Marriage and European Views Fertility

The family production unit's reliance on its own labor power merely served to expose it, nakedly, when the terms of trade swung violently against it after the mid-nineteenth century. Simple, repetitive tasks by which women and children had contributed significantly to the domestic economy of the peasant household inexorably declined in the face of competition from, first, specialized producers and, next, factory-based manufacturering. One of the most significant additions to the domestic economy was provided by spinning—an activity of women and children; the mechanization of spinning in the last decade of the eighteenth century effectively demolished this cottage industry at the moment when population growth was creating increasing stress on the income of the semi-proletarian households. The birth pangs of industrial society sent shock waves into the very core of the cottagers' lives; the family work unit was inexorably superseded.

Women and children were doubly marginalized from the world of work. Gendered roles and age-stratified activities replaced the mutuality of the cottage. The ideology of domesticity provided the key entry-point for the new culture of bread-winning respectability.

Not only does it (i.e., agricultural labour) almost unsex a woman in dress, gait, manners, character, making her rough coarse, clumsy and masculine; but it generates a further very pregnant mischief by infitting or indisposing her for a woman's proper duties at home.

This quotation from the "Report on the Employment of Children, Young Persons and Women in Agriculture" (1867), a British document, resonates in the reader's ears. At the heart of the writers' concerns is a worry that the supposed "natural" character of rural, proletarian women was threatened by "masculine" work. Such women would not only be "unsexed" but also socially deranged since they would be indisposed to "a woman's proper duties at home." Powerful as this prescription might have been, it was essentially beside the point because such working women had never conformed to bourgeois expectations nor did they give "femininity" more importance than family subsistence needs, which were always their primary focus.

In contrast to the rough-and-ready morality of the field and street, female mentalities were reeducated to make the cozy hearth a proper home. Work was reclassified as a masculine endeavor; masculinity was tested in the labor process and judged by the harmony of domestic discipline and its respectable independence. Propriety was to be the moral property of women who were reformulated as model wives and mothers. The vice of the bad home, and the virtue of the good home, could be just as easily translated to descriptions of the good and bad wife: one was chaotic, promiscuous, unsettled, sensual, dirty, and unhealthy; the other was orderly, modest, stable, rational, clean, and well. And what was true of the wife in her home determined the family also.

In French towns of Lille, Mulhouse, Rouen, and Saint Chamond—as in the English coal-mining region of County Durham—the proliferation of proletarians disturbed social policy makers. Nineteenth-century social reformers regarded the menacing features of urban, industrial society to reside in a realm of human behavior removed from the public theaters in which working-class challenges to the status quo usually took place. Malthusian social policy has ever since been based on the understanding that the disorderly family was the problem while the ordered married family was the solution to the population question. The personal was politicized. The workingclass family's profligacy—its population power—was thus the outer/public face of its inner/private lack of control.