Industrialization and the Social and Economic Structure of Europe 427Age, Gender, and the Family
The new industries initially favored the employment of
men in all jobs, but the textile mills adopted the sexual
division of labor that had typified cottage industry:
Women did most of the spinning and men did most of
the weaving. Many employment traditions quickly
broke down, however. Machines often required few
skills or little strength to make superior textiles; factory
owners often favored women and children for wage la-
bor because they worked for less than men. Women
soon held the majority of the jobs in textile mills, and
some occupations became feminized jobs, held only by
women (see illustration 22.4). Some factory owners
spoke of a woman’s dexterity and many thought (often
erroneously) of women as a less truculent labor force.
However, low wages remained the decisive factor. A
study of women workers in London in 1848, for exam-
ple, found that women earned 34 percent of men’s
wages. When Parliament investigated working condi-
tions, factory owners candidly admitted that they pre-
ferred women because they could pay them less and
because women would work hard to provide for their
children. As one mill owner testified, women “are atten-
tive, docile... and are compelled to use their utmostexertions to procure the necessities of life.” But this
low-paid existence was so precarious that thousands of
women were forced into prostitution to survive, a
plight dramatized by the character of Fantine in Victor
Hugo’s Les Misérables(1832) but visible to any contem-
porary on the streets.
Whether the factory hired men, women, or chil-
dren, factory employment changed the family econ-
omy. Instead of a husband, wife, and children working
together—at different tasks on a farm, in domestic
production, or in a shop—factory employment split the
family apart in individual employment for individual
wages. As factory wages remained low, such employ-
ment led all family members to take full-time employ-
ment, and it encouraged large families in which
children went to work at an early age. Economic histo-
rians label the new arrangement a “family wage econ-
omy” in which family members pool their earnings
from different jobs.
Not all towns became centers of textile manufac-
turing or heavy industry. Older towns, such as York,
England, still prospered on traditional handcraft man-
ufacturing and as commercial and marketing centers.
The social structure in such towns was different,Illustration 22.4
Women Workers.Women worked in many occupations
before industrialization—in the rural family economy, in cottage
industry, in family-run shops, in domestic service—but the fac-
tory system put a sharp new focus on the role of women in the
economy. Many occupations were entirely feminized, often be-
cause employers felt justified in paying women less than half of a
man’s wage. In the contemporary illustration here, women in an
English pen-grinding factory appear to constitute 100 percent of
the workforce.