554 Ch. 14 • The Industrial Revolutionwomen did work in these industries as well. The textile industry was the sec
ond largest employer of women (hiring 22 percent of all female workers). In
general, women everywhere worked for about half of what their male coun
terparts earned. As in the pre-industrial period, many, if not most, female
factory workers were young and single.
Many male workers bitterly resented the arrival of women in the work
place. This challenged traditional gender roles, including that of patri
archy, in that womens work had long been assumed to be at home. What
came to be called the “struggle for the breeches” began in Britain. One of
the significant developments brought about by the Industrial Revolution
may have been the slow change from the conception of gender as hierar
chical to one as representing different but complementary spheres.
Thus, despite significant continuities, wage labor altered family life and
the structure of communities. Wage labor made young women and men less
dependent on their parents, enabling many to marry earlier. But marriage
still remained to some extent an economic relationship; moreover, some cou
ples delayed wedlock until both partners could accumulate the skills or assets
to maintain an independent household. A sharp rise in illegitimate births (in
Paris, about 33 percent of all births, 45 percent in Stockholm) seems to have
been another effect of the rise in employment opportunities and wages for
unmarried couples in “free unions,” or common-law marriages, although
many women who gave birth were unattached.
Working-class families were presented with a dilemma: with the growth of
factories and the consequent separation of home and work, women had to
balance the need for the additional income factory work could provide with
caring for young children. Many mothers left the workforce to care for chil
dren for at least a time. But since the family economy also depended on their
wages, they generally returned to work as quickly as possible.
Hundreds of thousands of European women worked full- or part-time as
prostitutes. Prostitution presented a hierarchy of conditions of life and
wages, ranging from confident high-class courtesans to poor girls beckoning
clients from dark doorways. Some women, including many who were mar
ried, were able to earn much more money selling sexual favors than they
could earn in textile mills or in domestic service.
To middle-class moralists, prostitutes symbolized moral failure and the
dangers of modern life. Yet it was the increase in middle-class male demand
for prostitution that increased the number of prostitutes in Europe’s bur
geoning cities. Governments therefore accepted prostitution as a “necessary
evil.” They sought to police brothels and the comportment of prostitutes in
order to keep the profession hidden as much as possible from public view,
while trying to limit the ravages of venereal disease by ordering prostitutes
to have regular medical checkups. The number of prostitutes in London
was so difficult to determine that estimates for the 1840s vary from 7,000
to 80,000. In Saint Petersburg, there were over 4,000 registered prostitutes
in 1870.