Factories, cities, and families during the Industrial Revolution, 1780–1850

Factories, Cities, and Families in the Industrial Age. The Industrial Revolution (1780-1850)

America may have become the industrial powerhouse of the world, but the Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain. Britain was small in size, but the presence of highly concentrated labor and capital, combined with a culture of commerce made England fertile ground to spur the economic transformation of the Western World. Now, goods were generated through mechanical processes, rather than by the work of skilled tradesmen who made handicrafts. Instead of self-sustaining farms, a new form of factory-driven commerce ruled. Smelted iron and coal, along with the new railroad system provided the materials and transportation to fuel and propel the Industrial Revolution, metaphorically and literally. The once relatively small city of Manchester became utterly transformed by the industrial process -- now the entire town was governed by the needs of industry.

Urbanization transformed social life in general. It made modern life both more and less democratic. On one hand, it created new class mobility, as capitalists became richer, as did Britain itself in relation to the rest of the world. But industrialism came at a price to the common populace. As cities grew increasingly concentrated, factories belched smog, sanitation was abysmal, and working conditions were unregulated. Wages for laborers were low, hours were long, and old and injured workers were discarded without thought. Urbanization facilitated the spread of new diseases, the creation of medicine as a scientific profession, and the institution of a hospital system to house -- and sometimes heal -- the sick.

The creation of a public and a private space also transformed relationships between men and women in the middle class. The ideal middle class woman stayed at home, while the male entered the public sphere of work. However, working class men and women both worked outside the home -- before both would toil upon the family farm, in what was now designated as the domestic sphere. The traditional family structure was destroyed, as result of labor mobility and the population shift to the cities. Working-class women were affected in different, and in some ways, worse ways than men because of industrialization than their male counterparts -- prostitution was a common, desperate resort of many women struggling to eke out an existence in the cities.