The purpose of this research is to examine ways in which the industrial revolution of the 19th century changed the lives of people in Europe in general and European women in particular, as far as women's work was concerned. The plan of the research will be to set forth the background of women's position in European society in connection with the industrial revolution, and then to explore the impact of industrialization on women's work in the latter years of the 19th century. The principal focus of the research will be on women in France from 1890-1900.
In the last ten years of the 19th century, social and cultural changes were beginning to emerge as decisively as material changes that had come about as a result of the Industrial Revolution. In order to understand the position of women affected by the Industrial Revolution in these years, it is necessary to understand the social problems that had emerged because of it. The key point, as will be noted hereafter, was this: that socialism was equated to unionism, both were equated to anarchy, and all three were highly politicized realms of belief and action. The fear of unions on the part of the bourgeois and ruling classes in Europe stemmed in significant part from the then relatively recent Marxist interpretation of the Industrial Revolution. Tuchman's discussion of the socialist answer to problems of an industrial society encompasses Marx's argument.
Collective ownership was the answer of both [socialists and anarchists] to the terrible riddle posed by the Nineteenth Century: that the greater the material progress, the wider and deeper the resulting poverty. Marx drew from the riddle . . . the economic analysis of history. The effect of the Industrial Revolution had been to transform the worker from an independent producer who owned his own tools into a factory hand, a propertyless, destitute member of society, dependent for his livelihood on the capitalist who owned ...