Additionally, economic advances were far greater than changes in culturally Victorian attitudes. In the eighteenth century, women and children were seen as second-class citizens and sometimes as freely tradable goods and possessions. The economic revolution was the engine that drove culture and laws to undergo similarly drastic changes. When women left the camps in search of employment and education, they became a social force that could no longer be denied. Consequently, women's rights advanced dramatically during the late nineteenth century, something that would not have happened had it not been for the Industrial Revolution.
Until the eighteenth century, there were no opportunities for female labor. With the machines deployed by the Industrial Revolution, human skills changed in value. Capital left the work less manly and more intellectual, allowing women to compensate with neurons for what they lacked in muscle. Because it is more productive than rural labor, the income of industrial workers has exceeded that of the countryside. It was the Industrial Revolution that boosted the process of economic emancipation of women.
