After reading The Jungle, many Americans were appalled by the lack of safety precautions and sanitary systems in factories. Dissatisfaction with food and drug regulation at the state level in the 1890s soon led to pressures to give the federal government the power to monitor and promote the quality of food. Thus, the Pure Food and Drug Act along with the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 passed, making meat shipped over state lines subject to inspection (Paulet). Though, while muckrakers were influential in bring about reform, many of the leading progressive reformers were women. Middle class women played a major role in the awareness of poor working conditions, child education, and
Upon his visit to Chicago to do research for a book that was meant to show the nation how the labor of men and women are exploited for profit, Sinclair stumbled on the disgusting conditions in meatpacking factories. There were no regulations on food preparation and distribution at the time, and Sinclair wanted to change that. He wrote The Jungle and it was very successful. His readers ranged from normal citizens to President Theodore Roosevelt. After Roosevelt read the graphic novel, he pushed for passage of the Meat Inspection Act.
World War 1 played a significant part in developing women's political rights in both positive and negative ways. World War one may have foiled the drive by women to gain political rights just as much or even more so then it helped. Pre war women did have working opportunities though very little compared to men, as they were seen as weaker and that their place was in the "home". Their employment was limited to the domestic service (cleaning or working as a servant) and secretarial work and not manual labor in factories or working class women often worked in the textiles industry. Women were lower paid and were restricted to do less skilled work, as they were considered incompetent.
They were forced to live in squalor, however, being discriminated against and paid the lowest wages possible, hardly enough to live by (“The Industrial Revolution in America,” 2013). Women’s lives during this time changed as well. One way is that their role as homemaker was removed for some time, as they also joined
In turn, this taught the public that they couldn’t always trust government officials. Muckrakers paved the way for the correction of these problems that the officials created. Upton Sinclair is a famous muckraker that wrote The Jungle. He exposed the meat packing industry and its horrible health conditions. The concept of scientific management also came out of the Progressive Movement.
The documentary Food Inc. touches on these topics and shows how little consumers know about what they eat and where it derives from. The documentary Food Inc. shows how most people are under the fallacious belief that their foods are grown on appealing farms often depicted on the packaging of the product themselves. In reality only a few of these farms are present and large factory farms have replaced most of them (Food Inc.). Food Inc. displays how viciously animals are being treated from their living conditions and at slaughterhouses. The documentary also shows how animals are given antibiotics to make them grow much more rapidly.
The life of man in the 17th century was ‘nasty, brutish and short.’ I agree with this statement because the living and working conditions for the poor were terrible for most people in the 17th century. The food was poor and was very restricted due to the seasons and the price of it. People were undernourished due to lack of food that they needed, meat was expensive in the winter because they could not preserve it when it was fresh therefore it was salted so that it could last for the winter. Also, the poor relied on their harvests in the autumn for food to last them during the winter but if their crops failed many people starved therefore resulting in many undernourished people. Therefore, because people were so undernourished they had many diseases which became epidemics.
It was expected that they would rear their young. The women were to take care of the basic domestic duties such as cleaning the house, doing laundry, and preparing meals for the husbands who come home from a long day at work. Smith makes it seem as though women did not like their house work and was deemed more of a punishment. The main character in the novel, Nellie Smith, also called “Smithy” by her comrades, is always describing cleaning the worst part of her job. Women who did work outside of the home were often poor or working class.
People in the camps had poor diet, what they usually received were gruel, cornbread and vegetable soup that made from the cheapest vegetables available. Some camps have reported two meals a day while others allowed three. The camps were also infested with many types of pest which would cause severe skin problems and lead to dangerous infections and eventually, causing death. Nevertheless, they were still forced to work even if they were ill. Under these extremely bad circumstances, many of them were driven to insanity and in many cases committed suicide.
During an age of mass industrialization and urbanization, obtaining social justice was of vital importance because with social justice established, social control would naturally be achieved due to the satisfaction of citizens being treated equally. Progressive reformers moved to correct flaws in government and improve societal equality, but they soon found the widened divisions in American society to be difficult, if not impossible, to overcome. (Out of Many, 606) Progressivism was characterized by a series of movements, each of them aimed in one way or another at renovating or restoring American society, its values, and institutions. (Out of Many, 612) The three basic social issues addressed by the Progressives were women suffrage, freedmens civil rights, and working conditions. Each group of reformers challenged the words of our founding fathers as stated in the Constitution, “…in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity,…promote the general welfare…to ourselves and our posterity…,” progressives were searching for a perfect union for every individual to be satisfied with.