A Concise History of the World (Cambridge Concise Histories)

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  Ideas about the power of class distinctions were also held by those who regarded Marx and socialism as dangerous and misguided. In industrializing countries, successful businessmen and their wives—and those who hoped to become these—created standards of dress, household furnishings, cuisine, decorum, and behavior that marked their middle-class status. Ironically but unsurprisingly, many of these were derived from earlier aristocratic conventions of behavior, as now middle-class people were expected to behave like ladies and gentlemen, and to employ at least one servant girl if they could afford it. The middle class was extremely diverse, ranging from wealthy industrialists to the owners of tiny shops, but shared a code of behavior that for men involved hard work and discipline and for women ladylike gentility. Respectability meant more elaborate meals of several courses that were different depending on the time of day, often using industrially made products. In Japan, for example, factory-made miso, wheat noodles, and white rice allowed middle-class women to spend more time on other aspects of the meal, including elaborate presentation. In Europe and among European-background people elsewhere, women followed recipes in cookbooks or women's magazines to make sweet cakes and puddings using mass-produced white flour, sugar from sugar beets, and canned condensed milk. Canning was invented in the early nineteenth century to provide food for armies and navies, and men simply opened the cans with their knives and bayonets. Increasing safety and reliability in industrial canning processes and the invention of the can opener in 1870 led urban households to begin using canned foods, dramatically increasing the range of foodstuffs available.

  In the later nineteenth century, opinion-leaders, including some women, emphasized the propriety of a distinction between the “private” world of home and family and the “public” world of work and politics for middle-class families, what became known as a doctrine of “separate spheres.” Married women were encouraged to avoid work outside the household and make their homes a “haven in the heartless world” of industrialism and business. Europeans and Americans often criticized the societies they were colonizing for requiring women to be secluded in the home, but at the same time they created a stronger ideal of domesticity for women in their own societies. The Meiji reformers of Japan similarly stressed the importance of women's domesticity; “good wife, wise mother” (ryosai kenbo) became a standard government slogan defining women's proper roles.

  Middle-class ideals emphasized the mother–child bond, and also stressed the importance of children in general, in what some historians have dubbed the “discovery of childhood.” At the same time, however, working-class children were hired in factories and mines at very young ages, and rural children worked as soon as they were able. Concerns about the effects of factory work on children's health, the opening of free public schools, and the enforcement of mandatory schooling laws began to reduce child labor in the factories of some industrialized countries in the early twentieth century, but children continued to work in home-based production and on the plantations and farms that produced the raw materials for industry. Throughout the world, children continued to work in rural and urban family enterprises, just as they had for millennia, for their labor was vital for family survival, and working alongside parents, relatives, or older siblings was how they learned necessary skills.

  5.2 Breaker boys, whose job was to break the coal into uniform pieces and pick out impurities, work in the Kohinore Coal Mine, Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, 1891; most worked ten hours a day, six days a week. Technological improvements, the enforcement of compulsory education laws, and union actions led to a decline in child labor in European and American mines by 1920.

  Women also continued to make up a significant share of the workforce in many industries despite the ideology of separate spheres. In Japan, for example, though women were urged to stay home as “good wives, wise mothers,” their lower wages made them attractive to factory owners; in 1909, 62 percent of the factory labor force was female, working primarily in silk production. In the United States, more than a million women worked in factories in 1900, with similar large numbers elsewhere. Most of these were unmarried women, for the separation of workplace from home made it difficult for women with infants or small children to combine factory work with their responsibilities of feeding, clothing, and caring for the family. They often continued to engage in paid labor at home, however, sewing clothing, making hats, or doing other types of piecework for very low wages, what is often termed “sweated” labor, or they took in boarders. For married working-class women home was a workplace, not a haven.

  Supervisory positions in factories everywhere were reserved for older men, who were sometimes expected to oversee the morals and leisure-time activities of their workers as fathers had been expected to earlier. Middle-class officials worried about promiscuity among unrelated young people who worked together, and this, combined with a sense that mines in particular were dangerous for women's health, led to laws prohibiting underground work in mines for women, and later to restrictions on the hours of work by women in factories. In some heavy industries, such as steel and machine production, almost all of the workers were male; work was thus segmented by gender both within factories and across industries. In some areas segmentation by race or national origin was added to that of gender and marital status; by the 1880s, in the tobacco industry of North Carolina, for example, black men handled the bales of tobacco, black women stemmed tobacco leaves, white women operated cigarette-making machines, and white men repaired machinery and supervised the entire operation. In the gold and diamond mines of South Africa, where after the 1880s heavy machinery and a huge labor force were needed to extract deep deposits, white men held all skilled positions and lived with their families in subsidized housing, while African men did all actual mining and lived in police-guarded dormitories. Labor force segmentation limited the range of jobs available, and helped keep wages low. Prostitution increased as cities grew and women's wages remained low, and sexually transmitted diseases, especially syphilis and gonorrhea, spread widely.

  Industrialization involved de-skilling, as work that had traditionally been done by high-status skilled artisans was subdivided and made more monotonous with the addition of machinery, and was redefined as “unskilled,” with a dramatic drop in status and pay. In some cases there really was less skill involved, but the definition of “skill” is often gendered and racialized. For example, women had been excluded from certain crafts, such as glass-cutting, because they were judged clumsy or “unskilled,” yet those same women made lace, a task that required an even higher level of dexterity and concentration than glass-cutting. Thus in a circular process, jobs at which women came to predominate were viewed as less skilled and lower status, and they paid less, which meant that men avoided them if they could, thus further lowering their status and pay. This happened in weaving and shoemaking, and also in work outside of factories. Secretarial work changed from a male profession to a female job in the late nineteenth century with the introduction of the typewriter, as did teaching when the governments implementing mandatory schooling recognized that female teachers would work for far less than male. Schoolteaching came to be seen primarily as an occupation for young women; though male schoolteachers could marry, female schoolteachers who married were fired, a practice that continued until the mid twentieth century in many areas. Defenders of this practice argued that a woman's teaching continued, of course, after marriage, with her most precious pupils—her own children. They provided books of instruction for mothers based on contemporary educational theories in what some historians have termed the “professionalization of motherhood.”

  The second industrial revolution created technologies of communication, transportation, and computation, including the typewriter, telephone, telegraph, dictation machine, automobile, airplane, and adding machine, that allowed the development of a new sector of the economy in cities and larger towns in the early twentieth century, often termed “postindustrial.” In the postindustrial sector, service, sal
es, and information transfer played a more important role than production, with the store or office rather than the factory the primary place of work. Employees were expected to maintain certain standards of dress and decorum; their jobs were “white-collar,” though often the only way those collars (and the white cuffs that went with them) could be kept clean was by making them detachable and washing them after every wear. A white-collar job became a mark of middle-class status, although many paid far less than did blue-collar jobs in factories or as skilled tradesmen. Postindustrial workplaces also had their own gender expectations: Male managers and salesmen were celebrated for both competition and teamwork, and women were hired for their appearance and pleasing demeanor as well as their abilities.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, unions and social reformers had succeeded in shortening the work day and work week in many places, and industrial cities became places of leisure as well as labor. Downtown department stores, the first of which was Bon Marché in Paris, offered a staggering variety of consumer goods with fixed, marked prices, and free returns and exchanges, completely new practices in retail trade. To entice customers, department stores spent millions on illustrated newspaper advertising showing goods that were stylish and chic, innovations such as electric lighting and escalators, and elegant fixtures and decorations. They hired female salesclerks to attract middle-class women to the center city and because their wages were lower than those of their male counterparts. From Buenos Aires to Tokyo, shopping became a pastime as well as a necessity. Middle-class urban men and women also attended concerts, theatre and operas, and visited cafés, tea-shops, museums, and in many cities open-air beer gardens, where they drank lager beer made in industrial breweries established by German migrants. Working-class men (and some women) spent time in pubs and taverns, watched spectator sports such as soccer and racing, and went to music halls and vaudeville theatres. Working-class families rarely had much kitchen space, so purchased prepared food from shops and street vendors. In Europe and among European migrants this was primarily white bread, augmented by warm takeout foods such as the frankfurter (served on bread), meat pies, and in the British Isles fish and chips, served with mushy canned peas. By the 1920s, there were 30,000 fish and chip shops in Britain, which used half the fish caught in British waters.

  Many middle- and working-class people also attended church, although in Protestant or largely Protestant countries these became increasingly divided by social class and in the United States by race as well. The nineteenth century is often described as a time of growing secularism, when religion became less important in people's lives in Christian areas. This is true for some individuals, especially among educated elites, but for many people religion became more important, something to be expressed through daily individual actions and not simply communal worship. The charismatic English religious reformer John Wesley (1703–91), for example, advocated personal regeneration and sanctification through study, prayer and Bible-reading. His followers, known as Methodists, became the largest Protestant denomination in the English-speaking world, and provided strong support for missionaries active everywhere, who built churches and schools and sought converts. Some union leaders opposed the Methodists and other evangelical Protestants for emphasizing holiness and personal morality instead of social change, which they saw as placating and patronizing workers, but many Methodists also came to support humanitarian social causes, including the abolition of slavery, temperance, prison reform, and public education.

  Movements for social change

  Problems created by the growth of industry combined with liberal and socialist ideologies advocating greater political and social equality to inspire movements for social change. In crowded industrial cities, workers lived in narrow houses built wall to wall as close to factories as possible, separated by streets and lanes with open sewers and drains. In many Asian cities, human and animal excrement was used as fertilizer on fields and so taken out of the city quickly through an organized system of collectors, but in Europe human excrement was never used in this way, so piled up in communal outhouses until it overflowed and joined the rest of the garbage and animal dung in the streets. Medical reformers increasingly viewed this filth as a source of disease, and advocated the construction of underground systems for sewage and clean water, thus returning to ideas that had been practiced millennia earlier in the ancient Indian city of Mohenjo-Daro and classical Rome. Public health boards were established in the late nineteenth century, and built sanitary systems in many of the cities of Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Death rates declined dramatically, as outbreaks of typhus, typhoid, cholera, dysentery, and other diseases decreased. In Paris, shoddy slum housing was torn down and new wider streets were laid out, with parks, open spaces, sewers, and fresh water pipes. Paris became the model for other cities, including Mexico City. The destruction of housing meant workers had to live further away from factories, but mass public transportation made this easier: first horse-drawn streetcars that moved on steel tracks, and after the 1890s, electric streetcars, powered by coal-fired power stations. Power stations only increased the amount of coal smoke in the air, and cities were often blackened by smog, but otherwise they slowly became healthier places to live.

  The conditions of work under early industrialism were horrendous, with twelve-hour days and dangerous machinery and chemicals. Such conditions led workers beginning in the 1820s to form labor organizations that sought shorter hours, better wages, and safer working conditions. Initially governments outlawed unions and strikes, but workers organized anyway and engaged in actions and collective bargaining. Unions and other labor organizations pushed for an eight-hour work day and a five-day work week instead of the twelve-hour, six-day work schedule that was common; the eight-hour day became law in most industrialized countries in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Unions also pushed for an expansion of the right to vote, which was limited by property restrictions, and by 1914 universal male suffrage among white men was the norm in most countries that chose their leaders though voting. (Indigenous First Peoples were granted voting rights in Canada only in 1960 and Aboriginal peoples in Australia only in 1962, and in many places certain groups were kept from voting by discriminatory practices or violence long after they had officially been granted the vote.)

  Unions were predominantly male organizations. Women were harder to organize than men, as their wages were often too low to pay union dues, their family responsibilities prevented them from attending union meetings, and they had been socialized to view their work as temporary and not to challenge male authorities. Women made up a much smaller share of union membership than they did of the workforce, though they often participated with men in strikes, demonstrations, and protests for better conditions, even if they were not members, just as they had in earlier food riots. Separate women's unions were formed in some countries, however; by 1900, for example, women's unions in the tobacco, coffee, and textile industries in Mexico and Puerto Rico were demanding recognition and the right to bargain collectively.

  As had working men, women also began to demand the right to vote. The “woman question” was an international issue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though with different emphases in different parts of the world. Reformers in India urged an end to female infanticide, the prohibition of widow remarriage, and the practice of sati, a widow's self-immolation on her husband's funeral pyre; those in Europe worked for women's rights to own property and control their own wages; those in the United States worked for temperance and women's greater access to education; those in Latin America sought improvements in working conditions, and a restructuring of the civil codes that limited women's land ownership and economic rights. In most parts of the world, reformers did not dispute ideas about the centrality of marriage and motherhood in most women's lives, but used the notion of women's responsibility for home and family as the very reason that women should have an equal voice with men, often intertwining this with idea
s about what would make their nation stronger. Women, they argued, needed the vote to assure the well-being of their families and children, and would clean up corrupt politics in the same way that they cleaned up their households. A Japanese suffrage song from the early twentieth century called on women to “Be wise mothers and sisters to our people, and spread women's love throughout the land. Let us scrub away the age-old corruption of politics run by men and for men.”

  Groups specifically devoted to women's political rights began to be established in many countries of the world; they organized petition drives, letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations, marches, and hunger strikes, communicating with each other in what became an international feminist movement. Suffragists were initially ridiculed and attacked physically, and in many countries anti-suffrage groups were formed whose tactics paralleled those of the suffrage groups; such groups included women as well as men, for women have been the only group in history to mobilize both for and against their own enfranchisement. The efforts of suffragists, combined with international events such as World War I, were ultimately successful, however, and suffrage rights were gradually extended to women over the twentieth century.

  Both women and men became involved in movements for other types of liberal social change along with those for better working conditions and broader political rights, including prison reform, temperance, the extension of free public schooling, and the protection of animals. The abolitionist movement, inspired by the published writings and speeches of former slaves such as Olaudah Equiano (1745–97), and led by activists in Christian churches and advocates of human rights, called for an end to slavery and the slave trade. The revolutionary governments of France and Haiti outlawed slavery, although that of the United States did not. Britain and the USA banned the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, though Britain did not end slavery itself in its colonies until 1833 and the USA only in 1865, as a result of the Civil War. The new independent nations established in Latin America in the early nineteenth century outlawed slavery, as did France in its colonies in 1848, and finally Cuba and Brazil in the 1880s.