C. 22 wor-def (UrSo) Flashcards
utilitarianism
The idea of Jeremy Bentham that social policies should promote the “greatest good for the greatest number.”
germ theory
The idea that disease was caused by the spread of living organisms that could be controlled.
labor aristocracy
The highly skilled workers, such as factory foremen and construction bosses, who made up about 15 percent of the working classes from about 1850 to 1914.
sweated industries
Poorly paid handicraft production, often carried out by married women paid by the piece and working at home.
companionate marriage
Marriage based on romantic love and middle-class family values that became increasingly dominant in the second half of the nineteenth century.
separate spheres
The nineteenth-century gendered division of labor and lifestyles that cast men as breadwinners and women as homemakers.
suffrage movement
A militant movement for women’s right to vote led by middle-class British women around 1900.
thermodynamics
A branch of physics built on Newton’s laws of mechanics that investigated the relationship between heat and mechanical energy.
Second Industrial Revolution
The burst of industrial creativity and technological innovation that promoted strong economic growth in the last third of the nineteenth century.
evolution
The idea, applied by thinkers in many fields, that stresses gradual change and continuous adjustment.
Social Darwinism
A body of thought drawn from the ideas of Charles Darwin that applied the theory of biological evolution to human affairs and saw the human race as driven by an unending economic struggle that would determine the survival of the fittest.
Realism
A literary movement that, in contrast to Romanticism, stressed the depiction of life as it actually was.
