Changing+Society+During+the+Industrial+Revolution

=** Changing Society During the Industrial Revolution **=

**__Industry and Society__**
Society underwent a dramatic transformation as millions of people moved from the countryside to industrial centers. A bunch of people worked in rural areas before industrialization. Many societies also made use of slave labor, sometimes on a large scale. Industrialization encouraged the disappearance of slavery partly because of economics. Industrialists wanted laborers to spend their money on products that kept their factory busy.(BP)

As industrialization continued to move forward, new social classes emerged. Captains of industry and businesspeople became tremendously wealthy and powerful. Besides the wealthy and powerful were also less powerful middle class, consisting of small business owners, factory managers, engineers, accountants, skilled empoyees of large corporations, and professionals such as teachers, physicians, and attorneys. Due to the generated wealth of industrial productions, the middle class received a hefty portion for their work. The middle class was the pricipal beneficiary of industrialization due to the amounts of wealth that flowed to them. After the middle class there was the lower class, which consisted laborers who did most of the hard labor and factory work(JP)

Family was the most basic unit of social organization and it also underwent fundamental change during the industrial age. Industrializations moved economic production out of the family, which introduced a sharp distinction between work and family. Fathers, mothers, and the children usually all worked in some way and pooled their money together to support their family. Families working in groups became less common over time and family members led increasingly separate lives as they left their homes each day and worked an average of 14 hours in factories.(BP)

Men gained increased responsibilities, as work dominated public life. Their wages usually constitued the bulk of ther families' income and Upper-class and middle-class men especially enjoyed increased prestige at home. Professional men dedicated themselves to self-improvement even in their leisure hours. They ready lots of books, attended lectures, and imposed work discipline on the laborers under their supervision. Threats of fines, beatings, and dismissal convinced workers into accepting factory rules against absenteeism, tardiness, and swearing. They supported churches and sunday schools and they wanted their workers to adopt middle-class norms of respectability and morality. Workers frequently observed "Holy Monday" and stayed home to lengthen their weekly break from work on Sundays. Their leisure time included going to sporting events, like European soccer and American baseball. They also gambled, socialized at bars and pubs, and staged fights between their dogs of chickens. An effort was made to control workers' public behavior, but it had limited success.(BP)

Before industrialization, women worked long hours maintaining crops, raising children, and other jobs in or near the house. When industry moved productions from the home to the factory, married women were unable to work unless they left someone else in charge of looking after their homes and children. By the late 19th century, middle-class women were encouraged to devote themselves to traditional pursuits such as the raising of children, the management of the home, and the preservation of traditional family values. In //"Woman in Her Social and Domestic Character"// (1833), the writer, Mrs. John Sandford, referred to herself by her husband's name rather that her own. In her book, she described the ideal British woman who took much pride in her ability to make their home a happy place for her husband and children. One of every three women became domestic servants in some point in her life. However due to the high demand for servants ensured that women could switch jobs readily in search of more attractive positions. While women worked as servants, their employers would replace their parents as their guardians, but only for a temporary amount of time or if the women switch jobs. Young women servants often sent part of their earnings home to their family, but they also saved wages for personal goals.(JP)

Childhood experience was profoundly influenced by industrialization. Industrial work took children away from their homes and often put them to work in factories for long hours with hardly any breaks. However many families needed their childrens' wages to survive, so they continued sending their children to the very rough conditions of factories and mines. Inside thesfactories and mines, the children were sent to work from sunrise to sundown and beat them severely just to wake them up. By the 1840s, the British Parliament began to pass laws regulating child labor and ultimately restricted or removed children from the industrial workforce. In the long term, industrial society was responsible for removing children from the labor process altogether, even at home. After the children were taken out of the work force, governments established education requirements to train and educate them into highly skilled workers in the future.(JP)

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Among the most vocal and influential critics of early industrial society were the socialists, who worked to aleviate the social and economic problems generated by capitalism and industrialization. Early socialists sought to expand the Enlightenment understanding of equality: they understood equality to have an economic as well as a political, legal, and social dimension, and they looked to the future establishment of a just and equitable society.(SH)=====

The term //socialism// first appeared around 1830, when it referred to the thought of social critics like Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Robert Owen (1771-1858). Often called utopian socialists, Fourier, Owen, and their followers worked to establish ideal communities that would point the way to an equitable society. Fourier spent most of his life as a salesman, but he loathed the competition of the market system and called for social transformations that would better serve the needs of humankind. Owen, a successful businessman, transformed a squalid Scottish cotton mill town called New Lanark into a model industrial community. At New Lanark, Owen raised wages, reduced the workday from seventeen to ten hours, built spacious housing, and opened a store that sold goods at fair prices. Out of two thousand residents of the community, five hundred were young children from the poorhouses of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and Owen devoted special attention to their education. Owen's indictment of competitive capitalism, his stress on cooperative control of industry, and his advocacy of improved educational standards for children left a lasting imprint on the socialist tradition. (SH)

Despite the enthusiasm of the founders, most of the communities soon encountered economic difficulties and political problems that forced them to fold. By mid 19th century, most socialists looked no to Utopian communities but to large-scale organization of working people as the best means to bring about a just and equitable society. (SH)

[[image:apworldhistorywiki/marx.jpg width="185" height="226" align="right" caption="Karl Marx"]]
Most prominent of the 19th century socialists were the German Theorists Karl Marx (1818-183) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). They scorned the Utopian socialists as unrealistic dabblers whose ideal communities had no hope of resolving the problems of the early industrial era. They also believed that social problems of the nineteenth century were inevitable results of a capitalist economy. They held that capitalism divided people into two main classes, each with its own economic interests and social status: the capitalists, who owned industrial machinery and factories, and the proletariat, consisting of wage workers who had only their labor to sell. Intense competition between capitalists trying to realize a profit resulted in ruthless exploitation of the working class. To make things worse, according to Marx and Engels, the state and its coercive institutions, such as police forces and courts of law, were agencies of the capitalist ruling class. Even music, art literature, and religion served the purposes of capitalists, according to Marx and Engels, since they amused the working classes and diverted attention from their misery. Marx once referred to religion as "the opiate of the masses" because it encouraged workers to focus on a hypothetical realm of existence beyond this world rather than trying to improve their lot in society. (SH)

Marx developed these views fully in a long, theoretical work called Capital. Together with Engels, Marx also wrote a short, spirited tract entitled Manifesto of the Communist party (1848). In the Manifesto Marx and Engels aligned themselves with the communists, who worked toward the abolitions of private property and the institution of a radically egalitarian society. The manifesto asserted that all human history has been the history of struggle between social classes. Marx and Engels believed that a socialist revolution would result in a "dictatorship of the proletariat," which would abolish private property and destroy the capitalist order. Thus socialism would lead to a fir, just, and egalitarian society infinitely more humane that the capitalist order. Ideas dominated European and international socialism throughout nineteenth century. (SH)

Political parties, trade unions, newspapers, and educational associations all worked to advance the socialist cause, but the socialists disagreed strongly on the best means to reform society. While revolutionary socialists like Marx, Engels, and other communists wanted workers to seize control of the state and distribute wealth equally, evolutionary socialists doubted that a revolutionary could succeed, hoped in representitive governments and called for the election of legislatiors, who supported socialist reforms. (MM)

Socialists didnt take control of any government until the Russian revolution, but their critiques, along with liberals ad conservatives, had governement authorities adress some of the problems of early industrialization. They prohibited underground employment for women and boys and girls that are under the age of ten. They also made it so that children under nine years old couldn't work more than nine hours a day. In 1832, a series of parlimentary acts expanded the franchise for men by reducing property qualifications. The acts also removed obvious inequalites in representation between rural areas and cities of industrial society. While Otto von Bismark was leading in the 1880s, Germany introduced medical insurance, retirement pensions for people in the industrial society, and unemployment compensation. (MM)

The main point of trade unions wasn't to destroy capitalism, as was the communist view, but to simply make employers more aware and proactive to their employees needs and interests. Trade unions wanted a just and equitable society. They wanted higher wages and better working conditions. Though sometimes the trade unions caused violence when they went on strike and the businesses hired replacement workers to keep the business alive, overall the trade unions were very productive, and improved the lives of working people while reducing the chance that a disgruntled proletariat would mount a revoultionto overthrow industrial capitalist society. (MM)

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