Hardships of Early Industrial Life

1. Hardships of Early Industrial Life Chapter 7 Section 3

2. The Industrial Revolution brought great riches to most of the entrepreneurs who helped set in motion. • However, the industrial age brought poverty and harsh living conditions to the millions of workers who crowded into the new factories.

3. The New Industrial City • The Industrial Revolution caused rapid urbanization, or the movement of people to cities. • Almost overnight, small towns around coal or iron mines mushroomed into cities. • The British market town of Manchester increased from 17,000 people in the 1750s to 70,000 in 1801. • Visitors noticed the air pollution, noise of machines, and stench of the polluted river.

4. In Manchester, as elsewhere, a gulf divided between the urban population. • The wealthy and middle-class lived in pleasant neighborhoods, but the poor, working class lived in foul-smelling slums. • They were packed into tiny rooms in tenements, multistory buildings divided into crowded apartments, with no running water and no sewage or sanitation system. • Waste and garbage rotted in the streets. Cholera and other diseases spread rapidly. In time, reformers would push for laws to improve conditions in city slums.

5. The Factory System • In factories, people faced a rigid schedule. Men, women, and children worked in the factories. • Working hours were long. Shifts lasted from 12 to 16 hours. • Workers often suffered accidents from machines that had no safety devices. They might lose a finger, a limb, or even their lives. • Coal dust destroyed the lungs of miners, and textile workers constantly breathed air filled with lint. If workers were sick or injured they lost their jobs.

6. Employers often preferred to hire women workers rather than men. • They thought women could adapt more easily to machines and were easier to manage than men. • More important, they were able to pay women less than men, even for the same work. • Women worked for 12 or more hours a day, and then they returned to crowded slum tenements to feed and clothe their families, clean, and cope with sickness and other problems.

7. Factories and mines also hired many boys and girls. • Because children had helped with farm work, parents accepted the idea of child labor. Their wages were need to keep their families from starving. • Employers often hired orphans. Often they were treated poorly. A few enlightened factory owners did provide basic education and a decent life for child workers. More often, children, like their parents, were slaves to the machines.

8. In the 1830s and 1840s, British lawmakers looked into abuses or working children in factories and mines. • Government commissions heard about children as young as five years old working in factories. • Some died, others were stunted in growth or had twisted limbs. Most were uneducated. • Slowly, Parliament passed laws to regulate child labor in mines and factories.

9. The Working Class • In rural villages, farm families had strong ties to a community in which they had lived for several generations. • In the new industrial cities, many workers felt lost and bewildered. • In time factory and mine workers developed their own sense of community.

10. Protests: • As the Industrial Revolution began, weavers and other skilled artisans resisted the new “labor-saving” machines that were costing them their jobs. • Some smashed machines and burned factories. These protesters in England were called Luddites, after a mythical figure, Ned Ludd, who supposedly destroyed machines in the 1780s. • Protests met harsh repression. Workers were forbidden to organize in groups to bargain for better pay and working conditions. Strikes were outlawed.

11. Spread of Methodism: • Many working-class people found comfort in a new religious movement. • In the mid-1700s, John Wesley had founded the Methodist Church. Methodist meetings featured hymns and sermons promising forgiveness of sin and a better life to come. • Methodist preachers took this message of salvation into the slums. • Methodists helped channel workers’ anger away from revolution toward social reform.

12. The New Middle Class • Those who benefited most from the Industrial Revolution were the entrepreneurs who set it in motion. • Some were merchants who invested their growing profits in factories. Others were investors or skilled artisans who developed new technologies. • Middle-class families lived in solid, well-furnished homes. They dressed and ate well. Middle-class men gained influence in Parliament, where they opposed any effort to improve conditions for workers.

13. Middle-class women were encouraged to become “ladies”, which involved activities like drawing, embroidery, or playing the piano. • Ladies did not work outside the home, and a maid-servant was hired to do household chores. • Daughters were educated to provide a happy, well-furnished home for their future husbands. Sons gained an education that allowed them to become businessmen. • The middle-class often had little sympathy for the poor, feeling they were responsible for their own misery because they were lazy or ignorant.

14. Benefits and Problems • Since the 1800s people have debated whether the Industrial Revolution was a blessing or a curse. • In time, reformers pressed for laws to improve working conditions. • Workers’ organizations called labor unions won the right to bargain with employers for better wages, hours, and working conditions. • Eventually working-class men gained the right to vote which gave them political power.

15. Despite the social problems created by the Industrial Revolution – low pay, unemployment, dismal living conditions – the industrial age did bring material benefits. • Wages rose so that workers had enough left after paying rent and buying food to buy a newspaper, visit a music hall, or take a trip on a train. • Industrialization has spread around the world today. Often, it begins with great suffering. In the end, however, it produces more material benefits for more people.