What the exam asks
- Themes: Social Interactions and Organization (SIO) and Humans and the Environment (ENV).
- Reasoning Process: Continuity and Change Over Time (CCOT)—specifically tracking how pre-industrial agrarian hierarchies shifted into industrial class structures while patriarchy persisted in new forms.
- Common Stimuli: Excerpts from reform inquiries (like Britain’s Sadler Report), urban mortality tables, domestic advice manuals for middle-class wives, and illustrations of smoky industrial cities.
Core ideas
New social classes and hierarchies
Before industrialization, European and Asian social hierarchies were largely defined by birth and land ownership (feudal nobility vs. peasantry). Global capitalism and factory production reshaped these hierarchies around wealth and relationship to the means of production:
- Industrialists / Captains of Industry: Factory, railroad, and mine owners who amassed fortunes that rivaled or surpassed the traditional landed aristocracy.
- The Middle Class (Bourgeoisie): A rapidly growing tier of salaried professionals—managers, clerks, engineers, doctors, and lawyers—who did not perform manual labor and could afford consumer goods, servants, and education.
- The Industrial Working Class (Proletariat): Former agricultural laborers and artisans who migrated to cities and sold their labor for wages in factories and mines. Because machines reduced the need for specialized craftsmanship, factory workers were treated as interchangeable and faced low wages, 12-to-16-hour shifts, and hazardous conditions.
Diverging gender and family roles
Industrialization moved economic production out of the household (where families had farmed or woven textiles together in the cottage system) and into the factory. How this affected women and children depended strictly on social class:
| Feature | Industrial Working Class | Middle Class |
|---|---|---|
| Adult Women | Worked wage-earning jobs (especially in textile mills, coal mines, or as domestic servants for the middle class) to supplement low male wages, while still bearing full responsibility for housework. | Increasingly restricted to the domestic household; expected to manage servants, project moral purity, and create a comforting refuge from the competitive business world. |
| Children | Sent to factories and mines as young as age six because they could fit under machinery, were more obedient, and were paid a fraction of adult wages. | Focused on formal schooling, literacy, and moral/character development; childhood was viewed as a protected stage of life. |
| Ideology | Economic necessity overrode domestic ideals; however, working women were often criticized by elites as negligent mothers. | “Cult of Domesticity” (Separate Spheres): Defined the public sphere of work and politics as male, and the private home and child-rearing as female. |