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Women's Work and the Family in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Joan W. Scott  and
Louise A. Tilly
Joan W. Scott
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Louise A. Tilly
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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Extract

There is a great deal of confusion about the history of women's work outside the home and about the origin and meaning of women's traditional place within the home. Most interpretations of either of these questions depend on assumptions about the other. Usually, women at home in any time period are assumed to be non-productive, the antithesis of women at work. In addition, most general works on women and the family assume that the history of women's employment, like the history of women's legal and political rights, can be understood as a gradual evolution from a traditional place at home to a modern position in the world of work. Some historians cite changes in employment opportunities created by industrialization as the precursors of legal emancipation. Others stress political rights as the source of improved economic status. In both cases, legal-political and economic ‘emancipation’ usually are linked to changes in cultural values. Thus William Goode, whose World Revolution and Family Patterns makes temporal and geographic comparisons of family patterns, remarks on what he calls ‘the statistically unusual status of western women today, that is their high participation in work outside of the home’.

Type
The Family and Economic Roles
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , January 1975 , pp. 36 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1975

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References

Many people have helped us with comments on earlier drafts of this essay. We especially wish to thank Susan Rogers, Ellen Sewell, William Sewell, Jr., Charles Tilly, Marilyn Young, Richard Sennett, Natalie Davis, Sally Brown, Robert Brown, Lynn Hunt, Lynn Lees, and Maurine Greenwald for their critical readings of this paper.

A version of this paper was co-recipient of the Stephen Allen Kaplan Prize, University of Pennsylvania, 1973, and will appear in a forthcoming volume incorporating the Kaplan Lectures on the Family.

1 Goode, William, World Revolution and Family Patterns (New York, 1963), 56.Google Scholar Ivy Pinchbeck makes the opposite point—that occupational changes played a large part in women's emancipation—in the preface to the reprinted edition of her book, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (New York, 1969), v.Google Scholar

2 Deldycke, T., Gelders, H. and Limbor, J. M., La Population active et sa structure, under the supervision of Bairoch, P. (Brussells, 1969), 29–31.Google Scholar The figures given for Italy indicate that 1881 had even higher proportion of women working. The 1901 census, however, has been shown to be more reliable, especially in designating occupation. In 1881, census categories tended to overestimate the numbers of women working. In 1901, about 32.5 percent of Italian women worked.

3 The percentage of women in ‘middle class’ (white collar) occupations—teachers, nurses, shop assistants, secretaries and civil servants—increased in England between 1881 and 1911, while the percentage of women employed in working class occupations fell.

Holcombe, Lee, Victorian Ladies at Work (Hamden, Conn., 1973), 216.Google Scholar Holcombe shows that although mid-Victorian ideologies about women's place and women's dependent position in the patriarchal family were still being publicized, middle class women were increasingly entering the labor force. The reasons lie in demographic and economic realities, not ideology. The first of these was the surplus of unmarried or ‘redundant women’, in Harriet Martineau's phrase. These women, to whom the sex ratio denied husbands and for whom male mortality denied fathers and brothers, had to work. Furthermore, the expansion of the tertiary sector in England provided jobs for these women and for working class women who could take advantage of increased educational opportunities. In Holcombe's analysis, the development of feminist ideology about women's work accompanied change and justified it. It did not precede it or cause it in any sense.

In France, there was a similar move into ‘middle class’ occupations in the twentieth century. Clark, Francis, The Position of Women in Contemporary France (London, 1937), 74–5,Google Scholar gives the following figures for the percent female in selected occupations:

4 Pinchbeck, 315; Hutchins, E. L., Women in Modern Industry (London, 1915), 84.Google Scholar

5 Louise A. Tilly, ‘Women at Work in Milan, Italy—1880—World War I’, paper presented to the American Historical Association annual meeting, December 28, 1972. The national distribution of women workers, in Italy as a whole, showed textiles more important than domestic service as an employer of women. Domestic servants were disproportionately concentrated in cities, textile production, outside cities.

6 Calculated from data in Deldycke et al., 174. Agricultural activity was unimportant in England and in the city of Milan, so French figures are made comparable by excluding agriculture.

7 By industrialization we mean the process in which, over time, secondary and tertiary economic activity gain in importance in an economy. This is accompanied by an increased scale of these activities and consequent increasing productivity per capita.

8 See Gross, Edward, ‘Plus ca change … ? The Sexual Structure of Occupations over Time’, Social Problems, 16 (Fall, 1968), 198–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Census data from 1871 to 1901 analyzed in Tilly, Louise A., ‘The Working Class of Milan, 1881–1911’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1974.Google Scholar

10 Cohen, Miriam, ‘The Liberation of Working Class Women in England?’, unpublished paper, History Department, University of Michigan, 15; Hutchins 81–2;Google ScholarCadbury, Edward, Matheson, M. Cecile and Shann, George, Woman's Work and Wages. A Phase of Life in An Industrial City (Chicago, 1907), 219;Google ScholarHewitt, Margaret, Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry (London, 1958), 17.Google Scholar

11 Pinchbeck, 197–8.

12 Deldycke et al., 169.

13 Ibid., 185.

14 Chatelain, Abel, ‘Migrations et domesticité feminine urbaine en France, XVIII siècle—XX siècle’, Revue historique iconomique et sociale, 47 (1969), 521Google Scholar; Pyke, E. Royston, Golden Times (New York, 1970), 156.Google Scholar

15 McBride, Theresa, ‘Rural Tradition and the Process of Modernization: Domestic Servants in Nineteenth Century France’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Rutgers University, 1973, 85;Google Scholar Tilly (1974), 129–30. McBride found that in Versailles in the same period only 19.5 percent of female domestic servants were from urban working class families.

16 Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, translated by Baldick, Robert (London, 1962);Google ScholarBanks, J. A., Prosperity and Parenthood. A Study of Family Planning Among the Victorian Middle Classes (London, 1954);Google Scholar J. A. and Banks, Olive, Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England (New York, 1964)Google Scholar all associate the idea of these separate feminine characteristics with the middle class. John Stuart Mill made a compelling argument for granting political equality to women while recognizing feminine preferences and qualities which distinguish women from men. See J. S. and Mill, H. T., Essays on Sex Equality, Rossi, Alice, ed. (Chicago, 1971).Google Scholar For analysis of hierarchical patterns see Rogers, Susan, ‘Woman's Place: Sexual Differentiation as Related to the Distribution of Power’, unpublished paper, Northwestern University, April, 1974.Google Scholar

17 Laslett, Peter, The World We Have Lost (New York, 1965).Google Scholar Among the many anthropological and historical studies of pre-industrial societies are Foster, George, ‘Peasant Society and the Image of the Limited Good’, American Anthropologist, 67 (04, 1965), 293–315;CrossRefGoogle ScholarArensberg, Conrad and Kimball, Solon, Family and Community in Ireland (Cambridge, Mass., 1968);CrossRefGoogle ScholarBlythe, Ronald, Akenfield, Portrait of an English Village (New York, 1968);Google ScholarMorin, Edgar, The Red and the White: Report from a French Village (New York, 1970);Google ScholarWalker, Mack, German Home Towns: Community, State and General Estates, 1648–1871 (Ithaca, New York, 1971).Google Scholar

18 Engels, Frederick, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York, 1972), 81.Google Scholar

19 Our notion is a variation of the one presented by Bert Hoselitz: ‘On the whole, the persistence of traditions in social behavior… may be an important factor mitigating the many dislocations and disorganizations which tend to accompany rapid industrialization and technical change’. Hoselitz, Bert and Moore, Wilbert, Industrialization and Society (New York, 1966), 15.Google Scholar

20 Lewis, W. Arthur, ‘Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour’, in Agarwala, A. N. and Singh, S. P., eds., The Economics of Underdevelopment (New York, 1963), 408.Google Scholar

21 Shanin, Teodor, ‘The Peasantry as a Political Factor’, in Shanin, T., ed., Peasants and Peasant Societies; Selected Readings (Penguin Books, 1971), 241–4.Google Scholar A similar analysis of the peasant family in mid-twentieth century can be found in Mendras, Henri, The Vanishing Peasant. Innovation and Change in French Agriculture, translated by Lerner, Jean (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 76Google Scholar: “The family and the enterprise coincide: the head of the family is at the same time the head of the enterprise. Indeed, he is the one because he is the other… he lives his professional and his family life as an indivisible entity. The members of his family are also his fellow workers’.

22 Anderson, Michael, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971), 96.Google Scholar

23 ‘Giunta per la Inchiesta Agraria e sulle condizioni della Classe agricola, Atti’, Rome, 1882, Vol. VI, Fasc. II, 552, 559, Fasc. Ill, 87, 175–6, 373, 504, 575.Google Scholar

24 Brekilien, Y., La vie quotidienne des paysans en Bretagne au XIXe siécle (Paris, 1966), 37.Google ScholarGouesse, Jean-Marie, ‘Parenté, famille et marriage en Normandie aux XVIIe et XVIII siècles’, Annates, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 27e Année (07–10, 1972), 1146–7.Google Scholar

25 Basile Kerblay, ‘Chayanov and the Theory of Peasantry as a Specific Type of Economy’, in Teodor Shanin, ed., Peasants and Peasant Societies, op. cit., 151,Google Scholar and A. V. Chayanov on the Theory of Peasant Economy, Thorner, Daniel, Kerblay, Basile and Smith, R. E. F., eds. (Homewood, 111., 1966), 21, 60.Google Scholar See also Dussourd, Henriette, Au même pot et au même feu: étude sur les communautés familiales agricoles du centre de la France (Moulins, 1962).Google Scholar

26 For the most part, men worked outside the home. They performed public functions for the family and the farm. Women, on the other hand, presided over the interior of the house hold and over the private affairs of family life. Separate spheres and separate roles did not, however, imply discrimination or hierarchy. It appears, on the contrary, that neither sphere was subordinated to the other. This interpretation is, however, still a matter of dispute among anthropologists. See Roubin, Lucienne A., ‘Espace masculin, espace feminin en communaute provencale’, Annates, E.S.C. 26 (03–04, 1970), 540Google Scholar; Rogers, (1974), op. cit.,Google Scholar and Reiter, Rayna, ‘Men and Women in the South of France: Public and Private Domains’, unpublished paper, 1973, New School for Social Research.Google Scholar

27 Pinchbeck, , Part I, passim.; Alain Girard et Henri Bastide, ‘Le budget-temps de la femme mariée à la campagne’, Population, 14 (1959), 253–84.Google Scholar

28 Nadaud, Martin, Mémoires de Leonard, ancien garçon maçon (Paris, 1895, reissued 1948), 130.Google Scholar Agricole Perdiguier recalled that his father made his daughters work in the fields: ‘Madeleine and Babet worked with us, like men’. Mémoires d'un compagnon (Paris, 1964), 33.Google Scholar

29 Quoted in Drake, Michael, Population and Society in Norway, 1735–1865 (Cambridge, 1969), 145, 139–40.Google Scholar

30 Le Play, Frederick, Les ouvriers européens, 6 vols. (Paris, 1855–1878), Vol. 5, 45.Google Scholar

31 Ibid., Vol. 6, 145, 127, and Vol. 5, 261, respectively.

32 Dunham, Arthur, The Industrial Revolution in France (New York, 1935), 170.Google Scholar

33 Ets, Marie Hall, Rosa, The Life of an Italian Immigrant (Minneapolis, 1970).Google Scholar

34 Le Play, Vol. 3, 8 and Vol. 6, 109, respectively.

35 Pinchbeck, 59. See also Hubscher, R. H., ‘Une contribution à la connaissance des milieux populaire ruraux au XIXe siècle: Le livre de compte de la famille Flahaut, 1811–1877’, Revue d’histoire économique et sociale, 47 (1969), 361–403.Google Scholar

36 Le Play, Vol. 5, 386.

37 Ibid., Vol. 3, 281. Le Play adds that ‘For each day of work… the women transport twice, a weight of about 210 kilograms a distance of one kilometer’. Vol. 3, 161.

38 Ibid., Vol. 3, 325.

39 Clark, Alice, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1919), 150, 209.Google Scholar

40 LePlay. Vol. 3, 106–7.

41 Forrest, Alan, ‘The Condition of the Poor in Revolutionary Bordeaux’, Past and Present, No. 59 (1973), 151–2.Google Scholar

42 Hufton, Olwen, ‘Women in Revolution, 1789–1796’, Past and Present, No. 53 (1971), 92.Google Scholar

43 Thomas, Edith, Les Petroleuses (Paris, 1963), 73–9.Google Scholar The fleeting history of social concern and legislation during the Paris Commune of 1871 shows these values reflected in popular radicalism. Although women were not granted political equality by the Communards, illegitimate children were granted legal claims parallel to those of legitimate children. Among the institutions set up by the women of the Commune themselves were day nurseries for working mothers.

44 Rogers, Susan, ‘The Acceptance of Female Roles in Rural France’, unpublished paper, 1972, 95–6;Google ScholarAnderson, , 95Google Scholar; Covello, Leonard, The Social Background of the Halo-American School Child (Leiden, 1967),Google Scholar quotes a Sicilian proverb: ‘If the father is dead, the family suffers; if the mother dies, the family cannot exist’, 208–9. A French version of this is, ‘Tant vaut la femme, tant vaut la ferme’, quoted in Plan de Travail, 1946–47, La Role de lafemme dans la vie rurate (Paris, 1946).Google Scholar

45 Hufton, , 91–3,Google ScholarTilly, (1974), 259,Google ScholarAnderson, , 77Google Scholar, Ohren, Laura, ‘The Welfare of Women in Laboring Families: England, 1860–1950’, Feminist Studies, I (Winter–Spring, 1973), 107–25.Google Scholar

46 Hufton, , 93Google Scholar; Rogers, Susan, ‘Female Forms of Power and the Myth of Male Dominance: A Model of Female/Male Interaction’, unpublished paper, 1973Google Scholar; Clignet, Rémi, Many Wives, Many Powers; Authority and Power in Polygynous Families (Evanston, 1970);Google ScholarFriedl, Ernestine, ‘The Position of Women: Appearance and Reality’, Anthropological Quarterly, 40 (1967), 97–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Michaelson, Evelyn and Goldschmidt, Walter, ‘Female Roles and Male Dominance Among Peasants’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 27 (1971), 330–52;CrossRefGoogle ScholarReiter, Rayna, ‘Modernization in the South of France: The Village and Beyond’, Anthropological Quarterly, 45 (1972), 35–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Riegelhaupt, Joyce, ‘Salaoio Women: An Analysis of Informal and Formal Political and Economic Roles of Portuguese Peasant Women’, Anthropological Quarterly, 40 (1967), 127–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Huften, Olwen, ‘Women and the Family Economy in Nineteenth Century France’, unpublished paper, University of Reading, 1973.Google Scholar

47 Le Play, Vol. 5, 404 and Vol. 6, 110, respectively.

48 That sometimes management roles implied literacy as well is indicated in a manuscript communicated to us by Judith Silver Frandzel, University of New Hampshire. It is the account book of a farm in Besse-sur-Barge, Sarthe, undated but from the 1840s, kept exclusively by the daughter of the family. She lists everything, from sale of animals and land to purchase of handkerchiefs, kitchen utensils or jewelry, for which money was spent or received.

49 Le Play, Vol. V, 427; see also, IV, 198 for the life history of the tinsmith of Savoy and his wife.

50 Le Play, Vol. 6, 110–11. See also de Lauwe, Marie José Chombart and de Lauwe, Paul-Henry Chombart, La Femme dans la société (Paris, 1963), 158.Google Scholar

51 Brekelien, , 69.Google Scholar See also Anderson, , 77Google Scholar; Stearns, Peter, ‘Working Class Women in Britain, 1890–1914’, in Vicinus, Martha, ed., Suffer and Be Still (Bloomington, Indiana, 1972), 104, 108Google Scholar; Rogers, (1973), 28.Google Scholar

52 Rogers, (1973), p.Google Scholar

53 Le Play, Vol. 3, 111.

54 Braun, Rudolf, ‘The Impact of Cottage Industry on an Agricultural Population’, in Landes, David, ed., The Rise of Capitalism (New York, 1966), 63.Google Scholar

55 Pinchbeck, , 1–2.Google Scholar

56 Chayanov, , 40.Google Scholar

57 Tilly, (1972);Google Scholar this pattern of behavior also confirmed for pre-World War I Piedmont, another province of northern Italy, by interviews with several women who went, as young as age 10, to the city of Turin as domestic servants.

58 Braun, , in Landes, ed., 61–3.Google Scholar

59 Smelser, Neil, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to the British Cotton Industry (Chicago, 1959), 188–9.Google Scholar

60 Chatelain, , 508.Google Scholar

61 Ets, 87–115; Italy, , Ufficio del Lavoro, Rapporti sulla ispezione del lavoro (1 dicembre 1906–30 giugno (1908)),Google Scholar pubblicazione del Ufficio del Lavoro, Serie C, 1909, 64, 93–4, describes the dormitories and work arrangements in north Italian textile mills; Sullerot, Evelyne, Histoire et sociologie du travail féminin (Paris, 1968), 91–4;Google ScholarPerrot, Michelle, Les Ouvriers en Gréve, France 1871–1890 (Paris, 1974), 213, 328.Google Scholar Recent interpretations of similar American cases are to be found in Kasson, John, ‘The Factory as Republican Community: The Early History of Lowell, Mass.’, unpublished paper read at American Studies Convention, October 1973,Google Scholar and Harris, Alice Kessler, ‘Stratifying by Sex: Notes on the History of Working Women’, working paper, Hofstra University, 1974.Google Scholar

62 Yeo, Eileen and Thompson, E. P., The Unknown Mayhew (New York, 1972), 116–80.Google Scholar See also, Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. (London, 1861)Google Scholar, reprinted (London, 1967). Sullerot, 100, describes the household-like organization of seamstresses in small shops, in which the patronne and workers ate en famille, the less skilled workers dismissed, like children, before dessert.

63 Stearns, , 110.Google Scholar

64 Le Play, Vol. 5, 122.

65 Anderson, , 22Google Scholar; Lynn Lees, personal communication: ‘The sending back of money seems to have been a standard practice for Irish migrants everywhere. Rural Ireland has been living on the proceeds for several generations’.

66 Hubscher, , 395–6.Google Scholar

67 Ets, 138–40.

68 Anderson, , 153.Google Scholar

69 Drake, , 138.Google Scholar

70 Smuts, Robert, Women and Work in America (New York, 1971), 9.Google Scholar See also McLaughlin, Virginia Yans, ‘Patterns of Work and, Family Organization: Buffalo's Italians’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, II (Autumn, 1971), 299–314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The predominance of the family interest over that of individuals and the importance of the family as a model for social relationships can be glimpsed in the lives of young working men as well as in those of young girls. The Irish custom of sending money to parents was followed by boys as well as girls. In Italian immigrant families in the U.S., boys and girls turned over their salaries to parents. In French working class families, likewise. The compagnonnage system offered boys sponsored migration and houses in which to live, complete with a substitute family of mère, père and freres. These houses seemed to offer this kind of family setting without the authoritarian aspects of the factory dormitories.

71 Cf. Shorter, Edward, ‘Illegitimacy, Sexual Revolution and Social Change in Europe, 1750–1900’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2 (1971), 237–72;CrossRefGoogle Scholar‘Capitalism, Culture and Sexuality: Some Competing Models’, Social Science Quarterly (1972), 338–56,Google Scholar and, most recently, ‘Female Emancipation, Birth Control and Fertility in European History’, American Historical Review, 78 (1973), 605–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Shorter has argued that the increase in illegitimate fertility which began in the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries in Europe was preceded by a dramatic change in values. This change, he says, was stimulated by rebellion against parental authority and by exposure to ‘market values’ when young women broke with ‘old traditions’ and went out to work. The change was expressed in a new sexual ‘liberation’ of young working girls. They sought self-fulfillment and self-expression in sexual encounters. In the absence of contraception, they became pregnant and bore illegitimate children. We find Shorter's speculations imaginative but incorrect. He makes unfounded assumptions about pre-industrial family relationships and about patterns of work in these families. The actual historical experience of young women working in the nineteenth century was not what Shorter assumes it was. When one examines their history and finds that peasant values and family interests sent them to work, and when one examines the kinds of work they did and the pay they received, it is impossible to agree with Shorter that their experience was either radically different from that of women in the past, or was in any sense ‘emancipating’.

Shorter cannot demonstrate that attitudes changed; he deduces that they did. We show that the behavior from which Shorter deduced changed values was consonant with older valus operating in changed circumstances. Illegitimacy rose at least partly as a consequence of a compositional change in population—i.e., the increasing presence of many more young women in sexually vulnerable situations as workers in cities, removed from family protection and assistance. Under these circumstances, illicit liaisons can be seen as alternate families and illegitimate children the consequence of an attempt to constitute the family work unit in a situation in which legal marriage sometimes could not be afforded, other times, was not felt necessary. Far from their own parents and the community which could have enforced compliance with an agreement to marriage which preceded sexual relations, women were more likely to bear illegitimate children. This is discussed more fully in the text below. See DePauw, J., ‘Amour illegitime et société à Nantes au XVIIIe siècle’, Annates, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 27e Année (07–10, 1972), 1155–82,CrossRefGoogle Scholar esp. 1163. De Pauw shows (1166) that promises of marriage in cases of illegitimacy increased as both illegitimacy increased and the unions which produced the bastards increasingly occurred between social equals in the eighteenth century. (In each subsequent version of his argument, Shorter has become less qualified and more insistent about the logic of his argument. Logic, however, ought not to be confused with actual historical experience and Shorter has little solid evidence from the past to support his speculation.) See Tilly, Louise, Scott, Joan and Cohen, Miriam, ‘Women's Work and European Fertility Patterns’, unpublished paper, 1973.Google Scholar

72 Booth, Charles, Life and Labour of the People of London (London, 1902);Google ScholarYeo, and Thompson, , 116–80;Google ScholarFrance, , Direction du Travail, Les associations professionelles ouvriéres, Vol. 4 (1903), 797–805Google Scholar; Leroy-Beaulieu, P., Le travail des femmes au XIXe siécle (Paris, 1873), 50–145.Google Scholar

73 Hair, P. E. H., ‘Bridal Pregnancy in Rural England in Earlier Centuries’, Population Studies, 20 (1966–1967), 233–43,CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed and ‘Bridal Pregnancy in Earlier Rural England, Further Examined’, ibid., 24 (1970), 59–70; Sheppard, Thomas F., Loumarin in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of a French Village (Baltimore, 1971);Google ScholarWrigley, E. A., Population and History (New York, 1969), 61–106;Google ScholarWikman, K. R. V., Die Einleitung der Ehe: Eine vergleichende Ethnosoziologische untersuchung über die Vorstufe der Ehe in den sitten des Schwedischen Volkstums (Abo, 1937; Acta Academie Aboensis, Humaniora, II).Google Scholar

74 Yeo, and Thompson, , 167–80.Google Scholar For eighteenth century Nantes, Pauw, De, 1166–7,Google Scholar shows how economic promises to find the woman work, or teach her a craft led to liaisons which ended in pregnancy; Thomas, , 20–2, 76–9,Google Scholar describes common law marriage in the Parisian working class at the time of the Commune.

75 Yeo, and Thompson, , 141, 148, 169Google Scholar; Sigsworth, E. M. and Wylie, J. J., ‘A Study of Victorian Prostitution and Venereal Disease’, in Vicinus, cited above, 81.Google Scholar

76 Chayanov and other economic studies of peasantry remark on the concept of ‘target income’. On the demographic reflections of the developmental cycle see Berkner, Lutz, ‘The Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the Peasant Household: An Eighteenth-Century Austrian Example’, American Historical Review, 77 (04 1972), 398–418.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Lynn Lees is working on urban applications of the developmental cycle concept with English and Irish workers’ families.

77 Stearns, , 106.Google Scholar

78 Anderson, , 71, 79Google Scholar respectively.

79 Smuts, , 57.Google Scholar

80 McLaughlin, Virginia Yans, ‘A Flexible Tradition: South Italian Immigrants Confront a New York Experience’, unpublished paper, 1973, 8, 11,Google Scholar and McLaughlin, , 1972,Google Scholarop. cit.

81 Odencrantz, Louise, Italian Women in Industry: A Study of Conditions in New York City (New York, 1919), 19.Google Scholar Odencrantz also describes the concept of the family income—the sum of earnings of fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, other relatives, and returns from lodgers—as typical of Italian immigrants in New York. Covello, 295, describes the resistance of Italian immigrants to school requirements, and their haste to send boys out to work. One mother exclaimed, ‘The law [for school attendance] was made against the family’. The father of Louise Tilly, as an Italian immigrant schoolboy in New York before World War I, and the only member of his family not employed, did the cooking and kept house.

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83 Le Play, Vol. V, 9, 16–17, 45, 50–4.

84 MacPherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Hobbes to Locke (Oxford paperback, 1964), 3.Google Scholar

85 Anderson, , 131–2.Google Scholar

86 Ibid.

87 McBride, , op. cit.Google Scholar; Chatelain makes a similar point.

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89 See for example Nerlove, Marc, ‘Economic Growth and Population: Perspectives on the “New Home Economies’”, unpublished draft, Northwestern University, 1973.Google Scholar

90 Hewitt, , 99–122Google Scholar and Appendix I. For France, see the debate surrounding the passage of the Loi Roussel in 1874, regulating wet nursing.

91 Chatelain; McBride, 20. Domestic service continued, at the same time, to be the channel of geographic mobility of small rural population groups, sometimes in international migration streams.

92 Tilly, (1972).Google Scholar

93 Holcombe, , op. cit.Google Scholar

94 Steams, , 116.Google Scholar

94 These particular attitudes were expressed in Le Reveil des Verriers in an article published in 1893, entitled ‘La Femme socialiste’, but they are representative of many such attitudes expressed in the working class press. See Guilbert, M., ‘La Presence des femmes dans les professions: incidences sur Taction syndicate avant 1914’, Le Mouvement Social, No. 63 (1968), 129.Google Scholar For Italy, see La Difesa delle Lavoratrici (a socialist newspaper for women) 11 May, 1912,Google Scholar for a socialist view of women's role as mothers. See also Zeldin, Theodore, France, 1848–1945. Vol. I. Ambition, Love and Politics (Oxford, 1973), 346.Google Scholar