The machines were first used in the textile industry. Spinning and weaving machines made the muscular strength of the worker superfluous, but they required the speed and dexterity of the movement of the fingers. Under these conditions, it became technically advantageous to replace a man with a woman and a child. The technical moment was joined by another - economic. Such a replacement promised the manufacturer a saving in wages and placed at his disposal a labor force subject to the widest possible exploitation.
The appearance of the first factories with machine tools was the beginning of the massive involvement of children and women in industrial labor. But it is a mistake to think that in the era before the industrial revolution, the percentage of children and women employed in the manufacturing industry was negligible. The manor's court of the medieval lord was filled with serf workers (weavers, spinners, embroiderers, etc.). Medieval cities already in the 13th century had many women - artisans, city law and guild statuses speak of them.
Even then, male workers were anxiously watching the increasing supply of cheap female labor. An organized struggle of handicraft workshops against the influx of free female hands arose. In parallel with the growth of female labor, the number of children absorbed by the craftsman's workshop increased: children of both sexes entered it as apprentices, and the faster the technical division of labor developed, the more they were drawn into the maelstrom of industrial life. The 16th century is marked by the appearance of large capitalist workshops, in which the desire to intensively exploit children's forces is openly revealed. The Elizabethan Apprenticeship Act (1562) attempts to artificially check this growth in the interests of small industry.
The observed phenomenon is explained by the profound transformation of economic life: the successes of medieval trade dealt a decisive blow to the system of subsistence farming, a social division of labor arose, and a number of labor operations were transferred from the close circle of the family to isolated workshops. The sphere of the household is becoming more and more narrowed, freeing up the forces of the woman and the auxiliary forces of the children. The family is compelled to purchase many items from the market, and the desire to increase its purchasing power forces it to occupy the freed hands of a woman and a child in handicraft production. The lack of means of subsistence pushed single women to the same goal.
Thus the conditions of economic life, long before the advent of machines, undermined the organic integrity of the family unit. But these first heralds of new social relations pale before the later upheaval. The end of the 18th century in the history of England is marked by a continuous series of technical inventions that have gained world economic significance. The application of machines to the processing of fibrous materials with unprecedented force awakened an industrial initiative. Large-scale capitalist manufactory, which arose as early as the 16th century, is being transformed into a modern factory: huge masses of workers are concentrated in one enterprise, the old craft is falling, giving way to large-scale industry.
The machines were first used in the textile industry. Here the consequences of the technical revolution were revealed most clearly, and the course of further improvements was particularly successful. Spinning and weaving machines made the muscular strength of the worker superfluous, but they required the speed and dexterity of the movement of the fingers. Under these conditions, it became technically advantageous to replace a man with a woman and a child. The technical moment was joined by another - economic. Such a replacement promised the manufacturer a saving in wages and placed at his disposal a labor force subject to the widest possible exploitation. That is why, since the end of the eighteenth century, the number of women and children employed in the English textile industry has increased so rapidly. For the same reasons, the mass recruitment of women and children began in other branches of production.
The process, in the classical form, passed by England, with minor variations, was repeated by other countries. For the first half of the twentieth century, the displacement of adult men by women and children and the widespread, unrestricted exploitation of female and child labor were a pan-European phenomenon. The intensity of this phenomenon made a huge impression on contemporaries. This shows how sharply the feverishly rapid rate of growth of women's and children's labor in the machine period differed sharply from the gradual imperceptible growth in the previous era.
The subsequent changes in economic life did not stop, but intensified this process. The powerful development of transport, trade and capitalist agriculture drew new masses of women's and children's forces into the sphere of wage labor. The continuous differentiation of labor made this phenomenon possible, and the advantage of a cheap and submissive labor force desirable and advantageous for triumphant capital. On the contrary, for a dying craft, the unlimited exploitation of children has become the only way to support its agony. The system of fictitious apprenticeships led to a continuous increase in the number of children employed in crafts and allowed the craftsman to at least partially paralyze the annihilating competition of capital.
Displacing the labor of an adult man from some branches of production, a woman moves it to others, without reducing the total number of the male working population. There are specific branches of female labor in which the relative number of female workers is especially high, while the number of men is progressively falling (confectionery, sewing, lace, factory processing of fibrous substances, etc.). Here the economic benefit from the exploitation of the physical and spiritual characteristics of a woman is more pronounced.
There is no lack of a reciprocal supply of labor - severe need drives wives, mothers and young girls under the arches of factories and craft workshops. The questionnaire of German factory inspectors on the work of married women confirms that the decisive role in entering the factory is played by the extreme need of the worker herself or her relatives.
In Russia
In Russia, the emergence of large-scale industry dates back to the beginning of the 18th century. Weak beginnings of factory production are observed as early as the 15th-16th centuries, but the first large-scale enterprises arose in the Petrine era under the strong influence of state requirements. The reorganization of the army presented an increased demand for the products of an independent national industry, and Peter's entire economic policy was reduced to the feverish planting of cloth, linen, weapons and other factories on the basis of developed commercial capital. But in the 18th century, the Russian factory did not yet have a capitalist character: in the absence of free hands, it grows on the basis of the forced labor of the possession and patrimonial peasants. There is no freedom of contract; the position of factory workers is the same as that of serfs. And only in the 19th century, under the direct influence of the European industrial revolution, did the capitalist factory arise and quickly take over the market, and the labor of a free worker, as more economically profitable, displaces forced labor.
The fall of serfdom had a strong influence on the growth of the manufacturing industry. New branches of production are emerging, the network of railways is expanding, and large factory centers are expanding. Russia, still in the pre-reform era, caught up in the cycle of the world economy, is becoming a completely capitalist country. The phenomena that accompany capitalism in the West are repeated in our country: the age-old connection between the peasant and the land is broken, an independent class of unsecured hired workers is formed, and the former patriarchal nature of relations is replaced by the dominance of “cash”.
There is also a repetition of the phenomenon we noted on previous pages: in parallel with the growth and concentration of large-scale machine production, a whole labor army of women and children is being formed.
Child workers appear at the pre-reform factory very early. The organization of forced labor in the 18th century did not stop at the physical weakness of the child: manufacturers received a profitable privilege by forcibly placing poor children begging for alms on city streets in factories. As a general rule, juveniles met in the 19th century in property factories. Quite often, children were taken to the factories in urgent bondage or were taken in masses from the Orphanage for the most insignificant payment. The reports of these facts date back to the moment when the rise of capitalist industry began, machines were introduced, and the demand for labor increased. This phenomenon, similar to the English system of exploitation of "parish children", lasted until the 80s, and was canceled during the inspection of Moscow factories by the factory inspector Yanzhul.
Along with child labor, adolescent labor is very common. Comparing the data for a decade, we find here an absolute increase, relative figures fluctuate here too, but in the end there is no reduction ... Codes of Reports note the predominance of girls among adolescents, and in recent years there has been an undoubted tendency to replace adults with adolescents.
The position of women's labor can be more clearly understood. In the fortress factory of the 18th and 19th centuries, women worked alongside men. And here the government actively intervened in social relations, forcibly placing "guilty women and girls from prisons and prisons" in the factories. The Work Regulations of 1741 gave manufacturers the right to force the daughters and wives of serf artisans to do factory work. Some session factories have a huge number of workers, for example, the Great Yaroslavl Manufactory at the beginning of the 19th century had 1625 men and 2250 women.
The wide participation of women in the factory industry is noted by factory inspectors of the first call. In the enterprises they examined in 1885, there were workers:
male - 333052 people. (68.59%)
female - 152545 people. (31.41%)
Women's labor is increasing absolutely and relatively... What are the reasons for this phenomenon?
Personal observations of the factory inspectorate also lead to the following conclusions: manufacturers prefer to deal with female workers, since they are compliant and demand less pay, a woman is generally more attentive, more industrious and more restrained than a man, she is a calmer, more conservative element.
Out of every 1000 workers there were:
Women:
In tobacco factories: in 1895. - 647 people, in 1904. - 678 people
In match factories: in 1895. - 451 people, in 1904. - 482 people
In breweries: in 1895. - 24 people, in 1904. - 86 peopleChildren:
In tobacco factories: in 1895. - 91 people, in 1904. - 69 people
In match factories: in 1895. - 105 people, in 1904. -141 people
In breweries: in 1895. - 4 people, in 1904. -14 peopleFrom this it can be seen that the use of female labor has increased in all three industries indicated above, and the labor of children in match factories and breweries. Interestingly, even among juveniles, girls are gradually crowding out boys, because. and here their labor is paid less than that of the latter.
ON THE. Rubakin "Russia in numbers", 1912.
The motives of the manufacturers are completely analogous to those we observe in Western Europe. The social crisis of 1905-1906 only contributed to their awareness and explicit discovery.
In conclusion, let us present data on the distribution of working women by branches of industry. The 1897 summary of data covers all female employees. She shows that in Russia there is also a specific branch of women's labor: domestic service, institutions related to cleanliness and hygiene of the body, tobacco and textile production, clothing manufacturing. Here there is a complete parallelism with Western Europe, which is explained by the commonality of the main reason: a woman conquers a labor sphere that is more in line with her female characteristics. On the one hand, her homeliness developed over centuries, on the other hand, the dexterity and flexibility of her fingers, the weakness of her body, incapable of strong muscle tension. The higher the standard of economic life, the stronger this specialization of labor.
Thus, in Russia we observe a phenomenon that is common to all other capitalist countries: the development of machine production draws huge masses of children and women into the sphere of wage labor, they do not form temporary auxiliary detachments of the working class, but enter the system of economic life as a permanent and important link. without which normal economic development is impossible. A significant part of them is captured by factory production. With the growth of industry, the number of women increases absolutely and relatively, the number of children continues to remain at a high level.
The harmful effects of the factory on women and children
The disastrous influence of the factory system on the workers was felt with terrible force in the initial period of capitalism. The studies carried out in the 19th century by Marx, Engels, Villermé, Bure and others revealed to Western European society a stunning picture of physical and moral degradation, which crowned the sacredly guarded "freedom of contract". Masses of people, torn from the conditions of sustainable existence, accumulated in factory centers in terrifying dirt and crowding, suffering from a lack of air, light, food, dying from epidemics and premature exhaustion, mentally stupid and morally corrupted. Miserable wages, unlimited working hours, and unhealthy working conditions were the usual companions of the worker in this initial era.
In contrast to the peasant farmer, the industrial worker breathes in a poisoned atmosphere, is subjected to sharp fluctuations in temperature, suffers from the roar and clatter of machinery, his work is often stupefyingly monotonous, devoid of any mental content and harmful by a lack of muscular tension. Such conditions cannot but affect the state of the body, and a comparison of data on rural and industrial districts leads to the most sad conclusions. In the country of advanced social legislation, in Switzerland, in military recruitment, the percentage of rejected factory workers far exceeds that of the peasants. In the former, physical development is much lower, bodily deficiencies are much greater. We have similar data for France.
In Russia, with its political and cultural backwardness, factory conditions must act more oppressively than in the West. Sanitary-statistical studies of the Moscow Zemstvo and the first reports of factory inspectors unfolded a depressing picture of working life, later studies supplemented it, but changed little.
In general, even today the Russian worker crowds into cramped dirty barracks or huddles in corners and closets, eats meager and often unhealthy food, works in extremely unsanitary conditions and causes a huge percentage of traumatic injuries. Researchers-physicians, who wrote about factory life on the basis of strictly objective material, sometimes could not stand it and conveyed their personal impressions of the workers with bright strokes. They were struck by early old age and the imprint of eternal fatigue on exhausted, bloodless faces. Next to the expression of real suffering, they met complete apathy, stupid indifference to everything ...
If factory conditions do such harm to mature organisms, then with what destructive force must they influence children!
The child comes to the factory as an undeveloped creature, with weak resistance to external influences: he is more often exposed to diseases, his illnesses more often end in death. The members of his body do not have time to form, do not get stronger and more quickly succumb to the harmful effects of the situation. The child is alien to internal concentration and self-control, and his thoughts and feelings are far from the systematic and intense expenditure of energy. At the factory, the child worker finds himself in conditions that are abnormal for development, which are in sharp contradiction to the elementary requirements of hygiene and pedagogy. Therefore, various reviews about the harmful effects of factory labor on the child's body should not seem unexpected to us.
On the doctors who personally surveyed the factories, child workers have always made a particularly painful impression. The factory inspector Gvozdev, when describing the small factories of his site, contains the following lines: “Here I met juveniles, whose appearance made a terrible impression: you will not find such exhausted wax-colored faces with deeply sunken eyes and completely blue undereyes.”
On women, the harmful influence of the factory is reflected with no less force. Compared with a man, a woman is put in a disadvantageous, difficult position by the distinctive features of her sex. They are, on the one hand, in the physical body of a woman, on the other - in her social position.
A woman is physically weaker than a man ... From this it is clear how dangerous some factory operations are for women (carrying heavy loads, working at stoves, etc.). As a general rule, this factor is taken into account, and women are placed in light work. But in some professions the use of the muscular strength of women is being widely used, the pursuit of cheap and submissive labor forces the manufacturers to push the sphere of female labor beyond the physically permissible limits. This is observed equally in the West and in Russia.
Bondage, exploitation and oppression of female workers was the same as that of men, if not more. It was the woman who worked at the factory with the man who had to find time to take care of the children and do household chores. The length of the working day was not regulated in Russia at the end of the 19th century, and was 17-18 hours, and sometimes reached 20 hours a day.
When studying the status of workers in Russia at the end of the 19th century, it was revealed that the wages of a woman employed in the production of an industrial enterprise were paid by manufacturers at least two times lower than for males. So, for example, the earnings of the workers of the main button production shops of the Joint-Stock Company Beno-Rontaller, that is, men, amounted to 20-25 rubles per month. In the auxiliary workshops, “where women worked predominantly, earnings were 10-12 rubles a month, on their own grubs and with their own apartment. That is, in this case, women still had to rent their own housing and buy food, which was provided to men at the expense of the enterprise.
The gradual introduction of female labor in industry, the use of mechanization, and the reduction of workforce in Russia at the end of the 19th century led to the fact that competition arose between a man and a woman. The result of such changes was the use of women's labor in those departments of enterprises and in those professions that, according to their purpose, are lower paid. Most of the women of the Russian Empire were hired for heavy men's work in metallurgical enterprises, knowing in advance that their wages would be at least 30% less than those of men. Industrialists explained this fact by the fact that women, as a rule, have a “lack of professional training”, which makes their work less productive. However, none of the entrepreneurs was going to deal with such a clear lack of professional training: work experience increased the productivity of workers, while wages remained the same.
I.Yu. Tashbekova
"Women's Labor in Russia at the End of the 19th Century: Historical and Legal Aspect"
Once in the factory, a woman quickly weakens, becoming more accessible to the action of the disease ... The longer the factory work lasted, the more frail the body of the factory worker became.
The Russian factory differs in this respect from the European one in a disadvantageous way: primitive sanitary equipment, the carelessness of the factory administration, the absence of regulatory rules lead to an increase in traumatic injuries in our country. It is interesting to note that the increase in female labor in recent years has brought with it an increase in accidents, both absolutely and relatively.
The largest percentage of factory workers is employed in textile production, which affects the body of workers more harmful than other branches of industry. Comprehensive anthropometric measurements made by Dr. Dementiev revealed the worst physical condition of the textile workers. They are shorter, lightweight, have a smaller absolute and relative chest circumference and have significantly less muscle strength. The reason for such a sharp difference lies in the unfavorable conditions of textile factories: work is done here at a very high temperature and in air spoiled by the breath of a mass of people concentrated in enclosed spaces, muscle tension is negligible, and this lowers the life processes of the worker, work is uninterrupted, automatic and stupefying. monotonous. Added to all this is the harmful effect of dust and gases: the operations of fraying and combing fibers, sorting raw material and soaking silk are especially disastrous, creating fertile ground for the development of lung diseases.
Women's work is very common in tobacco production, the percentage of workers here exceeds the percentage of adult men. Meanwhile, from a sanitary point of view, it is one of the most harmful. Tobacco workshops are saturated with caustic poisonous dust, which settles on the lungs, causing various forms of lung diseases: asthma, chronic bronchitis, tonsillitis, consumption are rampant among the workers. The most terrible, in terms of their consequences, are industries associated with the use of toxic substances - mercury, phosphorus and lead. Here the air is filled with toxic fumes, from which nausea and dizziness begin, and chronic poisoning of the body occurs.
Young girls working in factories, without exception, suffer from anemia, the onset of manhood is delayed in them, the size of growth and pelvis is smaller than that of peasant girls.
These are the conditions of factory work and their effect on the female body. The factory not only hinders his normal development, but has a destructive effect on him, prematurely bringing to the grave entire generations of factory workers.
The factory inspectorate and the doctors unanimously point out the plight of the pregnant worker. The factory administration sometimes counts those who become pregnant, sometimes limits their work to a certain period, sometimes takes into account the fact of pregnancy and does not place any restrictions on pregnant women. Fearing calculation, a woman hides her pregnancy or resorts to artificial abortion. Necessity forces her to work during the entire period of her pregnancy and leave the factory at the very last moment, sometimes a few hours before the birth; there are times when a woman is relieved of her burden on the way from the factory or at the factory machine. If a healthy person is adversely affected by continuous standing and sitting position, then the pregnant woman suffers from both in the strongest degree. German inspectors in a special questionnaire on the factory work of married women stated frequent female diseases caused by the work of pregnant women.
Particularly dangerous work associated with muscle tension, with sudden movements and inhalation of toxic substances. The factory poisons not only the woman, it poisons the fetus, which carries the source of rapid decay and death. Scientists Geert and Schuster proved that aniline, lead and mercury from maternal blood pass into the embryonic organs. This fact results in frequent miscarriages and stillbirths. A study by the Paris Medical and Hygienic Society found them in tobacco workers, the same was seen in workers exposed to lead, zinc, mercury and other poisons. Comparison of the data of Dr. Paul and Dr. Fonberg gave reason to Professor Erisman to conclude that a huge number of miscarriages in mothers infected with syphilis is half as common as in women working with lead.
Studies by doctors Dementiev, Pismenny and Veger, carried out at large factories in Russia, led to a similar conclusion: the factory worker, on average, more often miscarries and more often gives birth to dead babies.
But even those born alive continue to feel the oppression of the factory. The mother, out of fear of losing her job, out of a desire to improve the budget, upset by her involuntary unemployment, rather hurries to the factory. Quite often a woman leaves her bed and goes to work before her strength is restored. Work in the postpartum period is no less harmful than the work of pregnant women, and causes the development of acute ailments and long-term chronic suffering.
An increase in infant mortality up to one year with the development of factory industry is observed in almost all countries, and in industrial districts with particular force.
Thus, infant mortality increases in direct proportion to the prevalence of factory work of mothers.
It remains for us to highlight one more point: the influence of the factory on the moral level of a woman, on her sense of honor and consciousness of her own dignity. The atmosphere of cynicism that develops at the factory, as a result of unculturedness and external working conditions, we partly touched upon. Entering the factory, a woman is met with a hail of insults, ranging from "innocent" jokes to acts of outrageous violence. Dirty gestures and importunately vile suggestions haunt her all the time she is in the factory. They come, first of all, from the lower factory administration: foremen and senior apprentices who use the dependence of the worker to exploit her honor. The “courtship” of craftsmen is a generally recognized phenomenon: a number of facts from this area are reported by the factory inspector Gvozdev, members of the trade unions complain about them, they are also revealed from official data.
There were cases when the administrative authorities, under the pressure of mass complaints from workers, took an official subscription from factory employees, obliging them to stop "improper treatment of women and girls working in factories." In the 90s, such a subscription was taken at one of the Moscow perfume factories by a senior inspector on the instructions of the Governor General.
There are times when workers stand up for the offended, a strike breaks out at the factory. But not infrequently, the factory worker encounters the same rude, defiant attitude from her male comrades. It feeds on the atmosphere of humiliation and lack of rights that reigns in the factory to this day. 30-40 years ago, there were cases when the owners harnessed workers instead of horses to their carriages, when the workers were locked in a burning factory building so that they could better extinguish a fire that broke out. Not far off is the time when the workers, by order of the factory administration, were searched by male watchmen. The system of humiliating searches has not yet disappeared. Beatings, abuse, the rooted system of extortion - are in our time a means of influencing workers on the part of the lower employees of the factory.
A woman who finds herself in such an environment is powerless to protest, the fear of getting paid and the strength of an ingrained custom make her reconcile and adapt. Gradually, it becomes habitually indifferent to the established way of life and is influenced by external conditions.
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