The Industrial Revolution and the European Family: The Institutionalization of ‘Childhood’ as a Market for Family Labor

The Industrial Revolution transferred both food production and home based manufacture from the family to larger nonkinship corporations. But, contrary to what is said by historians of the family, industrialization has not brought about the demise of ‘home-based’ family labor. Probably the most often cited premise in the study of the Western family is that ‘A fundamental characteristic of the world we have lost was the scene of labour, which was universally supposed to be the home’ (Laslett 1971: 13). Those who study the transition of the family from a peasant type of production to wage-labor production unquestioningly accept this view of post-peasant family labor (for example, see Mendras 1970: 238).