At the top of European society stood a wealthy elite, constituting
but 5 percent of the population but controlling
between 30 and 40 percent of its wealth. This
nineteenth-century elite was an amalgamation of the traditional
landed aristocracy that had dominated European
society for centuries and the emerging upper middle class.
In the course of the nineteenth century, aristocrats coalesced
with the most successful industrialists, bankers,
and merchants to form a new elite.
Increasingly, aristocrats and plutocrats fused as the
members of the wealthy upper middle class purchased
landed estates to join the aristocrats in the pleasures of
country living while the aristocrats bought lavish town
houses for part-time urban life. Common bonds were also
created when the sons of wealthy middle-class families
were admitted to the elite schools dominated by the children
of the aristocracy. This educated elite assumed leadership
roles in the government and the armed forces.
Marriage also served to unite the two groups. Daughters
of tycoons gained titles, and aristocratic heirs gained new
sources of cash. Wealthy American heiresses were in special
demand. When the American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt
married the duke of Marlborough, the new
duchess brought £2 million (approximately $10 million)
to her husband.
Below the upper class was a middle level that included
such traditional groups as professionals in law, medicine,
and the civil service as well as moderately well-to-do industrialists
and merchants. The industrial expansion of
the nineteenth century also added new groups to the
middle class. These newcomers included business managers
and new professionals, such as office workers, engineers,
architects, accountants, and chemists, who
formed professional associations as the symbols of their
newfound importance. At the lower end of the middle
class were the small shopkeepers, traders, manufacturers,
and prosperous peasants. Their chief preoccupation
was the provision of goods and services for the classes
above them.
The moderately prosperous and successful members of
the middle classes shared a certain style of life, one whose
values tended to dominate much of nineteenth-century
society. They were especially active in preaching their
worldview to their children and to the upper and lower
classes of their society. This was especially evident in Victorian
Britain, often considered a model of middle-class
society. It was the European middle classes who accepted
and promulgated the importance of progress and science.
They believed in hard work, which they viewed as the
primary human good, open to everyone and guaranteed
to have positive results. They also believed in the good
conduct associated with traditional Christian morality.
Such values were often scorned at the time by members
of the economic and intellectual elite, and in later
years, it became commonplace for observers to mock the
Victorian era—the years of the long reign of Queen Victoria
(r. 1837–1901) in Great Britain—for its vulgar materialism,
its cultural philistinism, and its conformist values.
As the historian Peter Gay has recently shown,
however, this harsh portrayal of the “bourgeois” character
of the age distorts the reality of an era of complexity and
contradiction, with diverse forces interacting to lay the
foundations of the modern world.
The working classes constituted almost 80 percent of
the population of Europe. In rural areas, many of these
people were landholding peasants, agricultural laborers,
and sharecroppers, especially in eastern Europe. Only
about 10 percent of the British population worked in agriculture,
however; in Germany, the figure was 25 percent.
There was no homogeneous urban working class. At
the top were skilled artisans in such traditional handicraft
trades as cabinetmaking, printing, and jewelry making.
The second Industrial Revolution, however, also brought
new entrants into the group of highly skilled workers, including
machine-tool specialists, shipbuilders, and metalworkers.
Many skilledworkers attempted to pattern themselves
after the middle class by seeking good housing and
educating their children.
Semiskilled laborers, including such people as carpenters,
bricklayers, and many factory workers, earned wages
that were about two-thirds of those of highly skilled
workers (see the box on p. 8). At the bottom of the hierarchy
stood the largest group of workers, the unskilled laborers.
They included day laborers, who worked irregularly
for very low wages, and large numbers of domestic
servants. One of every seven employed persons in Great
Britain in 1900 was a domestic servant.
Urban workers did experience a betterment in the
material conditions of their lives after 1870. A rise in real
wages, accompanied by a decline in many consumer
costs, especially in the 1880s and 1890s, made it possible
for workers to buy more than just food and housing.
Workers’ budgets now included money for more clothes
and even leisure at the same time that strikes and labor
agitation were winning ten-hour days and Saturday
afternoons off. The combination of more income and
more free time produced whole new patterns of mass
leisure.
Among the least attractive aspects of the era, however,
was the widespread practice of child labor. Working conditions
for underage workers were often abysmal. According
to a report commissioned in 1832 to inquire into
the conditions for child factory workers in Great Britain,
children as young as six years of age began work before
dawn. Those who were drowsy or fell asleep were tapped
on the head, doused with cold water, strapped to a chair,
or flogged with a stick.
The position of women during the Industrial Revolution
was also changing. During much of the nineteenth
century, many women adhered to the ideal of femininity
popularized by writers and poets. Tennyson’s poem The
Princess expressed it well:
Man with the head and woman with the heart:
Man to command and woman to obey;
All else confusion.
The reality was somewhat different. Under the impact
of the Second Industrial Revolution, which created a
wide variety of service and white-collar jobs, women began
to accept employment as clerks, typists, secretaries,
and salesclerks. Compulsory education opened the door
to new opportunities in the medical and teaching professions.
In some countries in western Europe, women’s legal
rights increased.
Still, most women remained confined to their traditional
roles of homemaking and child rearing. The less
fortunate were still compelled to undertake marginal
work at home as domestic servants or as pieceworkers in
sweatshops.
Many of these improvements occurred as the result of
the rise of Europe’s first feminist movement. The movement
had its origins in the social upheaval of the French
Revolution, when some women advocated equality for
women based on the doctrine of natural rights. In the
1830s, a number of women in the United States and Europe
sought improvements for women by focusing on
family and marriage law to strengthen the property rights
of wives and enhance their ability to secure a divorce.
Later in the century, attention shifted to the issue of
equal political rights. Many feminists believed that the
right to vote was the key to all other reforms to improve
the position of women.
The British women’s movement was the most vocal
and active in Europe, but it was divided over tactics.
Moderates believed that women must demonstrate that
they would use political power responsibly if they wanted
Parliament to grant them the right to vote. Another
group, however, favored a more radical approach. Emmeline
Pankhurst (1858–1928) and her daughters, Christabel
and Sylvia, in 1903 founded the Women’s Social and
Political Union, which enrolled mostly middle- and
upper-class women. Pankhurst’s organization realized the
value of the media and used unusual publicity stunts to
call attention to its insistence on winning women the
right to vote and other demands. Its members pelted government
officials with eggs, chained themselves to lampposts,
smashed the windows of department stores on fashionable
shopping streets, burned railroad cars, and went
on hunger strikes in jail.
Before World War I, demands for women’s rights were
being heard throughout Europe and the United States, although
only in Norway and some American states as well
as in Australia and New Zealand did women actually receive
the right to vote before 1914. It would take the dramatic
upheaval of World War I before male-dominated
governments capitulated on this basic issue.
World History
