The Industrial Revolution in America

Social relations transformed

I. The Great Transformation

A. Cottage industry 1. Putting out

2. Home & work

B. “American System” of manufacturing

1. Samuel Slater Slater

2. War of 1812

3. John H. Hall- interchangeable parts

4. Textiles – “leading industry

- production under one roof - control over mode of production - factory life and social change

II. New work, new workers

Origins of the American working class

A. Decline of the artisan

1. Declining need for skilled labor

2. Production, place & control- new obligations

B. Finding workers

1. Company towns

2. Lowell girls

C. Immigration

1. 1820-1830: 151,000 1830-1840: 600,000 1840-1850: + 1M

Demographic growth, cultural revolution

2. Out of Ireland

3. German immigration

D. Survival strategies1. (1st / 2nd generation)

- tenements - religion - neighborhoods/ communities

2. Leisure

3. Nativism

- racist - protestant “Know-Nothings”

E. “Blue collar” America

1. Factory discipline “wage slaves”

- working conditions

- living conditions

F. Labor & republicanism

1. Free Labor Ideology

“Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will”

G. Alternatives to industrialization

1. Utopian Socialism – Robert Owen, Saint-Simone

2. Agrarian communalism

3. Romanticism

III. The Middle Class

A. Bourgeois culture1. Distinguish themselves

2. Pro-capitalist, concerned with abuses

Liberalism

B. Home life and the Cult of Domesticity

1. Male & female “spheres”?

2. Empowerment, or “gilded cage”?

She's only a bird in a gilded cage,

A beautiful sight to see.You would think she was happyAnd free from care.She's not, though she seems to be.It's sad when you think of her wasted life,For Youth cannot mate with Age.And her beauty was soldFor an old man's gold.She's a bird in a gilded cage.

C. Romanticization and separation of male/female culture

1. Marriage, motherhood

2. Women and Society2nd Great AwakeningTemperanceAbolition

D. Early feminism

1. Born in Abolitionist movement Eliz. Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott

2. Seneca Falls ConferenceDeclaration of Sentiments

Reform born in industrial era increasingly intolerant of slavery…

Transcendentalism/Romanticism

2nd Great Awakening

Free Labor

Feminism

Abolition