Weathering the Storm Working-Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline

by Seccombe, Wally

• ISBN13: 9781859840641
• ISBN10: 1859840647
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-12-17
• Publisher: VERSO

Summary

The industrial revolution which so transformed nineteenth-century labour brought about fundamental changes in the lives of working-class families. In this challenging sequel to A Millennium of Family Change Wally Seccombe examines in detail the ways in which large-scale economic changes shape the microcosm of personal life.

Seccombe argues that what we think of as the modern nuclear family only took shape relatively recently: whereas at the beginning of the nineteenth century families tended to contain several earners, it was not until the time of the First World War that the male breadwinner had become the norm. He traces the effects on the family of increasingly centralized manufacture, the separation of workplaces from the home neighbourhood, and the changes in domestic labour brought about by urban housing. And he documents how the introduction of compulsory schooling and the rise of birth control contributed to changes in the dynamic of the working-class family, as children are differentiated from adults and conjugal rights and duties renegotiated.

Combining empirical scope with conceptual clarity, Weathering the Storm makes a decisive contribution to the study of family history.

Author Biography

Wally Seccombe teaches sociology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Preface	p. 1
Working-Class Family Forms in the Capitalist Mode of Production	p. 5
The Fetishism of the Wage Form and the Concealment of Domestic Labour	p. 7
Men's Domestic Prerogatives and Women's Subordination in the Labour Market	p. 10
Labour-Power: Proletarian Supply and Capitalist Demand	p. 14
Capitalism and the Nuclear Form of the Working-Class Family	p. 18
Changing Family Forms in the First Industrial Revolution	p. 21
The Industrial Revolution	p. 22
The Separation of Workplaces from Households: Effects on the Family Wage Economy	p. 29
Women's Employment Patterns	p. 32
Child Labour and Familial Relations of Production	p. 35
Housing in the Midst of the Urban Onrush	p. 40
Women's Domestic Work and the Household as a Workplace	p. 45
Working-Class Marriage Informalized	p. 49
'A Crisis of the Working-Class Family'?	p. 54
The Augmentation of Nuclear Families	p. 61
Strains in the Extensive Reproduction of Labour-Power	p. 71
The Second Industrial Revolution: 1873-1914	p. 81
The Recruitment and Training of Labour	p. 92
The Rise of Schooling	p. 96
The Effects of Compulsory Schooling on Working-Class Families	p. 107
Emergence and Consolidation of the Male-Breadwinner Norm	p. 111
Transformations in Working-Class Housing	p. 124
Changes in Household Technology and Domestic Labour	p. 129
The Rise of Mass Transit	p. 132
The Settling of Working-Class Neighbourhoods	p. 135
Household Composition and Domestic Space	p. 143
Wage Distribution Patterns within Families	p. 146
Starting to Stop: The Proletarian Fertility Decline	p. 157
Procreative Risks, Conjugal Power, Sexual Passion and Self-Control	p. 168
Reasons for Wanting to Stop	p. 174
Perennial Reasons and the Timing of the Decline	p. 176
Explaining the Fertility Decline: Towards an Un-Immaculate Reconception	p. 183
Conclusion	p. 195
Origins of the Traditional Family	p. 202
Putting Recent Trends in Perspective	p. 209
Notes	p. 213
Bibliography	p. 257
Index	p. 277
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