Industrialization

Industrialization refers to the mechanization of production, and particularly the substitution of human and animal labor by mineral power, such as coal, water, and steam. Two other processes, however, that preceded mechanization had a major impact on family life: agrarian reform that made the production of food more efficient, at once increasing the quantity of food and releasing human labor from its production; and proto-industry, a system in which rural workers, operating as family units, purchased raw materials from contractors, worked them into semi-finished or finished products, and sold them back to the urban manufacturer. In some regions and countries this type of production, particularly in the case of certain textiles, persisted along with full-scale factory production into the twentieth century. Output expanded through the multiplication of production units—families—rather than through mechanized tools of production, thus making the family an agent of economic development (Mendels 1972; Tilly 1983; Berg 1986). Ultimately mechanized production in factories became the dominant form of production, creating new social classes and a new ideology about family life.

A number of factors caused England to industrialize first, beginning around 1750. Rapid population growth acted as a catalyst for increased production of food and manufactured goods, and England had the advantages of abundant raw materials, colonial possessions, and advanced transportation systems on sea and land. The social impacts of industrialization in England were in many ways brutal, particularly when rural laborers were forced off the land and when the skills of artisans became obsolete. Although the case of England was long thought to be the "classic" model of industrialization, no other country had exactly the same conditions and patterns of development. Industrialization in France began later and far more slowly than in England, with large-scale industry developing only in the 1850s. Germany and parts of central Europe followed in the 1860s, the United States in 1870s, and Russia only at the end of the century (Blackwell 1968; Henderson 1969; Landes 1969; Trebilcock 1981).

Although the timing, pace and social impacts of industrialization varied, it had similar impacts everywhere on marriage and family life. One of the most important consequences was the removal of work from the home. Second, it promoted migration from the countryside to the city, and between towns, as well as to other countries, particularly across the Atlantic. Third, it promoted a decline in marital fertility, and families became much smaller. Fourth, it created two new social classes, the industrial proletariat and the bourgeoisie, each of which experienced change in family life very differently. The bourgeoisie gave rise to a new model of family life that came to dominate social mores as well as social policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Moch 1983; Accampo 1989; Levine 1984).

Marriage

Prior to industrialization and during its early phases, economic considerations determined the choice of marriage partners, leaving little room for romantic love. Among the upper classes, marriages were contracted to consolidate landholdings and political power through dowries, patrimony, and social alliances, and with the aim of preserving bloodlines. Among the lower classes, mere survival necessitated marriage, and men often chose wives on the basis of their potential productive contribution as well as their reproductive capacities. Peasant farmers needed strong women who could help with labor, especially during harvests, as well as cultivate gardens, run a household, and sell products in the local market. Artisans needed partners who could help with their craft, and often chose wives from families of the same occupation. Even middle class wives provided essential assistance to their husbands in running businesses, as shopkeepers and accountants, in purchasing and selling products, and in negotiating prices. Romantic love may have affected choice of a partner, but parents and other kin actually feared its subversive influence on the broader economic community. Because marriage involved so many economic and familial considerations, couples wed at a late age through the beginning of the nineteenth century. On the average, men married at about age twenty-nine, and women at about age twenty-six. Many couples married only after one or both of their parents had died; parental death not only released patrimony, it released young people from the need for parental consent (Stone 1977; Davidoff and Hall 1987; Smith 1981; Gillis 1985).

The more intensified development of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century undermined the restrictions on marriage among all classes, though economic concerns continued to prevail. In certain circumstances industrial wage labor encouraged earlier marriage because the contributions of a wife and children could increase chances for survival or for a higher standard of living. But in other circumstances low wages made marriage impossible; Michael Mitterauer and Reinhard Sieder (1983) discovered that in the Viennese district of Gumpendorf, up to a third of all workers in the mid-nineteenth century could never afford to marry or have a family. Others formed consensual unions and had children out of wedlock. Migration resulting from industrial change also disrupted marriage patterns, but far less than might be expected. Numerous studies have shown that young people rarely migrated alone, and when they did, it was to join relatives and neighbors who had preceded them to their destinations (Moch 1983; Anderson 1971). Marital endogamy thus persisted: people married others who were from similar occupations or similar origins, whether they had traveled twenty-five miles from their native village, or across the Atlantic. In Europe, and particularly in the United States, which received Europeans of so many different backgrounds, people married within their own ethnic groups, and specific ethnic groups concentrated in certain trades. In this manner, marriage countered the disruptive effects of geographical displacement, and continued to be the product of survival more than the result of romantic love.

Industrial capitalism and complex cultural factors associated with its impacts also influenced bourgeois marriages, but in a manner different from those of the lower classes. The accumulation of wealth that produced the bourgeoisie also fostered an ethic of individualism and created cultural freedom for the development of intimacy. The era of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century associated with art and literature also reflected and encouraged the development of romantic love (Perrot 1990; Kern 1992). Although economic considerations continued to play a crucial role in choosing a spouse, romantic love at least as an ideal began to compete with the traditional ethic, and gave rise to what historians have called the companionate marriage in which mutual affection was considered necessary for a successful union. Indeed, love between spouses became a moral duty among the middle classes (Stone 1977; Mitterauer and Sieder 1983).

Family

Industrialization changed the family by converting it from a unit of production into a unit of consumption, causing a decline in fertility and a transformation in the relationship between spouses and between parents and children. This change occurred unevenly and gradually, and varied by social class and occupation. Through the nineteenth century industrial workers continued to have relatively large families; women tended to have children about every two years from marriage to age forty. Most types of workers had little motivation for limiting family size because children continued to contribute to the family economy and infant and child mortality rates remained high in industrial cities, sometimes reaching fifty percent in the first year of life. Usually women stopped working outside the home once they became mothers, but often their husbands' wages were too low to support a family, so they took in tasks such as sewing to supplement the family income; but earnings were so low, and hours so long, that households suffered even more than they did when women left the home to work (Accampo, Fuchs, and Stewart 1995). In France especially, the practice of sending children out to wet-nurses continued to be widespread, and hygiene reports blamed infant mortality on women who did not breastfeed their own children (Fuchs 1992; Cole 2000).

Industrialization disrupted the traditional relationship between generations, as well as the relationship between spouses. Fathers could no longer pass on skills to their children—often the only patrimony workers had—when skills became obsolete. During times when the father was unemployed, family roles could be dramatically reversed: children and wives would bring home wages while the husband tended to the household. In conditions of severe poverty, "family life" could barely exist when multiple families and individuals crowded into tiny dwellings to save on rent.

The conditions of working class families varied widely, however, according to region and economic activity, and the family often became a means to resist change or soften its worst impacts. Particularly in textiles, male weavers went to great lengths to preserve their craft, avoid factory work, and preserve the family domestic economy. For example, French handloom weavers in the region around Cholet managed to preserve their craft for a century after linen production had become mechanized. As their own earnings declined from factory competition, they sent their wives and children into unskilled work in the local shoe and linen factories (Liu 1994). Where textiles did become completely industrialized in France, England, and the northern United States, historians have shown that entire families would become reconstituted in workshops, keeping the family unit together with fathers often supervising the work of their children. Families most affected by industrial change had a remarkable ability to adjust and survive (Smelser 1959; Hareven 1977, 1982; Hareven and Langenback 1978).

The nineteenth-century bourgeoisie experienced a fundamental transformation in family life as well. In the early phases of industrial capitalism, bourgeois women helped manage family businesses; little separation existed between private household affairs and the family enterprise, and their attitude about the latter extended to all aspects of life. As mothers they concentrated on alleviating themselves of childcare responsibilities and sent their infants to wet-nurses. When the mechanization of production and the professionalization of commerce removed work from the home, however, gender roles and ideals about family life changed dramatically. Men left the home to work and to socialize with other men, whereas women devoted themselves to domesticity and motherhood. Wives were to establish a moral haven from the unethical capitalist world to which their husbands could return. They supervised and instructed servants and elaborately decorated their households and themselves as symbols of their husbands' success. A cult of domesticity and a new ideology about motherhood emerged, dictating that women devote themselves exclusively to the nurturing function, breast-feeding their children themselves and rearing them according to strict rules of moral and religious discipline (Smith 1981; Davidoff and Hall 1987).

Although servants remained in bourgeois households until after World War I as domestics, nursemaids, and governesses—undermining the prescribed role of motherhood—family life among the bourgeoisie grew more private and closed in on itself, and affective relationships intensified. Ironically, the much higher expectations about marriage and childrearing emerged at a time when male and female worlds were becoming increasingly separate and differentiated. It was this family model that provided the basis upon which Sigmund Freud developed his psychoanalytic theory (Weeks 1985); it is difficult to imagine the theory's appropriateness to previous family forms.

The Bourgeois Family as a Model

Although workers generally did not embrace the same family ideology as that of the middle classes during the period of industrialization, the bourgeois model did spread to lower-middle and working-class families in the early twentieth century. As the male wage rose, and legislation restricted children's work, large families became impractical. Realizing that their populations were a national resource, governments throughout the industrializing world became deeply concerned with infant and child mortality, fertility decline, and marriage. They sought means to improve the health of the population and to guarantee a high growth rate. They feared that birth rates in competing nations and among their own immigrants and ethnic minorities would outpace their own "native stock" (Gordon 1977; Weeks 1981). Reform often meant intervening in family life through restricting women's and children's labor and attempting to encourage women to have more children and to breast-feed them rather than sending them to wet-nurses (Accampo, Fuchs, and Stewart 1985). Birth control generally remained difficult to obtain, if not illegal, until after World War I; it then became a part of family planning rather than individual reproductive freedom when it finally became legal (Gordon 1977; Weeks 1981).

The family that industrialization made possible, however, also created the very conditions that would undermine it, because political democratization accompanied economic modernization in Europe and North America. Although motherhood had gained a new status that gave women more dignity, many women began to seek the individual social and political rights that their brothers, husbands, and sons enjoyed, and became critical of their complete economic dependence and lack of education. Over the course of the twentieth century there has been an enormous rise in all industrial countries of married women in the labor force as well as a continuing decline in fertility, suggesting that women do not think of motherhood as their only purpose. Martine Segalen (1996) notes that by the late twentieth century, an increasing number of women with young children were entering the labor force throughout the industrial world. She suggests that the modern family, rather than representing the bourgeois "traditional" family, is a fusion of several models, including that of the working class where women never had the leisure or economic resources to make a "cult" of domesticity. High divorce rates and a sharp rise since 1970 of the number of unmarried, cohabiting couples suggest that the post-industrial family is continuing to reinvent itself (Segalen 1996; Burguière et al. 1996).

See also:Chronic Illness; Division of Labor; Family Roles; Fertility; Housework; Migration; Poverty; Rural Families; Time Use; Urbanization; Work and Family

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elinor accampo