Records of these events offer a means to study life among workers who otherwise left little or no documentation about themselves. Much of the analysis in this book is based on the reconstruction of these vital events. All workers left records of their individual vital histories: birth, marriage, death. A fundamental premise here is that fertility, nuptiality, and mortality provide measures of well-being.
Though its impacts may have been temporary and transitional, industrialization set the family on a path of change quite distinct from that of the middle class and helped to create deeper class differences.Ī starting point for understanding family life among workers is its demographic structure. This study argues that industrialization weakened the working-class family. Yet family life among urban workers remains relatively unexplored. The story of how the urban proletariat experienced the upheavals of its age must include a detailed examination of the family.Ī basic notion among many historians is that the lower classes followed the lead of those above them, that, for the most part, their families eventually adopted the same structural patterns and basic functions the middle class had evolved. The family is a key to understanding the effects that economic, political, and demographic change had on the "inarticulate" as well as on those who protested their condition. And yet those records represent only a fraction of all workers and only one facet of their past. Movements provide some of the best evidence of these workers' histories.
Records of conflict with employers and police and of militant protest that often translated into political Whatever their response or fate, the industrial proletariat endured a precarious existence and created new strains on the societies in which it lived. Benefits of democratic ideals came to them very late, and only after bitter struggles to add to the political meaning of freedom a social one: the basic right to exist. Their fertility and mortality remained high and they continued to have large families the shift from home-based production to mechanized factory production in most cases left a large portion of the working class disinherited. That the lower classes experienced these massive social changes very differently is indisputable. The changes described above most closely fit the European middle classes-the victors of all three revolutions-who left the most ample documentation of their everyday lives. The private nature of family life has kept it hidden from history, particularly among people who left few or no records of their past. But its history poses an overwhelming challenge as well. The family, after all, is the starting point of any society and rarely remains untouched by social change, whether as a cause or as an effect.
The study of family history provides a unique opportunity to understand the conjuncture of these major events that shaped modern Europe. Emotional functions replaced economic ones. Male and female spheres came to be more sharply defined. The convergence of these three revolutions caused the family to become more nuclear, private, and child-centered as it also shrank in size. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, three simultaneous events touched the core of European family life: while the demographic revolution transformed family structure, industrialization changed gender roles and Enlightenment philosophies inspired new ideals of equality, personal freedom, and individualism. Industrialization, Family Life, and Class Relations: Saint Chamond, 1815-1914. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1989 1989.
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