Okay y'all, let's finish up the Industrial Revolution by talking about how it caused prodigious amounts of change in social hierarchies and standards of living. And oh baby, it's a juicy one. So if you're ready to get them brain cows milks, let's get to it. So first let's talk about how industrialization affected social class hierarchies.
And this is where we witness the rise of brand spanking new social classes. First there was the industrial working class, which was made up mainly of factory workers and miners. And most of this class was composed of all those rural people who had moved to industrial urban areas in search of work on account of the increased mechanization of farming that left them jobless and, uh, real hungry. Now it's going to be important for you to remember here that prior to the industrial revolution, most workers possessed some kind of skill that their work required. Like farmers had been taught the delicate art of plowing fields and tending to livestock, artisans had developed the craft of carving wood and assembling it, et cetera.
But now all All these folks in the working class spent their days in factories performing unskilled labor. It was the machines that were precision instruments, not Randy over there pulling the lever to make the machine crank. That meant that the working class was viewed by factory managers as kind of interchangeable parts themselves since they could easily be replaced with another unskilled worker.
Now to be fair, the working class did benefit in some ways from the rise of industry. For example, on average, their wages were higher than they were in the rural places from which they migrated. However, there were steep costs as well.
Much of the danger of factory work and mining, the crowded living conditions and shoddy tenements, the spread of disease, and the mind-numbing repetitive work fell on them. Okay, now the second class to appear during this time was the middle class, and they arguably benefited the most from industrialization. This class included wealthy factory owners and managers as well as other white-collar workers like lawyers and doctors and teachers.
And they were called white-collar workers because they were workers because, you know, they wore white collars and didn't get filthy like the working class rabble. Anyway, the middle class had enough money to live pretty cushy lives. They could afford manufactured products that improved their quality of life, and in some of the upper parts of the middle class, they had enough money to kind of buy their way into the aristocracy in some places. And in general, the middle class understood themselves as having risen from the ranks of the working class strictly by their own ingenuity and effort, and that anyone who did not rise to the middle class was lazy and lethargic. I work 14 hours a day with seven fingers and one eye and explosive diarrhea.
on account of the cholera. Well, maybe if you had worked a little harder you wouldn't be in this situation. And then the third social class was known as the industrialists.
Sometimes known as captains of industry, industrialists were at the top of the social hierarchy, and because of the incredible wealth they gained by owning large industrial corporations, they soon became more powerful than the traditional landed aristocracy. Now industrialization had a profound effect on women as well, but those effects were different depending on what class they were in. Working class women in general worked wage-earning jobs in factories just as men did since the beginning of the 19th century. pittance of wages their husbands earned was not enough to sustain a family. And on a related note, in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, children as young as five worked wage jobs in factories and mines as well.
Like five-year-olds, digging coal out of the center of the earth, shaking hands with the devil, and like they were okay with this? Well, yeah, because remember, most folks in the working class had migrated from rural areas and many of them were farmers. However, men, women, and children in the industrial environment were often split up and worked in different factories or mines.
So while children were still working, they were doing so apart from the traditional context of the family. But once the dangers of industrial work became clear, some governments passed laws to remove children from the difficulties of industrial work and get them into school. Anyway, back to women, and now let's consider the experience of middle class women during this period, and it was, uh, different. Owing to their position in the middle class, their husbands made enough money to support the family, which means middle class women as a general rule did not work.
And so what are these women going to do if they have no paid labor to do? Well they stayed home in their separate sphere and got all domestic. Therefore middle class women were increasingly defined by their domestic roles as homemakers whose main task was to create a safe haven for their working men and a nurturing environment for their children. Because after all, those sandwiches ain't gonna make them sell.
Okay, and finally let's consider some of the challenges people in the industrial age faced, and I'm feeling saucy so I'm gonna give you three. And it's not just the sauce, you actually have to know these three. Now here's where I tell you that the rapid pace of industrialization meant that industrial cities grew far too quickly for their infrastructure to keep up. And that leads us to the first problem, namely the rampant problem of pollution in industrial cities. Coal smoke from factories and steamships covered towns in soot and often resulted in a toxic fog that lingered over cities causing health problems for those who lived there.
And then both industrial and human waste was often dumped into nearby rivers which polluted the drinking water. For example, the water in London's River Thames had gotten so low due to drought and all the... Fecal deposits produced a horrible stink that hung over the city for a long time.
So, you know, that's nasty. Anyway, the second problem came in the form of housing shortages. Because more people were flooding into cities than there were places for them to live, hastily constructed tenements were built to house them. In some cases, several families lived together in small apartments. apartments which were poorly ventilated, and sanitation was almost non-existent.
And that created the conditions for the rapid spread of diseases like typhoid and cholera, which sickened and killed many among the working class. And the third problem was increased crime. With so many poor and working class people concentrated into urban areas, there was a significant rise both in theft, oftentimes stealing in order to survive, and violent crime, which was often associated with higher levels of alcohol consumption.
Okay, it's the end of the unit, so click here to grab my AP World Heimler Review Guide, which is the fastest way to study for your course exams and your exam in May. Or you can click here to keep reviewing. reviewing my other topics in unit five so thanks for coming around and i'll catch on the flip-flop heimler out