One is both morally unjust and ignorant of history if one blames capitalism for the condition of children during the Industrial Revolution, since, in fact, capitalism brought an enormous improvement over their condition in the previous age.
The source of that injustice was ill-informed, emotional novelists and poets, like Dickens, fanciful medievalists like Southey and political tract writers posturing as economic historians like Engels and Marx. All of them painted a vague, rosy picture of a lost “Golden Age” of the working classes, which allegedly, was destroyed by the Industrial Revolution.
Historians have not supported their assertions. Investigation and common sense have deglamorized the pre-factory system of domestic industry.
The Effects of the Industrial Revolution on Women and Children – Robert Hessen (1962)
(I found it interesting that the “Comet Hits Eath – Women and Minorities Hardest Hit” memes were already so prevalent in the early sixties that the Objectivists decided to write this particular essay in order to combat the nonsense.)