Sons and mothers: family relations and sources of family income in early industrial Britain

"Quantitative and qualitative evidence has been extracted from 595 working-class autobiographies covering the period of the industrial revolution in Britain. It has been used to establish the origins of family subsistence and the nature of family relations. Investigation of the economic roles of mothers and fathers suggests the early and widespread predominance of reliance on the earnings of the male household head with mothers predominantly engaged in domestic activities. Less than 40 per cent of mothers augmented family incomes and many of these worked only spasmodically or in response to some family crisis that incapacitated or unemployed the male breadwinner. The families were “Parsonian” in their structure and function even though drawn from a pre and early industrial context. This division of labour structured relationships within families. Fathers became distant figures. “Providing” fulfilled their responsibilities. In the home, and in the life of the child, mothers were supreme and it was to their mothers that the autobiographers cleaved, allying with them against the rest of the world which sometimes included their fathers. These “Parsonian” family dynamics have implications for the age at which sons started work, first jobs and the control of their earnings. They also bear on the nature and consequences of inter-generational contracts for care and support that bound parents and children together over time."