A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Industrial Work and Workers 553

and cities during the warmer months of the year, while their wives cared for
the children and whatever land they might have at home. Before the middle
of the nineteenth century, seasonal workers still may have accounted for as
much as a third of the workforce.

Industrial Work and Workers

The English novelist Charles Dickens dubbed the grim, sooty industrial
cities of England “Coketown.” After completing his novel Hard Times
(1854), an account of working-class life, Dickens wrote that “one of Fic­
tion’s highest uses” is to “interest and affect the general mind in behalf of
anything that is clearly wrong—to stimulate and rouse the public soul to a
compassionate or indignant feeling that it must not be”
Middle-class socialists and workers themselves also began to criticize pas­
sionately some of the consequences of large-scale industrialization. The
growing awareness among some workers that they formed a class apart fol­
lowed directly from their growing sense that they were vulnerable to the
vicissitudes of capitalism.

Gender and Family in the Industrial Age

In Western European nations, domestic service remained the largest cate­

gory of female employment at the middle of the century, employing in

Britain 1.3 million women, nearly 40 percent of women workers. Working up

to eighteen hours a day, servants slept under staircases and in attics, but ate

relatively well. They had a higher rate of literacy than did working-class

women in general and better prospects of marrying above their social class.

Country women spun and wove wool, linen, and cotton; sewed, embroi­

dered, and knitted stockings by hand; and worked in fields or gardens, while

looking after children. Such cottage work on the continent allowed country

people to maintain the traditional rural family economy well into the nine­

teenth century. Urban women worked as laundresses, seamstresses, or street

merchants and peddlers, and some kept boardinghouses.

Female labor remained central to large-scale industrialization. Women

were employed in many of the industries, both rural (where their labor had

long been predominant in cottage industry) and urban, that expanded dur­

ing the industrial age. Although only a relatively small percentage of women

worked in factories, a gradual shift to larger textile and clothing workshops

and factories occurred in England, above all, as well as in parts of France,

Belgium, and the Prussian Rhineland. In France, women accounted for 35

percent of the industrial workforce. With the expansion in power-loom

weaving, women with experience as cottage laborers found employment in

textile mills. While there were a number of important predominantly male

industries, such as iron production, the leather trades, building, and mining,