New Ideologies and Social Change: Transformations

Two children pose in a factory in a sepia-toned photograph — Child workers in a glassworks factory in the USA.

Industrialization was intense, so radical that it could not help but change the way people were organized into society.

Social Classes

The Proletariat

The first and most obvious effect of industrialization on society was the growth of a new economic class, the factory workers, or proletariat. This group initially benefited the least in society and suffered hard treatment and exploitation.

Entire families had to work to make ends meet. Mothers worked together in factories, men worked in others, and children worked long hours in coal mines and factories as well.

Social Elites

The Industrial Revolution altered the structure of social elites. Previously, the highest status in European society was given to aristocrats who owned and inherited land. With the move to factory work, those who invested in industry were more important than those who owned land to be farmed. The middle class, or bourgeoisie, had expendable income to invest in capitalistic ventures.

As industrial production increased, so did the income of the middle class, while at the same time, industrial production made goods cheaper. They benefited the most from these changes and adopted a lifestyle formerly open only to aristocrats, enjoying nice homes, theater, and other entertainments. Industrial production had provided the way for a new group to rise to the status of elites.

Changing Family Structures

The industrial revolution also changed the structure of families, making them smaller and independent from larger, extended agricultural families. In an agricultural society, large families make more sense because children do work and add to the family economy. Large extended families would come together to complete tasks that required many people. They were economically dependent on each other. In industrial societies, where people had salaries and wages, each set of parents could be economically independent from cousins, aunts, and uncles. This nuclear family became the basic model of family life in industrial societies.

A family of four smiles while posing for a photograph — Industrial production led to the rise of the modern nuclear family, comprised of a single set of parents and their children.
This was a change from the larger, extended family model of agricultural economies.

Industrial families also had fewer children. As opposed to agricultural societies, children were an added expense to industrial families, especially middle-class families, where children went to school for years and added nothing to the family economy. As a result, the fertility rate dropped. The way of life in industrial societies made families smaller, and they had fewer children. Ironically, the population of industrial nations went up as food became more plentiful and the Second Industrial Revolution brought about awareness of sanitation and health. There was a drastic decrease in infant mortality rates.

The Roles of Women

Rows of women work in a factory The lives of women in middle class families were much different from those of women in working class families. Lower class women did factory work, often in terrible conditions, as did their children. They were segregated in the workplace and earned less money than men who did the same work.

In the rising middle class, things were more complicated. The lives of women in bourgeois families benefited from the flood of material goods and manufactured items. But their activities were largely confined to the home. An idea called the cult of domesticity emerged that held that women should be in charge of the affairs of the household. This 'Cult of Domesticity' created a rigid separate spheres ideology: the public sphere of work and politics was for men, while the private sphere of the home was the moral domain of women. They managed the home economy, raised the children, and served as moral examples for them in the home. For well-to-do husbands, having their wives not in the workplace signaled to others that they made sufficient income that allowed their wives to stay home. Thus, the material well-being of middle class women improved far beyond that of working class women, but positions in business and industry outside the home were off limits to them.

Environmental Impact of Industrialization

The use of fossil fuels and industrial production allowed humans to dramatically affect the environment and their living conditions.

There were no regulations on industrial waste in the 19^th century. Rivers were filled with waste sludge from factories and coal production. In some places in England, the landscape was literally blackened by coal dust bellowing from factory chimneys.

An illustration of smoke stacks spewing out dark smoke and ash with a hazy sky

The Urban Poor

Rapid urbanization led to poor living conditions in cities. The population quickly outgrew public services such as water and sewage. In London, thousands of workers lived in congested areas with no sewage or clean water; the city was nicknamed the “Big Stink.” Human waste was simply dumped out of windows into the dirt streets below. Between 1854 and 1860, a major outbreak of cholera took the lives of over 60,000 people in England and millions around the world. To meet the demands for rapid migrations to cities, tenement buildings for workers were hastily built, often with entire families crammed together in single rooms surrounded by filth. The spread of diseases like cholera and typhoid eventually forced governments to realize that the health of the poor affected the wealthy, leading to the first major Public Health Acts and urban planning regulations.

An illustration of the many lives being lived in a tenement building — Drawing of a cross section of a tenement building in New York City.

Most industrial cities were plagued by increases in crime, mostly theft and pickpocketing. It was not until the reform movements of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries that the most extreme conditions of industrial cities began to decrease.

Reflection: New Ideologies and Social Change

The point of this lesson was to teach the responses to industrialization, the new ideologies that emerged as a result of it, and how society as a whole was transformed. You should be able to describe these changes as well as the environmental consequences of industrial production.

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