Periods of Change: Effect Upon Sexual Norms During the Industrial Revolutions of the 19th Century

¶ … Change:

The effect upon sexual norms during the industrial revolutions of the 19th century

The Industrial Revolution spurred on seismic changes in male and female relationships that still relate to how we see one another today. During the pre-industrial era, although there was a general division of labor on family farms, women and men did not occupy separate spheres. There was little division between public and private life: work and home were intertwined. However, with industrialization, as people moved to cities and began to work for factory owners rather than work for themselves, the relationships between men and women began to change. "Whereas in the 1830s wives often assisted husbands in a small business or professional practice, by the 1890s work and home were commonly separated; exceptions included shopkeeping and upland farming." [footnoteRef:1] the home was conceptualized as the private, female, interior, domestic sphere, versus the male public sphere. "Early Victorian gender prescriptions featured men as industrious breadwinners and women as their loyal helpmeets…men were figured as competitors in the amoral, economic realm while women were positioned as either decorative trophies or spiritual guardians of men's immortal souls."[footnoteRef:2] [1: Jan Marsh, "Gender ideology and separate spheres in the 19th Century," Victoria & Albert Museum, http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/g/gender-ideology-and-separate-spheres-19th-century / [14 May 2014]] [2: Marsh, 2014]

The Industrial Revolution oversaw a profound shift in the demographics of labor. "Male employment shifted from agriculture to heavy industry, manufacturing and transport, with an accompanying increase in clerical and professional occupations. Men also left domestic service, which remained the largest category of female employment throughout the period (employing 10% of the female population in 1851, for example, and over 11% in 1891)."[footnoteRef:3] Certain occupations were dominated by women such as textile work, laundries, and sewing. (of course, these jobs were often far less well-paid).[footnoteRef:4] [3: Marsh, 2014] [4: Burnette, 2008]

Many traditionally female ways of making a living were also gutted by industrialization. For example, "before the Industrial Revolution, hand spinning had been a widespread female employment… the new textile machines of the Industrial Revolution changed that. Wages for hand-spinning fell, and many rural women who had previously spun found themselves unemployed. In a few locations, new cottage industries such as straw-plaiting and lace-making grew and took the place of spinning, but in other locations women remained unemployed."[footnoteRef:5] Later in the century, some of the labor laws designed to protect women and children actually reduced female employment such as the Factory Act of 1847. Employers as a result of the Act (which extended relatively modest protections to women, prohibiting their hours from stretching to 10 hours on weekdays, 8 hours on Saturday, and mandatory Sundays off) began to favor adult males given that male employment was less restricted. [footnoteRef:6] [5: Joyce Burnette, "Women Workers in the British Industrial Revolution," EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. 26 Mar 2008, http:/ / the.net/encyclopedia/women-workers-in-the-british-industrial-revolution / [15 May 2014]] [6: "Ten Hour Act of 1847," Industrial Child Labor, http://industrialchildlabor.weebly.com/the-ten-hour-act-of-1847.html [14 May 2014]]

The Industrial Revolution also saw an explosion of literacy -- a positive development, true, but one which also widened the divide between educated males and uneducated females, given women (even upper-class women) were not necessarily given equal access to practical educations. But gradually this began to change and women's access to education became more comprehensive. "Whereas in 1800 the majority of Britons had a predominantly practical education, acquired at home and at work, by 1901 formal learning at primary level was universal, with higher instruction available to the better-off. It is worth noting that girls were beginning to move on to university study by the 1860s."[footnoteRef:7] [7: Marsh, 2014]

The demarcation of the male public and the female private sphere also gave rise to the 'professionalism' of occupations such as medicine which further disenfranchised women. "The professionalization of certain occupations resulted in the exclusion of women from work they had previously done. Women had provided medical care for centuries, but the professionalization of medicine in the early-nineteenth century made it a male occupation."[footnoteRef:8] Women's roles as midwives and tenders of the sick were impinged upon by professional medical practitioners and their traditional roles at the sickbed were assumed by men. The profession of medicine itself became polarized into different roles: while as late as the Civil War in America males often assumed the role of 'nurse,' increasingly this profession (often conceptualized as a doctor's helper in its earlier incarnation) became relegated to women, although women such as Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale worked tirelessly to garner greater respect for the roles nurses could play. Even the role of midwife became male-dominated, as males who oversaw childbirth took on the oxymoronic title of 'male midwife.'[footnoteRef:9] [8: Burnette, 2008] [9: Burnette, 2008]

The law placed considerable obstacles in the paths of women who wished to own their own businesses or establish themselves as economically independent from the patriarchal wage and labor structures of industrial society. Married women could not make legally binding contracts or be sued, which meant that they found it difficult to secure loans.[footnoteRef:10] They were also largely barred from more lucrative work in guilds, with the exception of women who were widowed and who were viewed as capable of carrying on the trade, having presumably learned it working for their husband. [footnoteRef:11] [10: Burnette, 2008] [11: Burnette, 2008]