| During the nineteenth century, a vast number of people
migrated to cities. The increasing urban population led governments to
improve public health and sanitation services. Women began to advocate
for their rights, leisure time increased, and many Western governments
financed public education.
The New Urban Environment
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As workers migrated to cities, local governments had to solve
urgent public health problems; and their solutions allowed cities to grow
even more.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the new industrial
world had led to the emergence of a mass society in which the condition
of the majority—the lower classes—was demanding some governmental attention.
Governments now had to consider how to appeal to the masses,
rather than just to the wealthier citizens. Housing was one area of great
concern. Crowded quarters could easily spread disease. An even bigger threat
to health was public sanitation.
Growth of Urban Populations
With few jobs available in the countryside, people from
rural areas migrated to cities to find work in the factories or, later,
in blue-collar industries. As a result of this vast migration, more and
more people lived in cities. In the 1850s, urban dwellers made up about
40 percent of the English population, 15 percent in France, 10 percent
in Prussia (Prussia was the largest German state), and 5 percent in Russia.
By 1890, urban dwellers had increased to about 60 percent in England, 25
percent in France, 30 percent in Prussia, and 10 percent in Russia.
In industrialized nations, cities grew tremendously. Between
1800 and 1900, the population in London grew from 960,000 to 6,500,000.
Improvements in Public Health
and Sanitation
Cities also grew faster in the second half of the nineteenth
century because of improvements in public health and sanitation. Thus,
more people could survive living close together. Improvements came only
after reformers in the 1840s urged local governments to do something about
the filthy living conditions that caused disease. For example, cholera
had ravaged Europe in the early 1830s and 1840s. Contaminated water
in the overcrowded cities had spread the deadly disease.
On the advice of reformers, city governments created boards
of health to improve housing quality. Medical officers and building inspectors
inspected dwellings for public health hazards. Building regulations required
running water and internal drainage systems for new buildings.
Clean water and an effective sewage system were critical
to public health. The need for freshwater was met by a system of dams and
reservoirs that stored the water. Aqueducts and tunnels then carried water
from the countryside to the city and into homes. Gas heaters, and later
electric heaters, made regular hot baths possible.
The treatment of sewage was improved by building underground
pipes that carried raw sewage far from the city for disposal. A public
campaign in Frankfurt, Germany featured the slogan “from the toilet to
the river in half an hour.”
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Social Structure
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European society comprised three broad social classes—upper,
middle, and lower.
After 1871, most people enjoyed a higher standard of living.
Still, great poverty remained in Western society. Between the few who were
rich and the many who were poor existed several middle-class groups.
The New Elite
At the top of European society stood a wealthy elite.
This group made up only 5 percent of the population but controlled from
30 to 40 percent of the wealth. During the 1800s, the most successful industrialists,
bankers, and merchants—the wealthy upper-middle class—had joined with the
landed aristocracy to form this new elite.
Whether aristocratic or upper-middle class in background,
members of the elite became leaders in the government and military.
Marriage also served to unite the two groups. Daughters
of business tycoons gained aristocratic titles, and aristocratic heirs
gained new sources of cash. For example, when wealthy American Consuelo
Vanderbilt married the British duke of Marlborough, the new duchess brought
approximately $10 million to the marriage.
The Middle Classes
The middle classes consisted of a variety of groups.
Below the upper-middle class, which formed part of the new elite, was a
middle group that included lawyers, doctors, members of the civil service,
business managers, engineers, architects, accountants, and chemists. Beneath
this solid and comfortable middle group was a lowermiddle class of small
shopkeepers, traders, and prosperous farmers.
The Second Industrial Revolution produced a new group
of white-collar workers between the lower-middle class and the lower classes.
This group included traveling salespeople, bookkeepers, telephone operators,
department store salespeople, and secretaries. Although not highly paid,
these white-collar workers were often committed to middle-class ideals.
The middle classes shared a certain lifestyle with values
that dominated much of nineteenth-century society. Members of the middle
class liked to preach their worldview both to their children and to the
upper and lower classes of their society. This was especially evident in
Victorian Britain, often considered a model of middle-class society.
The European middle classes believed in hard work, which
was open to everyone and guaranteed to have positive results. Outward appearances
were also very important to the middle classes. The etiquette book The
Habits of Good Society was a best-seller.
The Working Classes
Below the middle classes on the social scale were the
working classes—also referred to as the lower classes—which made up almost
80 percent of the European population. These classes included landholding
peasants, farm laborers, and sharecroppers, especially in eastern Europe.
The urban working class consisted of many different groups.
They might be skilled artisans or semiskilled laborers, but many were unskilled
day laborers or domestic servants. In Britain in 1900, one out of every
seven employed persons was a domestic servant. Most servants were women.
After 1870, urban workers began to live more comfortably.
Reforms created better living conditions in cities. In addition, a rise
in wages, along with a decline in many consumer costs, made it possible
for workers to buy more than just food and housing. Workers now had money
to buy extra clothes or pay to entertain themselves in their few leisure
hours. Because workers had organized and conducted strikes, they had won
the 10-hour workday with a Saturday afternoon off.
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Women’s Experiences
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Attitudes toward women changed as they moved into white-collar
jobs, received more education, and began campaigning for the right to vote.
In 1800 women were mainly defined by their family and household
roles. The vast majority of women throughout Europe and the United States
had no legal identity apart from their husbands. Married women could not
be a party in a lawsuit, could not sit on a jury, could not hold property
in their own names, and could not write a will.
Women in the early nineteenth century remained legally
inferior and economically dependent on men. In the course of the nineteenth
century and during the Second Industrial Revolution, women struggled to
change their status.
New Job Opportunities
During much of the nineteenth century, working-class
groups maintained the belief that women should remain at home to bear and
nurture children and should not be allowed in the industrial workforce.
The Second Industrial Revolution, however, opened the
door to new jobs for women. There were not enough men to fill the relatively
low-paid, white-collar jobs being created, so employers began to hire women.
Both industrial plants and retail shops needed clerks, typists, secretaries,
file clerks, and salesclerks.
The expansion of government services created some job
opportunities for women.
Women could be secretaries and telephone operators, and
also took jobs in education, health, and social services. While some middle-class
women held these jobs, they were mainly filled by the working class who
aspired to a better quality of life.
The Marriage Ideal
Many people in the nineteenth century believed in the
ideal expressed in Lord Tennyson’s The Princess, published
in 1847:
“Man for the field and woman for the hearth:
Man for the sword and for the needle she:
Man with the head and woman with the heart:
Man to command and woman to obey.”
This view of the sexes was strengthened during the Industrial
Revolution. As the chief family wage earners, men worked outside the home.
Women were left to care for the family. Throughout the 1800s, marriage
remained the only honorable and available career for most women. There
was also one important change. The number of children born to the average
woman began to decline—the most significant development in the modern family.
This decline in the birthrate was tied to improved economic conditions,
as well as to increased use of birth control. In 1882 Europe’s first birth
control clinic was founded in Amsterdam.
The Family Ideal
The family was the central institution of middle-class
life. With fewer children in the family, mothers could devote more time
to child care and domestic leisure.
The middle-class family fostered an ideal of togetherness.
The Victorians created the family Christmas with its Yule log, tree, songs,
and exchange of gifts. By the 1850s, Fourth of July celebrations in the
United States had changed from wild celebrations to family picnics.
The lives of working-class women were different from those
of their middle-class counterparts. Most working-class women had to earn
money to help support their families. While their earnings averaged only
a small percentage of their husbands’s earnings, the contributions of workingclass
women made a big difference in the economic survival of their families.
Daughters in working-class families were expected to work until they married.
After marriage, many women often did small jobs at home to support the
family.
For working-class women who worked away from the home,
child care was a concern. Older siblings, other relatives, or neighbors
often provided child care while the mothers worked. Some mothers sent their
children to dame schools in which other women provided in-home child care,
as well as some basic literacy instruction. For the children of the working
classes, childhood was over by the age of 9 or 10. By this age, children
often became apprentices or were employed in odd jobs.
Between 1890 and 1914, however, family patterns among
the working class began to change. Higher-paying jobs in heavy industry
and improvements in the standard of living made it possible for working-class
families to depend on the income of husbands alone.
By the early twentieth century, some working-class mothers
could afford to stay at home, following the pattern of middleclass women.
At the same time, workingclass families aspired to buy new consumer products,
such as sewing machines and cast-iron stoves.
Women’s Rights
Modern feminism, or the movement for women’s
rights, had its beginnings during the Enlightenment. At this time, some
women advocated equality for women based on the doctrine of natural rights.
In the 1830s, a number of women in the United States and Europe argued
for the right of women to own property and to divorce. By law, a husband
had almost complete control over his wife’s property.
These early efforts were not very successful, however.
Married women in Great Britain did not win the right to own some property
until 1870.
The fight for property rights was only the beginning of
the women’s movement. Some middle- and upper-middle-class women fought
for and gained access to universities. Others sought entry into occupations
dominated by men.
Though training to become doctors was largely closed to
women, some entered the medical field by becoming nurses. In Germany, Amalie
Sieveking was a nursing pioneer who founded the Female Association
for the Care of the Poor and Sick in Hamburg. More famous is the British
nurse Florence Nightingale. Her efforts during the Crimean
War (1853–1856), combined with those of Clara Barton in the
U.S. Civil War (1861–1865), transformed nursing into a profession of trained,
middle-class “women in white.”
By the 1840s and 1850s, the movement for women’s rights
expanded as women called for equal political rights. They believed that
suffrage,
the right to vote, was the key to improving their overall position. Members
of the women’s movement, called suffragists, had one basic aim: the right
of women to full citizenship in the nation-state.
The British women’s movement was the
most active in Europe. The Women’s Social and Political
Union, founded in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters,
used unusual publicity stunts to call attention to its demands. Its members
pelted government officials with eggs, chained themselves to lampposts,
burned railroad cars, and smashed the windows of fashionable department
stores. British police answered with arrests and brutal treatment of leading
activists.
Before World War I, demands for women’s rights echoed
throughout Europe and the United States. Before 1914, however, women had
the right to vote in only a few nations, such as Norway and Finland, along
with some American states. It took the upheaval of World War I to make
maledominated governments give in on this basic issue.
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Education and Leisure
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As a result of industrialization, the levels of education
rose. People’s lives became more clearly divided into periods of work and
leisure.
Universal education was a product of the mass society of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before that time, education
was reserved mostly for the elite and the wealthier middle class. Between
1870 and 1914, however, most Western governments began to finance a system
of primary education. Boys and girls between the ages of 6 and 12 were
required to attend these schools. States also took responsibility for training
teachers by setting up teacher-training schools.
Public Education
Why did Western nations make this commitment to public
education? One reason was industrialization. In the first Industrial Revolution,
unskilled labor (workers without training or experience) was able to meet
factory needs. The new firms of the Second Industrial Revolution, however,
needed trained, skilled workers. Boys and girls with an elementary education
now had new job possibilities beyond their villages or small towns. These
included white-collar jobs in railways, post offices, schools, and hospitals.
The chief motive for public education, however, was political.
Giving more people the right to vote created a need for better-educated
voters. Even more important was the fact that primary schools instilled
patriotism. As people lost their ties to local regions and even to religion,
nationalism gave them a new faith.
Compulsory elementary education created a demand for teachers,
and most of them were women. Many men saw teaching as a part of women’s
“natural role” as nurturers of children. Women were also paid lower salaries
than men, which in itself was a strong incentive for states to set up teacher-training
schools for women. The first women’s colleges were really teacher-training
schools.
The most immediate result of public education was an increase
in literacy, or the ability to read. In Western and central
Europe most adults could read by 1900. In contrast, the story was very
different where governments did not promote education. For example, only
about 20 percent of adults in Serbia and Russia could read.
Once literacy expanded, a mass media developed. Newspapers
sprang up to appeal to this new reading public. In London, papers such
as the Evening News (1881) and the Daily Mail (1896) sold millions of copies
each day. These newspapers were all written in an easily understood style.
They were also sensationalistic—that is, they provided gossip and gruesome
details of crimes.
New Forms of Leisure
People read this new kind of newspaper in their leisure
time. There were other new forms of leisure, too. Amusement parks, dance
halls, and organized team sports, for example, became enjoyable ways for
people to spend their leisure hours.
These forms of leisure were new in several ways. First,
leisure was now seen as what people did for fun after work. In an older
era, work and leisure time were not so clearly defined. During the era
of cottage industries, family members might chat or laugh while they worked
on cloth in their homes. Now free time was more closely scheduled and more
often confined to evening hours, weekends, and perhaps a week in the summer.
Second, the new forms of leisure tended to be passive,
not participatory. Instead of doing a folk dance on the town square, a
young woman sat in a Ferris wheel and was twirled around by a huge machine.
Instead of playing a game of tug-of-war at the town fair, a young man sat
on the sidelines at a cricket match and cheered his favorite team to victory.
A third change in leisure during this era was that people
more often paid for many of their leisure activities. It cost money to
ride a merry-go-round or Ferris wheel at Coney Island. This change was
perhaps the most dramatic of all. Business entrepreneurs created amusement
parks and professional sports teams in order to make a profit. Whatever
would sell, they would promote.
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