Work and Income in the Family Economy: Belgium, 1853 and 1891

Abstract

During the last twenty years the focus of research on the workingclass family has undergone an important shift. Most previous scholarship emphasized the physical and moral hardships of women and children in factories which had been so luridly detailed by contemporary reformers. More recent work does not belittle the hardships experienced in early industrialization, but rather emphasizes the positive and essential economic contributions of women and children to the family budget. The women and children who labored in nineteenth-century factories were not the first to spend their lives in toil and drudgery, and their economic contributions served to raise the standard of living among the laboring classes for the first time in history.1 This article describes the sources of income in the family economy of European workers during the nineteenth century, and analyzes the ways in which these sources changed in the second half of the century. Two unusual surveys of family budgets, conducted in Belgium in 1853 and 1891, make it possible to describe: (I) what proportions of children and married women participated in the wage labor force; (2) how much they worked; (3) what proportion of the total family budget they contributed; and (4) how each of these patterns changed during the last half of the nineteenth century. The main finding is a strong decline in the labor force participation of married women, no surprise to anyone who has followed recent developments in the history of