Robert MonkVersion 1.1

Responses in the Family to Industrialization and other Effects of Capital Intensification in Europe 1780‹1900

Whether situated in a rural or an urban setting, European households in the century 1780‹1900 adapted new strategies for coping with the rapid changes in means to livelihood that were brought on by increasingly capital-intensive technologies of production. As Louise Tilly has pointed out, the strategies of a household intersect with a number of factors, such as "the economic and social structures in which the household is located, ... and ... the processes of change which these structures are undergoing"(Tilly, 1978; p. 3). More or less, depending on the region, "social structures" could include responding strategies of social control initiated by middle-class organizations and by the government, which increasingly served as the agent of the middle class; traditions of leisure, courtship, and social values and moral standards; the quality and availability of work ‹ relations of labor to capital, the level of real wages, seasonality of wages, and differentials in wages along age and gender lines. A study of family strategies provides unique insight into all these topics, but I will treat only last one ‹ labor ‹ with any thoroughness.
For several reasons, patterns of behavior may be most visible as they manifest themselves in the structure of households, but this does not mean that households are necessarily the most important unit of decision making for the nineteenth-century working class. Thus, before turning exclusively to aspects of family structure related to family size (number of children), I will use a broad comparison of more general strategies to argue that the relative importance of family strategy and individual self-interest depends on the rate of change the strategy responds to as well as the social group (child, man, woman, employed and unemployed) to which the individual belongs.
The term 'family strategy' conveys a sense that households were somehow the most important unit of response to changing circumstances. Some would argue precisely this. Tilly writes:

The concept of family strategies works as a series of hypotheses about, as Pierre Bourdieu puts it, "implicit principles", less rigid or articulated than decision rules, by which the household, not the individual, not the society as a whole, acts as the unit of decision making. [Tilly, 1978; p. 3]

Family strategy may attain as the unit of decision making when social change is slow enough to permit the traditions that structure family to change as fast as individual interests. When change is fast, however, individual interests are more likely to conflict with family strategy and more likely to be indulged in spite of it. In crisis circumstances, individuals within the family order may act independently and in conflict with the needs and demands of the family strategy. Family strategy must then adjust to changes in the behavior of individuals, not the other way around. This is not to suggest that the individual is the principle unit of decision making, only putting her divergent interests into visible relief during times of crisis. Rather, in periods of stressful change old family strategies become faulty and their limitations are revealed. Individuals seek alternatives that are viable within the new order, and they tend to reproduce what they can of the old strategy.
Others have suggested a unit of decision-making not smaller, but larger than the family. In her analysis of poor-lists and other sources on Antwerp 1770-1860, Catharina Lis concludes tentatively that "where Antwerp is concerned, the role of the neighborhood as the organizing principle in the construction of relations of reciprocity and solidarity ought to be accorded great importance"(Lis; p.158). Her strongest evidence is negative ‹ family relations of reciprocity were grossly inadequate after about 1840 ‹ or from literary sources, and, as she herself admits, "none of it is beyond dispute." Rather than an emphasis on neighborhood networks as the organizing principle of working-class social relations in Antwerp, I see evidence for a dialectical process in which rapid change in economic conditions stimulates self-interested individual responses that gradually accommodate one another in the form of a new equilibrium family organization. During a period of rapid and stressful change, such as Antwerp's in the first half of the Nineteenth Century, family strategy reflects the various interests of its individual participants only after sufficient time has elapsed for new patterns of individual behavior to accommodate one another.
For the period following 1820 ‹ generally considered a period of very rapid industrial growth and even rising real wages ‹ there seems to be a trend of falling wages for women, especially women beyond their late twenties. The older women Lis studied in Antwerp, those in England that Rule considered at a very general (Rule; p. 178) level and Anderson more narrowly, and the women Tilly studied in Roubaix, France all confronted at some time after 1820 a change in the structure of the job market favouring men (and to some extent younger women) almost to their exclusion.
One explanation for this change in Preston seems appropriate in light of Lis' analysis of the labor market in Antwerp. Anderson's study of Preston shows that male factory workers (SEG VI) in the cotton industry worked there only in the early phase of a complex work-cycle (Anderson, 1971; pp. 26-8). Upon leaving the factory, the majority became labourers, some higher factory workers, and a few tradesmen. Even though Preston was very different from Antwerp (its textiles industry did not collapse, for instance), the structure of work opportunities for women seems to be similar. Women were forced to leave the factories at a young age (Anderson, 1971; pp. 71-3). In Antwerp, employment, particularly for older women, was virtually eliminated with the collapse of the textiles industry. Antwerp's emergence as an important port-town provided labor for strong, male, casual laborers, but not women (Lis; pp. 36-77). Like the women of Antwerp, the women of Preston had few alternatives open to them after an initial phase in the factories (where half of all working women were employed).
Tilly notes the impact on family strategy of this type of urban industrial setting, in which there was structural unemployment for women :
In Roubaix in 1872, as in Preston, Lancashire, (1851) as described by Michael Anderson, there was an apparently successful family effort to keep children in the household and working for the family wage fund. AsAnderson suggests, and as our comparison of Roubaix with the fragmentary evidence for the Avesnes weavers corroborates, parents and children lived together longer in the textile city than in agricultural or weaving villages. [Tilly, 1978; pp. 18-19]

Tilly notes two factors influencing such co-habitation that are similar both to the factors Anderson defines in his study of Preson (Anderson, 1971; p. 141) and to those Lis identified in her study of Antwerp. These are short supply of housing, and the services with which wives, employed and unemployed, attracted even the high wage-earning members of the younger generation. Anderson's analysis adds the advantage of sharing family furniture, where a young couple would have had little in the way of savings with which to buy their own. It also suggests that expensive housing was not a necessary constraint in cases where young couples sought co-habitation with older family; the opportunity to save rent may have been enough for them. The universality of most of these factors indicates the strong possibility that this strategy of co-habitation may have been quite widespread in industrial towns, where housing was a relatively significant factor in household budgets.
Tilly also notes that "Wider kin networks facilitated migration and kin or neighborhood networks of women helped people find jobs or gave aid in times of unemployment or sickness"(Tilly, 1978; p. 19). Such a close parallel to the networks whose existence Lis tries to establish warrants more attention. Were neighborhood relief-networks important in all three cities (Preston, Roubaix, Antwerp)? If so, did the large proportion of inmigrants in these cities tend to intensify neighborhood networks where they would not normally be effective? Unfortunately, I cannot address these questions here.
That the responding strategies used by families of such far-flung cities were similar adds needed weight and some qualification to Tilly's assertion that the objective of working-class family strategies was "to promote nuclear family survival over a cycle of family expansion and contraction, from marriage of the couple, through child bearing, child departures, return to the solitary couple, and death of its members"(Tilly, 1978; p. 5). Her own examples, as well as examples from Preston and Antwerp, suggest family survival was indeed the objective of family strategies, but that the working classes were not particularly concerned about preserving the nuclear structure of their families (1). That families took many different forms over time and space rather than prefering a nuclear structure is evidence that they were responding to the interests of their constituent individuals to some extent.
I have already reviewed Tilly's own analysis of Roubaix, which contradicts her assertion that the objective of family strategy implied a stage in which a solitary couple played a part . In her analysis of marriage statistics and other indicators of household structure in Antwerp, Lis describes a family strategy that explains patterns both in Antwerp after the 1820s, and in Roubaix in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century. Lis establishes that there was increasingly a shortage of working class housing within the city of Antwerp (Lis; Part III). At the same time, as housing costs were rising dramatically, employment for women collapsed along with Antwerp's textile industries, dropping from a rate of some 80% in 1780 to only 55% employed by the mid- Nineteenth Century (Lis; p. 37). At the marginal wage-rates available to Antwerp workers, living as a solitary couple would have been feasible and even preferable before the Nineteenth Century, but as the cost of living-space rose and the earnings-contribution that could be expected from women fell, bare survival would require alterations in family strategy.
The statistics Lis looks at suggest a lag-time between changes in the social topography and adequate adjustments at the level of household. During this lag-time, individual self-interest prevailed. Lis states the males' economic perspective well:
Given that the economic transformation of Antwerp entailed structural unemployment for a growing number of women and nearly all young children, and that the real wages [calculated in terms of rye-bread] of those who could still get a job fell sharply, it seems probable that more and more male workers would have thought twice before marrying.

and her statistics bear this out:

Percentage of unmarried citzens over 20 in Antwerp, categorized by sex, 1796‹1856

Females Males
1796 44.4 32.3
1830 44.9 38.0
1846 44.1 41.7
1856 41.2 43.0
[pp. 140-1]

Growth in the percentage of bachelors was even greater for predominantly proletarian sectors of the city (p. 141). The initial response to structural changes in employment opportunity involved at least a strong component of individual self-preservation. Men were not as likely to accept fatherhood of their children, since this would mean a substantial fall in living-standard. Women increasingly found themselves pregnant and unmarried. Since poor-relief was made available only to mothers of legitimate children, these women increasingly abandoned their babies to the foundling hospital. In those cases where men took responsibility for their children, they did so increasingly through arrangements of unmarried co-habitation in order to avoid the costs of marriage.
As I have already hinted, this change in marriage practices had repercussions in reproduction statistics, and it is on the basis of these that Lis suggests the delayed response of household strategy to changing social conditions. The ratio of foundlings to total births grew, but only through the 1830s, after which it fell off considerably. While illigitimate births had been on the rise through the last half of the Eighteenth Century, the pace accelerated after 1780; but, like the foundling ratio, it seems to have peaked around 1840. According to Lis' interpretation, generations that grew up after 1830 could not have avoided recognizing the severe challenge present in Antwerp's state of poverty. More importantly, perhaps, they would have seen the effects of sexual practices that were unsuited to the new condition of structural unemployment for women. By the 1840s, couples, and particularly women, had realized that pregnancy out of wedlock was no longer a virtual assurance of eventual marriage. If men did not always abandon pregnant women outright, couples were finding marriage more and more often a financial impossibility (Lis; p. 146).
After an initial period in which self-interest predominated, a new family strategy emerged. Unmarried children and young couples (married and unmarried) lived more often with their parents, widows were more likely to live with kin, especially a married child, and couples who had been parents for less than six years were less likely to be married (Lis; pp. 144-6). These strategies were suited to the circumstances. The cost of housing was increasingly prohibitive. Living in over-stuffed space was preferable to spending most of the family earnings on shelter and having not enough to eat. Due to structural unemployment, widows, despite modest help from the Charity Bureau, could not survive alone unless prepared to subject themselves to the prison-like conditions of the poor-house (Lis; p. 155). Though they were probably an increasing burden to the young couples who took them in, these widows could offer domestic services such as house-keeping and child-care to those couples fortunate enough to have dual incomes. Child-care would have been particularly helpful between 1800 and 1840, when child employment decreased dramatically (45% in 1827 down to 11.5% in 1855)(Lis; p. 38), and schooling had not yet become common. Toward the end of this period, however, both real wages for men and employment for young women declined. As the the couples' earnings-surplus shrank, so did their preference for the parents' domestic services. Not surprisingly, the number of widows seeking poor-relief increased considerably after 1840 (Lis; pp. 152-4). In Antwerp during the first half of the Nineteenth Century, individual self-interest was gradually fixed into appropriate family strategies as different groups (men and women; young and old) adjusted to one another's initially self-centered strategies for survival. The extreme poverty of Antwerp put unusual and continuing pressure on its poor throughout the Nineteenth Century, making any equilibrium reached in this way merely a tentative one.
(1)Tilly claimed that the objective of family strategies was "to promote nuclear family survival over a cycle of family expansion and contraction" that ended with a "solitary couple." Yet the reality of family strategies in the urban settings of Roubaix and Antwerp was that they varied from the nuclear norm when it was convenient to do so. The flexibility of working class household structure in these two cases suggests that perhaps 'family strategy' is a useful concept mostly because individuals (particularly high wage-earning young males) saw family arrangements as the means to the highest standard of living. Admittedly, other factors were probably also at work, such as a sense of responsibility to mothers, whose potential to contribute in a nuclear family's household economy was decreasing after 1820. As Lis demonstrates, however, the economic advantages of multi-generational co-habitation in a highly pressurized housing market made it the best, if not the only choice, even for the most independent groups (young men) of the working class. Young men and young couples moved in with parents because they could save on housing costs, while the value of the older mother's house-keeping and child-care time was increased, as it served more people. Family strategy in Antwerp and Roubaix moved away from its older, nuclear structure under the pressure of social change.
There was an important difference between the changes in Antwerp and those in Roubaix. In Roubaix, changes in household structure were slower and more lasting than in Antwerp. The 'stem' family that resulted in Roubaix was maintained through the end of Tilly's study in 1914, whereas in Antwerp, in a span of a hundred years a typical widow went from being capable of self-sufficiency, through dependence on reciprocal relations with kin, to dependence on institutionalized public support. Older couples who were not self-sufficient were also increasingly likely to be abandoned by their children.
Judging from this comparison, family strategy can be understood best as an equilibrium between the diverse interests of the many social positions that constitute the family. These would include employed and unemployed children, employed and unemployed men and women, mothers caring for infants, and employed and unemployed elders both married and widowed. The individualist basis of the family strategies shaped by these interests becomes apparent only under pressure from the very rapid change wrought by capital-intensification such as that which took place in Antwerp between 1770 and 1860. In Antwerp, for the period Lis studied, change was too fast for any viable equilibrium family strategy to become established. Neighborhood networks may have taken up the slack, but evidence for this is slim. More clear is the extent of the dire poverty that Antwerp's working class was victim to and the degree to which individual self-interest determined resulting strategies for survival.
In discussing the role of family strategy in working-class lives I have said little about how it affected children, and what role they played in household economies. Why did couples bring children into the marginal existence that was the norm for so many European families in the Nineteenth Century? Why did they limit their families to three or four children in Roubaix, four or six in Preston, two or three in Antwerp, and not at all in the neighborhood of Avesnes-les-Aubert where Mémé, the subject of Tilly's case study, was born? Habit, conditioning, and direct social pressure must have played some role in directing couples to produce children, just as they do today. Birth control devices, if available, were not as effective then as they are now. Finally, even if they were not always helpful or necessary in the early stages of a marriage, productive children were very important to couples and the widowed in their old age as a source of support. Even in regions where the poor-laws provided adequate assistance for the helpless, accepting bureaucratic aid was considered shameful and was often made extremely unpleasant (Lis; Chapter 13).
Regional differences in family size are largely attributable to differing economic circumstances, though, as with the decision to have children in the first place, habit and conditioning must have had some effect on the numbers produced. A comparison between strategies employed by framework knitters in Shepshed, Leicestershire and those of the Camberlot hand-loom weavers of Avesnes-les-Aubert gives an idea of how circumstances can affect family size. In David Levine's analysis, the proto-industrialist framework knitters of Shepshed faced the dual spectres of over-population on one hand, and the precariousness of a household economy based on a single wage-earner, on the other. The response was emmigration (arguably an aspect of family strategy, but not one I will discuss), co-habitation of the kind already described, and high fertility through earlier marriage (Levine; pp. 155-6).
In 1815, framework knitting was still largely a household production, and one carried out most efficiently by several people. Young couples compressed their reproductive stage into the first years of their marriage, when the added cost of non-producing children was offset by the benefits of co-habitation. High infant mortality was met with high fertility as the means of ensuring the help of additional workers by the time the couple established its own household. Furthermore, insofar as children were considered a source of welfare in old age (Levine claims they were), a single child was little assurance until it was beyond five years of age (Levine; p. 157). Since children were born about two years apart, even a risky compromise meant producing two or three children, and though women "deliberately restricted their fertility"(Levine; p. 155) in the later years of marriage, birth control has never been perfect. Hoping to guarantee their welfare in old age and to obtain the productive capacity that was necessary for an independent household, young, co-habiting Shepshed families produced many children early on, despite growing population pressure.
Though the hand-loom weavers in Tilly's study of Avesnes engaged in a similar proto-industry, and though, like the framework knitters of Shepshed, Avesnes weavers responded to competition from factory production by emmigration, the family-size was considerably larger in Avesnes, and there was no corresponding period of co-habitation for couples. Whereas Shepshed families averaged four or five children, the typical number in Mémé's neighborhood generally was ten or more (Tilly, 1978; p. 11). There are differences between the two regions which may explain these differing strategies. Avesnes weavers managed to supplement their collapsing cottage industry with seasonal agricultural work in Normandy, some 100 miles distant (Tilly, 1978; p. 6). From the perspective of the single household economy, agricultural work provided labor for as many children as a couple could produce. Tilly calls the Camberlot weavers' excedingly long seasonal migration one of "a rather drastic series of expediencies" by which they were able to prolong the domestic weaving industry until World War I (Tilly, 1978; p. 6). As I will argue shortly, their unusually large families may have been a part of this attempt to preserve an old mode of production.
The absence of nearby kin may have been a decisive factor in non co-habitation. Mémé relates how her parents, the Gardez, embarked on the high-fertility strategy, but without the support of co-habitation or kin. Tilly summarizes:

In 1871, the Gardez were a young couple with three children under five. Pierre was called to serve in the Franco-Prussian War, and a tragic drama ensued. Marie Catharine, pregnant with her fourth child, was not able to weave enough to support herself and three little children. The infant she gave to a neighbor to mind died due to the baby sitter's carelessness. The two girls died of sickness. When he heard the news of his children's deaths, Gardez ran away from his regiment and returned home ‹ to weave. ... The couple's division of labor required the husband's labor, and wages, to support his wife in her child bearing years when there were no children old enough to work. [Tilly, 1978; pp. 12-13]

Clearly, co-habitation would have benefited the Gardez. Whether they would have done it, given the chance, is impossible to tell.
They did send their children into service with other families during the winters, when they were at work on the looms. Beyond the fifth child, additional working children were of little help at home during the winter, since only four or five could work efficiently at the looms (Tilly, 1978; p. 15). Older children were replaced by younger, and they went into service for other families and/or married young ‹ at around eighteen for Mémé and her eleven sisters.
Without the yearly migration to the sugar-beet fields of Normandy, such large families would have made little economic sense. In the summers, when their housing and food was provided by their commercial agricultural employer, the Gardez enjoyed the benefits of many wage-earners without the costs of supporting them. They used the surplus from this summer employment to pay their debt to their Avesnes baker, which accumulated every winter due to the insufficiency of income from the winter weaving (Tilly, 1978; p. 13). In the winter, they had the optimum labor input for their four-loom domestic weaving operation. The Gardez' many children enabled the family to continue its domestic weaving by supplying labor when it was needed and becoming scarce when it was not.
High fertility must have been of benefit to the community, as well. If, as with the framework knitting Levine describes, optimal efficiency on the hand-loom was reached only with two or more labourers, there would presumably have been households that could benefit from taking in servants. The added efficiency and increased total production would help to bring the parents of a young child through the precarious period of low producion-consumption ratios that Mémé's parents fell victim to. If domestic weaving was to survive as long as it did in Avesnes, the high fertility exemplified by the Gardez family was a necessary strategy.
While the circumstances of the framework knitters and the hand-loom weavers were similar ‹ a failing market for the products of cottage industry, emmigration, young marriage, high fertility ‹ the seasonal migration that the weavers undertook, and their lack of nearby kin must have been contributing factors in the differences ‹ family size and co-habitation ‹ between the two resulting family strategies. Would seasonal agricultural work have been a sufficient supplement to declining domestic industry of the Camberlot weavers without the strategy of very large families? Would Shepshed framework knitters have persisted as long as they did without co-habitation? That I can ask these questions indicates at least the potential importance of family strategies in the larger economic picture.
The interests of the individual do not seem to have played much of a role in these two examples of rural working-class economies. Part of the reason for this must be that I largely ignored the decision-making of adults for themselves. A discussion of strategies of family size necessarily begins with the assumption that there is a couple strategizing, so questions of whether and when to marry recede in importance. Anderson offers another reason. Based on evidence from his study of Preston workers as well as the rural communities from which they immigrated, he claims that the presence of alternative life-styles played a major role in the willingness of more capable individuals to repudiate their families (Anderson, Chapter 7). In rural proto-industrial towns, there would have been little alternative to the family production unit. To some extent, young, capable people did indeed take advantage of the one alternative that was available ‹ emigration to urban industrial centers.
Family strategy played an important role in working class responses to social change. In the cities of Antwerp, Preston, and Roubaix, family structure responded to high housing costs and decreasing employment for women by shifting from the nuclear household to one that involved some kind of co-habitation. In the struggling proto-industrial economies of Shepshed and Avesnes-les-Aubert, families tried to keep domestic production alive by high fertility combined with either co-habitation or supplemental agricultural work. Whether in an urban or an agricultural setting, family strategy could not maintain hegemony in decision making. While the comparatively many alternatives open to workers in an urban economy dominated by factory- or other non-domestic employment made family strategies more precarious in the cities, emigration offered rural youth engaged in domestic production at least one opportunity for escaping the family-oriented strategies of their parents.

Bibliography

Lis, Catharina, Social Change and the Labouring Poor: Antwerp 1770-1860
published in New Haven, CT, 1986, by Yale University Press.

Rule, John, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England 1750-1850
published in London, 1986, by Longman Group Limited

Tilly, Louise, Women and Family Strategies in French Proletarian Families
4th in the series "Michigan Occasional Papers in Women's Studies"
published in Ann Arbor, 1978, by the Women's Studies Program, University of Michigan

Anderson, Michael, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire
published in Cambridge, 1971, by Cambridge University Press

Levine, David, Reproducing Families: The Political Economy of English Popular History
published in New York, 1987, by Cambridge University Press

Loose Ends...
Especially in England, historians have had to contend with a mass of contemporary literature claiming that working-class parents exploited their children in order to increase their own leisure-time. While the odd drunken father probably did just that, such literature has been dismissed by the majority of historians as grossly misleading. Statements of the parents themselves indicate that they sent children to work in a factory only as a last resort, and the figures in Anderson's study suggest the same:
[I]n the large proportion of the cases where young children were employed, it is clear that they were sent to work because the family was so poor that their earnings were absolutely essential if the family was to continue to function at all as an effective unit. [Anderson, 1971; p. 75]

If couples produced children so as to ensure the presence of kinship support in their old age, they may have produced many children in order to offer the later ones an opportunity to advance their station. The nine children born before Mémé were capable of creating enough surplus to allow her a few years in school before joining them at the looms and in the fields. In Anderson's study, "A spinner sent his first four children into the mill before they were ten, but the fifth he kept out of the factory until the age of 12 or 13, 'because our circumstances were better'"(Anderson, 1971; pp. 76-7).

The ambiguous intersection between individual interests and family strategy can be seen clearly in the roles that women play in Tilly's study of Roubaix and Avesnes-les-Aubert in France. In her words, Roubaix "mothers bore the costs of their children's and their husband's leisure and of whatever saving family, husband and children did"(Tilly, 1978; p. 23). Perhaps women were more likely to behave according to the needs of family strategy than men. Whether by choice or necessity, women served family interests at their own expense.

Such a re-conceptualization of family strategy does not render the concept meaningless, even when considering periods of rapid change when it would seem to be least effective. Unless we are prepared to believe that people in past centuries conceived of families as merely practical, economic associations and not also as the locus of affective relationships, part of every individual's interest included membership in some kind of family . People generally wanted family, so their approach to the problem of living would include some component of family strategy: how to best live in conjunction with one or more others.