ShmoopTube

00:00

[ musical flourish ]

00:03

And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by the spinning jenny,

00:07

the dizziest girl on the block.

00:09

All right, take a look at the excerpt.

00:10

In almost every... [ mumbles ]

00:13

[ mumbling continues ]

00:17

And the question: Harriet Robinson describes

00:19

an economic shift characterized by

00:21

all of the following except for... what?

00:24

And here are your potential answers.

00:25

[ bell dings ]

00:29

What exactly is the economic shift described in the excerpt?

00:32

Well, first off, that title,

00:34

Life among the Early Mill Girls,

00:36

means we're talking about the Industrial Revolution

00:38

in the U.S. where goods were all of a sudden

00:40

made in factories rather than by hand in the home.

00:43

We also see the cotton factory described as a great opening

00:46

for women, where they could earn money

00:48

and spend it as they pleased.

00:50

So we've got women working outside the home and earning their own wages.

00:53

Talk about a tectonic shift. We just need to figure out

00:56

which of these answers does not describe

00:58

that same societal earthquake.

01:00

So was this economic shift during the Industrial Revolution

01:03

characterized by A - a decrease in subsistence farming?

01:07

Well, with the arrival of industrial factories,

01:09

women started leaving the small subsistence farms

01:12

owned by their families to go work for factories in the big city,

01:15

which led to a big increase in urban populations.

01:18

So we can say good-bye to both A and B.

01:20

Could the economic shift have been characterized by C -

01:23

a growing reliance on technological innovation?

01:26

Well, you bet. All those new inventions:

01:28

the spinning jenny, the spinning mule, the waterframe,

01:31

they all allowed production to be centralized in factories.

01:35

Not quite as cool as an iPhone, but still pretty revolutionary.

01:37

So it can't be C.

01:38

Which means that the economic shift wasn't characterized by

01:42

D - a relaxation of the strict social and moral codes

01:44

imposed upon women.

01:45

Yes, women did make big advances by entering

01:48

these new factory jobs.

01:49

They were earning their own money and living away from home,

01:51

a degree of freedom many women had never before experienced.

01:55

Except that freedom wasn't actually

01:57

very, well, free.

01:59

Younger girls were seen as vulnerable to

02:01

the temptations of urban life,

02:03

so they had to live in company housing

02:05

where older women supervised their every move.

02:07

So the correct answer is D.

02:09

And not that they'd have a chance to succumb to temptation

02:12

during the grueling 80-hour work week.

02:14

But apparently staying away from

02:16

sweets really is a full-time job.

02:19

[ bird sounds ]

Full Transcript