Taylor Braun World History Period: 1 May 5, 2016 Female Mill Workers in England and Japan: How Similar Were Their Experiences? Many of us complain about the tough hours we work or the amount of chores we have to complete, but think about the truly harsh conditions that young girls and women had to work in the textile industry with very little pay and no accolades. Back in the 18th century, when the Industrial Revolution struck, it made it hard for female mill workers to enjoy being employed. Due to the terrible working conditions, the amount of hours worked, and the low wages were a few of the similarities that the female mill workers in England and Japan shared. Everyone wants to work in a safe and healthy environment. Unfortunately, women …show more content…
These women, including mothers, and young girls worked extremely hard for long periods of time. “On weekdays she began work in the factory at 5:30 am, and finished at 8 pm. Included in this period were a thirty-five minute break for breakfast and a fifty-five minute break for dinner.” (Document 5: Douglas A. Galbi) On an average weekday in England the women and young children worked around thirteen-and-a-half hours and additional hours on the weekends. “On weekends she worked another nine hours.” (Document 5: Douglas A. Galbi) One of the young girls, Ellen Hooton, was working in an English factory and only nine years old. “She worked the same amount of hours as adult workers.” (Document 5: Douglas A. Galbi) Adults would tire after long days at work, but a children tire more easily because they are still growing. These ridiculous hours were also similar in the Japanese factories. “Normal working day in a plant in Okaya was thirteen to fourteen hours.” (Document 5: Noshomusho Shokokyoku and Shokko Jijo) “Given fifteen minutes for breakfast, and sent back to work by 6:15. They were allowed fifteen minutes for lunch, between 10:30 and 10:45, and ten-minute break from 3:30 to 3:40.” (Document 5: Noshomusho Shokokyoku and Shokko Jijo) Obviously, these approximately fifteen-minute breaks were barely enough time to eat a snack not to mention a bathroom break or a moment of quiet
Factory workers worked twelve to fifteen hours a day in hazardous condition. There were no protective rules for women and children and no insurances for job-related accidents or industrial illness. The workers were obliged to trade at company store
During the Japanese Industrial Revolution, female workers played a big role in the silk factories, but there were many negatives that came with that. Every factory worker during the Japanese Industrial Revolution had to work hard. Factories hired women and they were treated unfairly. Also the factories were very unsanitary which caused even more trouble for the workers. Female workers in Japanese Silk Factories: Did the costs outweigh the benefits? For the female silk factory workers the costs outweighed the benefits for two reasons. The first reason was that there were long, hard working hours. The second reason was that men got paid a lot more than women did.
“The development of agriculture was a radical change in humans’ way of life.” (Stearns, 2) It set the basis for faster change in human societies. Metalworking allowed farmers to work more efficiently. The development of languages increased the chances of civilizations because people were able to communicate with each other. Record keeping and innovated technology also brought people together because they began discovering new things about the society.
They were forced to go out to work and make a rapid transition into adulthood. In these work places they, like any other adult, had a limited amount of time to eat. Patience Kershaw, a miner at the age of 17 recalls having cake for dinner- in inadequate dinner- and she does “not stop or rest at any time for the purpose” referring to her inability to eat throughout the day . She of course is not the only one, Elizabeth Bentley who works in the mills was asked whether she had the opportunity to eat in the factory. The 23 year old who began working at the age of 6 replied with a “no” saying how she had little to eat. The human rights were furthermore diminished as I read further on about the consequences there were if a child were to arrive late to work or became drowsy. Clearly the long hours and often times the long travel from home to work would severely tire anyone, to keep the kids under control and alert while working, the over lookers resorted to strapping them “when they became drowsy”. Matthew Crabtree explains the dread that these kids had of getting beaten, due to the fear they had we can infer that the means of physical abuse was prevalent in these factories. In the mines the young girls and women had to adapt to the conditions of their workplace. The vigorous lifting and loading was a strenuous activity done by both sexes, males worked naked to combat heat while females also worked
The poem “My Boy” shows how long the work hours were by saying, “[Before] dawn my labor drives me forth. Tis night when I am free; A stranger am I to my child; And he one to me.” (Document 2) From dawn to night was a normal time period that people would work and she would come home to her family where they were strangers. The long hours were not only tiring on the body, but also put a strain on the quantity and quality of time spent with family. The hours were not easy labor either, the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley shows that labor was difficult and the bosses worked the employees
Small farms surrounded by the wild. There weren’t enough farmers so they could only look after 1 acre at a time. They always needed more land because tobacco used up much of the fertility in soil. They looked for land near rivers to help them from carrying the heavy loads.
Europeans dominated the African continent for centuries. The white man tried to “civilize” Africa by making themselves superior to other races. They created a rule that non-white races must obey them. This gave Europeans to the power to rob the continent of a huge amount of its riches and inflict a tremendous amount of suffering on Africans. The second letter was called to bury the unpleasant memories of slavery in the past and focus on a future, without this superior rule. It was asked that colonial powers cooperate and fix their past mistakes and injustices against the Africa, by granting them independence. The solution was to bring unity between Africa and the Europeans. The division made them weak because Africa had the potential to be
The working conditions in the mills and and mines were horrible, nasty, and disgusting. Elizabeth Bentley who started to work at a factory when she was only six years old said that she would work from 5 in the morning all the way to 9 at night. Imagine waking up that early to go to work for more than 12 hours. She also said that she didn’t have any time to get breakfast. When workers didn’t claim their food “the overlooker took it, and gave it to his pigs” (253, Bentley). This shows how much the owners cared about their workers. If people working at factories were late to work, they were beaten and she says that was a common thing at the factories. One view that caught me off guard was of Hannah Richardson, a mine employee that said she said
Following the closure of the Civil War, America and primarily the former Confederacy were tasked with the problem of how they were going to efficiently bring back thousands of former slaves back into the union and convert them into full-pledged American citizens. Adding on to the problems faced during presidential and radical reconstruction from 1865 to 1877, many people including President Johnson feared the rise of the blacks in politics. Due to the new rise in population, southern senators believed that blacks were not equipped for political equality and that suffrage would be destructive to the government by upsetting the balance of power between the republicans and democrats. Such notion that the blacks were inferior and should be treated
In the early years while the profits were high working conditions looked promising to the mill girls in their brief opening experiences of factory work. Jobs required little skill because the machinery was mostly self-acting. It looked very pleasant at first, the rooms were so light, spacious, and clean, the girls so pretty and neatly dressed, and the machinery so brightly polished or nicely painted (Harriet Farley, Letters from Susan, Letter Second).
You wake up, it is dark. You rush to get to the hot, muggy factory, knowing you will be there for the next fourteen hours. By the time you get your first break you are worn out for the day. You finally make it through the day, it is dark already. You go home, catch a few hours of sleep and do the same thing over again. If reading that made you miserable, you would not survive as a silk factory worker. Most girls were sold, by their parents, to the silk factories to help with the financial situation. These jobs required long, hard workdays for little pay and break time. Even though the conditions were so harsh people wonder, did the cost outweigh the benefits?Although it might seem like it wasn’t that bad, working
In the 1800's the construction of cotton mills brought about a new phenomenon in American labor. The owners needed a new source of labor to tend these water powered machines and looked to women. Since these jobs didn't need strength or special skills th...
Industrialization had a major impact on the lives of every American, including women. Before the era of industrialization, around the 1790's, a typical home scene depicted women carding and spinning while the man in the family weaves (Doc F). One statistic shows that men dominated women in the factory work, while women took over teaching and domestic services (Doc G). This information all relates to the changes in women because they were being discriminated against and given children's work while the men worked in factories all day. Women wanted to be given an equal chance, just as the men had been given.
The Industrial Revolution was a time in where machines were making great changes in people's’ lives. Making threads were easier to make with the spinning jenny, clothes were being made faster than in a blink of an eye. Machines were being spread throughout the globe in which for some countries were good and for some were bad. The Japanese borrowed many ideas from but in a country like Japan silk and other clothes goods were needed and making Japan very rich in connections with other countries and money. The idea of the machines were very revolutionary for the Japanese, especially since silk needed a long process to make into threads. But there was some costs in employing workers for these factories and some benefits for the employees who were
It was estimated that nearly 35 percent to 53 percent of female workers were less than 16 years old in England (Document C), an age that was illegal for employment in modern society. Some of them were even under the age of ten. "I think the youngest children is about seven...I dare say there are twenty under nine years old" the description of the situations in Mr. Wilson's Mill from a worker named Hannah Goode in 1833 (Document J). In addition, a report in 1841 showed that 43% percent of the female workers were no more than 20 years old in four English textile industries in cotton, silk, lace and woolen manufacturing (Document C). In Japan, in the silk factory in Nagano, Japan 1901, 66 percent of female worker were under 20 years old. Female worker were more or less working for gaining more family income in order to release their financial burden. However, did they really contributed to family income and did they get the reasonable payment from the