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Station 6. Exhibit 1-9. Station 6/Exhibit 1 : Northern Society in the 1800’s.
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Station 6 Exhibit 1-9
Station 6/Exhibit 1: Northern Society in the 1800’s • New levels of wealth were attained by the leaders of the Industrial Revolution. A new poor working class emerged but so did a middle class that no longer had to produce large families to work the land. Urban centers like Boston, Philadelphia, New York, St. Louis and Chicago developed and became home to 22 million Americans. • Modernization drove social reform including the creation of public education systems in the North and associated high literacy rates. Suffrage (voting rights) and temperance (anti-alcohol) movements formed. Abolitionism (anti-slavery) became tied with humanitarian reforms driven by Christian crusades.
In the late 1700's and early 1800's, power-driven machines replaced hand labor for the making of most manufactured items. Factories began to spring up everywhere, first in England and then in the United States. The owners of these factories found a new source of labor to run their machines — children. Operating the power-driven machines did not require adult strength, and children could be hired more cheaply than adults. By the mid-1800's, child labor was a major problem. Children had always worked, especially in farming. But factory work was hard. A child with a factory job might work 12 to 18 hours a day, six days a week, to earn $1. Many children began working before the age of 7, tending machines in spinning mills or hauling heavy loads. The factories were often damp, dark, and dirty. Some children worked underground, in coal mines. The working children had no time to play or go to school, and little time to rest. They often became ill. By 1810, about 2,000,000 school-aged children were working 50- to 70-hour weeks. Most of them came from poor families. When parents could not support their children, they sometimes turned them over to a mill or factory owner. One glass factory in Massachusetts was fenced with barbed wire "to keep the young imps inside." The "young imps" were boys under 12 who carried loads of hot glass all night for a wage of 40 cents to $1.10 per night. Church and labor groups, teachers, and many other people were outraged by such cruelty. They began to press for reforms. The English writer Charles Dickens helped publicize the evils of child labor with his novel Oliver Twist. The novel showed people how poorly children were being treated and the hardships they faced in factories.
Station 6/Exhibit 4: Journal of Sadie Fraum, Sweatshop Girl, c/o digitalhistory.org At seven o'clock we all sit down to our machines and the boss brings to each one the pile of work that he or she is to finish during the day, what they call in English their 'stint.' This pile is put down beside the machine and as soon as a skirt is done it is laid on the other side of the machine. Sometimes the work is not all finished by six o'clock and then the one who is behind must work overtime. Sometimes one is finished ahead of time and gets away at four or five o'clock, but generally we are not done till six o'clock. All the time we are working the boss walks about examining the finished garments and making us do them over again if they are not just right. So we have to be careful as well as swift. But I am getting so good at the work that within a year I will be making $7 a week, and then I can save at least $3.50 a week. I have over $200 saved now. For the last two winters I have been going to night school. I have learned reading, writing and arithmetic. I can read quite well in English now and I look at the newspapers every day. I read English books, too, sometimes."
