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Gender Roles During The Industrial Revolution

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In the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution caused a sharp differentiation between gender roles. Men and women were thought to have completely different roles. Men were seen as workers while women were seen as home-makers. Men and women were totally opposites each other. Marriage was seen as the only proper locale for sex, and women didn’t have any rights in their marriage lives. Birth controls were absent, and abortion was forbidden since 1800s. Sex within marriage usually meant frequent pregnancy, especially as some areas had laws that a husband had his rights to his wife’s body. The death rate for a woman delivering a child was 1 in 200 in 1870 (Radek-Hall), so having children could be psychologically traumatic for women. The …show more content…

Many children died at an early age because of poverty, and lack of medical treatment, while the others lived in bad conditions, uneducated. It was a desperate situation for low-income families all over the nation.
On the other hand, female’s role in society was to be wives. They take care of the children, do housework, or go to work which is limited to unskilled jobs or agriculture labor. Having a lot of children was a terrible panic for women because they had to go through the childbirth without medical access. Especially, women in working class families had to go back to work right after giving birth without taking any medicine because they needed money for the other children. Mothers’ health declined if they kept getting pregnant, so women tried many ways to prevent having children. However, most of the methods were not safe and sometimes dangerous for their body.
Margaret started her job as a nurse; during her work, she met working-class, and deprived women who had to go through recurrent childbirth, miscarriages, or self-induced abortions because of lacking of information on how to avoid unwanted pregnancy. In the early 1900s, there was neither birth control nor education on how to stop pregnancy. Working class women usually used the natural methods to avoid having children; for example, olive oil, pomegranate pulp, ginger, and even tobacco juice were used to smear on or inside the vagina as an early spermicide. More scary than that, some women drank

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