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Women and children in Welsh coal mines
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In certain parts of Wales England times were hard for women, men and children. Age barely played any part in the labor coal mines, nor the fact that they are woman and children that were picked to work in the mines. The different cities in England some mines have different requirement of working for all sex and gender in the pits. In some coal mines for women, children, and men to work in the coal mine they were forced to have not one piece of clothing on while working. Woman had different jobs in the mines they were not allowed to seek out to retrieve the coals pits themselves; it was left up for the men to handle. One insight about the mines is that how they would dress the females up like males and have them chained and degraded like downs crawling around the pit. The work conditions that little girls have to endure are pretty much sad. They did most of their work sitting down or even lying down on their backs chipping a way with a pick that the men would use to do the job. For most of the young female’s workers having to chip the coals in unlike requirements made them more...
With the gradual advancements of society in the 1800’s came new conflicts to face. England, the leading country of technology at the time, seemed to be in good economic standing as it profited from such products the industrial revolution brought. This meant the need for workers increased which produced jobs but often resulted in the mistreatment of its laborers. Unfortunately the victims targeted were kids that were deprived of a happy childhood. A testimony by a sub-commissioner of mines in 1842 titled Women Miners in the English Coal Pits and The Sadler Report (1832), an interview of various kids, shows the deplorable conditions these kids were forced to face.
Often, children were forced to work due to money-related issues, and the conditions they worked in were terrible. Children worked in coal mining, such as at Woodward Coal Mining in Kingston, Pennsylvania (Doc. 7). Children were used to make the process of producing products cheaper, and they were paid low wages; the capitalists hired children just to keep the process of making products going and to make profit. One cause of child labor in harsh conditions was the unfateful fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City in 1911. Teenaged immigrant girls that were employed there worked under sweatshop-like conditions. The building they worked in was inadequately equipped in case of a fire, for the doors were locked, leaving no exit for the girls, and the single fire escape collapsed with the rescue effort; as a result, when the fire started, they were unable to escape. 145 workers were killed, but the company owners were not penalized harshly for this tragedy. This further demonstrates that capitalists were able to get away with the harsh conditions that they put their laborers, especially child laborers, through for their own benefit, which is making more money and using any means to get it, even if those means are low wages and harsh working
The owners of the factories in New England, like in Lowell, Massachusetts, oppressed young girls by being careless with their safety. It was already terrible that women made one-eighth of what men made; their affordability for employers made girls, especially immigrants, desirable to save money. That could be the cause of the employer’s lack of regard for their safety. In the factories, from sunrise to sunset, women, men, and children had to breathe in unhealthy and unventilated air. In addition, men and women were being injured and killed because of hazardous surroundings, as Mary S. Paul writes to her father, “My life and health are spared while others are cut off.” Workers have been breaking their necks and ribs and being killed by cars (Doc F). It is an employer’s responsibility to keep his/her employees safe because, in reality, it would be in their interest to keep their workers alive to make them money. Still the girl’s well-being and interests were ignored because it would trouble the factory owners. As a result of the owner’s profiteering, employees were dying.
In the agricultural industry the children would harvest crops and sewing. If the children were working in the mining industry it was very dangerous. The conditions were very poor, it was very dirty and not pleasant. The boys were called “Breaker Boys” they broke down raw coal into different pieces for certain furnaces. The coal bearers would carry coal on their shoulders, and the smallest children worked as trappers, they would open trap doors in the mines to move the coal. As for the manufacturing industry, the children would work in dark and dirty conditions. They worked around sharp tools and and machines, which caused a lot of injuries to them.
The labor conditions that children faced were very demanding for a human being from such a small age. For example “In the Manayunk district of Philadelphia, children as young as seven assisted in spinning and weaving of cotton and woolen goods” (Wolensky 2). The children working in the factories had their childhood freedom taken away from them. “In 1830 in a sample of 43 Manchester mills, 22.3% of the workforce was under 14 and 32.4% under 16” (Cunningham 412). This means that about 50% of the workforce in the mills were made up of children under the age of 16 and in today in the United States, a person cannot work until the age of 16. “And it is a hard thing for small children to be confined in a tight close room all day long. It affects their growth, makes them pale and sickly” (Nason). The time these children spent in the factories prevented them from spending time with their neighbors, friends, and family. The fact that young children had to work in these textile mills, created changes to American culture on how childhood years are supposed to be spent.
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.
The slaves worked long tiresome hours under all sorts of weather conditions but it couldn’t compare to the factory girls. Inside of a factory was excessive heat and noise.
In the Industrial Revolution, textile mills and factories grew at an alarming rate, and women were needed in the workplace because there weren’t enough men to fill the low-paying jobs. Women worked in dangerous conditions and were paid less than half as much as men. Those in textile factories usually worked long hours in unsanitary and crowded spaces. In fact, work hours went from 8 AM to 11 PM in the winter and 6 AM to 12 PM in the summer. Machinery was often broken and unsafe to use. (Burnette) Although this sounds nothing like equality of men and women in the workplace, “while young women were attending to their futures, and supporting themselves in mill towns, they achieved a measure of economic and social independence not possible while living under the parental roof.” (Dublin) The independence from working gave women the freedom and courage to stand up for their rights. Women were beginning to have a sense of self-independence and autonomy from men, and used this new-found liberty to do things such as found the Lowell Factory Girl’s Association in Lowell, Massachusetts to protest the increase of boardinghouse charges without increase in wag...
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
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.
Imagine being forced to work in conditions that might cause you to lose a limb, to be beaten daily, or to be left with long term respiratory conditions. These terrible conditions were realities to families who worked in textile factories in the 1700’s. England was the first to adopt textile factories which would benefit with mass production of cotton material. According to the power point, “Industrial Revolution; Life in English Factories”, low and unskilled workers, often children, ran the machines and moved material, this helped lower the cost of goods. During this time, commissions investigated the working conditions of the factories.
It was very enlightening reading Weis’s “Class Reunion” (2004) because I could relate to the foundation of the book since my father-in-law is a former steel mill worker and left the state of Pennsylvania in the late 1970’s as a result of a local mill closing down. I have heard the stories of the life of a steel mill worker and married into the ideals of the generation of that time, many of which still exist today for a lot of my relatives. That is, women should be subservient, keep the home, can the food, bake the bread, sew the clothes, and do not work outside the home. Nevertheless, my family has shared many memories of mill life such as the community connections, the bowling alley, the local bar at the corner that the men went to after each shift ended, as well as…the burns, the scars, the tragedy and the filth from working in a mill. Additionally, I could clearly understand the way both males and females responded to Weis’s interviews in 1985 from my own experience as a high school teacher for ten years and a high school administrator for eight. Over the years, I have
In the early nineteenth century, masculinity and femininity were in a state of transition. While the Romantic era 's male supremacy values were being replaced by Victorian gender equity conceptions; ideologies of 'natural ' characteristics of men and women, separate spheres, and disability emerged and have rested in the minds of people decades into the twenty-first century. In 1870s Britain, people knew where they belonged and law and social customs kept them there. Non-existent in the political realm, women were blockaded from the work force and denied many jobs outside the of domesticity –the work and knowledge within the realm of the household. Married women were denied any rights to property which included their own children. As
In the essay, “Women, Work, and Protest in the Early Lowell Mills” by author Thomas Dublin explains the textile mills back in the 1850’s in Lowell, Massachusetts enjoyed by monetary and cultural desirability. Interest was triggered by a gigantic ratio of the mills, the efficiency of the machinery, and the circumstances that women contained the majority of the workforce. Dublin wraps up about the lives and labor of Lowell’s female workforce that the visitors was hit by the uniqueness of the mills and cities also the sophistication of the female crew which they worked really hard to have a good payment. Women went on a strike to protest wage cuts because the measure of the work needed to rise up later on women complain on the company policies and working circumstances they couldn't get enough money for all the work they’ve done.
How would you feel if your boss cut down your work paycheck just because he wanted a better life for them self? The men, women and children that worked in factories during the 18th and 19th centuries were brutally mistreated causing poverty, injuries and pallid body types (Thompson). At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, working was incredibly unsafe because there were absolutely no labor or safety laws. Working conditions back then were extremely different from those that are in place today. The unbearable working conditions caused a vast amount of labor laws and rights.