Industrialism

With every change in life there is something lost or removed. In the case of Industrialism, the innocence of pastures and farms, family and country were swept away with the motions of the locomotive. In their place, social freedom and awareness, economic gain and power, technology came and dominated. After reading many writers from the Industrial Era, it is assumed that most had suspicion of the locomotives good for mankind and country. Though, the days of family and extended family may have been dwarfed, I can find no reasonable alternative to the locomotive coming into the lives of humans.

The locomotive was a powerful force in moving my things forward, women’s rights being one that began to move with great speed. After factory work became available the idea of the “factory girl,” the immoral promiscuous female, became a popular symbol for working women. Women who earned a living, helped to raise the economic standing of a nation were somehow the enemy, because they were “undermining the family structure” (487). Industrialization was widening the economic gap between the rich and the poor, and as in any time of ‘war’, women chipped in the close the gap so their families could eat. In essence women were told they weren’t needed. Their responsibility to industrialism and their country was to supply children for work, which the women could not feed. This made some women begin to look at the double-sided crazy talk of being a woman. It also made many people notice the effects factory work had on children.

Though working conditions were not ideal for women, children, or men; it was work. And many people needed the work to survive the times they were in. As, we do now. Those who do not work, do not eat; or eat very well.