The Effects Of The Industrial Revolution On

The Family Essay, Research Paper

In the last part of the eighteenth century, a new revolution was formed and gave birth to a new standard of living. It shaped the world into what people of “today” are familiar with. This major occurrence of the late eighteenth century is known as the industrial revolution. It first began in Great Britain, which was the biggest empire in Europe at the time. The industrial revolution brought many positive aspects to society but it also brought suffering, dissonance, and other social problems. In order for machine efficiency to be carried out, the machines needed to have people running, powering, and keeping them in tip top shape. As a result of this, working people faced many hard economic and societal times that became problems in their every day life. The family was forever changed as a result of the industrial revolution and because of this people’s lives were affected for the greater part of the nineteenth century. Life generally improved, but the industrial revolution also proved harmful to the essence of the family.

The Industrial revolution was a time of drastic change and transformation from hand tools, and hand made items to machine manufactured and mass-produced goods. This change generally helped life, but also hindered it as well. Pollution, such as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rose, working conditions declined, and the number of women and children joining the ever-growing workforce increased. The government, literature, music, architecture, and man’s way of looking at life all changed during this period. Prior to the industrial revolution people worked at home, on farms, or with trade guilds while children, once they were old enough, would help their family out with the chores that needed to be done. In fact, it was not uncommon for people to be born, grow up and died in roughly the same geographical areas. With the construction of the railway, people were able to move from their small towns to the more urbanized areas of the country. When they arrived they found out that life was much different from what they were normally use to. The cities continued to grow in size at a rapid pace. Unable to keep up with the growing population as a result of urbanization, people found a lack for housing, good sanitation, or recreational facilities available. This added more misery to the working classes that did not have all that much to begin with. Living in the city was very different from what people from countryside were use to. Homes took the shape of small unsanitary places that were squashed between many other houses with similar characteristics. Most of these homes had only one room for a whole family to live in. Living conditions were indeed terrible but working conditions were much worse.

The Industrial Revolution changed manufacturing by changing the way people worked. For one thing, it brought work out of the home and centralized it in the factory facilities of places like London. Trades men were no longer needed because the introduction of machinery took these jobs away from the common working class person. Instead, the working class had to make a living by fueling, cleaning or operating the machines which became a grueling job. This change didn’t just affect men but the entire household. Since materials were cheaper to produce that meant that they were sold for a lower price, which in turn made the wage of the working class much smaller. In order to compensate for the loss of earnings everyone in the household once old enough were also sent to work at the major textile mills and refineries in order to make an income that they could contribute to the family. Eventually, the entire family consisting of man, woman, and child plodded off to work to do the same jobs. Children were especially liked because their hands were small enough to fit into the machines, which got stuck or needed cleaning on a regular basis. Unfortunately, some children suffered the loss of arms or fingers due to the machinery and there was nothing parents could really do about it.

Factory work during the industrial revolution also affected the family’s personal time, as people would be forced to work their entire day everyday in order to put food on the table. The average worker usually started at six in the morning and went late into the evening with only: a half hour for breakfast and tea, and an hour for dinner. This proved detrimental as each member of the family would be placed in different locations in the factory and would not see each other for the duration of the day. Unlike today, where people interact with their families on a fairly regular basis, if not daily, the definition of the family in the latter 19th century was changing. This would of course be a somewhat of a culture shock for county folk who were used to the isolation of family farms or small businesses and were now faced with the over shadowing of industrialized industry.

Before industrialization, the family was the basic social unit. Most families were rural, large, and self-sustaining; they produced and processed almost everything that was needed for their own support and for trading in the marketplace. Basically, families were self-sufficient. In these pre-industrial families women had a lot to do and their time was almost entirely absorbed by household tasks. Under industrialization the household was no longer the focus of production as the producti