Working-class Households Research Articles

Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870-1914 by Anna Davin (review)

REVIEWS Anna Davin. Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870-1914. London: Rivers Oram P, 19%, xvi + 289. £19.95 (cloth). What was it like to be a working-class child in London in die last decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? The question, well-rehearsed in die minds of many social historians, has been analyzed mainly from the perspective of the representation of childhood by historians such as Hugh Cunningham and Carolyn Steedman. In contrast to them, Anna Davin deals widi die experience of childhood, particularly childhood for girls. One of the seUing-points of diis book is that she uses oral history derived from die interviews she conducted of her subjects in the 1970s. In doing so, she provides considerable new evidence for die position that the value assigned to die work done by working-class girls was often invisible but nevertheless essential to the steady running of the working-class household. From die girl who ran errands for her mother or neighbors to the one who 'minded a lady's baby' to die one who helped out in the sweated trade at home, Davin argues that adults — particularly mothers — relied on their daughters' labor. By analyzing both childhood experiences and the expectations placed upon children by adult society, Davin moreover provides a larger view concerning die relationship between parents and die state in diis critical period when die latter assumed increasing power over die former and tiieir families. As both members of a family and members of die State, children in late-nineteenth century Britain were the subjects of an important power struggle. To be sure, the Education Act of 1870, which forms the point of departure for this book, marked die beginning of a new epoch in which the educational demands made by die state on die nation's youth ostensibly compromised die control diat parents had over their children's current and future labor. Even so, Davin demonstrates that truancy and/or late attendance at school remained a common experience for working-class children. The often erratic promise of work in their neighborhoods meant that these children relied on piece-meal and seasonal jobs in order to supplement die family 198Victorian Review income at the expense to their own education. Where steady employment appeared, it often took the form of after-school jobs such as matchbox making at home — sometimes extending quite late into the night — and morning jobs, such as delivering newspapers or milk (particularly by boys). If such jobs enabled boys and girls to get to school on time, they may have also been responsible for prompting exhaustion and for preventing these children from achieving their maximum academic potential. Eldest daughters or 'Utde mothers', Davin intimates, shouldered the greatest burden since they were often expected to remain at home in order to look after the youngest members of the family while their mothers worked or performed domestic duties. In order to compel these girls to attend school, the London School Board convinced the Education Department, albeit temporarily, that creches ought to be established in the schools. And, as early as 1879, twelve creches were littered throughout metropolitan schools in order to meet the needs of these school-age girls — a point which raises interesting questions about the origins of the welfare state and the extent to which the School Board was able to influence government policy concerning children. Involved in a process that aided their parents to make ends meet, these children found themselves laden with responsibilities that their socially privUeged peers never knew. However strict rules, steady household demands, economic pressure and close quarters did not indicate that the children of these famtiies were treated harshly. Davin is careful to point out that growing up poor did not preclude growing up loved. In conjunction with class, Davis is concerned with race. She sheds an interesting new Ught on the relationship in the East End among the Irish, English and Jews, the latter being a group that constituted an increasing proportion of recent immigrants to this part of London from Eastern Europe. That Jewish families often hired non-Jewish children to light the fires in their fireplaces at...

Paul Nurse: cycling up the hill

Paul Nurse: cycling up the hill

Age, Labor Force Participation, and Income Patterns for Working-Class Households in the United States and England, 1889-1890

Dans le cadre des societes post-industrielles la retraite tend a devenir un fait ordinaire et une transition souhaitee par les plus anciens membres de cette population. En tout etat de cause cette conception apparait comme un phenomene relativement recent. L'A. estime que cette affirmation est peu evidente aussi s'efforce-t-il d'etudier l'histoire de la retraite et cela dans le cadre des nations industrialisees. Il s'atache plus particulierement a la periode 1889-1890. Il examine le statut d'emploi et les revenus de menages dont au moins un membre appartient a un echantillon travaillant dans neuf industries aux Etats-Unis et en Grande-Bretagne

Connecting Household History and Labour History

Labour historians have always shown an interest in working class men and women who participated in strikes, unions, and political parties. However, even when historians are receptive to the importance of family life behind public activism these scholars continue to use the “public sphere” as an approach for studying the family. This approach runs counter to historical logic because the daily life of those who join social movements and organizations involves far more than merely labour activism. To understand the true causes of collective resistance among workers, it is necessary to use the “private sphere” as an approach for studying labour protests as well. While this reverse perspective may not prove a panacea for all problems associated with analysing labour history, it will provide insight into the rather obscure motives of the working class for deciding whether or not to support the development of workers' movements. Furthermore, Jean H. Quataert wrote that examining working-class households makes it possible to keep “in focus at all times the lives of both men and women, young and old, and the variety of paid and unpaid work necessary to maintain the unit”.

Les bénéficiaires de la réhabilitation du centre historique de Moscou

OLGA TROUCHTCHENKO BENEFICIARIES FROM RENOVATIONS IN THE HISTORICAL CENTER OF MOSCOW At the beginning of the 1920s, the Soviet State expropriated many buildings in the historical center of Moscow and used them to accomodate, in "collective apartments", many working class families. During the seventies, the bad housing conditions and the physical decay of the buildings lead to a policy of renovation, which sent many former residents to the periphery of Moscow. A survey of the Sretenka street area shows the resulting change in the social structure. Among the new residents, the share of working class households has declined, that of professionals has increased, the strongest increase being that of State and Party officials, the privileged categories of the system.

Within site of the white house: The archaeology of working women

Gender roles define appropriate behavior for members of society according to sex and age, and appropriate behavior includes appropriate work. The relationship between consumer behavior, household composition, and household function in turn-of-the-century Washington, D.C., is elucidated by understanding women’s work. Archaeological excavations in downtown Washington, D.C.’s, Federal Triangle produced artifact collections from two types of households, working-class households and brothels. For working-class wives, the home was the workplace, and many of these women participated in both paid and unpaid labor without going out to work. Turn-of-the-century brothels were also both workplace and home, but brothels were organized as commercial institutions, not social units. Comparisons of artifact assemblages from a brothel and two working-class households in the neighborhood historically known as Hooker’s Division and assemblages from two other Washington, D.C., neighborhoods indicate different consumer patterns; these patterns reflect differences in household composition and household function.

Response to John French

After researching and writing my article, the one thing concerning issues of ideology and practice about which I am sure is that gender analyses anger some historians. John French's response to the article is fairly representative of negative reactions to the use of gender as a category of analysis. He fails to engage the artcle's arguments with new evidence or a reinterpretation of existing documentation. Instead, he attacks it as lacking proof and an empirical foundation.' I believe the article is well supported and that French's objection is that I do not document an argument-about women's lack of labor activity-which he puts forth and I reject. In order to attack the article, French misconstrues its main theses. He discusses at length, for example, alternative explanations for women workers' quiescence and then chides me for not engaging those ideas. The reason I do not refer to women's powerlessness is that I do not believe women shied away from strikes and other protest activities; I believe they often led them. In the article I argue that women organized on their own, around those issues they considered most important because of the sexual division of labor in working-class households and within Paulistano industry. Women's organizing and protest activities, I argue, played a key role in convincing many male anarchists to adopt more of a bread and butter perspective in the late 1910S and throughout the 1920S. I do not see the

Women and social class: a methodological study comparing individual, household, and census measures as predictors of black/white differences in reproductive history.

The aim was to compare four different measures of women's social class (interview and census based) as predictors of well known social gradients in reproductive outcomes. The intent was to address two obstacles that confront research in the United States regarding social gradients in women's health: how women's social class should be measured, and the absence of socioeconomic data in most health records. The study was a retrospective cohort analysis, using a community based random sample. Setting--Alameda County, California, 1987. 51 black and 50 white women, ages 20 to 80 years, identified by random digit dialling, were interviewed by telephone. Census data were linked to individual records via the respondents' addresses. Using number of full term pregnancies as an example, multiple linear regression analyses demonstrated that individual class was not significantly associated with this outcome, whereas household class was: women from non-working-class households had 0.8 fewer such pregnancies than women from working class households (95% confidence interval [CI] = -1.4, -0.1). The block group measure functioned most like the household class measure (beta = -0.7, 95% CI = -1.4, 0.1), while the census tract measure was non-significant (beta = -0.4, 95% CI = -1.2, 0.4). Similar results were obtained for the outcomes: age at first full term pregnancy, percent of early terminated pregnancies, and yearly income. These results suggest block group data may offer a uniform source of social class information that can be appended to individual health records, and that this strategy is not invalidated by concerns regarding ecological fallacy.

Social Class and Social Support: The Same or Different?

This paper is concerned with themes taken from two different areas of sociological theory and investigation. The first relates to work on social class and social relationships and networks, within which a central issue has been the extent to which interpersonal ties are differentiated by occupationally-based class groups in modern society. The second area of work lies within the sociology of health and illness, and concerns the question of the health-promoting potential of social support. The paper draws on data from a study of a social support intervention in pregnancy involving 507 pregnant women in the Midlands and the South of England, and considers to what extent family, friendship and neighbourhood ties exhibit different patterns by occupational and other measures of class. The study findings suggest that working class women are not more closely involved with their relatives and are more isolated in terms of friends than middle class women; male domestic support is also less common in working class households. These patterns are discussed as part of the context within which services for the promotion of maternal and infant health are provided in modern industrial societies.

THE SOCIAL ORGANISATION OF FOOD CONSUMPTION: A COMPARISON OF MIDDLE CLASS AND WORKING CLASS HOUSEHOLDS

Evidence from epidemiological studies (Doll and Peto, 1981 European Atherosclerosis Society, 1987) has clearly pointed to a strong association between food consumption and disease. This association has been used to account at least in part for the relationship between social class and a range of diseases (Townsend, Davidson and Whitehead, 1988), as evidence from survey research (MAFF, 1987) suggests that patterns of food consumption and dietary intake vary markedly between social classes and income groups. The aim of this article, drawing on data derived from an exploratory, qualitative investigation of patterns of food consumption in middle class and working class households, attempts to throw some light on the relationship between social class and food consumption.

‘Clean and Comfortable and Respectable’: Working-class Aspirations and the Australian 1920 Royal Commission on the Basic Wage

In 1920 the Australian government established a Royal Commission on the Basic Wage with a brief to enquire into and report on the living standards of the working population. Many women and men testified before it. Their evidence provides not only extraordinarily detailed and intimate portraits of the everyday lives of working-class households but more important reveals a process of struggle around competing interpretations of the situation and needs of the 'normal' Australian family of the early interwar period.' By listening to the voices of the working people who testified to the Commission, it is possible to trace something of the way in which they 'made history' through their determination to maintain what they saw as appropriate conditions and standards of behaviour on the part of household members. The opening decades of the century were years of relative economic prosperity in Australia with further expansion of the major urban centres; the Australian predilection for suburban family living was already evident.2 Following Federation in 1901, the contours of the twentieth century's political system were established: at both state and federal levels, liberalism and labour concurred on the desirability of an interventionist state. Amongst the many legislative measures of this period were pensions for the

The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs

Almost every Friday night between 1949 and 1956, millions of Americans watched Rosemary Rice turn the pages of an old photograph album. With music from Edvard Grieg's Holverg Suite playing in the background, and with pictures of tur-of-the-century San Francisco displayed on the album pages, Rice assumed the identity of her television character, Katrin Hansen, on the CBS network program Mama. She told the audience about her memories of her girlhood, her family's house on Steiner Street, and her experiences there with her big brother Nels, her little sister Dagmar, her Papa, and her Mama--most of all, she said, when I remember that San Francisco of so long ago, I remember (Meehan and Ropes 1954). Katrin Hansen's memories of her Norwegian immigrant working-class family had powerful appeal for viewers in the early years of commercial network broadcasting. Mama established itself as one of CBS' most popular programs during its first season on the air, and it retained high ratings for the duration of its prime time run (Mitz 1983:458). The show's popularity coincided with that of other situation comedies based on ethnic working-class family life-The Goldbergs, depicting the experiences of Jews in the Bronx; Amos 'n Andy, blacks in Harlem; The Honeymooners and Hey Jeannie, Irish working-class families in Brooklyn; Life with Luigi, Italian immigrants in Chicago; and Life of Riley, working-class migrants to Los Angeles during and after World War II.' The presence of this subgenre of ethnic, working-class situation comedies on television network schedules seems to run contrary to the commercial and artistic properties of the medium. Television delivers audiences to advertisers by glorifying consumption, not only during commercial breaks but in the programs themselves (Barouw 1979). The relative economic deprivation of ethnic workingclass households would seem to provide an inappropriate setting for the display and promotion of commodities as desired by the networks and their commercial sponsors. Furthermore, the mass audience required to repay the expense of network programming encourages the depiction of a homogenized mass society, not the particularities and peculiarities of working-class communities. As an artistic medium, television's capacity for simultaneity conveys a sense of living in an

Review Article : Some Perspectives on Scandinavian Welfare Research

One of the most important developments in Scandinavia within applied sociology has been the accomplishment of several large-scale surveys of living conditions Living conditions research relies on a solid tradition reaching beyond the social indicator movement' of the 1960s back to the social surveys of consumption patterns of working-class households in the days of early capitalism. This review article argues. however, that welfare research has far from exhausted the opportunities in respect to social expla nation offered by this particular field of social inquiry Social structure and social agency have not been sufficiently dealt with Future living conditions research must address itself to the 'syntax' of welfare distribution instead of focusing exclusively on individual attributes

Women's smoking and family health

Women's smoking behaviour, and the smoking behaviour of mothers in particular, is becoming an important focus of research in the area of health and inequality. Smoking among women is linked to social disadvantage, with the highest rates among white women in working class households. Evidence is accumulating of the effects of women's smoking on their health and on the health of their children. Women's smoking behaviour is also implicated in the process of childhood socialisation into smoking, with mother's smoking attitudes and practices identified as powerful influences on children's smoking behaviour. Despite the emphasis on maternal smoking in epidemiological studies, little attention has been paid in psychological and social research to the experience of smoking in the context of poverty and motherhood. Drawing on a study of 57 women caring for pre-school children in low-income families, the article explores some of the complex links between women's poverty, caring and smoking. The study suggests that, for a significant minority of mothers, poverty and caring combine with low levels of physical and emotional energy, with sleep problems and with feelings of social isolation. In this context, smoking appeared to provide a way of coping with caring-in-poverty: a way of coping alone with the demands of full-time caring and with the struggle of making ends meet.

The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs

Almost every Friday night between 1949 and 1956, millions of Americans watched Rosemary Rice turn the pages of an old photograph album. With music from Edvard Grieg's Holverg Suite playing in the background, and with pictures of tur-of-the-century San Francisco displayed on the album pages, Rice assumed the identity of her television character, Katrin Hansen, on the CBS network program Mama. She told the audience about her memories of her girlhood, her family's house on Steiner Street, and her experiences there with her big brother Nels, her little sister Dagmar, her Papa, and her Mama--most of all, she said, when I remember that San Francisco of so long ago, I remember (Meehan and Ropes 1954). Katrin Hansen's memories of her Norwegian immigrant working-class family had powerful appeal for viewers in the early years of commercial network broadcasting. Mama established itself as one of CBS' most popular programs during its first season on the air, and it retained high ratings for the duration of its prime time run (Mitz 1983:458). The show's popularity coincided with that of other situation comedies based on ethnic working-class family life-The Goldbergs, depicting the experiences of Jews in the Bronx; Amos 'n Andy, blacks in Harlem; The Honeymooners and Hey Jeannie, Irish working-class families in Brooklyn; Life with Luigi, Italian immigrants in Chicago; and Life of Riley, working-class migrants to Los Angeles during and after World War II.' The presence of this subgenre of ethnic, working-class situation comedies on television network schedules seems to run contrary to the commercial and artistic properties of the medium. Television delivers audiences to advertisers by glorifying consumption, not only during commercial breaks but in the programs themselves (Barouw 1979). The relative economic deprivation of ethnic workingclass households would seem to provide an inappropriate setting for the display and promotion of commodities as desired by the networks and their commercial sponsors. Furthermore, the mass audience required to repay the expense of network programming encourages the depiction of a homogenized mass society, not the particularities and peculiarities of working-class communities. As an artistic medium, television's capacity for simultaneity conveys a sense of living in an

Urban Indian Working Class Households

Urban Indian Working Class Households

The Rotating Credit Association: A "Middle Rung" in Development

The building up of a variety of institutions, serving the purpose of promoting individual savings, and organizing them and making them fruitful to the saver and to the community, should be given a high priority in every development plan. To be effective, the institutions have to be adapted to different individual needs and possibilities and must fit into the community patterns; they must aim at encouraging planned and "goal-directed" savings. Even if, at least in the beginning, the financial results would not constitute more than a trickle of new capital disposal, the effects in rationalizing attitudes and mobilizing ambitions might be crucially important. --Gunnar Myrdal, in An International Economy (p. 360)

Recent Studies of the Russian Peasant

THERE is a vast literature on the Russian peasant. In the 19th century the Russian peasant became known to the west through the writings of Russian novelists, especially Leo Tolstoi, and of foreign travellers. These latter include A. von Haxthausen (1844-1852), an incisive survey unfortunately involved in an outmoded controversy over the original forms of Russian peasant life; P. von Kippen (1852), a statistical treatment of the Don Cossacks and the south-central Russian peasant; J. Engelmann (1884), an excellent study of the condition of the Russian peasant before and after emancipation from serfdom in the 1860s; the keen if somewhat romanticized, notes on the peasant by a Scotsman, Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace (1912); and above all, Frederic Le Play (1877). Le Play, one of the founders of sociology, studied the peasant household of central and southern Russia in the mid-19th century, as well as working class households of the Urals, with particular reference to his specialty, family budgets. At this time the Russians themselves were also developing the study of their native peasantry, and they produced a literature which was unsurpassed in scope and comprehensiveness by any other national tradition. One of the most impressive studies is a six volume series on the Russian peasant, Etnograficheskii Sbornik (1853-1864). The Russian Geographical Society was charged with these studies down to the Soviet period. Even more compendious was a 19 volume series, Materialy dlia Geografii i Statistiki Rossii (1860-1864). This series is a vast reservoir of information gathered province by province on the demography, family life, village organization and social relations of the peasants. The journal of the ethnographic section of the Russian Geographic Society, Zhivaia Starina (The Living Past), in virtually every issue for a 25 year period from 1891 to 1916 published important contributions on the Russian peasant economy, ceremonials, agricultural round, family relations including the position of women, settlement patterns, customary law, house types, and folklore. A collection edited by V. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii (1899-1914) devoted some nine volumes to a systematic survey of the Russian peasant, among other subjects such as Russian geography, history, etc. At this time a number of individual scholars were examining the peasant life. Among the most outstanding of these is V. I. Semevskii (1888). Peasant customary law has been covered by a number of legal specialists, the chief of whom is undoubtedly V. I. Sergeevich (1902-1911); despite the somewhat oldfashioned conception his book is a vast compendium of peasant customary law. In any survey of prerevolutionary Russian literature on the peasant, a high place must be assigned to Aleksandra Efimenko (1884), whose work is of great significance in method, theory, and presentation of detail.

The Urban Working-Class Household Diet 1940 to 1949.

The Urban Working-Class Household Diet 1940 to 1949.

The Urban Working-Class Household Diet 1940-49

The Urban Working-Class Household Diet 1940-49