760 Ch. 19 • Rapid Industrialization and Its Challenges
it was hardly flawless. Rudimentary condoms made of animal intestines were
superseded in the 1880s by rubber condoms, although these still were rela
tively expensive, and were used primarily for protection against disease rather
than for birth control. As families sought to limit the number of children and
single women encountered unplanned pregnancies, abortion became more
common, in part because contraception methods remained very hit or miss. A
quarter of pregnancies probably ended in abortion, even though abortions
were both illegal and extremely dangerous. Women seeking to terminate a
pregnancy took all sorts of concoctions rumored to be effective, or put them
selves at the mercy of quacks.
In some places, however, births to unmarried couples or to single moth
ers increased rapidly. Young female migrants to the city were vulnerable to
the advances of men promising marriage or promising nothing at all.
Unplanned pregnancies followed. A sizable percentage of the population
of most countries—about 10 to 15 percent—never married or entered into
permanent or long-term relationships. Unmarried women were especially
common in Scotland, Ireland, and in Brittany in France, from which more
males than females migrated to urban, industrial regions.
Improving Standards of LivingLiving standards improved for ordinary people in every industrialized
country. Standards of living were far higher in northern Europe than in
southern and eastern Europe, greater in Britain than in France, with Ger
many closing the gap with both of its rivals. In Britain, real wages (taking
inflation into account), which had increased by a third between 1850 and
1875, again rose by almost half during the last three decades of the cen
tury. Workers enjoyed higher levels of consumption because the price of
food fell as agricultural production increased and transportation improved.
Working-class families still spent half of their budget on food, but this was
less than during previous centuries. This left more money to spend on
clothes, with something occasionally left over. Small-town shops were bet
ter supplied than ever before, and ready-made clothes sold on market day
alongside manufactured household utensils.
More grain and meat, arriving in refrigerated ships, reached Europe from
Australia, Canada, the United States, and Argentina. Meat ceased to be a
luxury. The average German had consumed almost 60 pounds of meat in
1873, 105 pounds in 1912. Germans consumed on average three times
more sugar at the end of the century than thirty years earlier. People who
lived a good distance inland—and who were of some means—found that fish
reached them before the ice keeping the fish fresh had melted. The poor,
too, now enjoyed a more varied diet, consisting of more vegetables, fruit,
and cheese. As the diet of ordinary people improved, and thus their nutri
tion, people gradually became taller. Still, workers almost everywhere
remained chronically undernourished and vulnerable to childhood diseases.