FORGING THE INDUSTRIAL FAMILY

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
CONTENT

1. Industrial revolution ?
2. Impact on families
3. Industrial family
4. Industrial family; another perspective
5. Impact on man/woman
6. Women employment
7. Impact on children as child labor
8. What after child labor
9. Redefinition of childhood
10. Conclusion
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION ?

 The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to
sometime between 1820 and 1840. This transition included
 hand production methods to machines,
 new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes
 the increasing use of steam power
 the development of machine tools and
 the rise of the factory system.
 The Industrial Revolution marks a major turning point in history; almost every aspect of daily life was influenced
in some way. In particular, average income and population began to exhibit unprecedented sustained growth. Some
economists say that the major impact of the Industrial Revolution was that the standard of living for the general
population began to increase consistently for the first time in history, although others have said that it did not
begin to meaningfully improve until the late 19th and 20th centuries.
IMPACT ON FAMILIES

 The industrial revolution had an immense impact on family life.

 Rates of marriage went up in western Europe during the 19th century because more people could hope to
support a family and because marriage seemed to offer important advantages.
 The biggest jolt the industrial revolution administered to the Western family was the progressive removal of work
from the home.
 Families were no longer centers of production.
INDUSTRIAL FAMILY

 Middle-class commentators increasingly saw the family as an emotional haven, an essentially spiritual refuge
deliberately separate from the new stresses of economic life.
 Home was a sanctuary in which innocent children could be taught morality.
 Marriage was a loving partnership between two people who shared a pure affection that could rise above petty
material concerns.
 Many middle-class families became centers of sedate leisure, and women enhanced family time by playing the
piano and reading uplifting stories aloud.
 Thus emerged a growing market for a variety of manufactured products, such as wallpaper, furniture, and
carpeting.
INDUSTRIAL FAMILY; ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE

 The second definition of the industrial family, common in the urban working class, stuck closer to tradition.
 The family remained an economic unit.
 Families could serve new economic needs by providing supplementary wage earners, particularly children.
 They could provide additional earnings from home-based activities such as taking in boarders or doing laundry.
 A more extended family that linked several adult relatives, not just the married couple, could aid with loans to
help the jobless ride through unemployment and provide information about available jobs.
IMPACT ON MAN/WOMAN

 The task of the man of the family was to generate primary economic support.
 Women had to spend growing amounts of time organizing family consumption.
 Many a working-class housewife had to feed her husband all the meat she could afford because his stamina was so
essential to the family’s survival.
 Women’s work roles declined substantially during the industrial revolution in Western society.
 They might acquire other family responsibilities.
 Furthermore, when production did move outside the household setting, many families faced a genuine dilemma.
WOMEN EMPLOYMENT

 The economic decline of women was long masked by their importance in the early factories, particularly the
textile centers.
 Over half the early labor force in cotton production, from New England to Belgium, was made up of women.
 Many employers argued that women’s willingness to work for lower wages.
 Finally,the percentage of women in the textile factories declined somewhat with time; the mechanization of
weaving.
 Women kept accounts and supervised sales.
IMPACT ON CHILDREN AS CHILD LABOR

 The challenge to traditional roles in the family economy extended to children, for whom the industrial revolution
also ushered in a fundamental transformation.
 Children had always begun to work early in life, both in agriculture and in craft shops; child labor was not a
invention of the industrial revolution.
 Some children were mercilessly exploited, especially in British industrialization, and the pace of work put unusual
strain on young workers.
 Accidents were common.
 Child workers were increasingly separated from their parents and other relatives.
WHAT AFTER CHILD LABOR

 Improvements in machinery made child labor increasingly unnecessary.

 Larger textile machines and more automatic processes reduced the viability of very young workers.
 Such changes, combined with humanitarian concerns and workers’ desire to regain family control, led to a series
of child labor laws, initiated in Britain in 1833.
 A growing number of middle-class reformers condemned the cruelty of industrial child labor.
 The British example finally helped spur child labor legislation elsewhere. France passed its first law in 1841, and
the German states introduced similar measures.
 In the long run, obviously, the chief impact of the industrial revolution was to dissociate children from productive
labor.
 Middle-class families did not put their sons to work until their later teens.
REDEFINITION OF CHILDHOOD

 A new barrier emerged between fathers and their children, as the separation of work and family meant an
increasing day-to-day gap between men and their offspring.
 Families also had to reconsider how many children to have.
 The industrial revolution thus led quite directly to a population revolution—called “the demographic transition”
 By 1900, families in most groups throughout the Western world expected to have two to four children rather
than the six to eight regarded as the norm just a century before.
 This change had further implications for adult sexuality and birth control, for the functions attached to
motherhood, and for family interactions with the children themselves.
CONCLUSION

 The adjustments in family roles that the industrial revolution impelled varied in duration.
 The first impulse to heighten the division between men and women proved not to be permanent.
 Later phases in the evolution of industrial society in the West brought a subsequent transformation in women’s
employment that undid much of the differentiation introduced in the nineteenth century.
 The man/provider– woman/homemaker distinction lingered to an extent.
 In contrast, the transformation of childhood steadily intensified as the length of schooling expanded and as the
dissociation of children from extensive work commitment increased.
 On a larger scale still, the need persisted to redefine family functions—to find a basis for stability once
the family stopped serving as an essential economic unit and to generate believable definitions of family
success once production moved outside the home. Even though the industrial revolution in a strict sense
was completed almost a century ago, many people in Western society today continue to grapple with the
huge changes it introduced into personal life and private institutions.

Presented by:
THANKYOU Deeksha Jain