The Family and Industrialisation

Today, a few comments on the family and industrialisation. This area in the specification is important for what it tells us about social change, social structures and the relationship between industrialisation and family structures. You can also link it up to debates about whether the nuclear family is universal - but on that point you need to attend carefully to the specific requirements of the particular question you are answering - get the balance the right way around. Questions where you can focus on industrialisation are generally pretty clearly signposted - the clue is in that word ‘industrialisation’.

Key points in the debate are:

Did industrialisation cause (or create) the nuclear family - generally this is functionalist Talcott Parson’s view.

or

Was industrialisation cauesd by the nuclear family - this is broadly the view of historian Peter Laslett.

In discussing this issue, you can and should have fun with poking holes in the methodology used by both sides.

Parsons tends to provide very much a theoretical argument, which isn’t underpinned by much in the way of empirical evidence. What evidence he does use (not referenced in most textbooks) tends to be secondary - i.e. he relies on other people’s research and makes his conclusions accordingly. Might Parson’s have been using evidence selectively, to back his own views?

You can’t be quite so firm about Laslett - he loved the empirical detail and produces a lot, which suggests that the nuclear family predated the industrial revolution. That seems to damage Parson’s case beyond repair. However, Laslett used parish records to make his conclusions, and they can be shot through with all sorts of inaccuracies - recording errors and such like. And as well as that, its not clear that Laslett had a representative sample of parish records - he used those which have survived and one can’t rule out the possibility that they are systematically biased.

But a third character - historian Michael Anderson, suggests that the reality is more complex than both the above suggest. Anderson used the census to look at Preston in 1851. He found that extended families were in fact quite common at that time - the peak of industrialisation. That’s not what you’d expect if you were to believe Parsons. Anderson argues this isn’t surprising- during industrialisation people needed support and help and extended families provided that. the nNuclear family grew with increasing affluence and higher standards of living. Sure, Anderson is only looking at one town, in one year and it may not be representative. On the other hand, was Preston necessarily that unusual in mid 19C Britain?

So is there a direct relationship between industrialisation and the nuclear family?

You must reach your own conclusion. But given the lack of evidence presented by Parson’s, and summing up both Anderson and Laslett - it seems that family structures can be quite flexible - there’s no magic formula - culture and economics play a role. Industrialisation didn’t vitally depend on nuclear families - people moved to the cities and towns as best they could and extended family relations could still be useful. Change was more complex and more gradual than the functionalist account allows for.