The Industrial Revolution began in the year 1750 with Britain’s textile industry. The decade of 1750 - 1760 it is generally known to be as the eve of the Industrial Revolution. The profits of cloth merchants made from exports in wool, linen, and cotton cloth increased through the speedy process of newly invented spinners and weavers which superseded the then outdated slow-making process of manual labor. Of these new textile inventions were the flying shuttle (John Kay), the spinning jenny (James Hargreaves), the water frame (Richard Arkwright), the spinning mule (Samuel Crompton), and the cotton gin (Ely Whitney). Though, in order for such inventions to cause the economic expansion and experience revolution in comprehensiveness, additional industrial augmentations essentially had to be made. The Industrial Revolution needed to spread to the transportation aspect of the economy. The invention of James Watts’ steam engine of the late 1790s is what came on to the scene next. This sufficed for a while until steam energy went to new heights in 1820 with the railroad engine which became most momentous in Britain’s new means of efficiency and facilitation of profit increase. The railroad connected all cities thereby revolutionizing Britain’s way of life and travel. Railroads made transportation of manufactured products and goods much cheaper. Railroads created many new jobs for miners and railroad workers.
In the agricultural aspect of the Industrial Revolution, it was the massive changes thereof that were constitutive for the sustenance of the then factory work force. Agriculture was the paramount source of raw materials for the textile industry. At first, in early agricultural practices, land was left to lie fallow after being exhausted through cultivation. Agricultural knowledge and practice was improved later through the discovery of clover and other legume cultivation as being the new exceptionally vital form of restoration of fertility in the soil. More newly discovered knowledge and practices of agriculture made the provision of food more plentiful for livestock to ensure their survival through the annual winter months. More herds and livestock were able to be bred giving more provision of meat for families and some surplus of livestock each spring leaving farmers with more than what they had during the spring prior. Farming implements began to be made out of metal instead of wood. The energy of horsepower replaced the use of oxen. Insect control was improved by new formulas of insecticides. Enclosure of common village fields into individual landholdings and the partition of infertile into private property is what led to the concentration of ownership of such land into the hands of the few with the establishment of farming technique improvements being brought onto the scene and being used in greater magnitude.
It wasn’t until after 50 years of Britain experiencing the Industrial Revolution alone that the United States and other European nations began to experience it as well. Unfortunately for Britain, the next two centuries would involve the United States and Germany surpassing them in imperial and superpower status in 1820. Sophisticated western technology would be applied to artillery and machine guns putting other nations at a gargantuan military disadvantage against the West. With new international markets and access to serious accumulative capital Americans felt valiant and insufferable. With coal powered engines initially reforming energy and later having fossil fuels take the production process to new heights, the speed of manufacturing gained monumental augmentation with automatic processes replacing people and animals. Every newly established form of sophistication in technology, transportation, and communication that took place in Britain was now happening in the new United States. This whole industrialization process not only affected all portions of the economy but also inspired reactionary upheavals and rebellions much like the one of the American colonies rising up against Britain. This involved the United States’ strong desires of the abolishment of a monarchial rule to create a republican rule for them in effort to put more power in the hands of the people. This reactionary upheaval spread into France giving birth to the French Revolution of 1789 thereby launching new Enlightenment principles of equality, religious freedom, inalienable citizenry rights, amendments of republican constitutionalism, and pervasive nationalistic sentiments. It is from this we can say about how the prevalence of secularism and a multi-religiously influenced culture in American and other Western nations was inspired. It started with the Industrial Revolution and French Revolutions’ political and social reactionary groups spawning gradual increases of apostates and people being desirous to be emancipated from religious hierarchies deciding for them their religious identity.
The Industrial Revolution by all means not only drastically advanced people’s medical, agrarian, and industrial knowledge, mechanical apparatuses, and procedures of making things, but it also changed familial life meagerly in the initial phase. Before the Industrial revolution, the members of each family were much closer with each other since farming, the workplace, and home were all on one land and in one place. The change that occurred here within this aspect of the Industrial Revolution was the division of labor; the breaking down in mode of production and separation of everything into smaller units. Since the division of labor led to cheap implements and materials and cheap labor with new farming methods and machinery expediting mass production and profitability, farmers were enabled to buy large masses of land to create super farms employing crop rotation, soil improvements, and better stock. In order to foster the progression of the Industrial Revolution, the farming industry had to make this change in diminishing the number of farmers thenceforth forcing families to move away from rural areas and farm life into suburban areas and cities where they would have to find new jobs.
Both women and their very young children were forced to work alongside their husbands inside mills and factories. Due to how the industry and the amenities of American life has programmed America’s thinking, it strikes Americans as unimaginable and unconscionable what the children of this era had to endure. When women would go to work they either had to give their infants and toddlers over to some expensive and dangerous wet nurse or bring the infant or toddler with them to work and beforehand drug them with opiates to quiet them for prevention against alerting the foreman of their violation of work rules. Before the year 1870, 50% of the working class in the textile industry was made up of women, and the wages they earned were less than that of the men. It was not until 1844 that the disproportionate number of working hours and greatly minimal time of recess was outlawed by government interventions. From the rural textile mills of 1769 onward, children were made to be pauperized apprentices taken from orphanages and workhouses. They were given housing, clothing, and food but didn’t receive any monetary earnings for their exorbitantly long hours of physically incapacitating workforce tasks. Charles Dickens referred to these work places as the “dark satanic mills.” E.P Thompson said of them as being “places of sexual license, foul language, cruelty, violent accidents, and alien manners.” In the early 1800s, 40% of the children in the British work force in industry were under the age of 15.
When the end of the 1800s came around, the quality of family life was remarkably and radically changed again, and it can be said that it was for the better this time. Middle class families began to redefine the meaning of the familial unit and the reason for bearing progeny. At this point, women and children were seen as needing to be sheltered from the risky and endangering liabilities of the industrial work force. Women took on a new role being that of wife and a stronghold of security and stability and the primary source of affection, nurturing, and purity for the progeny.
Instead of being an extension of the work force for their entire lives, children spent the majority of the time of their childhood and partially of their adolescence in the educational system developing the compulsory coping mechanisms, skills, and integrity for withstanding against the asperities of the business and professional life. Furthermore, it was at this time that a certain level of educative training was becoming requisite for employment. Males, especially, were very much expected to follow in the footsteps of their father’s consistent diligence and the successful honing of skills of a largely laborious life style. In the midst of such high standardizations of immensity in masculinity, children experienced pressures and acerbities from their parents, especially the father. This often likely led to bitterness, resentment, and in some aspects emotional disconnection on the part of the child.
Women eventually became exasperated by being perpetually confined to the boundaries of tending to the home-life and all of the domestic affairs thereof. At this time, marital infidelity committed on the man’s part was culturally acceptable and condoned to a certain extent so long as the man went about this type of doing discreetly, and in the meantime, the woman was still expected to still uphold familial stability, devoutness, and hallowedness.
Women eventually became exasperated by being perpetually confined to the boundaries of tending to the home-life and all of the domestic affairs thereof. At this time, marital infidelity committed on the man’s part was culturally acceptable and condoned to a certain extent so long as the man went about this type of doing discreetly, and in the meantime, the woman was still expected to still uphold familial stability, devoutness, and hallowedness.
