The work of men and women during the industrial revolution.
From the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards, the Industrial Revolution began to change the way in which many people worked. The home was no longer the centre of work. This particularly affected women. Although there was still plenty of work that could be done at home, it tended to be low-paid work, such as making clothes or hats. All the better-paid jobs that had been created by the Industrial Revolution had to be done away from the home.
This gave women a difficult decision to settle on .They could move to where the work was — which was often impossible to combine with looking after a house and children — or they could stay at home and take whatever home-based work they could find, while they looked after the children and the house. Most of them took the decision to go to where the work was. The picture below shows A Punch cartoon 1844 entitled Capital and Labour, which contrasts the luxurious life of a mine owner with the harsh working conditions in the pits. Although the Industrial Revolution brought Britain as a whole, greater material prosperity, it also caused massive social upheavals not to mention changes in gender roles.
Women made good workers in textile factories. They were thought to be better than men were at very fiddly tasks, such as tying threads of cotton, because their fingers were smaller and more nimble. They tended to do what they were told and did not complain about long hours and bad working conditions. Above all, they were cheaper, because women were not paid as much as men. Although it might look unfair today, at that time nobody really questioned whether it was right to pay men and women differently. Employers assumed that men worked harder than women and that men had to earn enough money to support their families, while women were only working to top up the wages of their fathers or husbands.
The textile industry saw most of the early benefits of these innovations. The flying shuttle was invented 1738, rendering the old process of carrying the weft through the threads of the warp obsolete and enabling the weaver to double output. This in turn led spinners to seek mechanical aids to meet the increased demand for yarn. These innovations were swiftly followed by others, notably James Hargreaves's spinning jenny´ about 1764, Richard Arkwright's water- frame spinning roller 1768, and Samuel Crompton's `spinning mule´, a combination of Hargreaves's jenny and Arkwright's water-frame, 1779.
Edmund Cartwright's power loom was not perfected for another 25 years but by that time his Doncaster factory was equipped with a steam engine and a year or two later hundreds of his looms were selling to Manchester firms. Gradually the power loom began to be used in the woollen industry as well as the cotton trade for which it had been invented. This meant that home-based workers could not compete with the factories. Women could no longer make a living by making these products at home. Either they lost the income they had earned for such work or they had to concede and work in the factory - which was most often than not, a long way from their homes.
In June 19 1838, John Roebuck, a Member of Parliament, described a visit to a cotton mill in a letter to his wife, “Amongst other things I saw a cotton mill a sight that froze my blood. The place was full of women, young, all of them, some large with child, and obliged to stand twelve hours each day. Their hours are from five in the morning to seven in the evening, two hours of that being for rest, so that they stand twelve dear hours. The heat was excessive in some of the rooms, the stink pestiferous and in all an atmosphere of cotton dust. I nearly fainted. The young women were all pale, sallow, thin yet generally fairly grown, all with bare feet — a strange sight to English eyes.”
This tells me that attitudes to women’s work by 1800 were more of denunciation than of support.
The work of men and women during the Second World War.
During the Second World War, so many men had gone away to fight that women were needed to do their jobs. As a result, the number of women working in industry increased enormously. The war made it acceptable for women to work in shipyards, collieries and brickyards, as they had done a century or more earlier. Some of them took on highly skilled work as engineers, lathe-operators and carpenters. Later in the War, women made up most of the workforce in government munitions factories. In some of these jobs, the women were welcomed. In others, they were resented because with little or no training they did jobs that had previously been seen as being skilled. The images below and on the next page show women making a lorry in an engineering workshop and a female tram driver during the Second world war respectively.
There were however, important differences between the First and Second World War as you can see listed below.
- In 1941, every woman had to register for War work. Many more women were involved than in the First World War.
- In the First World War, civilian casualties were very low. In the Second World War, the War came to the towns and cities of Britain, with nightly bombing raids by German aircraft. Women were now in the front line’ of attack in a way they had not been in the First World War (see Source 1 on page 72).
- Other changes, such as the evacuation of children and strict food rationing, greatly affected every woman’s life in Britain.
- In the First World War, the trade unions had largely resented and resisted women taking men’s jobs. In the Second World War, the male-dominated trade unions agreed that women had equal rights to employment.
Even so, when the War ended there was a sense of history repeating itself. Women were once again demoted when the men came back and married women were asked to return to their homes even though most of the women produced better results both in quality and in quantity. This is from an interview with a Leeds bank worker, “When all the men came back after the War the bank said, ‘Thank you very much for doing all the work for our men while they’ve been away, but we are not going to have ladies on the counter’. Now you’ve got to teach the men.’ Instead of having four of us on the counter. they had seven men. We went back to the jolly old machines . . . the shorthand and the typing …we didn’t get paid extra for teaching the men”
The work of men and women since the Second World War.
The I55 960s was a boom time for some parts of British industry. Men’s and women’s wages were rising quickly, unemployment was not a major problem and many women had more money than ever before. The Prime Minister told the young people of the I960’s: ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ In the 1960’s the first effective contraceptive pill was made available to women. For the first time women could reliably decide whether and when to have children. They could therefore plan their careers more systematically, and in their relationships with men, the pill gave women a greater sense of freedom and equality.
Old ideas were being challenged in many areas of life. Television, which had first become available in the 1940s — but was bought only by the very rich — was present in the majority of homes in Britain by the 1960s. Television helped to spread ideas much more quickly than ever before. In the 1960’s more women than ever before went to university. With equal educational prospects, many women were becoming increasingly frustrated that the best jobs were still closed to them.
The result of all these pressures was that women joined to form an active and often angry ‘women’s liberation movement’. Many things that had gone unquestioned for hundreds of years now came under attack.
The pressure was such that in 1970, for the first time, it became illegal to pay women less than men did for the same work. In 1975, the Sex Discrimination Act outlawed discrimination in jobs, housing and other areas. In the longer term the movement gave women confidence to assert their rights in many areas, including their private lives.
This was an important moment in the history of gender roles because women were now being increasably recognized as having equal rights as men. Therefore, in looking at history I can come to the opinion about gender roles that they have significantly changed through the Middle Ages, the industrial revolution, the Second World War and into our present time.
Conclusion and Evaluation
This coursework has investigated the question of gender role stereotyping. I have found this work challenging because it was very difficult to get information on this particular subject and since the industrial revolution happened nearly 200 years ago.
I found out that the part involving the work of men and women during the Second World War was very difficult. This is because when researching, the data I found had the tendency to deal solely on the causes and the effects of the war. This was a great hindrance to my coursework knowledge. I finally found some of the information I needed orally from my grandfather whose father was present at the time of the industrial revolution and from the book Work In World War II which I found in the local library.
Although the evidence for gender stereotyping is all around us, we still sometimes found it difficult to complete research. I think this was difficult because the industrial revolution happened about two centuries ago. Although it was quite popular, I quickly found out that not many authors were keen on writing on this very subject.
However, some research was easy to complete. A good example would be the historical background. I found many books that contained a lot of information on the subject. Some few examples are The changing role of women, the Hutchinson Educational Encyclopaedia, etc
In the coursework, I have learned that there is still a lot of gender stereotyping, for example in toys; when advertising toy products on TV I have found that the manufacturers often present the product to a particular gender (girls are shown playing with Barbie or Sindy whereas boys are shown with Action man). Most things have changed from the Middle Ages, for example when a man hears of a woman doctor he will merely raise an eyebrow or may not react at all although this would have been very different some years back where such a thing as a woman doctor was unheard of.
In conclusion, I would answer the question by saying; yes, traditional gender roles have definitely changed.
