Give an account of the social change in Europe in 19th and 20th centuries.
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(from 2 to 4 up to 10 percent of total births) among young rural as well as urban workers. Sexual pleasure, or its quest, became more important for young adults. Similar symptoms developed among some middle-class men, who exploited female servants or the growing numbers of brothels that dotted the large cities and that often did exceptional business during school holidays. Respectable young middle-class women held back from these trends. They were, however, increasingly drawn to beliefs in a romantic marriage, which became part of the new family ideal. Marriage age for middle-class women also dropped, creating an age disparity between men and women in the families of this class. Economic criteria for family formation remained important in many social sectors, but young people enjoyed more freedom in courtship, and other factors, sexual or emotional or both, gained increasing legitimacy.
Changes in family life, rooted in shifts in modes of livelihood and methods of work, had substantial impact on all family members. Older people gained new roles, particularly in working-class families, where they helped out as baby-sitters for grandchildren. Women’s economic power in the family decreased. Many groups of men argued vigorously that women should stick to family concerns. By the 1830s and ’40s one result was the inception of laws that regulated women’s hours of work (while leaving men free from protection or constraints); this was a humanitarian move to protect women’s family roles, but it also reduced women’s economic opportunities on grounds of their special frailty. The position of children also began to be redefined. Middle-class ideals held that children were innocents, to be educated and nurtured. Most working-class families urged a more traditional view of children as contributors to the family economy, but they too could see advantages in sending their children to school where possible and restricting their work in dangerous factories. Again, after the first decades of industrialization, reform laws began to respond. Legislation in Britain, France, and Prussia during the 1830s restricted the employment of young children in the factories and encouraged school attendance.
Along with its impact on daily patterns of life and family institutions, economic change began to shift Europe’s social structure and create new antagonisms among urban social classes. The key division lay between the members of the middle class, who owned businesses or acquired professional education, and those of the working class, who depended on the sale of labour for a wage. Neither group was homogeneous. Many middle-class people criticized the profit-seeking behaviour of the new factory owners. Artisans often shunned factory workers and drew distinctions based on their traditional prestige and (usually) greater literacy. Some skilled workers, earning good wages, emulated middle-class people, seeking education and acquiring domestic trappings such as pianos.
Nevertheless, the social divide was considerable. It increasingly affected residential patterns, as wealthier classes moved away from the crowded slums of the poor, in contrast to the greater mixture in the quarters of preindustrial cities. Middle-class people deplored the work and sexual habits of many workers, arguing that their bad behaviour was the root cause of poverty. City governments enacted harsh measures against beggars, while new national laws attempted to make charity harder to obtain. The British Poor Law Reform of 1834, in particular, tightened the limits on relief in hopes of forcing able-bodied workers to fend for themselves.
Class divisions manifested themselves in protest movements. Middle-class people joined political protests hoping to win new rights against aristocratic monopoly. Workers increasingly organized on their own despite the fact that new laws banned craft organizations and outlawed unions and strikes. Some workers attacked the reliance on machinery in the name of older, more humane traditions of work. Luddite protests of this sort began in Britain during the decade 1810–20. More numerous were groups of craft workers, and some factory hands, who formed incipient trade unions to demand better conditions as well as to provide mutual aid in cases of sickness or other setbacks. National union movements arose in Britain during the 1820s, though they ultimately failed. Huge strikes in the silk industry around Lyon, France, in 1831 and 1834 sought a living minimum wage for all workers.