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The role of women in the industrial revolution
The role of women in the industrial revolution
The role of women in the industrial revolution
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Have you ever wondered how the working life was for women thousands of miles apart in the 18th century? The factories located in Britain and Japan were not all that different. The two sets of females lived very far apart but carried many of the same strategies and ideas. The working women were not working under fair conditions in either setting. In Document 2 the graphic shows how women would work under dangerous condition with strict men supervising with whips in hand. Document 5 shows the life stories of the two women worlds away from each other both having similar 14 hour days with minimal breaks. This just shows how women were treated so poorly to work these long hours with men over seeing every move that they make. The conditions were so bad in both places, in document 10 Hannah Goode describes watching little kids nine and under get whipped for falling asleep because they are running on maybe three hours of sleep. The women consumed their life with an extremely trentius career for barely any money at all. …show more content…
According to Document 7 and 8 on average the women earned about half of what the men did. In document 6 we hear the voice of Mrs.Smith a woman who looks past the way she is treated at her work and only complains that she does not get paid enough. When looking at the chart on document 9, it listed that the food cost about 11% of a woman's income to pay for her family's food and that would be just a starchy not nutrient rich meal. Women being paid half of their equally qualified husbands, women making just enough money to pay for their family's dinner, this is how you can tell that neither the Japanese or English women are being paid what they rightfully
This source is very accurate. It is a reliable source as it was an extract from a book written by Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell, Sweet Freedom: The Struggle for Women’s Liberation, London, 1982, page 15. This source clearly shows the position that women were in and how inferior they were treated in the workplace.
2. Female workers in Lowell, MA can be compared to slaves in the south in many ways but they are also very different. The conditions that the women in Lowell and slaves had to live in were very unsanitary and unbearable. The woman even felt like slaves. They were constantly watched as were slaves and they were also forced to go to church. Unlike slaves they were paid, even though they were paid very little because they could do the work of a man but get paid less, they still got paid. They had choices of what jobs to do where slaves were assigned to certain jobs. The women got some free time and even a 30 minute lunch break while slaves had very little or no brakes at all.
As many women took on a domestic role during this era, by the turn of the century women were certainly not strangers to the work force. As the developing American nation altered the lives of its citizens, both men and women found themselves struggling economically and migrated into cities to find work in the emerging industrialized labor movement . Ho...
Women of the seventeenth century had many reasons to accept the challenge of traversing to the New World. Life in England was not always easy, in fact, sometimes worse than in Virginia. Working conditions were appalling, with little pay and long hours. Many found work as servants to the upper class or turned to prostitution. The type of women who gladly boarded the ships were mostly young, single women of low class roots. Sometimes they were young widows who had been left impoverished or women who had no male in their lives for support and protection.1.
The work and safety conditions were terrible for these young women. Work environments were cramped, many of these young women were teenagers, and they would work 12 hours a day, everyday only getting paid $15/week. 4 elevators had access to the factory, but only one was fully working, and just to use that one they had to climb down a ladder just to reach it. If they ever needed to get out of the building in case of an emergency it would have taken them hours just to do so. This was an extremely unsafe environment for all these girls to be in.
Many factories became short-handed and had to hire women to cover the jobs. The factories were very dangerous and unhealthy, and the women were only getting paid half the wages of men. The women were not unionized because the Labor Union said that they had to hire many women to replace one man and that the skilled tasks were broken in to several less skilled tasks. They had no protection, so their lungs and skin were exposed to dangerous chemicals. Many women worked in munitions factories, where they worked with sulphur.
A woman in the workplace was common but they did not receive the pay they deserved. Often, a woman’s job was the same as the previous male, but they did these jobs for 53% of the male’s pay. (Tolman) Eventually many woman and men went on strike demanding equal pay.
The Second Industrial Revolution had a major impact on women's lives. After being controlled fro so long women were experiencing what it was like to live an independent life. In the late nineteenth century women were participating in a variety of experiences, such as social disabilities confronted by all women, new employment patterns, and working class poverty and prostitution. These experiences will show how women were perceived in the Second Industrial Revolution.
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.
The men in the factories looked at the women coming in as just an extra pair of hands. They were mostly indifferent. Even so, the women could not date the men. This rule was more of a control effort and a bit of the women not being seeing as respectable women. Yet, the bosses were at a lost because they were not used to women working. The bosses tried to enforce rules; when they were broken, the bosses did not know how to punish the women because they were women. The women had to wear hats, even if their hair was longer than the men. The women did not like this because they felt as though they were being discriminated against. They would wear slacks and carry tools because the men had to, but the men did not wear head coverings. Also, everyone that worked in the factories, besides the factory women, viewed them as girls because a true woman would be at home taking care of the house. They had to trade in their smooth soft hands for rough hands filled with
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.
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
“Tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all the night through…” She makes the reader and listeners feel guilty for sleeping nonchalantly as girls do rigorous work. By appealing to emotion, she hints how troublesome and inhumane child labor really is. Not only are the girls working rigorously but they’re working to make things that really aren’t needed: “...weaving cotton and wool silks and ribbons for us to buy.” The small detail also expounds at how unnecessary child labor really is. She continues to produce facts of how child labor is all over the country: “Alabama limit the children’s work at night to eight hours, .. . New Jersey permits [children working] all night long.” Despite the advantages children could have while
The average woman gets paid 77 cents to every dollar that a man with the same job gets paid (Still A Man’s Labor Market). This can be attributed to the affects of discrimination since childhood, including discrimination by the enforcement of societal norms at home, discrimination in education, and finally discrimination in the labor market. All of this labor related discrimination affects women later in life as to whether they have as good of opportunities as others, experience poverty, obtain a secure retirement, and whether single mothers can provide well enough for their children.
The women were supervised by a factory foreman, who acted as an intermediary between the girls and management. The foreman was notorious for his poor handling of the workers. The women were told ‘never mind your fingers’ when operating the machinery. This on various occasions led to those who followed the foreman’s instructions losing a limb, and hereafter also without support. According to Annie Besant’s article, the foreman also was a man of ‘variable temper’, who delivered blows to the women when he was enraged. Poor conditions can be evidenced further from The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, which exposed children as young as twelve working for the factory; some being solely responsible for their own wellbeing. The women demanded that all future complaints should be taken straight to the management without having to involve the foremen who had prevented the management from knowing of previous disputes. A demand which Bryant and May reluctantly conceded to, stating that they had continually been ready to give their ‘most careful attention to any complaints’ that were brought to their attention. It is evidenced here that the match strikes were successful for the women involved, that Bryant and May submitted to their demands and officially took on theirs concerns shows us the positive effect of the match