Skilled and Unskilled Workers 487Increasingly family life was defined in terms of tan-
gible goods: especially large houses, which were
crowded with furniture, books, lamps, and all man-
ner of decorative objects. Modern scholars have
often indicted this “culture of consumption” for its
superficiality, a criticism commonly aired by patri-
cian elites at the time. But no attack on middle-class
culture and its conspicuous consumption surpassed
the venom of Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the
Leisure Class(1899). Veblen contended that con-
sumers derived little real pleasure from their big
homes and gaudy purchases; they were simply show-
ing off their wealth. Fashionable clothes, for exam-
ple, induced “aesthetic nausea,” prompting women
to soon discard them. No one was ever satisfied with
their wealth because everyone else was scrambling
to get ahead of them. Everyone wanted more.
Middle-class people regarded the matter differ-
ently. They conceived of the family as a refuge from
the increasingly chaotic and unsavory aspects of urban
life: A beautiful house that was filled with books,
paintings, and musical instruments would inculcate
the finer sensibilities and elevate the minds of its
occupants. Better for children to find stimulation at
home than to visit the vice districts or unsupervised
amusements downtown. The abundant material cul-
ture of the “Victorian age” reflected not its superfi-
ciality but its solidity.
Modern historians have often denounced the
middle-class family as emotionally stiff and, in matters
pertaining to sexuality, downright prudish. But
diaries and letters provide ample proof that many
couples experienced emotionally intense and sexually
fulfilling relationships. Elaborate and protracted
courtship rituals intensified the expression of love by
delaying its gratification. Middle-class mothers at the
end of the century had two or three children, four or
five fewer than their grandmothers. Their families
were smaller mostly because they married later in life
and practiced abstinence, though during the last half
of the century contraceptive devices were both more
reliable and more available commercially.
While most women remained home to supervise
their children and to preside over the private world
of the family, men worked away from home, in
shops and offices. Members of the professions and
the large and diffuse groups of shopkeepers, small
manufacturers, skilled craftsmen, and established
farmers that made up the middle class lived in vary-
ing degrees of comfort. A family with an annual
income of $1,000 in the 1880s would have no need
to skimp on food, clothing, or shelter. When
Professor Woodrow Wilson moved with his family
to Wesleyan University in 1888, he was able to rent
a large house and employ two full-time servants on
his salary of $2,500 a year. Indeed, at this time,
about a quarter of all urban families employed at
least one servant.
The presence of servants showed that the middle-
class family was never wholly “private.” Husbands, of
course, left the house each day to work in the busi-
nesses that provided the economic rationale for cities;
but wives also made recurrent forays into the public
world in order to shop, visit parks and museums, and
participate in charitable and social organizations.Skilled and Unskilled Workers
Wage earners, too, were drawn to urban areas. They
felt the full force of the industrial tide, being affected
in countless ways—some beneficial, others unfortu-
nate. As manufacturing became more important, the
number of manufacturing workers increased nearly
ten-fold, from around 600,000 in 1860 to nearly
5 million in 1890. While workers lacked much sense
of solidarity, they exerted a far larger influence on
society at the turn of the century than they had in
the years before the Civil War.
More efficient methods of production enabled
them to increase their output, making possible a rise
in their standard of living. The working day still
tended to approximate the hours of daylight, but it
was shortening perceptibly by the 1880s, at least in
many occupations. In 1860 the average had been
eleven hours, but by 1880 only one worker in four
labored more than ten hours and radicals were begin-
ning to talk about eight hours as a fair day’s work.
This generalization, however, conceals some
important differences. Skilled industrial workers—
such types as railroad engineers and conductors,
machinists, and iron molders—were relatively well-off
in most cases. But it was still true that unskilled labor-
ers could not earn enough to maintain a family
decently by their own efforts alone.
Industrialization created problems for workers
beyond the obvious one of earning enough money to
support themselves. By and large, skilled workers
improved their positions relatively, despite the increased
use of machinery. Furthermore, when machines took
the place of human skills, jobs became monotonous.
Mechanization undermined both the artisans’ pride
and their bargaining power with employers. As expen-
sive machinery became more important, the worker
seemed of necessity less important. Machines more
than workers controlled the pace of work and its dura-
tion. The time clock regulated the labor force more
rigidly than the most exacting foreman. The length of
the workday may have declined, but the pace of work
and the danger involved in working around heavy,
high-speed machinery increased accordingly.