Women During The Industrial Revolution

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The American Industrial Revolution was as real an actual revolution as the war for independence in the eighteenth century. Women started to work in America. An invention like the cotton gin was an efficient way to create cotton. Many southerners found this profitable and as a nation of entrepreneurs, we expanded the industry to create a larger profit flow. America produced an abundant amount of cotton to substantially sell to other nations and also develop cheap clothing for Americans. The Industrial Revolution changed American tremendously. In the beginning women had no rights and were strictly housewives intended to raise children. Throughout these times many changes occurred within the roles and rights of women. Women during this era were given opportunities for freedom. Women took advantage of these opportunities and…show more content…
In the drive to squeeze the last ounce of profit from the new factories, mill owners quickly found that they could hire unskilled workers to run the machines on the cheap, and could hire women even more cheaply. The work was long, and often dangerous. Women were expected to work fourteen to sixteen hour days with a break for lunch, six days a week. The mills were choked with flammable cotton dust and their chimneys spewed high-sulfur coal smoke into the air of the mill towns. Women, in addition, were used in other dangerous and degrading kinds of work, most notoriously mining, where they could squeeze into small coal seams to dig. Sometimes they were actually hitched to carts like animals to pull coal within low, narrow shafts. Yet the impact of these acts also reduced the earning power of many working class women and, along with the growing influence of middle-class notions of the home as the proper sphere of women, helped to foster the ideas of women as
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