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

Author(s): Joan W. Scott and Louise A. Tilly
Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Jan., 1975), pp. 36-64
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Women's Work and the Family in
Nineteenth-Century Europe
JOAN W. SCOTT
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
LOUISE A. TILLY
Michigan State University
There is a great deal of confusion about the history

outside the home and about the origin and meaning of w
place within the home. Most interpretations of either
depend on assumptions about the other. Usually, wom
time period are assumed to be non-productive, the antith
work. In addition, most general works on women and
that the history of women's employment, like the h
legal and political rights, can be understood as a grad
a traditional place at home to a modern position in t
Some historians cite changes in employment opport
industrialization as the precursors of legal emancipat
political rights as the source of improved economic st
legal-political and economic 'emancipation' usually are
in cultural values. Thus William Goode, whose World
Family Patterns makes temporal and geographic com
patterns, remarks on what he calls 'the statistically
western women today, that is their high participatio
of the home'. He maintains that previous civilizations
labor because of restrictive cultural definitions. 'I beli
'that the crucial crystallizing variable-i.e. the necessary
cause of the betterment of the western woman's position
the gradual logical philosophical extension to wom
Protestant notions about the rights and responsibilitie
undermined the traditional idea of "women's proper
Many people have helped us with comments on earlier drafts of th
wish to thank Susan Rogers, Ellen Sewell, William Sewell, Jr., Charle
Richard Sennett, Natalie Davis, Sally Brown, Robert Brown, Lynn
Maurine Greenwald for their critical readings of this paper.
A version of this paper was co-recipient of the Stephen Allen Ka
of Pennsylvania, 1973, and will appear in a forthcoming volume inc
Lectures on the Family.
William Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns (New
36
WOMEN'S WORK IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE 37
Yet Goode makes no systematic effort to validate his statements with

historical data. If, however, notions about individual rights did transform
cultural values and lead to the extension of rights to women, and if
opportunities for women to work stemmed from the same source, we
should be able to trace an increase in the number of women working
as they gained political rights. The only long period for which there are
any reliable labor force statistics for any populations (whether of cities or
countries) is the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These should serve
our purpose, however, since women gained political rights in most
European countries only in the twentieth century. If we examine the
figures for three European countries during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, we find no confirmation of Goode's belief. In Great Britain, a
Protestant country, the civil status of women was reformed through the
married women's property acts of the late nineteenth century, and political
emancipation in the form of suffrage came in 1918. In 1851 and 1861,
about 25 percent of British women worked; in 1921, the figure was still
about 25 percent. In both Catholic France and Italy, women's legal rights
within the family were severely limited until after World War II. Immedi-
ately after the war, constitutional changes granted women the right to
vote. In France, in 1866, 25 percent of women worked; in 1896, 33 percent
worked and in 1954, 30 percent worked, down from a high of 42 percent
in 1921. In Italy, the highest percentage for women's employment outside
the home (before 1964) was in 1901.2
There are several conclusions to be drawn from these figures. First,
there was little relationship between women's political rights and women's
work. The right to vote did not increase the size of the female labor force,
neither did the numbers of women in the labor force dramatically increase
just prior to their gaining the vote. Moreover, great numbers of women
worked outside the home during most of the nineteenth century, long
before they enjoyed civil and political rights. Finally, rather than a steady
increase in the size of the female labor force, the pattern was one of
increase followed by decline.
What then is the source of Goode's inaccurate conception? It stems
above all from a model that projects middle-class experience and middle-
class values as representative of all experience and all values. It generalizes
a particular class experience into one which represents 'western civiliza-
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.
2 T. Deldycke, H. Gelders and J. M. Limbor, La Population active et sa structure, under
the supervision of P. Bairoch (Brussells, 1969), 29-31. 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.
38 JOAN W. SCOTT AND LOUISE A. TILLY
tion'. And it projects backward in linear fashion, twentieth-century
values and experiences. As a result, Goode fails to make important
distinctions about women, work and values, and he therefore misrep-
resents their history. Middle-class women formed an insignificant part
of the female labor force in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Europe, although their numbers began to increase in that period.3 If we
ask: 'which women worked?' and 'what kind of work did they do?',
we discover that not only are Goode's facts wrong, but his model of
social change is inappropriate as well.
The women who worked in great numbers in the nineteenth century
were overwhelmingly members of the working and peasant classes. Most
held jobs in domestic service, garment making or the textile industry. In
England in 1841 and still in 1911 most working women were engaged in
domestic or other personal service occupations. In 1911, 35 percent were
servants (including laundresses), 19.5 percent were textile workers and
15.6 percent were engaged in the dressmaking trades.4 In Milan, according
to the censuses of 1881, 1901 and 1911, a similar concentration of women
in domestic service existed, with garment making ranking second and
textiles much less important than in England.5 Similarly, in France,
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.
1881 1911
Middle Class Occupations 12.6% 23.7

Working Class Occupations 87.4 76.3
Lee Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work (Hamden, Conn., 1973), 216. 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. Francis Clark, The Position of Women in Contemporary France (London, 1937),
74-5, gives the following figures for the percent female in selected occupations:
1906 1926
Typists, copyists, accountants 22.8 54.8

Workers in hospitals,
convalescent homes, etc. 73.2 76.1
Postal service 22.4 30.5
Teachers (state) 48.5 59.2
Teachers (private) 68.7 71.4
4 Pinchbeck, 315; E. L. Hutchins, Women in Mod
5 Louise A. Tilly, 'Women at Work in Milan, Ital
to the American Historical Association annual meet
distribution of women workers, in Italy as a whole
domestic service as an employer of women. Dome
concentrated in cities, textile production, outside c
excluding agriculture, textiles, garment making and domestic service
were the chief areas of female employment. In France, 69 percent of
working women outside agriculture were employed in these three fields
in 1866: domestic service, 28 percent; garment making, 21 percent;
textiles, 20 percent. In 1896, the proportions were altered, but the total
was 59 percent: domestic service, 19 percent; garment making, 26 percent;
textiles, 14 percent.6
Despite very different rates of industrialization in England, France and
Italy, the evidence strongly suggests that women in all three cases did not
participate in factory work (except in textiles) in large numbers. Rather,
economic and social changes associated with urban and industrial develop-
ment seem to have generated employment opportunities in a few tradi-
tional sectors in which women worked at jobs similar to household tasks.
The economic changes leading to high employment of women included
the early industrialization of textiles7 and the nineteenth-century pattern
of urbanization, with cities acting as producers of and markets for
consumer goods and as places of employment for domestic servants.
The expansion of production of consumer goods involved the growth of
a large piece-work garment industry. Production moved from the work-
shops of craftsmen to the homes of people who sewed together pre-cut
garments. This change in the process of production generated employment
opportunities for large numbers of women. The subsequent decline of
this method of producing ready-made goods and its replacement by
factory production, as well as the decline of textiles and the growth of
heavy industry, led to lower female participation in the work forces of all
three countries we have examined.
The kinds of jobs available to women were not only limited in number
and kind; they also were segregated-that is, they were held almost
exclusively by women.8 The women who held these jobs were usually
young and single. In Milan, about 75 percent of women aged 15 to 20
worked in 1881 and 1901. In female age groups over 20, employment in
textile manufacture and garment making declined sharply, presumably
as women stopped work after marriage. The only female occupation with
appreciable proportions (50 percent or more) of workers aged over 30
was domestic service, in which celibacy prevailed.9 In Great Britain,
similar age patterns are evident in the scattered available data. Most
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 Edward Gross, 'Plus Ca change ... ? The Sexual Structure of Occupations over Time',
Social Problems, 16 (Fall, 1968), 198-206.
9 Census data from 1871 to 1901 analyzed in Louise A. Tilly, 'The Working Class of Milan,
1881-1911', unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1974.
women operatives in the Lancashire cotton mills in 1833 were betwe

16 and 21 years old. Only 25 percent of female cotton workers wer
married in the Lancashire districts in 1841. Hewitt argues for an increase
in proportions either married or widowed among cotton operatives
peaking sometime in the 1890s and declining thereafter. The highe
percentage of married women in this occupation was about one-third
The much less specialized labor force of London in the 1880s was primaril
aged between 15 and 25 years."
When census figures finally provide marital status, some big nation
differences can be noted. In 1911, while 69 percent of all single women in
Britain worked, only 9.6 percent of married women did.12 In France
1896, 52 percent of all single women were in the labor force, and 38 per-
cent of married women.13 Although our evidence is impressionistic a
scattered, it looks as though as industrialization advanced (at least in t
pre-1914 period), fewer married women worked. Thus Britain, the mo
advanced industrial country in 1911, had the lower proportion of married
women workers; on the other hand, in France, in which both agriculture
and manufacturing were organized on a smaller scale than in Britai
more married women were in the labor force.
Why did women work in the nineteenth century and why was the female
labor force predominantly young and single ? To answer these questions we
must first examine the relationship of these women to their families of origin
(the families into which they were born), not to their families of procreation
(the family launched at marriage). We must ask not only how husbands re-
garded their wives' roles, but what prompted families to send their daugh-
ters out into the job market as garment workers or domestic servants.
The parents of these young women workers during industrialization
were mostly peasants and, to a lesser extent, urban workers. When we
examine the geographic and social origins of domestic servants, one of
the largest groups of women workers, their rural origins are clear. Two-
thirds of all the domestic servants in England in 1851 were daughters
of rural laborers. For France, we have no aggregate numbers, but local
studies suggest similar patterns. In his study of Melun, for example,
Chatelain found that in 1872, 54 percent of female domestic servants were
either migrants from rural areas or foreigners.14 Theresa McBride calculated
that in Versailles from 1825 to 1853, 57.7 percent of female domestic
10 Miriam Cohen, 'The Liberation of Working Class Women in England?', unpublished

paper, History Department, University of Michigan, 15; Hutchins 81-2; Edward Cadbury,
M. Cecile Matheson and George Shann, Woman's Work and Wages. A Phase of Life in An
Industrial City (Chicago, 1907), 219; -Margaret Hewitt, Wives and Mothers in Victorian
Industry (London, 1958), 17.
11 Pinchbeck, 197-8. 12 Deldycke et al., 169. 13 Ibid., 185.
14 Abel Chatelain, 'Migrations et domesticit6 feminine urbaine en Franc
XX siecle', Revue historique economique et sociale, 47 (1969), 521; E. Roysto
Times (New York, 1970), 156.
servants were daughters of peasants. In Bordeaux, a similar proportion

obtained: 52.8 percent. In Milan, at the end of the nineteenth century, ser-
vants were less likely to be city-born than any other category of workers.15
If cultural values were involved in the decisions of rural and lower
class families to send their daughters to work, we must ask what values
they were. Goode's loose references to 'values' obscure an important
distinction between modern middle-class values and pre-industrial lower-
class values. Goode assumes that the idea of 'woman's proper place',
with its connotations of complete economic dependency and idealized
feminity is a traditional value. In fact, it is a rather recently accepted
middle-class value not at all inconsistent with notions of 'the rights
and responsibilities of the individual'. The hierarchical division of labor
within the family which assigned the husband the role of breadwinner
and the wife the role of domestic manager and moral guardian emerged
clearly only in the nineteenth century and was associated with the growth
of the middle class and the diffusion of its values.16 On the other hand, as
we will demonstrate at length below, traditional ideas about women
held by peasant and laboring families did not find feminine and economic
functions incompatible. In the pre-industrial Europe described by Peter
Laslett and in contemporary pre-modern societies studied by anthro-
pologists,17 the household or the family is the crucial economic unit.
Whether or not all work is done at home, all family members are expected
to work. It is simply assumed that women will work, for their contribution
is valued as necessary for the survival of the family unit. The poor, the
illiterate, the economically and politically powerless of the past operated
according to values which fully justified the employment of women
outside the home.
We are arguing then, contrary to Goode, that pre-industrial values,
15 Theresa McBride, 'Rural Tradition and the Process of Modernization: Domestic Servants
in Nineteenth Century France', unpublished doctoral dissertation, Rutgers University, 1973,
85; Tilly (1974), 129-30. McBride found that in Versailles in the same period only 19.5 per-
cent of female domestic servants were from urban working class families.
16 Philippe Ari6s, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, translated by
Robert Baldick (London, 1962); J. A. Banks, Prosperity and Parenthood. A Study of Family
Planning Among the Victorian Middle Classes (London, 1954); J. A. and Olive Banks,
Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England (New York, 1964) 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 H. T. Mill,
Essays on Sex Equality, Alice Rossi, ed. (Chicago, 1971). For analysis of hierarchical patterns
see Susan Rogers, 'Woman's Place: Sexual Differentiation as Related to the Distribution of
Power', unpublished paper, Northwestern University, April, 1974.
17 Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York, 1965). Among the many anthro-
pological and historical studies of pre-industrial societies are George Foster, 'Peasant Society
and the Image of the Limited Good', American Anthropologist, 67 (April, 1965), 293-315;
Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland (Cambridge, Mass.,
1968); Ronald Blythe, Akenfield, Portrait of an English Village (New York, 1968); Edgar
Morin, The Red and the White: Report from a French Village (New York, 1970); Mack
Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State and General Estates, 1648-1871 (Ithaca,
New York, 1971).
rather than a new individualistic ideology, justified the work of workin

class women in the nineteenth century. In so doing, we are not mer
disputing his analysis, we are rejecting the model of social change
which he bases that analysis. Goode's model (a standard one for theor
of development) assumes a one-to-one connection between cultural
values and social change. He argues, in effect, that ideological chang
led directly and immediately to structural and behavioral changes. W
also reject the antithesis of Goode's argument which says that mate
changes in economic, political or social structures led directly and immed
ately to changes in values and behavior. It, too, is based on a mode
which assumes that change in one realm necessarily and directly lea
to change in another. Thus Engels tells us that the coming of capital
excluded women from 'participation in social production' and redu
their role and status to that of servants in the home. Proletarian women
are exceptions to this description because in industrial society they are
engaged in social production. Nonetheless, in both instances, Engels
makes a direct connection between economic change and changes in
values and status.18
Our examination of the evidence on women's work in the nineteenth
century has led us to a different understanding of the process which led
to the relatively high employment of women outside the home in nineteenth-
century Europe. The model we use posits a continuity of traditional values
and behavior in changing circumstances. Old values coexist with and are
used by people to adapt to extensive structural changes. This assumes
that people perceive and act on the changes they experience in terms of
ideas and attitudes they already hold. These ideas eventually change,
but not as directly or immediately as Goode and Engels would have us
believe. Behavior is less the product of new ideas than of the effects of
old ideas operating in new or changing contexts.19
Traditional families then, operating on long-held values, sent their
daughters to take advantage of increased opportunities generated by
industrialization and urbanization. Industrial development did not affect
all areas of a given country at the same time. Rather the process can best
be illustrated by an image of 'islands of development' within an under-
developed sea, islands which drew population to them from the less
developed areas.20 The values of the less developed sector were imported
18 Frederick Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York,
1972), 81.
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'. Bert Hoselitz and Wilbert Moore, Industrialization and Society (New
York, 1966), 15.
20 W. Arthur Lewis, 'Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour', in
A. N. Agarwala and S. P. Singh, eds., The Economics of LUnderdevelopment (New York,
1963), 408.
into the developing sector and there were extended, adapted and only
gradually transformed.
As peasant values were imported, so was the behavior they directed.
And work for the wives and daughters of the poor was a familiar experience
in pre-industrial societies. No change in values, then, was necessary to
permit lower class women to work outside the home during the nineteenth
century. Neither did industrialization 'emancipate' these women by
permitting more of them to work outside the home. And, given the
fluctuations in the size of the female labor force especially, it is difficult
to see any direct connection between the work of peasant and working-
class women and the political enfranchisement of all women.
II
Let us now attempt to reconstruct the historical experience of women

workers during the early stages of industrialization. Since most were of
rural origin, we will begin by examining the peasant or family economy
whose values and economic needs sent them into the job market.
Commentators on many different areas of Europe offer strikingly
similar descriptions of peasant ,ocial organization. Anthropologists and
social historians seem to agree that regardless of country 'the peasantry
is a pre-industrial social entity which carries over into contemporary
society specific elements of a different, older, social structure, economy
and culture'. The crucial unit of organization is the family 'whose
solidarity provides the basic framework for mutual aid, control and social-
ization'. The family's work is usually directed to the family farm, property
considered to belong to the group rather than to a single individual. 'The
individual, the family and the farm appear as an indivisible whole'.
'Peasant property is, at least de facto, family property. The head of the
family appears as the manager rather than the proprietor of family land'.21
These descriptions of Eastern European peasants are echoed by
Michael Anderson in his comparison of rural Lancashire and rural
Ireland early in the nineteenth century. He suggests that in both cases the
basis of 'functional family solidarity... was the absolute interdependence
of family members such that neither fathers nor sons had any scope for
alternatives to the family as a source of provision for a number of crucially
important needs'.22 Italian evidence confirms the pattern. Although in
21 Teodor Shanin, 'The Peasantry as a Political Factor', in T. Shanin, ed,, Peasants and
Peasant Societies; Selected Readings (Penguin Books, 1971), 241-4. A similar analysis of
the peasant family in mid-twentieth century can be found in Henri Mendras, The Vanishing
Peasant. Innovation and Change in French Agriculture, translated by Jean Lerner (Cambridge,
Mass., 1970), 76: '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 Michael Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971
96.
late nineteenth-century Lombardy a kind of frereche (brothers and t

families living together and working the land together) was a fre
alternative to the nuclear family, the household was the basic u
production. All members of the family contributed what they
either by work on the farm, or, in the case of women and the young
work in nearby urban areas or in rural textile mills. Their earnings w
turned over to the head of the household; in the case of brothers
in one household, the elder usually acted as head. He took care of fina
matters and contractual relationships in the interests of all.23 For
mandy in the eighteenth century, Gouesse's recent study has desc
the gradual evolution of reasons given for marriage when an ecclesias
dispensation had to be applied for. At the end of that century, r
such as 'seeking well-being', or 'desire to live happily' became m
common. Gouesse considers these differences of expression rather sup
ficial; what all these declarations meant, although few stated this explic
was that one had to be married in order to live. 'The married coup
the simple community of work, the elementary unit'. In ninete
century Brittany, 'all the inhabitants of the farm formed a wo
community... linked one to the other like the crew of a ship'.24
Despite differences in systems of inheritance and differences i
amount of land available, the theory of the peasant economy dev
by Chayanov for nineteenth-century Russia applies elsewhere. The
of this system is the family, or more precisely the household-in R
all those 'having eaten from one pot'. It has a dual role as a unit o
duction and consumption. The motivations of its members, unlike cap
ist aims, involve 'securing the needs of the family rather than ... mak
a profit'. The family's basic problem is organizing the work of its me
to meet its annual budget and 'a single wish to save or invest cap
economic conditions allow'.25
Members of the family or household have clearly defined duties,
based in part on their age and their position in the family and in part on
their sex. Sex role differentiation clearly existed in these societies. Me
and women not only performed different tasks, but they occupied differen
space.26 Most often, although by no means always, men worked the
23 'Giunta per la Inchiesta Agraria e sulle condizioni della Classe agricola, Atti', Rome,
1882, Vol. VI, Fasc. II, 552, 559, Fasc. III, 87, 175-6, 373, 504, 575.
24 Y. Brekilien, La vie quotidienne des paysans en Bretagne au XIXe siMcle (Paris, 1966),
37. Jean-Marie Gouesse, 'Parent6, famille et marriage en Normandie aux XVIIe et XVIII
siecles', Annales, Economies, Societes, Civilisations, 27e Annee (July-October, 1972), 1146-7.
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, and A. V. Chayanov on
the Theory of Peasant Economy, Daniel Thorner, Basile Kerblay and R. E. F. Smith, eds.
(Homewood, Ill., 1966), 21, 60. See also Henriette Dussourd, Au meme pot et au meme feu:
itude sur les communautes familiales agricoles du centre de la France (Moulins, 1962).
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,
fields while women managed the house, raised and cared for animals
tended a garden and marketed surplus dairy products, poultry and
vegetables. There was also seasonal work in the fields at planting and
harvest times.27 Martin Nadaud, a mason from the Creuse, expressed
husband's expectation for his wife this way:
We know there are countries where women marry with the oft-realized hope of havin
to work only in the house; in France, there is nothing of the sort, precisely the contrary
happens; my wife, like all other women of the country was raised to work in the field
from morning until night and she worked no less... after our marriage...28
Of course the wives of masons from the Creuse were in a peculiar

position. Their husbands were gone for long periods of time building
houses in Lyon or Paris. They had to do all agricultural chores since th
division of labor in the Creuse was between women who handled most
of the agricultural tasks and men whose primary work was as artisans in
the cities. Women's work on the farm was so important there that at one
point Nadaud's family tried to arrange a marriage for him with a girl
whose mother was widowed. That way, the Nadaud family farm would
acquire two female hands instead of one.
Despite the peculiarity of the Creuse, however, Nadaud's expectation
that women would work seems typical of peasant economies. Eilert Sundt's
reports on the Norwegian peasantry in the mid-nineteenth century show
that women were needed as workers, so experienced and often older
women were the choice of young men as wives. Sundt wrote, 'the material
progress of a family depended as much upon the wife as upon the
husband'.29 And Frederick Le Play, describing marriage customs of
Slavic peasants noted that 'the peasant takes a wife to augment the number
of hands in his family'.30
Women labored not only on the farm, but at all sorts of other work,
depending in part on what was available to them. In most areas their
activity was an extension of their household functions of food provision,
animal husbandry and clothing making. Documentation of this can be
found in almost every family monograph in the six volumes of Le Play's
Les ouvriers europeens. There was the wife of a French vineyard worker,
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 Lucienne A. Roubin, 'Espace masculin, espace feminin en communaute
provenqale', Annales, E.S.C. 26 (March-April, 1970), 540; Rogers (1974), op. cit., and
Rayna Reiter, 'Men and Women in the South of France: Public and Private Domains',
unpublished paper, 1973, New School for Social Research.
27 Pinchbeck, Part I, passim.; Alain Girard et Henri Bastide, 'Le budget-temps de la femme
mariee a la campagne', Population, 14 (1959), 253-84.
28 Martin Nadaud, Memoires de Leonard, ancien garcon macon (Paris, 1895, reissued 1948),
130. Agricole Perdiguier recalled that his father made his daughters work in the fields:
'Madeleine and Babet worked with us, like men'. Memoires d'un compagnon (Paris, 1964), 33.
29 Quoted in Michael Drake, Population and Society in Norway, 1735-1865 (Cambridge,
1969), 145, 139-40.
30 Frederick Le Play, Les ouvriers europeens, 6 vols. (Paris, 1855-78), Vol. 5, 45.
for example, whose principal activity involved the care of a cow. 'She
gathers hay for it, cares for it and carries its milk to town to sell.' Another
wife worked with her husband during harvest seasons and 'washed laundry
and did other work ... for farmers and landowners in the neighborhood'.
She also wove linen 'for her family and for sale'. Other women sewed
gloves or clothing; some took in infants to nurse as well.31 In the regions
surrounding the silk-weaving city of Lyon, the wives and daughters of
farmers tended worms and reeled silk.32 Similarly, in Lombardy, seasonal
pre-occupation with the care of the hungry worms filled the time of
women and children in the household.33
Work of this type was a traditional way of supplementing the family
income. Indeed, Le Play insisted on including all activities of family
members in his budgets because, he argued, 'the small activities undertaken
by the family are a significant supplement to the earning of the principal
worker'. In fact, he often noted that not only did women work harder
than men, but they contributed more to 'the well-being of the family'.34
Often women's work meant the difference between subsistence and near
starvation. Pinchbeck cites a parish report on rural women who, in a
time of economic crisis, could find no work: 'In a kind of general des-
pondency she sits down, unable to contribute anything to the general
fund of the family and conscious of rendering no other service to her
husband except that of the mere care of his family.'35
In non-farming and some urban families a similar situation seems to
have prevailed. In fact, Chayanov's description of the peasant economy
seems a fitting characterization of pre-industrial working class social
arrangements. In The World We Have Lost Peter Laslett describes the
household as the center of production. The workshop was not separated
from the home, and everyone's place was at home. In the weaver's house-
hold, for example, children did carding and combing, older daughters
and wives spun, while the father wove. In the urban worker's home, a
similar division of labor often existed. Among Parisian laundry workers,
for example, the entire family was expected to work, although women
were uniquely responsible for soaping and ironing. This kind of business,
in fact, was as well run by women as by men. And parents willed their
shops and their clientele to their daughters as frequently as to their sons.36
Wives of craftsmen sometimes assisted their husbands at their work of
tailoring, shoemaking and baking. Sometimes they kept shop, selling the
31 Ibid., Vol. 6, 145, 127, and Vol. 5, 261, respectively.

32 Arthur Dunham, The Industrial Revolution in France (New York, 1935), 170.
33 Marie Hall Ets, Rosa, The Life of an Italian Immigrant (Minneapolis, 1970).
34 Le Play, Vol. 3, 8 and Vol. 6, 109, respectively.
35 Pinchbeck, 59. See also R. H. Hubscher, 'Une contribution a la connaissance des milieux
populaire ruraux au XIXe siecle: Le livre de compte de la famille Flahaut, 1811-1877',
Revue d'histoire economique et sociale, 47 (1969), 361-403.
36 Le Play, Vol. 5, 386.
goods and keeping accounts. The wives of skilled cutlery workers ser
as intermediaries between their husbands and their masters. They
only picked up materials for their husbands to work on at home
transported finished products back to the employer, but they
negotiated work loads and wages.37
When the husband worked away from home, women engaged
enterprises of their own. Like their rural counterparts, urban work
class women contributed to the family economy by tending vegeta
gardens and raising animals-usually some pigs and hens-and market
the surplus. Some women set up cafes in their homes, others sold the f
and beverages they had prepared outside. A Sheffield knifemaker's w
prepared a 'fermented drink called "pop", which she bottled and sol
the summer to the inhabitants of the city'.38 These are early-nineteent
century examples, but Alice Clark refers to gardening and the garm
trades in seventeenth-century England. She cites another expedient
poor women, 'selling perishable articles of food from door to door'
This practice continued in the nineteenth century. Le Play details t
work of a German miner's wife who 'transported foodstuffs on her bac
Two times a week she goes to [the city] where she buys wheat, potat
etc. which she carries [10 kilometers]... Some of this food is for h
household, some is delivered to wealthy persons in town, the rest is
[for a small profit] at the market'.40 In eighteenth-century Paris and B
deaux, among the popular classes, 'it was generally accepted that women
folk had an important part to play in the domestic economy. Most t
a job to bring in an additional income'.41 They worked as domesti
laundresses, seamstresses, innkeepers, and beasts of burden-haulin
heavy loads many times a day. They also begged and smuggled if they h
to. 'The importance of the mother within the family economy was imme
her death or incapacity could cause a family to cross the narrow b
extremely meaningful barrier between poverty and destitution'.42
popular culture which valued the work of women existed in Franc
during much of the nineteenth century.43
37 Ibid., Vol. 3, 281. Le Play adds that 'For each day of work... the women transpo
twice, a weight of about 210 kilograms a distance of one kilometer'. Vol. 3, 161.
38 Ibid., Vol. 3, 325.
39 Alice Clark, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London, 19
150, 209.
40 Le Play, Vol. 3, 106-7.
41 Alan Forrest, 'The Condition of the Poor in Revolutionary Bordeaux', Past and Pres
No. 59 (1973), 151-2.
42 Olwen Hufton, 'Women in Revolution, 1789-1796', Past and Present, No. 53 (1971),
43 Edith Thomas, Les Petroleuses (Paris, 1963), 73-9. The fleeting history of social con
and legislation during the Paris Commune of 1871 shows these values reflected in popu
radicalism. Although women were not granted political equality by the Communar
illegitimate children were granted legal claims parallel to those of legitimate children. Am
the institutions set up by the women of the Commune themselves were day nurseries
working mothers.
The indispensable role of women was demonstrated, too, by the fact

that in many communities, widows could manage a farm alone (with the
assistance of a few hired hands) whereas widowers found the task almost
impossible.44 It is also demonstrated vividly in times of financial hardship.
Hufton insists that women were the first to feel the physical effects of
deprivation, in part, because they denied themselves food in order to feed
the rest of the family. Other observers describe a similar situation. The
report Anderson cites from Lancashire is representative of conditions in
Italy, England and France: 'an observation made by medical men, that
the parents have lost their health much more generally than the children
and particularly, that the mothers who most of all starve themselves,
have got pale and emaciated'.45
The role women played in the family economy usually gave them a
great deal of power within the family. Scattered historical sources comple-
ment the more systematic work of contemporary anthropologists on this
point. All indicate that while men assume primacy in public roles, it is
women who prevail in the domestic sphere. Hufton even suggests they
enjoyed 'social supremacy' within the family.46 Her suggestion echoes
Le Play's first-hand observation. In the course of his extensive study of
European working-class urban and rural families (carried out from the
1840s-70s), he was struck by the woman's role. 'Women are treated with
deference, they often... exercise a preponderant influence on the affairs
of the family (la communaute).' He found that they worked harder and in
a more sustained fashion than their husbands and concluded that their
work, their energy and their intelligence 'makes them more fit... to
direct the family'.47
The key to the woman's power, limited almost exclusively, of course,
to the family arena, lay in her management of the household. In some
areas, wives of craftsmen kept business accounts, as did the wives or
44 Susan Rogers, 'The Acceptance of Female Roles in Rural France', unpublished paper,
1972, 95-6; Anderson, 95; Leonard Covello, The Social Background of the Italo-American
School Child (Leiden, 1967), 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 rurale (Paris, 1946).
45 Hufton, 91-3, Tilly (1974), 259, Anderson, 77, Laura Ohren, 'The Welfare of Women in
Laboring Families: England, 1860-1950', Feminist Studies, I (Winter-Spring, 1973), 107-25.
46 Hufton, 93; Susan Rogers, 'Female Forms of Power and the Myth of Male Dominance:
A Model of Female/Male Interaction', unpublished paper, 1973; R6mi Clignet, Many Wives,
Many Powers; Authority and Power in Polygynous Families (Evanston, 1970); Ernestine
Friedl, 'The Position of Women: Appearance and Reality', Anthropological Quarterly,
40 (1967), 97-108; Evelyn Michaelson and Walter Goldschmidt, 'Female Roles and Male
Dominance Among Peasants', Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 27 (1971), 330-52;
Rayna Reiter, 'Modernization in the South of France: The Village and Beyond', Anthro-
pological Quarterly, 45 (1972), 35-53; Joyce Riegelhaupt, 'Salaoio Women: An Analysis
of Informal and Formal Political and Economic Roles of Portuguese Peasant Women',
Anthropological Quarterly, 40 (1967), 127-38. See also Olwen Huften, 'Women and the Family
Economy in Nineteenth Century France', unpublished paper, University of Reading, 1973.
47 Le Play, Vol. 5, 404 and Vol. 6, 110, respectively.
daughters of farmers.48 Their familiarity with figures was a function of

their role as keeper of the household's accounts, for the woman was
usually the chief buyer for the household in the market place and often
the chief trader as well. Primitive as was the accounting these women
could do, it was a tool for dealing with the outside world. Working-class
women also often held the purse strings, making financial decisions, and
even determining the weekly allowance their husbands received for wine
and tobacco. Le Play's description of the Parisian carpenter's wife was
typical not only of France:
She immediately receives his monthly wage; it is she who each morning gives her
husband the money necessary to buy the meals he takes outside the house. To her alone
... in conformity with the custom which prevails among French workers, are confined
the administration of the interior of the home and the entire disposition of the family
resources.49
Indeed, this practice was so linked to the wife's role that when factories
replaced the home as the location of work for craftsmen, factory owners
sometimes paid directly 'to the wives the wages earned by their husbands'.50
Whether in Lorraine, Brittany or Lancashire, among Northern English
miners, peasants or London workers, women seem to have dominated
family finances and some areas of family decision making. 'The man struts,
presides at the table, gives orders, but important decisions-buying a
field, selling a cow, a lawsuit against a neighbor, choice of a future son-in-
law-are made by la patronne'.51 Or, as a retired farmer from a French
village remarked to a visiting anthropologist: 'The husband is always
the chef d'exploitation... Well, that's what the law says. What really
happens is another matter, but you won't find that registered in the
Code Civil'.52
It is important here to stress that we speak here of married women.
Whatever power these women enjoyed was a function of their participation
in a mutual endeavor, and of the particular role they played as a function
of their sex and marital status. Their influence was confined to the domestic
sphere, but that sphere bulked large in the economic and social life of the
family. In this situation, women were working partners in the family
enterprise.
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 Marie Jos6 Chombart de Lauwe and Paul-Henry
Chombart de Lauwe, La Femme dans la socidte (Paris, 1963), 158.
51 Brekelien, 69. See also Anderson, 77; Peter Stearns, 'Working Class Women in Britain,
1890-1914', in Martha Vicinus, ed., Suffer and Be Still (Bloomington, Indiana, 1972), 104,
108; Rogers (1973), 28.
52 Rogers (1973), 21.
Daughters were socialized early, in lower-class families, to assu

family and work responsibilities. 'Daughters... begin as soon as t
strength permits to help their mother in all her work'.53 Frequently
were sent out of the household to work as agricultural laborers or dom
servants. Others were apprenticed to women who taught them to wea
sew. In areas of rural Switzerland where cottage industry was also
ticed, daughters were a most desirable asset. It was they who co
spared to spin and weave while their mothers worked at home; and
gave their earnings 'as a matter of course to the economic unit,
maintenance of whose property had priority over individual happines
Whatever her specific job a young girl early learned the meaning
saying, 'woman's work is never done'. And she was prepared to w
hard for most of her life. Many a parent's advice must have echoed th
words to a young girl, written in 1743: 'You cannot expect to ma
such a manner as neither of you shall have occasion to work, and
fool would take a wife whose bread must be earned solely by hi
labor, and who will contribute nothing towards it herself.'55 W
were expected to work, and the family was the unit of social as w
economic relationships: these were the cultural values held by fam
who sent their daughters out to work in the early stages of industrializ
III
Women's work was in the interest of the family economy. Their

those of their husbands, brothers and fathers, could be mo
adjusted to meet difficult times or changing circumstances. H
anov's discussion of the limits of self-exploitation is instructive:
When our peasant as worker entrepreneur is not in a position to develop a
sale of his labor on his own farm and to get for himself what he consider
earnings, he temporarily abandons his undertaking and simply converts h
a worker who resorts to someone else's undertaking, thus saving hi
unemployment in his own.56
This means that traditional families employed a variety of str

promote the well-being of the family unit. Sometimes the wh
hired itself out as farm hands, sometimes this was done only by
other times by one or more children. Supplemental work in
industry was frequently resorted to by mothers of families
greater need or economic crises. That is why such work was
seasonal or undertaken sporadically. The custom of sending c
both sexes out to serve on other farms, or to work in nearby cit
53 Le Play, Vol. 3, 111.

54 Rudolf Braun, 'The Impact of Cottage Industry on an Agricultural Pop
David Landes, ed., The Rise of Capitalism (New York, 1966), 63.
55 Pinchbeck, 1-2. 56 Chayanov, 40.
another expedient-a way of temporarily extending the family beyond

its own limited resources in order to increase those resources and thereby
guarantee economic survival.
As major structural changes affected the countries of Europe (in the
late eighteenth century in England, much later in France and Italy)
these strategies were adapted and new ones were developed (in the face
of new pressures and opportunities) to attain the traditional goals of the
family economy. In Western Europe in the nineteenth century population
growth was causing land-shortage in some areas. In addition, rationalized
large-scale agriculture was putting marginally productive lands under
great competitive pressure. New forms and methods of industrial pro-
duction also transformed the location and nature of the work of rural
and urban craftsmen. In this situation, it became increasingly necessary
for family members, but particularly for children, to work away from
home. The development of domestic industry, of rurally located textile
mills and the expansion of urban populations (with their increased demand
for consumer goods and domestic services) provided opportunities for
these people to work.
In Lombardy, for example, the northern Italian province of which
Milan is the capital, peasants had long practiced labor intensive farming on
small holdings. During the nineteenth century, peasants were increasingly
unable to support their growing families on these holdings. They seized
options similar to the temporary expedients they had customarily employed.
Women and girls, whose work on the farm was less productive than that
of men, went to work in nearby rural silk mills. Others went to Milan as
domestic servants or garment workers, into what were essentially self-
exploitative, low-paying, marginally productive jobs. The point was to
make enough money to send home.57
In the hinterland of Zurich, described by Rudolf Braun, another sort
of strategy developed. Originally among landed peasants all family
members worked to make ends meet-as domestics, as soldiers, or as
quasi-servants in the households of their siblings who had inherited land.
Everyone turned his money over to the family. 'The maintenance of the
property had priority over individual happiness ... the question of who
got married and at what age, was less an individualistic decision than a
family agreement'. Demographic and economic pressures made some
families landless, others had to supplement their farming with work in
rural industry, particularly textiles. In these areas the system of Rastgeben
arose. This was the practice of children paying their parents a set amount
for room and board. If they did not work at home, but spun at another
57 Tilly (1972); 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.
house, the children paid the landlady the rast. Once such money or w
had been given as a matter of course. The practice became form
and the size of the contribution specified as work relations among fam
members changed. Braun tells us that modifications of this sort even
broke down family solidarity.58 He is undoubtedly right. The imp
point of the Zirich example for our argument, however, is that
process of transformation old values and practices informed str
adaptations to new conditions.
Similar examples can be drawn from non-farming families as
The first industrial revolution in England broke the locational un
home and workshop by transferring first spinning and then weaving
factories. Neil Smelser's study of Social Change in the Industrial Revol
shows, however, that in the first British textile factories the family
work unit was imported into the mills. 'Masters allowed the ope
spinners to hire their own assistants... the spinners chose their w
children, near relatives or relatives of the proprietors. Many chi
especially the youngest, entered the mill at the express request of
parents'.59 This extension of the family economy into factories in
industrialization declined after the 1820's, of course, with the inc
differentiation and specialization of work. But the initial adjustment
changed economic structure involved old values operating in new setti
This is eminently demonstrable in the case of women workers
single ones who constituted the bulk of the female labor force and th
numerous married women as well. Long before the nineteenth cen
lower-class families had sent their daughters out to work. The continu
of this practice and of the values and assumptions underlying it is ev
not only in the fact of large numbers of single women working b
in the age structure of the female labor force, in the kinds of work t
women did and in their personal behavior.
The fact that European female labor forces consisted primaril
young, single women-girls, in the language of their contemporar
itself an indication of the persistence of familial values. Daughter
expendable in rural and urban households, certainly more expen
than their mothers and, depending on the work of the family,
brothers. When work had to be done away from home and when its d
tion was uncertain, the family interest was best served by sending fo
its daughters. Domestic service, the chief resort of most rural girls, w
traditional area of employment. It was often a secure form of mig
since a young girl was assured a place to live, food, and a family.
were risks involved also; servant unemployment and servant explo
58 Braun, in Landes, ed., 61-3.

59 Neil Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of The
the British Cotton Industry (Chicago, 1959), 188-9.
were real. Nevertheless, during the nineteenth century, though many

more girls were sent into service and moved farther from home than had
traditionally been the case, the move itself was not unprecedented.
Domestic service was an acceptable employment partly because it afforded
the protection of a family and membership in a household.60
This was true not only of domestic service, but of other forms of female
employment. In Italy and France, textile factory owners attempted to
provide 'family' conditions for their girls. Rules of conduct limited their
activity, and nuns supervised the establishments, acting as substitute
parents. In loco parentis for some factory owners sometimes even meant
arranging suitable marriages for their female operatives.61 These factory
practices served the owner's interests too, by keeping his work force under
control and limiting its mobility. They also served the interests of the girls'
families more than those of the girls as individuals, for the girls' wages
sometimes went directly to their parents. We do not wish to argue that the
factory dormitory was a beneficient institution. The fact that it used the
family as model for work and social relationships, and the fact that the
practice did serve the family interest to some degree, is, however, important.
In the needle trades, which flourished in urban centers, similar practices
developed. The rise of ready-made clothing production involved a two-
fold transformation of garment-making. First, piece-work at home
replaced workshop organization. Only later (in England by 1850, in
France by the 1870s depending on the city and the industry, in Italy,
still later) did new machinery permit the reorganization of the garment
industry in factories. In the period when piece-work expanded women
found ample opportunity for work. Those who already lived in cities
customarily took their work home. Migrants, however, needed homes.
So, enterprising women with a little capital turned their homes into lodging
houses for piece-workers in their employ. While these often provided
exploitative and miserable living conditions, they nonetheless offered a
household for a young girl-a household in which she could do work
similar to what she or her mother had done at home.62
60 Chatelain, 508.
61 Ets, 87-115; Italy, Ufficio del Lavoro, Rapporti sulla ispezione del lavoro (1 dicembre
1906-30 giugno (1908)), pubblicazione del Ufficio del Lavoro, Serie C, 1909, 64, 93-4,
describes the dormitories and work arrangements in north Italian textile mills; Evelyne
Sullerot, Histoire et sociologie du travail feminin (Paris, 1968), 91-4; Michelle Perrot, Les
Ouvriers en Greve, France 1871-1890 (Paris, 1974), 213, 328. Recent interpretations of similar
American cases are to be found in John Kasson, 'The Factory as Republican Community:
The Early History of Lowell, Mass.', unpublished paper read at American Studies Convention,
October 1973, and Alice Kessler Harris, 'Stratifying by Sex: Notes on the History of Working
Women', working paper, Hofstra University, 1974.
62 Eileen Yeo and E. P. Thompson, The Unknown Mayhew (New York, 1972), 116-80. See
also, Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. (London, 1861), 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 dis-
missed, like children, before dessert.
Domestic service, garment-making and even textile manufactu

the three areas in which female labor was overwhelmingly concent
were all traditional areas of women's work. The kind of work p
sent their daughters to do, in other words, did not involve a ra
departure from the past. Many a wife had spent her girlhood in s
at someone else's house. Piece-work and spinning and weaving wer
common in traditional households. The location of work did cha
and that change eventually led to a whole series of other differ
but, initially, there must have been some comfort for a family se
a daughter to a far-off city in the fact that they were sending her to
familiar, woman's work.
As parents sent daughters off with traditional expectations, s
daughters attempted to fulfill them. Evidence for the persisten
familial values is found in the continuing contributions made by work
daughters to their families. If in some cases factories sent the girls' w
to their parents, in others, girls simply sent most of their money
themselves. In England, it was not until the 1890s that single wor
girls living at home kept some of their own money.63 Earlier, o
continent, their counterparts 'normally turned over all their pay
family fund'. The daughter of a Belgian locksmith first served her fa
by tailoring. She habitually gave her family all her earnings 'and thus
no savings at the time of her marriage'.64 Irish migrants sent money
from as far away as London and Boston.65 And, even when they no lo
expected to return home to marry and live in their natal villages, Fre
and Italian servant girls continued to send money back home
servant girls working for the Flahaut family during the period 18
1877 in rural France sent money home to their parents. There w
regular arrangements by which Monsieur Flahaut sent foodstuffs inst
of money or paid the rent on the father's farm or sent clothing and
directly to the parents of his servant girls. Sometimes, too, youn
unemployed brothers and sisters received these payments which
deducted from the domestic's wages. Hubscher tells us that for ce
farmers who rented their lands, their daughters' contributions
'indispensable, without them it would have been impossible to cul
the fields they rented'. He adds that the 'financial support' of the daugh
for their parents 'seemed absolutely normal to both' parties. It repres
a 'strong family solidarity which required a mature and econom
independent child to contribute to the support of its relatives'.66
girls in Lombardy also made contributions to their families and, if
63 Stearns, 110. 64 Le Play, Vol. 5, 122.
65 Anderson, 22; Lynn Lees, personal communicati
to have been a standard practice for Irish migrants e
on the proceeds for several generations'.
66 Hubscher, 395-6.
lived close enough, the families sent regular baskets of food. According
to one autobiographical report, the employer actually sent a man and
wagon around to the girls' villages weekly to pick up their families' food
baskets.67
In Lancashire 'considerable contact was maintained' between migrants
and their families. Money was sent home, members of the family were
brought to the city to live by family members who had 'travelled' and
sometimes even 'reverse migration' occurred.68 The children of married
daughters working in Norwegian cities as domestics were sent home to be
raised by grandparents. In this case, the young husband and wife continued
to work separately as domestics to save to set up their own household.69
Even when whole families migrated to the United States, they carried
these traditional practices with them. Willa Cather notes in My Antonia
that immigrant girls' work as domestics or farm hands 'contributed to
the prosperous, mortgage free farms' their parents built in Nebraska.70
The cultural values which sent young girls out to work for their families
also informed their personal behavior. The increase, noted by historians
and demographers, in illegitimate birth rates in many European cities
from about 1750 to 1850 can be seen, paradoxically, as yet another
demonstration of the persistence of old attitudes in new settings.71
67 Ets, 138-40. 68 Anderson, 153. 69 Drake, 138.
70 Robert Smuts, Women and Work in America (New Y
Yans McLaughlin, 'Patterns of Work and. Family Organizat
of Interdisciplinary History, II (Autumn, 1971), 299-314. T
interest over that of individuals and the importance of th
relationships can be glimpsed in the lives of young working
girls. The Irish custom of sending money to parents was f
In Italian immigrant families in the U.S., boys and girls tur
In French working class families, likewise. The compagnonnag
migration and houses in which to live, complete with a sub
freres. These houses seemed to offer this kind of family
aspects of the factory dormitories.
71 Cf. Edward Shorter, 'Illegitimacy, Sexual Revolution
1750-1900', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2 (1971),
Sexuality: Some Competing Models', Social Science Quarte
recently, 'Female Emancipation, Birth Control and Fertility
Historical Review, 78 (1973), 605-40. Shorter has argued th
fertility which began in the mid-eighteenth to late ninete
ceded by a dramatic change in values. This change, he sa
against parental authority and by exposure to 'market v
with 'old traditions' and went out to work. The change was
tion' of young working girls. They sought self-fulfillmen
encounters. In the absence of contraception, they became
children. We find Shorter's speculations imaginative but
assumptions about pre-industrial family relationships and
families. The actual historical experience of young women w
was not what Shorter assumes it was. When one examines the
values and family interests sent them to work, and when
they did and the pay they received, it is impossible to agree w
was either radically different from that of women in the
pating'.
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
values operating in changed circumstances. Illegitimacy rose at least partly as a consequence
Alliances with young men may have begun in the city as at home, the
girls seeking potential husbands in the hope of establishing a family of
their own. The difference, of course, was that social customs that could
be enforced at home, could not be in the city.
When a girl was far from home, her family had little control over whom
she married, or when. The pressure that kept a Swiss daughter spinning
at home until she was forty could not affect the choices of a daughter
who had migrated to the city. In fact, her migration implied that she
was not needed in the same way at home. The loneliness and isolation of
the city was clearly one pressure for marriage. So was the desire to escape
domestic service and become her own mistress in her own home as her
mother had been. The conditions of domestic service, which usually
demanded that servants be unmarried, also contributed to illicit liaisons
and led many a domestic to abandon her child. This had long been true;
what was different in nineteenth-century Europe was that the great
increase in the proportions of women employed in domestic service
outstripped increased employment in manufacturing. This meant that
more women than ever before, proportionately, were employed in this
sector, which was particularly liable to produce illegitimate children.
Yet another motive for marriage was economic. Girls in factories
were said to be fairly well-paid, but most girls did not work in factories.
Women in the needle trades and other piece-work industries barely made
enough to support themselves. (Wages constantly fluctuated in these
consumer product trades and declined after the 1830s in both England
and France. Women in these trades were also paid half of what men
received for comparable work, often because it was assumed that women's
wages were part of a family wage, an assumption which did not always
correspond with reality.72) In the rural households they came from,
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 J. DePauw, 'Amour illegitime et societ6 a Nantes au XVIIIe siecle', Annales, Economies,
Societes, Civilisations, 27e Annee (July-October, 1972), 1155-82, esp. 1163. De Pauw shows
(1166) that promises of marriage in cases of illegitimacy increased as both illegitimacy increas-
ed 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 Louise Tilly, Joan Scott and Miriam Cohen, 'Women's
Work and European Fertility Patterns', unpublished paper, 1973.
72 Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People of London (London, 1902); Yeo and Thomp-
son, 116-80; France, Direction du Travail, Les associations professionelles ouvridres, Vol. 4
(1903), 797-805; P. Leroy-Beaulieu, Le travail des femmes au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1873),
50-145.
subsistence depended on multiple contributions. The logical move for

a single girl whose circumstances took her far from her family and whose
wages were insufficient either to support herself or to enable her to send
money home, would be to find a husband; together they might be able to
subsist.
It may well be that young girls became 'engaged' to their suitors and
then followed what were in many rural areas customary practices: they
slept with the men they intended to marry.73 When they became pregnant,
however, the men either disappeared, or continued living with them, but
did not marry them. Sometimes the couple married after the child or
children were born. The constraint of the traditional necessity to bring
a dowry to her marriage sometimes meant that a woman worked while
cohabiting with her lover until the requisite trousseau was put aside.
The absence of the moral force of family, local community and church
prevented the fulfillment of marital expectations. Lack of money and
severe economic pressures, as well perhaps as different attitudes and
expectations on the part of the men, kept them from fulfilling their promise.
The testimony of abandoned women to Henry Mayhew indicates that
often (a) there was no money for a proper wedding; (b) the men's jobs
demanded that they move on; (c) poverty created a possible emotional
stress; and (d) traditional contexts which identified and demanded proper
behavior were absent.74 Young girls, then, pursued mates and behaved
with them according to traditional assumptions. The changed context
yielded unanticipated (and often unhappy) results.
Even among prostitutes, many of whom were destitute or unemployed
servants and piece-workers, a peculiar blend of old and new attitudes
was evident. In pre-industrial society, lower-class women developed
endless resources for obtaining food for their families. Begging was not
unheard of and flirtations and sexual favors were an acknowledged way
of obtaining bread or flour in time of scarcity. Similarly, in nineteenth-
century London, prostitutes interviewed by Mayhew explained their
'shame' as a way of providing food for their families. One, the mother
of an illegitimate boy, explained that to keep herself and her son from
starving she was 'forced to resort to prostitution'. Another described the
'glorious dinner' her solicitations had brought. And a daughter explained
73 P. E. H. Hair, 'Bridal Pregnancy in Rural England in Earlier Centuries', Population
Studies, 20 (1966-7), 233-43, and 'Bridal Pregnancy in Earlier Rural England, Further
Examined', ibid., 24 (1970), 59-70; Thomas F. Sheppard, Loumarin in the Eighteenth Century:
A Study of a French Village (Baltimore, 1971); E. A. Wrigley, Population and History (New
York, 1969), 61-106; K. R. V. Wikman, Die Einleitung der Ehe: Eine vergleichende Ethno-
soziologische untersuchung iiber die Vorstufe der Ehe in den sitten des Schwedischen Volkstums
(Abo, 1937; Acta Academie Aboensis, Humaniora, II).
74 Yeo and Thompson, 167-80. For eighteenth century Nantes, De Pauw, 1166-7, 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, describes common law marriage in the Parisian
working class at the time of the Commune.
her prostitution to the author of My Secret Life as her way of enabling
the rest of the family to eat: 'Well, what do you let men fuck you for?
Sausage rolls?' 'Yes, meat-pies and pastry too'.75
Not all single working girls were abandoned with illegitimate children,
nor, despite the alarm of middle-class observers, did most become
prostitutes. Many got married and most left the labor force when they
did. Both the predominance of young single girls in the female labor force
and the absence of older married women reflect the persistence of tradi-
tional familial values. When they married, daughters were no longer
expected to contribute their wages to their parents' household. Marriage
meant a transfer from one family to another and the assumption of some
new roles. Single girls, however, carried the values and practices of their
mothers into their own marriages. The traditional role of a married woman,
her vital economic function within the family economy, sent her into the
labor force when her earnings were needed by the household budget.
When the income of her husband and children was sufficient for the family's
needs, she left the labor force. Mothers of young children would sometimes
leave the labor force only after their oldest child went out to work. Over
the developmental cycle of the family, this pattern is valid, but in cases
of temporary need, such as sickness, or in the case of the death of a
money earner, the married woman would go back to work.76 Even with-
out a money contribution, however, her contribution to the family economy
was nevertheless substantial. In the 1890s in London, the wives of the
lower classes 'had great responsibility, whether they earned a salary of
their own or not, they handled most of the family's money and were
responsible not only for food shopping, but for paying the rent, buying
clothes, keeping up insurance payments and overseeing school expenses
for their children'.77
Although increasingly the location of work in factories or shops outside
the home made such work more feasible for single women, some married
women continued to find jobs. Industrialization only gradually trans-
formed occupational opportunities. Old jobs persisted for many years
alongside the new. Women who married industrial workers and who lived
in cities imported old styles of behavior into new contexts. Much of the
work performed by married women was temporary. Anderson describes
varieties of domestic employment for married women in Preston in 1851.
75 Yeo and Thompson, 141, 148, 169; E. M. Sigsworth and J. J. Wylie, 'A Study of
Victorian Prostitution and Venereal Disease', in Vicinus, cited above, 81.
76 Chayanov and other economic studies of peasantry remark on the concept of 'target
income'. On the demographic reflections of the developmental cycle see Lutz Berkner, 'The
Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the Peasant Household: An Eighteenth-
Century Austrian Example', American Historical Review, 77 (April 1972), 398-418. Lynn Lees
is working on urban applications of the developmental cycle concept with English and Irish
workers' families.
77 Stearns, 106.
Many helped their husbands, others ran 'a little provision shop or beer
house'. Well over a third of those who worked, he continues, 'were
employed in non-factory occupations. Many others also worked irregularly
or part time' and often were not even listed in official records as having
an occupation. Indeed, Anderson's formulation for Lancashire that
'patterns of family structure in towns can only be explained as hangovers
from rural patterns' has much wider application.78 Whether in the cities
and towns of Europe or in America, the patterns of work of married women
resembled older, pre-industrial practices. Immigrant women in New
England textile mills, for example, were 'the only large group of regularly
employed married women' other than blacks. Smuts explains that they
were attracted by the familiar work of spinning and weaving and, more
important, by the opportunity of working with their children. 'A mother
whose children worked could look after them better if she worked in
the same mill'.79 Depending, of course, on their past experience, immigrant
women adapted their skills to American conditions. Thus Italian mothers
with their children picked fruit and vegetables around Buffalo, New York,
an activity reminiscent of southern Italy.80 Italian women on New York's
lower East Side sewed pants or made paper flowers with their daughters
at home. Their husbands, lacking these skills, dug ditches and swept
the streets. When these same women followed their work into factories
and sweatshops, the husbands sometimes kept house and cared for the
children. Married Irish women with only agricultural experience became
domestics. But many cleaned New York office buildings at night so they
could care for their families during the day.81
Whether they worked outside the home or not, married women defined
their role within the framework of the family economy. Married working-
class women, in fact, seem almost an internal backwater of pre-industrial
values within the working-class family. Long after their husbands and
children had begun to adopt some of the individualistic values associated
with industrialization, these women continued the self-sacrificing, self-
exploitative work that so impressed Le Play and that was characteristic
of the peasant or household economy. Surely this (and not the fact that
'husbands gave purpose to married women among the poor') is the
meaning of the testimony of a woman from York cited by Peter Stearns:
78 Anderson, 71, 79 respectively. 79 Smuts, 57.

80 Virginia Yans McLaughlin, 'A Flexible Tradition: South
a New York Experience', unpublished paper, 1973, 8, 11, and McLaughlin, 1972, op. cit.
81 Louise Odencrantz, Italian Women in Industry: A Study of Conditions in New York
City (New York, 1919), 19. 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.
'If there's anything extra to buy such as a pair of boots for one
children, me and the children goes without dinner-or mebbe o
a cop o' tea and a bit o' bread, but Him allers takes 'is dinner to
and I never tell 'im'.82 As long as her role is economically functio
her family, familial values make sense for the lower-class woma
the role of provider and financial manager, of seamstress and oc
wage earner was economically functional for a long time in working
families.
Perhaps most illustrative is this case history which embodies
collective portrait we have just presented. Francesca F. was born i
1817 in a rural area of Moravia and remained at home until she was 11.83
She had a typical childhood for a girl of her class. She learned from her
mother how to keep house and help on the farm, and she learned at school
how to read, write, figure and, most important of all, sew. At eleven,
she was sent into domestic service in a neighboring town. She worked
successively in several different houses, increasing her earnings as she
changed jobs. At one house she acquired a speciality as a seamstress.
She saved some money, but sent most of it home, and she returned home
(to visit and renew her passport) at least once a year.
Until her eighteenth year, Francesca's experience was not unlike
young girls' of earlier generations. Her decision to 'seek her fortune
in Vienna', though, began a new phase of her life. With the good wishes
of her parents, she paid her coach passage out of her savings and three
days after she arrived she found a job as a maid. She lived with the
bourgeois family she worked for for six months. Then she left for a better
position which she held until her master died (six months). Yet another
job as a domestic lasted a year.
At twenty, attracted by the opportunities for work available in a big
city and tired of domestic service, she apprenticed herself to a wool
weaver. He went bankrupt after a year and she found yet another job.
That one she quit because the work was unsteady and she began sewing
gloves for a small manufacturer. Glove-making was a prospering piece-
work industry and Francesca had to work 'at home'. Home was a boarding
house where she shared her bed with another working girl of 'dubious
character'. Unhappy with these arrangements, Francesca fortunately met
a young cabinet maker, himself of rural origin with whom she began living.
(The practice of sleeping with one's fiance was not uncommon in rural
Moravia according to Le Play.) She soon had a child whom she cared
for while she sewed gloves, all the while saving money for her marriage.
(Viennese authorities at this time required that workers show they could
support a family before they were permitted to marry. The task of accu-
mulating savings usually fell to the future bride.)
82 Stearns, 104. 83 Le Play, Vol. V, 9, 16-17, 45, 50-4.
WOMEN'S WORK IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE 6I
Three years after she met the cabinet-maker, they were married.
Francesca paid all the expenses of the wedding and provided what w
essentially her own dowry-all the linens and household furnishings th
needed. The daughter of rural peasants, Francesca was now the mothe
of an urban working-class family. Although the care of her children and
the management of her household consumed much of her time, she st
managed to earn wages in 1853, by doing the equivalent of 125 full da
of work, making gloves. (Although it amounted in Le Play's calculatio
to 125 days, Francesca sewed gloves part of the day during most of th
year.)
As long as piece-work was available to her, Francesca F. could supple-
ment her husband's wage with her own work. With the decline of such
domestic work, however, and the rise of factories, it would become
increasingly difficult for the mother of five young children to leave her
household responsibilities in order to earn a wage. Economic conditions
in Vienna in the 1850s still made it possible for Francesca to fulfill the
role expected of a woman of the popular classes.
IV
Traditional values did not persist indefinitely in modern or modernizing

contexts. As families adapted customary strategies to deal with new situa-
tions they became involved in new experiences which altered relationships
within the family and the perceptions of those relationships. As the process
of change involved retention of old values and practices, it also trans-
formed them, but in a more gradual and complex manner than either
Goode or Engels implied.
The major transformation involved the replacement of familial values
with individualistic ones. These stressed the notion that the individual
was owner of him- or herself rather than a part of a social or moral
whole.84 They involved what Anderson calls 'an instrumental orientation'
of family members to their families 'requiring reciprocation for their
contribution in the very short run'.85 These attitudes developed differently
in different places depending in part on specific circumstances. None-
theless, the evidence indicates an underlying similarity in the process
and the final outcome. Sons first, and only later daughters, were permitted
to keep some of their earnings. They were granted allowances by their
parents in some cases; in others a specified family contribution was set,
in still others the child decided what portion of her pay she would send
home (and it diminished and became increasingly irregular over time).
Anderson points out that in Preston, high factory wages of children
84 C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Hobbes to Locke

(Oxford paperback, 1964), 3.
85 Anderson, 131-2.
reversed normal dependencies and made parents dependent on t

children. The tensions created by the different priorities of paren
children led to feuds. And in these situations children often left home
voluntarily and gladly and 'became unrestrained masters of their destiny'.86
Long distance and permanent migration also ultimately undermined
family ties. And the pressures of low wages and permanent urban living,
the forced independence of large numbers of young girls, clearly fostered
calculating, self-seeking attitudes among them. They began to look upon
certain jobs as avenues of social and occupational mobility, rather than
as a temporary means to earn some money for the family. Domestic
service remained a major occupation for women until the twentieth
century in most of Europe. (In fact, in the mid-nineteenth century the
number of women employed as domestics increased tremendously.)
Nonetheless, as it embodied traditional female employment, a position
as a servant also began to mean an opportunity for geographic and
occupational mobility. Once the trip to the city and the period of adjust-
ment to urban life had been accomplished under the auspices of service,
a young girl could seek better and more remunerative work.87 Her pros-
pects for marrying someone who made better money in the city also
increased immeasurably.
Their new experiences and the difficulties and disillusionment they
experienced clearly developed in young women a more individualistic
and instrumental orientation. They lived and worked with peers increas-
ingly. They wanted to save their money for clothes and amusements.
They learned to look out for their own advantage, to value every penny
they earned, to place their own desires and interests above those of their
families.
Decreased infant mortality and increased educational opportunity
also modified family work strategies. And instead of sending all their
children out to work for the family welfare, parents began to invest in
their children's futures by keeping them out of the work force and sending
them to school. (Clearly this strategy was adopted earlier for sons than
daughters-the exact history of the process remains to be described.)
The family ethic at once sponsored intergenerational mobility and a
new individualistic attitude as well.88
A number of factors, then, were involved in the waning of the family
economy. They included the location of job opportunities, increased
standards of living and higher wages, proximity to economic change,
increased exposure to and adherence to bourgeois standards as chances
for mobility into the bourgeoisie increased, ethnic variations in work
86 Ibid.
87 McBride, op. cit.; Chatelain makes a similar point.
88 For an important discussion of changes in family strategies, see Charles Tilly, 'Population
and Pedagogy in France', History of Education Quarterly (Summer, 1973), 113-28.
patterns and family organization, and different rates of development in
different regions and different countries. All of these factors contributed
to the decline of the family as a productive unit and to the modification
of the values associated with it. The decline can be dated variously for
various places, classes and ethnic groups. It reached the European peasant
and working classes only during the nineteenth century, and in some
areas, like Southern Italy, rural Ireland and rural France, not until the
twentieth century. The usefulness of the family model as a unit of analysis
for social relationships and economic decision making, however, has not
disappeared.89
A great deal more work is needed on the redefinition of family relation-
ships and on the changes in the definition of women's work and women's
place that accompanied it. Clearly many things changed. The rising stan-
dard of living and increased wages for men, which enabled them to support
their families, made it less necessary for married women to work outside
the home. (In early industrialization, such work also exacted great costs
in terms of infant and child mortality.)90 Even for single women, economic
change reduced traditional work opportunities, while new jobs opened
up for those with more education. After World War I, for example,
domestic service was much less important as an area of employment
for young women. A smaller number of permanent servants who followed
that occupation as a profession replaced the steady stream of young
women who had constituted the domestic servant population.91 The rise
of factory garment production seems to have limited work available
for women in Milan and elsewhere.92 On the other hand, the growth of
new jobs in expanding government services, in support services for
business, in commerce, in health services and in teaching provided work
opportunities, primarily for single women, especially for those with at
least a basic education.93
There is evidence also that women's role in the household, whether
as wives or as daughters, was modified with time. In Britain, women in
working-class families began to lose control over finances early in the
twentieth century, but the process was not complete until World War II.
Working girls began to receive spending money of their own only at the
end of the nineteenth century. After about 1914, more and more single
girls kept more and more of their wages, and wives began to receive a
household allowance from their husbands, who kept the rest and deter-
89 See for example Marc Nerlove, 'Economic Growth and Population: Perspectives on the
"New Home Economics"', unpublished draft, Northwestern University, 1973.
90 Hewitt, 99-122 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). 93 Holcombe, op. cit.
mined how it was spent.94 The rhetoric of some working-class organiza-
tions also suggests a change in ideas about family roles. Labor unions
demanded higher wages for men so that they could support families
and keep their wives at home. Some socialist newspapers described the
ideal society as one in which 'good socialist wives' would stay at home and
care for the health and education of 'good socialist children'.95
The changes that affected women's work and women's place in the
family late in the nineteenth and in the twentieth centuries are subjects
which are virtually unexplored by historians. They cannot be understood,
however, apart from the historical context we have presented. It was
European peasant and working-class families which experienced at first
hand the structural changes of the nineteenth century. These experiences
were anything but uniform. They were differentiated geographically,
ethnically and temporally and they involved complex patterns of family
dynamics and family decision making. The first contacts with structural
change in all cases, however, involved adjustments of traditional strategies
and were informed by values rooted in the family economy. It is only
in these terms that we can begin to understand the work of the vast
majority of women during the nineteenth century. We must examine
their experience in the light of their familial values and not our individu-
alistic ones. The families whose wives and daughters constituted the
bulk of the female labor force in western Europe during most of the
nineteenth century simply did not value the 'rights and responsibilities
of the individual' which Goode invokes. Their values cannot be logically
or historically tied to the political enfranchisement of women. The con-
fusion about women's work and women's place begins to be resolved
when assumptions are tested against historical data. The evolutionary
model which assumes a single and similar experience for all women, an
experience in which political and economic factors move together, must
be discarded in the light of historical evidence.
94 Stearns, 116.
95 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 M. Guilbert, 'La Presence des femmes dans les
professions: incidences sur l'action syndicale avant 1914', Le Mouvement Social, No. 63 (1968),
129. For Italy, see La Difesa delle Lavoratrici (a socialist newspaper for women) 11 May,
1912, for a socialist view of women's role as mothers. See also Theodore Zeldin, France,
1848-1945. Vol. I. Ambition, Love and Politics (Oxford, 1973), 346.

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Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History

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

There is a great deal of confusion about the history

Yet Goode makes no systematic effort to validate his statements with

Middle Class Occupations 12.6% 23.7

Typists, copyists, accountants 22.8 54.8

women operatives in the Lancashire cotton mills in 1833 were betwe

10 Miriam Cohen, 'The Liberation of Working Class Women in England?', unpublished

servants were daughters of peasants. In Bordeaux, a similar proportion

rather than a new individualistic ideology, justified the work of workin

Let us now attempt to reconstruct the historical experience of women

late nineteenth-century Lombardy a kind of frereche (brothers and t

Of course the wives of masons from the Creuse were in a peculiar

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

The indispensable role of women was demonstrated, too, by the fact

daughters of farmers.48 Their familiarity with figures was a function of

Daughters were socialized early, in lower-class families, to assu

Women's work was in the interest of the family economy. Their

This means that traditional families employed a variety of str

53 Le Play, Vol. 3, 111.

another expedient-a way of temporarily extending the family beyond

58 Braun, in Landes, ed., 61-3.

were real. Nevertheless, during the nineteenth century, though many

Domestic service, garment-making and even textile manufactu

of a compositional change in population-i.e., the increasing presence of many more young

subsistence depended on multiple contributions. The logical move for

78 Anderson, 71, 79 respectively. 79 Smuts, 57.

Traditional values did not persist indefinitely in modern or modernizing

84 C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Hobbes to Locke

reversed normal dependencies and made parents dependent on t

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