6.4 Social Effects of Industrialization

Factories pulled people from the countryside, and the population of Europe was rising fast. The 1851 census showed that more than half the people of England and Wales lived in towns, the first large country where that was true. London passed six million people by 1900, and northern factory towns like Manchester grew several times over in the first half of the century.

Housing was thrown up quickly and cheaply. Families crowded into back-to-back houses and cellars with no running water, shared outdoor privies, and streets with open drains. Water supplies were often polluted by sewage, so cholera spread in waves (Britain was hit in 1832, 1848–1849 and 1854). In 1854 the London doctor John Snow traced one outbreak to a single contaminated water pump, early evidence that the disease spread through water, not bad air. Friedrich Engels described Manchester's slums in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).

Meanwhile, the countryside lost young workers and village communities weakened. Where industry was weak, as in much of eastern and southern Europe, big landowners kept their wealth and power well into the 1900s.

Old society was divided mainly by birth: nobles, clergy, commoners. Industrial society was divided more by wealth and the kind of work people did.

Class consciousness, the sense of belonging to a class with shared interests, grew as workers lived and worked together in large numbers, and it was reinforced by clubs and associations: charities, political clubs and social societies for the middle class; mutual aid (friendly) societies and trade unions for workers. Marx built his theory on this idea (6.7).

In the putting-out system the whole family worked together at home. The factory split home from work. Middle-class families developed the ideal of separate spheres, sometimes called the cult of domesticity: men belonged in the public world of business and politics, while women ran the home, raised children and set the family's moral tone. A respectable middle-class wife was not supposed to earn wages.

Working-class reality was different. Women worked in textile mills, as domestic servants (the largest single job for women in Britain) and in sweated trades like sewing at home for low piece rates. Over the century, laws pushed children and then married women out of many factory jobs, and the ideal of a male breadwinner earning a family wage spread to skilled workers. Childhood itself changed as schooling slowly replaced child labor. Marriage changed too: money still mattered, but the middle-class ideal of companionate marriage, based on affection and partnership, spread to working-class families. By late in the century, many couples used birth control to have fewer children, and leisure centered more on the family, in new parks, museums, theaters, sports grounds and seaside resorts.

Early factory workers often worked 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week, with children employed because they were cheap and small enough to crawl under machines. A parliamentary inquiry led by Michael Sadler in 1832 publicized these conditions. Britain's Factory Act of 1833 banned children under 9 from textile mills, limited children aged 9 to 13 to 9 hours a day, required some schooling, and, most importantly, created government inspectors to enforce it. The Mines Act (1842) banned women and girls, and boys under 10, from working underground, and the Ten Hours Act (1847) limited the workday for women and teenagers in textile mills.

Historians have long argued about the standard of living during early industrialization. Optimists point to cheaper goods, more jobs and, after about 1850, rising real wages. Pessimists point to overcrowding, disease, the loss of skilled crafts and lower life expectancy in industrial towns. A fair summary: conditions were often harsh before 1850 and improved noticeably after it. By 1900, higher wages, cheaper food, better sanitation and shorter hours meant many workers ate better and lived longer than their grandparents, and they had some time for leisure.