488 Chapter 18 American Society in the Industrial Age
As businesses grew larger, personal contact between
employer and hired hand tended to disappear. Relations
between them became less human, more businesslike,
and ruthless. On the other hand, large enterprises usu-
ally employed a higher percentage of managerial and
clerical workers than smaller companies, thus provid-
ing opportunities for more “blue-collar” workers to
rise in the industrial hierarchy. But the trend toward
bigness made it more difficult for workers to rise from
the ranks oflabor to become manufacturers themselves,
as Andrew Carnegie, for example, had done during the
Civil War era.
Another problem for workers was that industrial-
ization tended to accentuate swings of the business
cycle. On the upswing something approaching full
employment existed, but in periods of depression
unemployment became a problem that affected work-
ers without regard for their individual abilities. It is
significant that the word unemployment(though not,
of course, the condition itself) was a late-nineteenth-
century invention.
Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor
atwww.myhistorylab.com
Working Women
Women continued to supply a significant part of the
industrial working force. But now many more of
them were working outside their homes; the factory
had almost completely replaced the household as the
seat of manufacturing.^1 Such women had no choice
but to leave the “domestic sphere” to make a living.
Textile mills and “the sewing trades” absorbed a large
percentage of women, but in all fields women were
paid substantially lower wages than men.
Women found many new types of work in these
years, a fact commented on by The New York Times
as early as 1869. They made up the overwhelming
majority of salespersons and cashiers in the big new
department stores. Store managers considered women
more polite, easier to control, and more honest
than male workers, all qualities especially valuable in
the huge emporiums. Over half of the more than
1,700 employees in A. T. Stewart’s New York store
were women.
Educated, middle-class women also dominated the
new profession of nursing that developed alongside the
expanding medical profession and the establishment of
large urban hospitals. To nearly all doctors, to most
men, and indeed to many women of that day, nursing
seemed the perfect female profession since it required
the same characteristics that women were thought to
ReadtheDocumenthave by nature: selflessness, cleanliness, kindliness, tact,
sensitivity, and submissiveness to male control. Typical
was this remark of a contemporary authority: “Since
God could not care for all the sick, he made women to
nurse.” Why it had not occurred to God to make more
women physicians, or for that matter members of other
prestigious professions like law and the clergy, this man
did not explain, probably because it had not occurred
to him either.
Middle-class women did replace men as teachers
in most of the nation’s grade schools, and they also
replaced men as clerks and secretaries and operators of
the new typewriters in government departments and
in business offices. Most men with the knowledge of
spelling and grammar that these positions required
had better opportunities and were uninterested in
office work, so women high school graduates, of
whom there was an increasing number, filled the gap.
Both department store clerks and “typewriters” (as
they were called) earned more money than unskilled fac-
tory workers, and working conditions were more pleas-
ant. Opportunities for promotion for women, however,
were rare; managerial posts in these fields remained
almost exclusively in the hands of men.Working-Class Family Life
Early social workers who visited the homes of indus-
trial laborers in this period reported enormous differ-
ences in the standard of living of people engaged in
the same line of work, differences related to such
variables as health, intelligence, the wife’s ability as a
homemaker, the degree of the family’s commitment(^1) However, at least half of all working women were domestic servants. to middle-class values, and pure luck. Some families
This girl ran four spinning machines in a cotton mill in Whitnel,
North Carolina. Only four feet, three inches tall, she earned forty-
eight cents a day. Photographer Lewis Hine hoped that pictures
such as this one (1908) would generate public support for child
labor laws.