648-d

Life in an Industrializing and Urbanizing Society

As industrialization changed patterns of work, it also transformed the social class structure and the way people thought about class. Factory owners and industrial capitalists joined merchants and professionals in a larger and wealthier middle class, or bourgeoisie, whose interests often clashed with those of the people who worked for them — the working class, or proletariat. Individuals experienced a growing sense of class-consciousness, the awareness of belonging to a distinct social and economic class. Working-class solidarity was strengthened through trade unions and collective actions such as strikes, while class identity among middle-class people was enhanced by membership in philanthropic, religious, and social associations.

As industrialization expanded across Europe and agricultural improvements meant fewer people were needed to raise crops, many people left their villages to find work in ever-growing cities. Rural areas often stagnated: tenant farmers and eastern European serfs eked out a precarious living, and debt and famine remained a common threat. Living conditions were often squalid for working people in overcrowded cities, but advances in public health, improved sanitation, better medical knowledge, and urban planning brought some relief. The early industrial workforce included large numbers of women and children, but gradually humanitarian concerns about the effects of long workdays and dangerous working conditions led to the passage of laws prohibiting child labor and limiting the workday. Married women found it difficult to combine factory work with care for children, and a new gendered division of labor developed among working-class families, with men and unmarried women in factories and married women working at home, in a system of poorly paid sweated labor.

Among middle-class families, women were encouraged to leave the labor force by a developing “cult of domesticity” that proclaimed women’s sphere was the home and family, while men’s was the public world of work and politics. This principle was reinforced by laws that placed ownership of all property and funds in the hands of the husband. The heart of the home was supposed to be a companionate marriage based on love rather than on family or economic interests, an ideal that spread from the middle classes both up and down the social scale. Women were expected to spend more time on child rearing and caring for their homes, which, for those who could afford them, were increasingly filled with consumer goods transported long distances in steamships, railroad cars, and automobiles and purchased in department stores. People engaged in some of the new leisure activities offered by cities in family groups, but other leisure activities were segregated by class and gender, including taverns and sports arenas for working-class people, and operas and theaters for wealthier folk. (Pages 665–672, 718–742)