Before the rise of the factory, home and work weren't separate places. Most people lived on farms, where both men and women worked in the fields. In the winter, women spent most of their time carding, spinning and weaving wool, sheared from sheep. In towns and cities, shopkeepers and the masters of artisanal trades—bakers, tailors, printers, shoemakers—lived in their shops, where they also usually made their goods. They shared this living space with journeymen and apprentices. Artisans made things whole, undertaking each step in the process of manufacturing: a baker baked a loaf, a tailor stitched a suit. With the rise of the factory came the division of labor into steps done by different workers.* With steam power, not only were the steps in the manufacturing process divided, but much of the labor was done by machines, which came to be known as “mechanical slaves.”
These Truths page 193
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Factories accelerated production, canals accelerated transportation. The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, took eight years to dig and covered 360 miles. Before the canal, the wagon trip from Buffalo to New York City took twenty days; on the canal, it took six. The price of goods plummeted; the standard of living soared. A mattress that cost fifty dollars in 1815, which meant that almost no one owned one, cost only five dollars in 1848. One stop on the Erie Canal was Rochester, a mill town on the shore of Lake Ontario that processed the grain from surrounding farms. In 1818, Rochester exported 26,000 barrels of flour a year. Its mills were small, made up of twelve to fifteen men working alongside a master, in a single room, in the master’s house. There was, as there had been in such shops for centuries, a great deal of drinking: workers were often paid not in wages but in liquor. Work wasn’t done by the clock but by the task. By the end of the 1820s, after the completion of the canal, these small shops had become bigger shops, typically divided into two rooms and employing many more men, each doing a smaller portion of the work, and generally working by the clock, for wages. “Work” came to mean not simply labor but a place, the factory or the banker's or clerk’s office: a place men went every day for ten or twelve hours. “Home” was where women remained, and where what they did all day was no longer considered work—that is, they were not paid. The lives of women and men diverged. Wage workers became less and less skilled. Owners made more and more money. Rochester was exporting 200,000 barrels of flour a year by 1828 and, by end of the 1830s, half a million. In 1829, a newspaper editor who used the word “boss” had to define it (“a foreman or master workman, of modern coinage”). By the early 1830s, only the boss still worked in the shop; his employees worked in factories. Masters, or bosses, no longer lived in shops, or even in the neighborhoods of factories: they moved to new neighborhoods, enclaves of anew middle class.
That new middle class soon grew concerned about the unruliness of workers, and especially about their drinking. Inspired by a temperance crusade led by the revivalist Lyman Beecher, a group of mill owners formed the Rochester Society for the Promotion of Temperance. Its members pledged. to give up all liquor and to stop paying their workers in alcohol. Swept up in the spirit of evangelical revival, they began to insist that their workers join their churches; and they ultimately fired those who did not. In this effort, they were led, principally, by their wives.
These Truths pages 195-6
1876-1900: Library of Congress
In the decades following the Civil War, the United States emerged as an industrial giant. Old industries expanded and many new ones, including petroleum refining, steel manufacturing, and electrical power, emerged. Railroads expanded significantly, bringing even remote parts of the country into a national market economy.
See the Gilded Age, from Wikipedia:
In United States history, the Gilded Age is described as the period from about the late 1870s to the late 1890s, which occurred between the Reconstruction Era and the Progressive Era. It was named by 1920s historians after an 1873 Mark Twain novel. Historians saw late 19th-century economic expansion as a time of materialistic excesses marked by widespread political corruption.
See the Gay Nineties, from Wikipedia:
The Gay Nineties is an American nostalgic term and a periodization of the history of the United States referring to the decade of the 1890s. It is known in the United Kingdom as the Naughty Nineties, and refers there to the decade of supposedly decadent art of Aubrey Beardsley, the witty plays and trial of Oscar Wilde, society scandals and the beginning of the suffragette movement.
Despite the term, part of the decade was marked by an economic crisis, which greatly worsened when the Panic of 1893 set off a widespread economic depression in the United States that lasted until 1897.