Introduction

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Chapter 19: American Society in the Industrial Age

Introduction
As the industrial era progressed, social divisions in America became more apparent. The middle class, wage earners, women, and farmers all experienced industrialization differently. In middle-class families, husbands and wives functioned in separate spheres of responsibility, and children were closely supervised. Improvements in urban transportation allowed them to move out of city centers. Wage earners, especially unskilled ones, had a more difficult time with industrialization, as large-scale industry decreased and made more impersonal contact between employees and employer, machines set the pace of work, and workers were subject to swings of the business cycle and poverty dogged them. Nevertheless, although strikes revealed working-class unrest, many in the working class still believed that with ability and hard work they could rise from their circumstances. Growing numbers of women worked outside the home, most as domestic servants, but others in mills and sewing, nursing, the secretarial field, and in elementary education. Farmers in more established areas benefited from technology and easy access to urban markets, but farmers in general increasingly lived at the mercy of industrial cycles, and reacted with periodic waves of radicalism that shook off some of their previous laissez-faire attitudes. Despite the increasing rigidity of these emerging social divisions, America still remained a socially, economically, and educationally mobile society. The working class and the problems of the cities were of particular concern during this era, probably because the influential urban middle class saw them every day. Working-class slums (and, soon, ethnic neighborhoods) were being filled by new, and different-looking immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, alarming many with their alien customs, the threat they appeared to pose to "American" laborers, and their reputed radicalism. Meanwhile, at the same time that their concentrations of people fostered varied social, artistic, and intellectual opportunities, cities were overwhelmed by their population growth. Reformers, then, were driven by a desire to clean up the cities, alleviate poverty, and in the process, "Americanize" the immigrants. Some church leaders, preaching the "Social Gospel," and settlement houses made up the ranks of the reform movement.

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