The Market Revolution
North
1815-1860
Study Guide: Identifications
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Transportation, Market & Industrial Revolutions
Putting Out system
Immigration and Scapegoat
Status of artisan
Rhode Island and Waltham System
Cult of Domesticity
Purity Crusade
Universal White Male suffrage
2nd Great Awakening
Study Guide: Questions
• What marked the increasing industrialization
in the US economy between 1815 – 1860?
• How and why did inequalities increase
among the rich, the middle class and the
working class?
• How did the socio-economic changes of the
Industrial Revolution impact women?
Changes that allowed for the
Industrial Revolution
• Transportation Revolution
– Improvements in transportation made that
transformation possible
• Federal, state and corporate investments in transportation
improvements
• Roads, Canals, Railroads
• Market Revolution
– Transition from domestic markets to for distant
markets
• Industrial Revolution
– Domestic hand labor to machine and factory output
• Immigration
– Cheap and exploitable labor
Immigration
• Political turmoil and Famine brought Massive
immigration
– Irish Potato Famine 1845-1846
• 2.5 Million (30% of Ireland’s population)
– German immigration 1840-60
• 4.2 Million
• Provided Cheap/Exploitable Labor
• Used to scapegoat political, economic & social
issues
“The Bog Trotters”
The Poor House from Galway
“The Irish fill our prisons, our
poor houses, scratch a convict
or a pauper, and the chances
are that you tickle the skin of an
Irish Catholic. Putting them on
a boat and sending them home
would end crime in this country”
The Great Fear of the Period
That Uncle Sam is Swallowed by
Foreigners
The Problem Solved
Thomas Nast
Cartoon,
1870
Expresses
the worry that
the Irish
Catholics
threatened
American
Freedom
Early Industry
• The northeast led Americans industrial revolution
– Household and small workshop production
– Putting-out system
• Local merchants furnished or put out raw materials to
rural households and paid at a piece rate for the labor
that converted those raw materials into manufacture
products. The supplying merchant then marketed and
sold these goods.
Shoe Makers, Massachusetts
Status of Artisan:
• Owned tools of
production
• Owned shops
• Managed time
and produce
• skilled workers
• Independence
• prestige
Industrial Espionage
• Slater’s Rhode Island System
– Water powered spinning machine
• Richard Arkwright -1769 had invented a water
power machine that spun yarn and thread
• Samuel Slater - Memorized machine & 1790
Imported the plans from England to Patuxet,
Rhode Island
– The Rhode Island System
• The countryside factory towns
• Labor of Farmer’s daughters
• Mill Villages
Waltham System
• Lowell’s Waltham
System
• Machines that turned raw
cotton into finished cloth
• Francis Cabot Lowell
Toured factories in
England in 1811
– Boston Associates Co.
1813
• Fully mechanized
• By the 1830s - Unskilled,
female labor
Daguerreotype of a young mill girl, c.
1850, Massachusetts
Middlesex Company Woolen
Mills, 1848
Bi-products of the Industrial
Revolution
• Widening gap between the rich and the
poor.
– Lowered Standard of living for producers in
society
• Creation of the Urban working class
– “The Hands”
• Increase wealth & concentration of wealth
– Growing middle class
• Commercial Class or Managerial class
• Redefinition of women’s role & character
Growing Inequality & Middle Class
Ideal
Consumer goods
Symbols of
their middle class
status
Notions of gentility
 distinction
between manual
and non manual
work
Cult of Domesticity
• The separation of work and
home
– New sense of classconsciousness.
• Middle class fathers left for
their jobs while mothers
governed households.
• Reduction in size of
families
• 1820s ministers and female
writers elevated the family role of
middle class women into a cult of
domesticity
Cult of Domesticity
– Biological difference
determined separate social
roles for men and women.
– Men:
• strong, aggressive and
ambitious, intelligent
• Place in business and
politics.
– Women:
• Kind, pure, emotional,
moral
• Place to preserve religion
and morality in the home
and family
Evangelical Crusades
• Early 19th C ministers bolstered doctrine of
separate spheres
– Clerical endorsement of female moral superiority in
exchange for women’s activism
• Decline of clerical authority in society
• Opposed forces that seemed to act against
women’s interests
– Materialism
– Intemperance
– Licentiousness
Purity Crusade
• Traditionally: both men and women wee
sexual beings, women weaker willed,
lustful and licentious and insatiable
• Purity Crusade: women lacked sexual
feeling, lust and carnality became a part of
men’s sphere
– Etiquette manuals counseled to deter male
advances
Professional Medicine & Women’s
Sexuality
• Women were Asexual beings
– Defined by their sex & sexual roles, yet did not desire
it
– Dr Alcott, “Women, as is well known, in a natural
state…seldom if ever makes any of those advances,
which clearly indicates sexual desire and for this very
plain reason, she does not feel them.”
– Only “low” women suffered from the indignity of
sexual desire
• Long periods of abstinence proper
• Masturbation damaged future offspring, and
caused “mania” and “idiocy” on the guilty party
Lowered Standard of Living
Twin Revolutions
• Universal White Male Suffrage Movement
– Suffrage extended to white males (18071860’s)
• By the 1800s race and gender began to replace
wealth and status as the basis for defining the
limits of political participation
• Second Great Awakening (1800-1840)
– Democratization of religion & Salvation
• Impact socially and politically
New York 1837
“Foreigners and
aliens to our
government and
laws, strangers to
our institutions are
permitted to flock to
this land and in a few
years are endowed
with all the privileges
of citizens, but we
native born
Americans…are
most of us shut out.”