How did industrialization change working class families?
Jasmin Greenholt
2025-05-13 12:50:59
Count answers: 2
Industrialization affected American families in various ways. The Industrial Revolution in the United States had a significant impact on how families lived and worked. It illustrates the types of circumstances and constraints impacted working-class families’ living situations. The activity below provides data on the income, expenses, and living situations of eight families who resided in Illinois during 1884.
Magnolia Von
2025-05-01 05:38:42
Count answers: 1
With the introduction of mechanization and the assembly line in a factory setting, the system of production was increasingly subdivided into smaller tasks. These tasks demanded less skilled workers. We call this process de-skilling. More and more workers in our industrial economy were semi-skilled or unskilled. Workers became like the machines they used. Many workers felt they lost control over their work process, and felt dislocated and alienated from their work.
Many working-class families lived hand-to-mouth and needed all the supplemental income they could get, which often meant having all members of the family, including women and children, work for wages. Employers embraced women and children workers because they felt they could justify paying them less than adult men. Working-class men sometimes viewed women and child workers as a threat and competition. Most child labor was dangerous and unhealthy. By 1900, nearly 1 in 5 children aged 10-15 was employed.
Working-class families often found it hard to make ends meet. Overall, wages in the era did increase – but the Cost of Living also increased. The average annual wages for a family of 4 in 1890 were $380. Yet in that same year, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that the subsistence income for a family of 4 was $530. In general, workers were not sharing in the new wealth being created by industrial capitalism. Long hours were also a problem, with work weeks that could be 10, 12, or 14 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week.
Annabel Hane
2025-05-01 05:07:48
Count answers: 1
Industrialization changed the family by converting it from a unit of production into a unit of consumption, causing a decline in fertility and a transformation in the relationship between spouses and between parents and children. This change occurred unevenly and gradually, and varied by social class and occupation. Industrialization disrupted the traditional relationship between generations, as well as the relationship between spouses. Fathers could no longer pass on skills to their children—often the only patrimony workers had—when skills became obsolete. During times when the father was unemployed, family roles could be dramatically reversed: children and wives would bring home wages while the husband tended to the household. In conditions of severe poverty, family life could barely exist when multiple families and individuals crowded into tiny dwellings to save on rent. The conditions of working class families varied widely, however, according to region and economic activity, and the family often became a means to resist change or soften its worst impacts. Where textiles did become completely industrialized in France, England, and the northern United States, historians have shown that entire families would become reconstituted in workshops, keeping the family unit together with fathers often supervising the work of their children. Families most affected by industrial change had a remarkable ability to adjust and survive.
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