Industrialization
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
Bibliography
Accampo, E. (1989). Industrialization, Family Life and Class Relations: Saint Chamond, 1815–1914. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Accampo, E.A.; Fuchs, R.; Stewart, M. L. (1995). Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870–1914. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Anderson, M. (1971). Family Structure in Nineteenth- Century Lancashire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Berg, M. (1986). The Age of Manufacturers: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain, 1700–1820. New York: Oxford University Press.
Blackwell, W. L. (1968). The Beginnings of Russian Industrialization, 1800-1860. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Burguière, A.; Klapisch-Zuber, C.; Segalen, M.; and Zonabend, F. (1996). "The Family: What Next?" In A History of the Family, Vol. 2: The Impact of Modernity, ed. A. Burguière, C. Klapisch-Zuber, M. Segalen, and F. Zonabend. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cole, J. (2000). The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Davidoff, L., and Hall, C. (1987). Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fuchs, R. G. (1992). Poor and Pregnant in Paris. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Gillis, J. (1985). For Better, for Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gordon, L. (1977). Woman's Body, Woman's Right: Birth Control in America. New York: Penguin Books.
Hareven, T. (1977). Family and Kin in Urban Communities, 1700–1930. New York: New Viewpoints.
Hareven, T. (1982). Family Time and Industrial Time. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hareven, T., and Langenback, R. (1978). Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City. New York: Pantheon.
Henderson, W. O. (1969). The Industrialization of Europe, 1780-1914. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Kern, S. (1992). The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Landes, D. (1969). The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. London: Cambridge University Press.
Levine, D. (1977). Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism. New York: Academic Press
Levine, D., ed. (1984). Proletarianization and Family History. New York: Academic Press.
Liu, T.P. (1994). The Weaver's Knot: The Contradictions of Class Struggle and Family Solidarity in Western France, 1750–1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Mendels, F. (1972). "Proto-Industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process." Journal of Economic History 32:241–261.
Mitterauer, M., and Sieder, R. (1983). The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Moch, L. (1983). Paths to the City: Regional Migration in Nineteenth-Century France. Arlington, TX: A&M University Press.
Perrot, M, ed., (1990). A History of Private Life: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Segalen, M. (1996). "The Industrial Revolution: From Proletariat to Bourgeoisie." In A History of the Family, Vol. 2: The Impact of Modernity, ed. A. Burguière, C. Klapisch-Zuber, M. Segalen, and F. Zonabend. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Smelser, N. (1959). Social Change and the Industrial Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Smith, B. (1981). Ladies of the Leisure Class: TheBourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stone, L. (1977). The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. New York: Harper & Row.
Tilly, C. (1983). "Flows of Capital and Forms of Industry in Europe, 1500–1900." Theory and Society 12:123–142.
Trebilcock, C. (1981). The Industrialization of the Continental Powers, 1870-1914. London and New York: Longman.
Weeks, J. (1981). Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800. London: Longman.
Weeks, J. (1985). Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and Modern Sexualities. London: Routledge.
ELINOR ACCAMPO
Additional topics
Marriage and Family EncyclopediaModern Marriage & Family IssuesIndustrialization - Marriage, Family, The Bourgeois Family As A Model