Rachel Fuchs Gender And Poverty

Rachel Fuchs, the author of Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth Century Europe, noticed that throughout her research the two classes of people that struggled the most were the poor and women. Fuchs wrote, “gender is the overriding organizing principle, and the lens through which we seek to understand power relationships in the history of women and poverty.” Fuchs writes to show the reader how their lives were shaped and what the lives of the poor entailed. She begins with the revolutionary era in 1770, assessing the effects of the French and Industrial revolutions on the impoverished. With industry finally becoming increasingly mechanized, labor was typically done in factories as opposed to being done at the homes previously. Women and children …show more content…
During this time, as Fuchs describes, there was instability in regards to employment always. The poor lived in constant fear of loss of a job, disability, and losing their independence. People could go from self-sufficient, while still poor, to indigent. It was often more difficult for poor women to obtain jobs than men, which led to potential disruption and violence. Sometimes women engaged in food riots outside of farms and bakeries, and often got away with it due to society viewing this as them being distraught over not being able to feed their children. Women at the end of the eighteenth century were emerging into the workforce, however were unable to compete with men and did not get the recognition they deserved. Fuchs goes on to discuss the effects of population of poverty, as the nineteenth century, focusing on the city and its impact on gender, lives and poverty in chapters 4 and 5. The population in Europe underwent two transitions in demographics during this time. First, from 1750-1850, the population doubled. Second, beginning in 1880, began a fertility decline, thus reversing the trends of the first stage of …show more content…
The impoverished population lived in unsanitary and crowded conditions—suffering both high morbidity and mortality. Living in such close quarters bred disease, such as tuberculosis, bronchitis. Smallpox and scarlet fever were the most frequent causes of death. Epidemic diseases caused wide-scale morality and killed large amounts of the impoverished population. Life was very difficult for the poor during the nineteenth century in Europe. She focuses on the parameters of life for the poor and for women. The final chapter focuses on charity and welfare, and ties in some of the points she had made earlier. People started to realize that poverty was an underlying issue, and Europe couldn’t be as successful with it. There were attempts at reform, to wipe out poverty so there could be more healthy people for the military, more people in the work force, and more people able to vote. More assistance became available with the implementation of