Chapter 22: Life in the Emerging Urban Society

Taming the City

Industry and the Growth of Cities

The main causes of the poor quality of urban life— deadly overcrowding, pervasive poverty, and lack of medical knowledge— had existed for centuries.
The Industrial Revolution exacerbated these deplorable conditions.
The steam engine freed industrialists from dependence on the energy of fast-flowing streams and rivers so that by 1800 there was every incentive to build new factories in urban areas, which had many advantages.
Great Britain, the first country in the world to go through the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, was forced to face the acute challenges of a changing urban environment early on.
Except on the outskirts, early-nineteenth-century cities in Britain used every scrap of available land to the fullest extent.
These highly concentrated urban populations lived in extremely unsanitary and unhealthy conditions.
The environmental costs of rapid urbanization and industrialization were enormous as well.
The crucial factors included the tremendous pressure of more people and the total absence of public transportation.
Most responsible of all was the sad legacy of rural housing conditions in preindustrial society combined with appalling ignorance of germs and basic hygiene.

The Advent of The Public Health Movement

Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, people’s fatalistic acceptance of their overcrowded, unsanitary surroundings began to give way to a growing interest in reform and improvement.
Chadwick found inspiration in the ideas of radical philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), whose approach to social issues, called utilitarianism, had taught that public problems ought to be dealt with on a rational, scientific basis to advance the “greatest good for the greatest number.
Chadwick collected detailed reports from local Poor Law officials on the “sanitary conditions of the laboring population” and published his hard-hitting findings in 1842.
Chadwick correctly believed that the stinking excrement of communal outhouses could be dependably carried off by water through sewers at less than one twentieth the cost of removing it by hand.
The public health movement won dedicated supporters in the United States, France, and Germany from the late 1840s on.
Though factories and coal stoves continued to pump black smoke into the air, and pollution remained a serious problem, city dwellers started to reap the reward of better health, and death rates began to decline.

The Bacterial Revolution

Although improved sanitation in cities promoted a better quality of life and some improvements in health care, effective control of communicable disease required a great leap forward in medical knowledge and biological theory.
The breakthrough in understanding how bad drinking water and filth actually made people sick arrived when the French chemist Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease.
Pasteur (1822– 1895), who began studying fermentation for brewers in 1854, used a microscope to develop a simple test that brewers could use to monitor the fermentation process and avoid spoilage.
By 1870 the work of Pasteur and others had demonstrated the general connection between germs and disease.
When, in the middle of the 1870s, German country doctor Robert Koch and his coworkers developed pure cultures of harmful bacteria and described their life cycles, the dam broke.
Acceptance of germ theory brought about dramatic improvements in the deadly environment of hospitals and operating rooms.
The achievements of the bacterial revolution coupled with the public health movement saved millions of lives, particularly after about 1880.
By 1910 a great silent revolution had occurred: the death rates for people of all ages in urban areas were generally no greater than those for people in rural areas, and sometimes they were lower.

Improvements in Urban Planning

In addition to public health improvements, more effective urban planning was a major key to a better quality of urban life in the nineteenth century.
The Paris of 1850 was a labyrinth of narrow, dark streets, the results of desperate overcrowding and a lack of effective planning.
For two decades Haussmann and his fellow planners proceeded on many interrelated fronts.
Rebuilding Paris provided a new model for urban planning and stimulated urban reform throughout Europe, particularly after 1870.
Zoning expropriation laws, which allowed a majority of the owners of land in a given quarter of the city to impose major street or sanitation improvements on a reluctant minority, were an important mechanism of this new urban reform movement.

Public Transportation

The development of mass public transportation often accompanied urban planning, further enhancing living conditions.
Electric streetcars were cheaper, faster, more dependable, cleaner, and more comfortable than their horse-drawn counterparts.
Mass transit helped greatly in the struggle for decent housing.
The new boulevards and horse-drawn streetcars facilitated a middle-class move to better and more spacious housing in the 1860s and 1870s; after 1890 electric streetcars meant people of even modest means could access new, improved housing.
On the continent, many city governments in the early twentieth century built electric streetcar systems that provided transportation to new public and private housing developments for the working classes beyond the city limits.
Suburban commuting was born.

Rich and Poor and Those in Between

The Distribution of Income

By 1850 at the latest, real wages— that is, wages received by workers adjusted for changes in the prices they paid— were rising for the mass of the population, and they continued to do so until 1914.
Greater economic rewards for the average person did not eliminate hardship and poverty, however; nor did they make the wealth and income of the rich and the poor significantly more equal, as contemporary critics argued and economic historians have clearly demonstrated.
Income inequality reflected social status.
In almost every advanced country around 1900, the richest 5 percent of all households in the population received about a third of all national income, and the richest 20 percent of households received from 50 to 60 percent of it.
To understand the full significance of these statistics, one must realize that the middle classes were much smaller than they are today.
The great gap between rich and poor endured, in part, because industrial and urban development made society more diverse and classes less unified.
Rather, the social and occupational hierarchy developed enormous variations, though the age-old pattern of great economic inequality remained firmly intact.

The People and Occupations of the Middle Classes

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the diversity and range within the urban middle class were striking.
Below the wealthy top tier, the much larger, much less wealthy, and increasingly diversified middle class included moderately successful industrialists and merchants as well as professionals in law, business, and medicine.
Management of large public and private institutions also emerged as a kind of profession as governments provided more services and as very large corporations such as railroads managed ever-larger numbers of human and physical resources.
Industrialization expanded and diversified the lower middle class.
Relatively well educated but without complex technical skills, many white-collar occupational groups strove to achieve professional standing and higher social status.
Dentistry was taken out of the hands of working-class barbers and placed in the hands of highly trained (and middle-class) professionals.

Middle-Class Culture and Values

Despite growing occupational diversity and conflicting interests, lifestyle preferences loosely united the European middle classes.
Unlike the working classes, the middle classes had the money to eat well, and spent a substantial portion of their household budget on food and entertainment.
The middle-class wife could cope with this endless procession of meals, courses, and dishes because she had servants as well as money at her disposal.
Well fed and well served, by 1900 the middle classes were also well housed.
Many prosperous families rented, rather than owned, their homes, complete with tiny rooms for servants under the eaves of the top floor.
The middle classes paid great attention to outward appearances, especially their clothes.
The factory, the sewing machine, and the department store had all helped reduce the cost and expand the variety of clothing.
Rich Europeans could devote more time to “culture” and leisure pursuits than less wealthy or well established families.
In addition to their material tastes, the middle classes generally agreed upon a strict code of behavior and morality, which stressed hard work, self-discipline, and personal achievement.
The middle-class individual was supposed to know right from wrong and act accordingly.

The People and Occupations of the Working Classes

At the beginning of the twentieth century, about four out of five people belonged to the working classes— that is, people whose livelihoods depended primarily on physical labor and who did not employ domestic servants.
The urban working classes were even less unified and homogeneous than the middle classes.
First, economic development and increased specialization expanded the traditional range of working-class skills, earnings, and experiences.
Highly skilled workers— about 15 percent of the working classes— became known as the labor aristocracy.
While the labor aristocracy enjoyed its exalted position, maintaining that status was by no means certain.
To maintain this precarious standing, the upper working class adopted distinctive values and straitlaced, almost puritanical behavior.
Below the labor aristocracy stood the enormously complex world of hard work, composed of both semiskilled and unskilled workers.
One of the largest components of the unskilled group was domestic servants, whose numbers grew steadily in the nineteenth century.
Nonetheless, domestic service had real attractions for young women from rural areas who had few specialized skills.
Many young domestics made the successful transition to working-class wife and mother.
Yet with an unskilled or unemployed husband, a growing family, and limited household income, many working-class wives had to join the broad ranks of working women in the sweated industries.
An army of poor women, usually working at home, accounted for many of the inexpensive ready-made clothes displayed on department store racks and in tiny shops.

Working-Class Leisure and Religion

Notwithstanding hard physical labor and lack of wealth, the urban working classes sought fun and recreation, and they found both.
Generally, however, heavy problem drinking declined in the late nineteenth century as it became less socially acceptable.
The two other leisure-time passions of workingclass culture were sports and music halls.
In more serious moments, religion continued to provide working people with solace and meaning.
The eighteenth-century vitality of popular religion in Catholic countries and the Protestant rejuvenation exemplified by German Pietism and English Methodism carried over into the nineteenth century.
Why did working-class church attendance decline? On one hand, the construction of churches failed to keep up with the rapid growth of urban population, especially in new working-class neighborhoods.
The pattern was different in the United States, where most nineteenth-century churches also preached social conservatism.
Irish Catholic churches in Protestant Britain, Catholic churches in partitioned Polish lands, and Jewish synagogues in Russia were outstanding examples.

Changing Family Lifestyles

Middle-Class Marriage and Courtship Rituals

Rather than marry for convenience, or for economic or social reasons— as was still common among workers, peasants, and aristocrats— by the 1850s the middleclass couple was supposed to meet, court, fall deeply in love, and join for life because of a shared emotional bond.
The growing popularity among all classes toward the end of the nineteenth century of what historians call companionate marriage underscores the way historical contexts influence human emotions and behaviors.
Strict rules for courtship and engagement enshrined in the concept of falling in love ensured that middle-class individuals would make an appropriate match.
Parents, chaperones, and the general public closely guarded the boundary between courtship and sex, between the proper and the improper.
Engagement also followed a complicated set of rules and rituals.
Secret engagements led to public announcements, and then the couple could appear together, though only with chaperones when in potentially delicate situations.
Marriage had its own set of rules.
Usually a middleclass man could marry only if he could support a wife, children, and a servant.
Love meant something different to men and women.
Trained to fall passionately in love with “Mr. Right,” young women equated marriage with emotional intensity.

Middle- and Working-Class Sexuality

A double standard in sexual relations paralleled the gender inequalities built into middle-class standards of love and marriage.
Middle-class moralists assumed that men would enter marriage with some sexual experience, though this was unthinkable for a middle-class woman.
The sexual standards of the working classes stood in marked contrast to these norms early in the nineteenth century, but that changed over time.
Romantic love held working-class families together, and marriage was less of an economic challenge.
The urban working-class couple of the late nineteenth century thus became more stable, and that stability strengthened the family as an institution.

Prostitution

In the late nineteenth century prostitution was legal in much of Europe.
In Italy, France, Great Britain, and much of Germany, the state licensed brothels and registered individual prostitutes.
In streets, dance halls, and pubs across Europe, young working-class women used prostitution as a source of second income or as a way to weather a period of unemployment.
Prostitutes clearly transgressed middle-class ideals of feminine respectability, but among the working classes prostitution was tolerated as more-or-less acceptable work of a temporary nature.
As middle-class family values became increasingly prominent after the 1860s, prostitution generated great concern among social reformers.
As general concerns with public health gained publicity, state and city authorities across Europe subjected prostitutes— in their eyes the vector of contagious disease— to increased surveillance.
The Contagious Diseases Acts were controversial from the start.
A determined middle-class feminist campaign against the policy, led by Josephine Butler and the Ladies National Association, loudly proclaimed that the acts physically abused poor women, violated their constitutional rights, and legitimized male vice.
Prostitution had never been safe, but it had been accepted, at least among the working classes.
Prostitutes were now stigmatized as social and sexual outsiders.

Separate Spheres and the Importance of Homemaking

After 1850 the work of wives became increasingly distinct and separate from that of their husbands in all classes.
Thus many historians have stressed that the societal ideal in nineteenth-century Europe became a strict division of labor by gender within rigidly constructed separate spheres: the wife as mother and homemaker, the husband as wage earner and breadwinner.
For the middle classes, the single-family home, a symbol of middle-class status and a sanctuary from the callous outside world of competitive capitalism, was central to the notion of separate spheres.
At the heart of the middle-class home stood the woman: notions of femininity, motherhood, and private life came together in the ideal of domestic space.
By 1900 working-class families had adopted many middle-class values, but they did not have the means to fully realize the ideal of separate spheres.
Feminist historians have often criticized the middleclass ideal of separate spheres because it restricted women’s educational and employment opportunities, and the women’s rights movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century certainly challenged the limitations of the model.
According to this view, when husbands specialized in earning an adequate cash income— the “family wage” that labor unions demanded— and wives specialized in managing the home, the working-class wife could produce desirable goods that could not be bought in a market, such as improved health, better eating habits, and better behavior.
The woman’s guidance of the household went hand in hand with the increased pride in the home and family and the emotional importance attached to them in working- and middle-class families alike.

Child Rearing

Another striking sign of deepening emotional ties within the family was a growing emphasis on the love and concern that mothers gave their infants.
The surge of maternal feeling was shaped by and reflected in a wave of specialized books on child rearing and infant hygiene, such as French family reformer Gustav Droz’s phenomenally successful book Papa, Mama, and Baby, which went through 121 edition between 1866 and 1884.
The loving care lavished on infants was matched by greater concern for older children and adolescents.
They, too, were wrapped in the strong emotional ties of a more intimate and protective family.
The most important reason for this revolutionary reduction in family size, in which the comfortable and well-educated classes took the lead, was parents’ desire to improve their economic and social position and that of their children.
In middle-class households, parents expended considerable effort to ensure that they raised their children according to prevailing family values.
Attempts to repress the child’s sexuality generated unhealthy tension, often made worse by the rigid division of gender roles within the family.
The children of the working classes probably had more avenues of escape from such tensions than did those of the middle classes.

The Feminist Movement

The ideal of separate spheres and the rigid gender division of labor meant that middle-class women faced great obstacles when they needed— or wanted— to move into the man’s world of paid employment outside the home.
Facing discrimination in education and employment and suffering from a lack of legal rights, some women rebelled and began the long-continuing fight for equality of the sexes and the rights of women.
Progress toward women’s rights was slow and hardwon.
In Britain, the women’s suffrage movement mounted a militant struggle for the right to vote, particularly in the decade before World War I.
In Germany before 1900, women were not admitted as fully registered students at a single university.
Women inspired by utopian and especially Marxist socialism blazed a second path.
Often scorning the reform programs of middle-class feminists, socialist women leaders argued that the liberation of working-class women would come only with the liberation of the entire working class through revolution.

Science and Thought

The Triumph of Science in History

As the pace of scientific advancements quickened and resulted in greater practical benefits, science exercised growing influence on human thought.
A perfect example of the translation of better scientific knowledge into practical human benefits was the work of Louis Pasteur and his followers in biology and the medical sciences.
Another was the development of the branch of physics known as thermodynamics
Chemistry and electricity were two other fields characterized by extremely rapid scientific progress.
And in both fields, “science was put in the service of industry,” as the influential economist Alfred Marshall (1842–1924) argued at the time.
Electricity, a scientific curiosity in 1800, was totally transformed by a century of tremendous technological advancement.
The successful application of scientific research in the fast-growing electrical and organic chemical industries between 1880 and 1913 provided a model for other industries.
Systematic “R&D”— research and development— was born in the late nineteenth century.
Above all, the burst of industrial creativity and technological innovation, often called the Second Industrial Revolution, promoted the strong economic growth in the last third of the nineteenth century that drove the urban reforms and the rising standard of living considered in this chapter.
The triumph of science and technology had three other significant consequences.
First, though ordinary citizens continued to lack detailed scientific knowledge, everyday experience and innumerable articles in newspapers and magazines impressed the importance of science on the popular mind.
Second, as science became more prominent in popular thinking, the philosophical implications of science formulated in the Enlightenment spread to broad sections of the population.
Third, the methods of science acquired unrivaled prestige after 1850.
The “unscientific” intuitions of poets and the revelations of saints seemed hopelessly inferior.

Darwin and Natural Selection

Scientific research also progressed rapidly outside of the world of industry and technology, sometimes putting forth direct challenges to traditional beliefs.
Lamarck’s work was flawed— he believed that the characteristics parents acquired in the course of their lives could be inherited by their children— and was not accepted, but it helped prepare the way for Charles Darwin (1809–1882), the most influential of all nineteenth-century evolutionary thinkers.
Darwin’s great originality lay in suggesting precisely how biological evolution might have occurred.
His theory of evolution is summarized in the title of his work On the Origin of Species by the Means of Natural Selection (1859).
Darwin’s controversial theory had a powerful and many-sided influence on European thought and the European middle classes.
Some thinkers went a step further and applied Darwin’s theory of biological evolution to human affairs.
English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820– 1903) saw the human race as driven forward to evergreater specialization and progress by a brutal economic struggle that determined the “survival of the fittest.”
The poor were the ill-fated weak; the prosperous were the chosen strong.
Social Darwinism gained adherents among nationalists, who viewed global competition between countries as a grand struggle for survival, as well as among imperialists, who used Social Darwinist ideas to justify the rule of the “advanced” West over their colonial subjects and territories.

The Modern University and the Social Sciences

By the 1880s major universities across Europe had been modernized and professionalized.
Education now emphasized controlled research projects in newly established clinics and laboratories; advanced students conducted independent research in seminar settings.
Sociology, the critical analysis of contemporary or historical social groups, emerged as a leading social science.
Perhaps the most prominent and influential late nineteenth-century sociologist was the German Max Weber (1864–1920).
In France, the prolific sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858– 1917) earned an international reputation for his wide-ranging work.
Other sociologists contributed to the critique of modern society.
The German Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) argued that with industrialization Western civilization had undergone a fundamental transformation from “community” to “society.”
The new sociologists cast a bleak image of urban industrial society.
While they acknowledged some benefits of rationalization and modernization, they bemoaned the accompanying loss of community and tradition.

Realism in Art and Literature

In art and literature, the key themes of realism emerged in the 1840s and continued to dominate Western culture and style until the 1890s.
Emphatically rejecting the romantic search for the exotic and the sublime, realism (or “naturalism,” as it was often called) energetically pursued the typical and the commonplace.
The realist movement started in France, where romanticism had never been completely dominant.
Artists like Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet, and Honoré Daumier painted scenes of laboring workers and peasants in somber colors and simple compositions.
Literary realism also began in France, where Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Émile Zola became internationally famous novelists.
Balzac (1799–1850) spent thirty years writing a vastly ambitious panorama of post revolutionary French life.
Madame Bovary (1857), the masterpiece of Flaubert(1821–1880), is far narrower in scope than Balzac’s work but is still famous for its depth and accuracy of psychological insight.
Émile Zola (1840–1902) was most famous for his seamy, animalistic view of working-class life.
Realism quickly spread beyond France.
In England, Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), who wrote under the pen name George Eliot, brilliantly achieved a more deeply felt, less sensational kind of realism in her great novel Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871– 1872).
The novels of Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), such as Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and The Return of the Native (1878), depict ordinary men and women frustrated and crushed by fate and bad luck.
Yet Tolstoy’s central message is one that most of the people discussed in this chapter would have readily accepted: human love, trust, and everyday family ties are life’s enduring values.