New Classes, New Cities
Introduced| English | Meaning |
|---|---|
| middle class/ˈmɪdl klæs/ | A social group between the wealthiest and poorest groups, often associated with professional, managerial or business occupations. |
| industrial working class/ɪnˈdʌstrɪəl ˈwɜːkɪŋ klæs/ | People who earned wages in factories and mines. |
Two classes that did not exist before
- New social classes, including the middle class and the industrial working class, developed.
- A middle class 中产阶级 lives on salaries, professions and commerce rather than land or wages at a machine.
- An industrial working class 工业工人阶级 sells labour for a wage in a factory — a category that needs a factory to exist.
Select all the new social classes the CED names.
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Nobility and peasantry existed long before industrialisation.
Class divided women's lives
- While women and often children in working class families typically held wage-earning jobs to supplement their families' income, middle-class women who did not have the same economic demands to satisfy were increasingly limited to roles in the household or roles focused on child development.
- One sentence, two opposite experiences — and the CED makes class the variable that separates them.
- So "what happened to women in the nineteenth century" has no single answer, which is exactly the point.
The variable the CED uses to explain women's different experiences is...
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Working-class women held wage jobs; middle-class women were increasingly confined to the household.
Cities grew faster than they could cope
- The rapid urbanisation that accompanied global capitalism at times led to a variety of challenges, including pollution, poverty, increased crime, public health crises, housing shortages and insufficient infrastructure to accommodate urban growth.
- Six named challenges, and they share one cause: growth outrunning the systems built for a smaller city.
- At times is the CED's qualifier — not every city, and not permanently.
New class, gendered experience, or urban challenge?
Sort each development in industrial society.
Select all the urban challenges the CED names.
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Poverty, crime and insufficient infrastructure complete the six.
Class, not gender alone, decided women's experience of industrialisation. The CED's single sentence puts working-class women in wage work and middle-class women increasingly confined to the household — so an answer generalising about "women in the nineteenth century" has erased the variable the CED built the sentence around.
This subtopic supplies the content for 5.7's qualifier, "for ____".
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The middle class gained; working-class families sent women and children into wage work.
This is where "for some" gets its content
- 5.7 said industrial capitalism raised living standards for some; this subtopic is the other side of that qualifier.
- The middle class gained; working-class families sent women and children into wage work to make ends meet.
- Linking the two subtopics is the cheapest way to show you understand the unit rather than the bullet.
Standards of living could rise and urban conditions worsen at the same time.
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Cheaper, more various goods and pollution, crowding and disease — both at once.
Hierarchies and standards of living
- The objective is how industrialisation caused change in existing social hierarchies and standards of living.
- Hierarchies: new classes appear and old ranks based on land lose relative position.
- Standards of living: consumer goods became cheaper and more various while urban conditions in some places got worse — both at once.
Two women in the same city in 1870. One works twelve hours in a mill because the family's income requires it; the other is expected not to work at all, and her respectability depends on that. The same economy produced both roles, and the thing that separates them is which class the household belongs to.
New social classes developed — the middle class and the industrial working class. Working-class women and children held wage jobs; middle-class women were increasingly limited to household or child-development roles. Rapid urbanisation at times brought pollution, poverty, crime, public health crises, housing shortages and insufficient infrastructure.
Write from class and women's work
- A middle-class wife was expected to run the household and not the mill.
- A working-class woman worked a factory shift.
How did class change women's lives?
Industrial class position shaped what women were expected to do.
What split these two women's working lives?
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Middle-class and working-class expectations differed.