Conditions of employment and sanitation are acknowledged to have been best in the larger and newer factories. As successive Factory Acts, between 1819 and 1846, placed greater and greater restrictions on the employment of children and adolescents, the owners of the larger factories, which were more easily and frequently subject to visitation and scrutiny by the factory inspectors, increasingly chose to dismiss children from employment rather than be subjected to elaborate, arbitrary, and ever-changing regulations on how they might run a factory which employed children. The result of legislative intervention was that these dismissed children, who needed to work in order to survive, were forced to seek jobs in smaller, older, and more out-of-the-way factories, where the conditions of employment, sanitation, and safety were markedly inferior. Those who could not find new jobs were reduced to the status of their counterparts a hundred years before, that is, to irregular agricultural labor, or worse— in the words of Professor von Mises—to “infest the country as vagabonds, beggars, tramps, robbers and prostitutes.”
Child labor was not ended by legislative fiat; child labor ended when it became economically unnecessary for children to earn wages in order to survive—when the income of their
2 Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1949, p. 615.
parents became sufficient to support them. The emancipators and benefactors of those children were not legislators or factory inspectors, but manufacturers and financiers. Their efforts and investments in machinery led to a rise in real wages, to a growing abundance of goods at lower prices, and to an incomparable improvement in the general standard of living.
The proper answer to the critics of the Industrial Revolution is given by Professor T. S. Ashton:
There are today on the plains of India and China men and women, plague-ridden and hungry, living lives little better, to outward appearance, than those of the cattle that toil with them by day and share their places of sleep by night. Such Asiatic standards, and such un-mechanized horrors, are the lot of those who increase their numbers without passing through an industrial revolution.8
Let me add that the Industrial Revolution and its consequent prosperity were the achievement of capitalism and cannot be achieved under any other politico-economic system. As proof, I offer you the spectacle of Soviet Russia which combines industrialization—and famine.
WOMEN AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
To condemn capitalism one must first misrepresent its history. The notion that industrial capitalism led to nothing but misery and degradation for women is an article of faith among critics of capitalism. It is as prevalent as the view that children were victimized and exploited by the Industrial Revolution—and it is as false.
Let us examine the source of this view. To appreciate the benefits that capitalism brought to women, one must compare their status under capitalism with their condition in the preceding centuries. But the nineteenth-century critics of capitalism did not do this; instead, they distorted and falsified history, glamorizing the past and disparaging everything modern by contrast
1T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830, London: Oxford University Press, 1948, p. 161.
For instance, Richard Oastler, one of the most fanatical nineteenth-century enemies of capitalism, claimed that everyone was better off spiritually and materially in the Middle Ages than in the early nineteenth century. Describing medieval England, Oastler rhapsodized about the lost golden age: “Oh, what a beautiful ship was England once! She was well built, well manned, well provisioned, well rigged! All were then merry, cheerful and happy on board.”
This was said of centuries in which “the bulk of the population were peasants in a servile condition, bound by status, not free to change their mode of life or to move from their birthplace”4—when people had only the promise of happiness in the life beyond the grave to succor them against decimating plagues, recurring famines and at best half-filled stomachs—when people lived in homes so infested with dirt and vermin that one historian’s verdict about these cottages is: “From a health point of view the only thing to be said in their favor was that they burnt down very easily!”5
Oastler represented the viewpoint of the medievalists. The socialists, who agreed with them, were equally inaccurate historians.
For example, describing the conditions of the masses in the pre-industrial seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Friedrich Engels alleged: “The workers vegetated throughout a passably comfortable existence, leading a righteous and peaceful life in all piety and probity; and their material position was far better off than their successors.”
This was written of an age characterized by staggeringly high mortality rates, especially among children—crowded towns and villages untouched by sanitation—notoriously high gin consumption. The working-class diet consisted mainly of oatmeal, milk, cheese, and beer; while bread, potatoes, coffee, tea, sugar, and meat were still expensive luxuries. Bathing was infrequent and laundering a rarity because soap was so costly, and clothing—which had to last a decade or generation—would not last if washed too often.
The most rapid change wrought by the Industrial Revolution was the shifting of textile production out of the home and into the factory. Under the previous system, called “domestic industry,” the spinning and weaving was done in the workers’s own home with the aid of his wife and children. When technological advances caused the shifting of textile
« Buer, p. 250. ‘Ibid., p. 88.
production into factories, this led, said one critic of capital ism, “to the breakup of the home as a social unit.”6
Mrs. Neff writes approvingly that “under the system ol domestic industry the parents and the children had workec together, the father the autocratic head, pocketing the familj earnings and directing their expenditure.” Her tone turns tc condemnation when she recounts: “But under the factor} system the members of the family all had their own earnings they worked in separate departments of the mill, coming home only for food and sleep. The home was little but £ shelter.”
The factories were held responsible, by such critics, foi every social problem of that age, including promiscuity, infidelity, and prostitution. Implicit in the condemnation of women working in the factories was the notion that a woman’s place is in the home and that her only proper role is tc keep house for her husband and to rear his children. The factories were blamed simultaneously for removing girls from the watchful restraints of their parents and for encouraging early marriages; and later, for fostering maternal negligence and incompetent housekeeping, as well as for encouraging lack of female subordination and the desire for luxuries.
It is a damning indictment of the pre-factory system to consider what kind of “luxuries” the Industrial Revolution brought within reach of the working-class budget. Women sought such luxuries as shoes instead of clogs, hats instead of shawls, “delicacies” (like coffee, tea, and sugar) instead of “plain food.”
Critics denounced the increasing habit of wearing ready-made clothes, and they viewed the replacement of wools and linens by inexpensive cottons as a sign of growing poverty. Women were condemned for not making by hand that which they could buy more cheaply, thanks to the revolution in textile production. Dresses no longer had to last a decade— women no longer had to wear coarse petticoats until they disintegrated from dirt and age; cheap cotton dresses and undergarments were a revolution in personal hygiene.
The two most prevalent nineteenth-century explanations of why women worked in the factories were: (a) that their “husbands preferred to remain home idle, supported by their wives,” and (b) that the factory system “displaced adult men and imposed on women ‘the duty and burden of supporting their husbands and families.'” These charges are examined in
•Wanda Neff, Victorian Working Women, New York: Columbia University Press, 1920, p. 51.
Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry, a definitive study by Dr. Margaret Hewitt of the University of Exeter. Her conclusion is: “Neither of these assumptions proves to have any statistical foundation whatsoever.”7
In fact, women worked in the factories for far more conventional reasons. Dr. Hewitt enumerates them: many women worked because “their husbands’ wages were insufficient to keep the home going”; others were widowed or deserted; others were barren, or had grown-up children; some had husbands who were unemployed, or employed in seasonal jobs; and a few chose to work in order to earn money for extra comforts in the home, although their husbands’ wages were sufficient to cover necessities.8
What the factory system offered these women was—not misery and degradation—but a means of survival, of economic independence, of rising above the barest subsistence. Harsh as nineteenth-century factory conditions were, compared to twentieth-century conditions, women increasingly preferred work in the factories to any other alternatives open to them, such as domestic service, or back-breaking work in agricultural gangs, or working as haulers and pullers in the mines; moreover, if a woman could support herself, she was not driven into early marriage.
Even Professor Trevelyan, who persistently disparaged the factories and extolled “the good old days,” admitted:
the women who went to work in the factories