As you’ve already seen, the Industrial Revolution transformed human societies particularly in
the West in the 19th century, or throughout the 19th century.
So what we’re going to do in this video is take a look at how that structured gender
norms and how those gender norms structured society in this period as well, or as a result
of industrialization.
So we start with a quick word on the earliest type of industrialization.
So we’ve looked at the Industrial Revolution – or the process of industrialization – and
we noticed that it was not one sort of coherent movement or one large-scale change that dramatically
reshaped the European; American; and Japanese perspectives – or frameworks – automatically.
Instead, there was a progression.
There was a series of changes that took place to reshape, or to fundamentally reshape European
societies and economies.
So we start our story of gender and industrialization in the same place that we started the story
of industrialization, and that was with the precursors to the Industrial Revolution – what’s
often referred to as protoindustrialization, or the putting out system, or cottage industry
– and this was one of the earliest significant changes in economic output and the structure
of economic output that would lead to industrialization.
So in this protoindustrialization, which is often referred to as the Industrious Revolution,
the nature of manufacturing starts to change.
So throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period, manufacturing and craftsmanship was
based more or less on the guild model in which you had an expert craftsman who created a
product from raw material to finished product.
Their work was governed by the rules and power of a guild, which organized and controlled
everything about the production of that craft – from which raw materials could be used
to which processes were involved to quality of the final product to the price of the final
product.
So this was a model based on skilled labor.
There were very few people in a given village or city who could do that craft – in part
because of the length of time and the amount of training that it took, but in part because
of strict guild restrictions.
So what happens with protoindustrialization is that that skilled nature of craft production
starts breaking apart, and it takes place in the textile industry.
So what happens is a growing population leads to demand for more stuff, in particular more
textiles, and even more specifically – more cotton.
And so you have these early entrepreneurs who want to meet that new demand, the demand
being created by a growing population, and what they end up doing is purchasing the raw
material – so they would purchase something like raw cotton, and then they would take
it to the home of a peasant woman who would spin that raw cotton into thread.
They would then pick up that thread, take it to the home of another peasant woman who
could weave the thread into cloth.
Then they would pick up the final product, which was the cloth in this case, and sell
it for profit.
So that entrepreneur bought, or invested in the raw material, and in the relatively low
wages of the spinner and the weaver – and what he’s doing in the process is breaking
up the, or distributing the labor so that it’s not one person who takes the raw cotton
and produces woven material, woven cloth, but is rather paying each individual for their
specific part of the process.
In protoindustrialization this happened primarily, or this labor was done primarily by women,
and it was done because this was a way for women to bring in extra money for their family,
peasant women, to bring in extra money for their family without having to leave their
children or their home entirely.
So these wages, the wages that were paid in protoindustrialization – or in cottage industry
– were low, in part because entrepreneurs wanted to maximize their profits, and in part
because they were paying women who saw this money as extra to some degree or another.
So a lot of the early stages of industrialization were driven by women.
But the output was small; the production was necessarily limited because it was taking
place in peasant households.
You see the emergence of some new forms of technology – things like the spinning jenny
or the power loom, the flying shuttle, which could increase productivity within a peasant
household.
But it still wasn’t meeting demand, there were still bottlenecks – it still wasn’t
keeping up with the demand; so larger-scale transformations took place.
You have the development of things like the steam engine, and the steam engine isn’t
going to fit in a peasant household.
So that transforms the nature of work.
So we’ve already divided up labor, you know, broken the skilled craft into steps with this
Industrious Revolution or protoindustrialization.
So the next step is shifting the work to factories, and factories were places where these entrepreneurs
– now factory owners – could house their machines and bring the workers to the work
rather than bringing the work to the workers.
This new model of factory-based work heavily relied on machines, and really kind of changed
the nature of production – further reducing this idea that it was skilled labor and creating
increasingly unskilled labor.
This is a process known as the deskilling of labor, and in the end it would drive wages
down.
So this new factory model in industrialization did offer some new opportunities for women.
Initially factory owners hired a number of women and children to do the labor, in part
building off of protoindustrialization and the existing model, but in part because women
and children were willing to work for lower wages.
This brought many women – many impoverished women to cities looking for work, looking
for opportunities.
You see this in England in the early 19th century, in the Northern United States, in
the mid-19th century – early to mid-19th century, in Japan in the late 19th century.
Time and time again you see young women moving from farms to factories hoping to earn a living.
And so, this gave them new opportunities, opportunities for independence, opportunities
for self-sufficiency – but that wasn’t universal.
They risked low wages, oftentimes wages far below what was necessary for survival.
They risked sexual harassment, issues adjusting to urban living, homesickness; all of these
were things that continued or would characterize women’s lives as they moved into the cities
looking for factory work.
They did gain some limited economic power and independence.
Prior to industrialization women wouldn’t have had any opportunity for living independently
or purchasing property.
So they did have some opportunities, but their lives and their ability to support themselves
could be unstable.
They worked for low wages and often dangerous conditions and they could be easily fired.
They could be abused and often were abused at the hands of factory owners and managers.
So while it was a profoundly transformative moment in women’s history – in gender
history, it didn’t always make women’s lives better, and specifically it didn’t
always make working-class women’s lives better.
So let’s take a moment to talk about the class dimensions of the effects of industrialization
on women – because oftentimes we tend to think of history – and particularly gender
history or women’s history – as being this universal, that it affected all women
in one particular way, and that just wasn’t the case.
In industrialization there were class-based dynamics.
So just like industrialization benefitted the middle class with the emergence of new
consumable goods and more money and lots of profit and advancement to take advantage of
– that happened for the middle class in general.
Industrialization tended to improve the lives of middle-class women.
There were more consumable goods produced.
There were more consumables purchased – bulk – by the middle class.
The 19th century would see the opening of department stores – like Le Bon Marche;
Macy’s; The Marble Palace – and these became places to see and be seen and to buy
the latest trends.
Advertising came into its own, particularly in magazines devoted to women’s issues,
where new styles, new fashions were promoted and advertised to middle-class women, encouraging
them to engage in consumption – and not just consumption but conspicuous consumption
– and conspicuous consumption is the idea that people are buying stuff, they were buying
items, buying consumer goods in order to show that they could buy those goods – in order
to demonstrate wealth.
So it wasn’t about necessity; it wasn’t about need – it was about a demonstration
of wealth.
Women became – middle-class women became more closely associated with the domestic
sphere and with the home front, not just in terms of childrearing, but in terms of you
know, kind of taking care of home; decorating the home; hosting parties; things that had
been left to noblewomen prior to the modern world, and so they start to engage in these
things.
So you see among middle-class households this division of labor in which men go out into
the world; work; earn money; they produce in this economy.
Women stayed home; looked after the household; looked after children; they did the shopping;
did the cooking; they were the consumers in this household.
So instead of their being a family economy, where everybody works in order to ensure the
survival of the family, you have this division of labor and with it comes this worldview
that historians call ‘the ideology of separate spheres’ and the ideology of separate spheres
is the principle or the belief that men and women are destined for – they’re biologically
destined for different roles – men playing a productive role; women playing the consumer
role.
Middle-class women continued to engage in domestic labor – shopping; cooking; cleaning;
knitting; sewing – but they didn’t do it for wages.
So there was this sense that the productivity of their husbands protected them from the
degradation of wage labor.
This is a period where affectionate marriage is starting to grow among the middle class,
and there’s a sense of individualism – and this was proffered, it was offered – I guess,
as the ideal; this was the way that gender was supposed to work according to the middle
class.
But it wasn’t the reality for everyone.
For working class women, the idea of staying home and not working for wages wasn’t even
a possibility; they didn’t have the option, their labor was necessary, and as the process
of deskilling labor – as the process of relying on machines continued to grow, women’s
labor – the reliance on women’s labor, continued to grow as well because they would
work for lower wages; they often had to work longer hours; they worked those hours in unsafe
and unsanitary conditions.
You see industrial accidents, devastating problems like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire
in 1911.
You see, in Japan under the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th century – young women living
in dormitories where devastating diseases like tuberculosis spread and killed large
percentages of the population.
Alcoholism and prostitution were not uncommon among working-class women.
In Japan, for example, the second-largest employer of women in the late 19th century,
so the first largest employer of women was the textile industry – silk and cotton.
The second-largest employers were brothels.
Marriage for the working class remained primarily an economic union.
They married in the working class for survival, and for a combination of wages.
In Europe, among the working class, the marriage age went up to about 24, it was between 24
and 26 – in the United States it was 21 to 22 – in Japan the average age of marriage
was between 23 and 25, and so you start to see the effects of industrialization on women
and family structures and marriage.
They did, women did many of the same things that they had done before, but the question
was really whether their labor was necessary in terms of wages or the product of biology
and this ideology of separate spheres.
So it’s important to understand that these new gender roles were rooted in class distinctions,
and there was no one universal gender experience of industrialization.
Thank you.