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Popular Courses. Economy Economics. Article Sources. In the laboring class at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, women traditionally married men of the same social status e.
Marriage outside this norm was not common. During the Industrial Revolution, marriage shifted from this tradition to a more sociable union between wife and husband in the laboring class. Women and men tended to marry someone from the same job, geographical location, or social group.
The rural pre-industrial work sphere was usually shaped by the father, who controlled the pace of work for his family. However, factories and mills undermined the old patriarchal authority to a certain extent. Factories put husbands, wives, and children under the same conditions and authority of the manufacturer masters. In the latter half of the Industrial Revolution, women who worked in factories or mills tended not to have children or had children that were old enough to take care of themselves, as life in the city made it impossible to take a child to work unlike in the case of farm labor or cottage industry where women were more flexible to combine domestic and work spheres and deprived women of a traditional network of support established in rural communities.
Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Search for:. Urbanization Learning Objective Connect the development of factories to urbanization. Key Points Industrialization led to the creation of the factory, and the factory system contributed to the growth of urban areas as large numbers of workers migrated into the cities in search of work in the factories.
In , Friedrich Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England, arguably the most important record of how workers lived during the early era of industrialization in British cities. He described backstreet sections of Manchester and other mill towns where people lived in crude shanties and overcrowded shacks, constantly exposed to contagious diseases. These conditions improved over the course of the 19th century. Transportation advancements lowered transaction and food costs, improved distribution, and made more varied foods available in cities.
The historical debate on the question of living conditions of factory workers has been very controversial. While retail emporiums could be blocks long and only a few stories tall, other business rented space in thinner buildings built much higher. By the late s, structures that had once been built with iron began to be built with a structural steel—a new, stronger kind of steel. The practice had begun in Chicago, championed by the architect Louis Sullivan, who designed the first skyscrapers there.
Even then, such skyscrapers had to be tapered; otherwise, the weight from the top floors could make the whole structure collapse. Creating structural steel for skyscrapers required entirely different production methods than had been required to make Bessemer steel which had been used primarily for railroad rails. Quantity and speed were the main requirements of producing Bessemer steel. Structural steel required a more carefully made product.
The demands of structural steel encouraged steelmakers like Andrew Carnegie to redesign entire factories, most notably replacing older Bessemer converters with the open-hearth process. This new kind of steelmaking not only produced higher quality steel, it also required fewer skilled workers. The other innovation that made skyscrapers possible was the electric elevator.
Elisha Graves Otis designed the first reliable elevator in With electric power, it became possible to rise sixty stories in a matter of seconds. With elevators, tenants willing paid a premium in order to get better views out their windows.
Without elevators, nobody would have bothered to erect a building taller than five stories. The construction of skyscrapers was itself a terrific example of the industrial age coordination of labor and materials distribution.
Steel skeletons meant that the unornamented higher sections of a building could be worked on even before the inevitable elaborate ornamental fringes on the lower part of the building were finished. This saved both time and money. When New York got so crowded that there was no space to store raw materials, the appearance of those materials would be carefully choreographed, and they would be taken directly off of flatbed trucks and placed in their exact positions near the tops of new buildings.
Around the turn of the 20th century, a major skyscraper could be built in as little as one year. The faster a building could be built, the faster an owner could collect rents and begin to earn back construction expenses. The great benefit of skyscrapers was the ability to compress economic activity into smaller areas.
Each building is an almost complete city, often comprising within its walls, banks and insurance offices, post office and telegraph office, business exchanges restaurants, clubrooms and shops.
By the s, the value of land in Manhattan grew so fast because of its possible use for skyscrapers that second generation industrial families sold their mansions, since they no longer wanted to pay huge property taxes on them. The same basic principles of skyscraper production—build it quick and large, and pack it with people—motivated the way that builders produced other kinds of urban domiciles.
They came about as the result of a design contest, but were generally so crowded that they did more harm than good to the people who lived in them. Four families might live on a single floor with only two bathrooms between them. Designed to let light and air into central courtyards which explains why they were shaped like a dumbbell from above , stacked up back-to-back, one against the other they did neither. Widely copied, New York City actually outlawed this design for new buildings in —but the old structures remained.
Apartment houses made it easier to pack people into small urban areas and therefore live closer to where they worked. To counter these unequal tendencies, New Yorkers developed the idea of the cooperative, where many people bought a single building and managed it themselves. Lavish apartments became alternatives for mansions once Manhattan real estate became too expensive for all except those with huge fortunes.
The farther away that people lived from central business districts, the more they needed efficient transportation. Streetcars helped, to an extent, but passenger lines that centered on downtown neighborhoods left large areas that could be occupied with housing for a growing working population, provided that these residents had their own way to get around. It also revolutionized the entire concept of American production.
He would make a market for his cars by producing them so cheaply that nearly every American could afford one. Ford could achieve both quality and a low price at scale because of the assembly line. In the same way that a single carcass was picked apart by men with specialized jobs as it moved along a line, mounted upon a hook, Ford arranged his new factory at Highland Park so that men with highly specialized assignments could build an automobile much faster than before.
The assembly line moved work to the men rather than forcing men to move to the work, thereby saving valuable time and energy. It also extended the concept of the division of labor to its logical extreme so that workers would only perform one function in a much larger assembly process all day, every day. The applicability of these principles to the manufacturing of just about everything is what made Ford such an important figure in the history of industrialization.
Mass production became possible for all kinds of things that had once seemed far removed from the automobile. Ford built Model Ts at three different facilities over the entire history of that vehicle. He improved his production methods over time which included introducing and improving upon the assembly line so that he could produce them more cheaply and efficiently. Efficiency depended on speed, and speed depended upon the exact place in the factory where those machines were placed.
Because Ford made only one car, he could employ single-purpose machine tools of extraordinarily high quality. The company also used lots of other automated manufacturing equipment, like gravity slides and conveyors, to get parts of the car from one place to another in its increasingly large, increasingly mechanized factories.
Because the assembly line moved the work to the men rather than the men to the work, the company could control the speed of the entire operation. Like earlier manufacturers, Ford depended upon standardized, identical parts to produce more cars for less, but the assembly line also made it possible to conserve labor—not by mechanizing jobs that had once been done by hand, but by mechanizing work processes and paying employees just to feed and tend to those machines.
This was not fun work to do. Before Ford came along, cars were boutique goods that only rich people could afford to operate. After Ford introduced the assembly line actually a series of assembly lines for every part of the car , labor productivity improved to such a degree that mass production became possible. Perhaps more important than mass production was mass consumption, since continual productivity improvements meant that Ford could lower the price of the Model T every year, while simultaneously making small but significant changes that steadily improved the quality of the car.
Mass production eliminated choice, since Ford produced no other car, but Ford built variations of the Model T, like the runabout with the same chassis, and owners retro-fitted their Model Ts for everything from camping to farming.
The increased number of automobiles on city streets further congested already congested downtown areas. Streetcars got blocked. Pedestrians died in gruesome traffic accidents. One of the basic requirements of having so many new cars on the roads was to improve the quality and quantity of roads. Local city planners tended to attack such problems on a case-by-case basis, laying pavement on well-traveled roads and widening them when appropriate.
New traffic rules, such as the first one-way streets, appeared in an effort to alleviate these kinds of problems. Traffic control towers and traffic lights—the mechanical solution to a problem inspired by industrialization—also appeared for the first time during this era.
Cities grew when industries grew during this era. Since people had to live near where they worked and few people lived in skyscrapers , many builders built out into undeveloped areas. If a city had annexed much of the land around it previous to these economic expansions like Detroit , those areas became parts of a larger city. Chicago was so confident of further growth during this period that it built streetcar lines into vacant fields.
To meet rising demand for housing, homebuilders applied industrial principles to building—using standardized parts that were themselves the result of mass production techniques. By the s, buying pre-cut mail order houses became big business. After , mechanization made factories even more productive thanks to technological improvements.
The electrical and chemical industries formed the vanguard for the blending of science and the useful arts during this era. By the s, engineers had been formally integrated into the management hierarchies of countless American industries. Reorganization of production merged with technological improvement had made mass production possible long before Ford developed the assembly line. By the end of that decade, it could produce , cigarettes in a day.
By the s, mass production had arrived in industries that produced goods that were much more expensive than cigarettes. Among the other manufacturers that used Fordist principles during the s were the makers of home appliances, like refrigerators and radios. General Electric, for example, built an eighteen million dollar assembly line for its Monitor Top refrigerator and sold a million refrigerators just four years after its introduction in Even craft-dominated industries like furniture making came to depend upon mass production to make their products more available to the masses.
People who moved from farms to cities desperately needed furniture for their new urban residences, but in industrial towns like Grand Rapids, Michigan, they could not afford pieces made by craftsman.
New mass-produced models made with minimal carving and overlays, based on stylish patterns, found a market all over the country. It helped that companies like Bassett, founded in Virginia in , discouraged their workers from forming unions, just like Ford did.
An unorganized workforce made it easier for industrialists to impose changes in the production process without resistance from employees. The changeover from the Model T to the Model A, in , demonstrated the limits of industrialized mass production.
The Model A was incredibly expensive, and Ford had to shut his main plant for months to retool the production line for his new models. While the new car sold well initially, sales dropped precipitously as the Depression deepened. Urban building slowed precipitously during the Depression too. Since cities were the focal points of industrialization, urban citizens suffered disproportionately when production waned.
Of course, when the United States sank into the economic downturn of the Great Depression, both urban and industrial growth decreased sharply. It is difficult to cite previous scholarship on either industrialization or urbanization from precisely the — period because both these trends pre- and post-date this period.
Equally importantly, both are so broad, in the sense that they encompass all kinds of industries and locations that they include a huge range of books and other sources.
While none of the following suggestions are exact fits for these subjects during this time, they are all worth reading because they cast at least some light on industrialization and urbanization during this particular time period. It covers a few very important industries in detail like automobile manufacturing , but it is at its best when dealing with the similarities in production technologies from industry to industry.
My own Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life is a simplified introduction to these principles and a summary of their effects on many aspects of American history during this period, including urbanization.
A number of excellent studies of important industries during this period show how industrialization progressed in some detail. Rockefeller, Sr. Richard R.
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