modern economic history, the children who toiled in early mills, mines and manufactories became invisible. In Jane Humphries’, ‘Childhood and Child Labor in the British Industrial Revolution’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), she states: “In the standard economic history text book, it contains only five references to child employment… as a topic of research, children’s role in industrialization has become passé. Clark Nardelli’s (1990) revisionist interpretation provided an exception that shocked traditional historians. Nardelli argued that since child workers and their families had the option to work and yet chose employment, it must have been that child labor was preferred, and in this economist’s sense was optimal. Although Nardelli’s version has been disputed, it remains a powerful position within mainstream economic history… Disagreements persist about child labor’s extent and setting, its causes and consequences, and the reasons for its retreat…”. Due to this speculation, there was a debate about whether child labor in industry was just a continuation of child labor on the farm, in a workshop or home-based industry before. The debate still exists as to whether the employment of children under age 10 was widespread or not during the industrial revolution. Judging by the conditions of the work environments, certain family dynamics and the low pay and awful treatment, the theory of children being employed and over-worked at such young ages would seem to be true. Managers or bosses, to save a penny, would adopt children from orphanages. They would save money by paying the bare minimum to have them work harder and longer hours in order to meet demands, keeping production costs low and profits high knowing full-well that they were taking advantage of them to line their pockets. Additionally, mothers would bring their children with them to help, and they were also taken advantage of in order to meet these high demands. This was expressed in Elizabeth Barret Browning’s poem ‘The Cry of the Children’ (1843). She describes the children working in the factories: “They are wretched and prefer death to this life”. The children were exhausted and their bodies were frail: “…for oh, say the children, we are weary, and we cannot run or leap. If we cared for any meadows, it was merely to drop down in them and sleep. Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping – we fall upon our faces, trying to go”. These children did not know what life was like outside of these mills, mines and factories, that was their normal. They only knew an assembly line of constant work.

Industrialization changed the lives of many people and the way people lived their lives for a long time. Many people believed that there were several negative aspects, but as with all change, there will be both sides of the coin. You will have people who will resist, people who will be sacrificed, and people who will progress with what is given to them. If children weren’t thrusted into the workforce during this time, then child labor laws wouldn’t exist now. If women weren’t uprooted from their day-to-day lives, then we would still be facing a deeper issue of equality and still be fighting for the right to vote. If industrialization did not happen, technology and the brilliant ideas of great inventors such as James Hargreaves who invented the spinning jenny all the way up to Thomas Edison who invented the light bulb, would not have been spread all over the world. During this time scientists and inventors changed the way humans thought, lived and worked. This time period was a tremendous benefit and a seismic shift in the way we operate even today.

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