Political and cultural conservatives have spent the last several decades sounding alarms about the state of the family in our society. We can easily find a slew of articles or podcasts bemoaning the rise of single motherhood, sexual libertinism, pornography, and abortion. However, as Wendell Berry noted in the early 1990s, these “conservative” defenses of the nuclear family have generally rung hollow because they have failed to address the whole problem, specifically skirting the issue of the “economic integrity of the household.” For Berry, any attempt to respond to the current cultural crisis surrounding the nuclear family must address the implications of women’s liberation from the home and full entrance into the public sphere of the workplace.[1] In this post, I review the technological and economic changes that made this fundamental social transformation possible and now make it so difficult for us to imagine any other world.
Ideas Have Consequences
In a previous post, I reviewed nineteenth-century (or first-wave) feminists’ attacks on the institution of marriage and the family. As I noted in that essay, while many of these women had good cause to be suspicious of men and the institution of marriage based on their experiences with wicked men (and women), their attempts to address specific problems led to much more personally and socially destructive relations with men.
The abstract ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton faced significant hurdles when applied to the real lives of women. Most nineteenth-century women rejected feminism outright for a whole host of religious, philosophical, and cultural reasons.[2] However, even many women who were inclined to embrace feminist ideas recognized the practical dangers of single motherhood and the severe social exclusion it brought for them and their children in the nineteenth century.[3]
Even if a woman remained chaste, she had few ways to provide a living without the support of the family structure. Unless you were from a very wealthy background, the burdens of providing enough income to acquire and care for a home, homemade clothing, homemade food, and the other (often homemade) basic necessities of life required the combined labor of a family. For these reasons, many women could not conceive of how feminists’ calls for the destruction of the family could realistically be put into practice.
The Industrial Revolution
Philosopher Charles Taylor helpfully explains that the images, stories, and legends celebrated by societies shape the imaginations of individuals, making specific ideas and practices legitimate while excluding others.[4] Economic arrangements and technological innovations also play a key part in shaping the social imagination, though we should never see them as deterministic. Rather, as historians of technology and economics show, these systems are shaped by the cultures that create them and then influence and respond to the societies they inhabit.[5]
The industrial revolution that matured in Europe and the United States of America over the nineteenth century is one of the most dramatic periods of economic and technological transformation in human history. This social, economic, and technological revolution was shaped by specific assumptions about the unfettered benefits of institutional and social change and organization for the sake of efficiency.[6] In addition, the expansion of the market into every area of life served to commodify not only goods but also the whole range of human experiences. These changes altered the social imagination of people in the West, including making it much more feasible for women to live and define themselves as individuals without reference to family.[7] While most women still pursued marriage and children, these fundamental social commitments became increasingly a matter of choice rather than necessity.
A Commodified Life
No area of life evaded the influence of the industrial revolution. The most direct change was the exit of men from the daily affairs of the home. Prior to the industrial revolution, most men worked on a farm, manufactured goods in their homes, or served as merchants in shops with their families. This system of labor had not been organized for efficiency and work schedules. The labors of any given day could be arranged to serve the needs of the family. They thought of time according to “human rhythms and seasonal variations.” This also meant that men played a significant role in household chores.[8] However, once men began submitting to the discipline of the factory clock, leaving their families early in the morning and returning exhausted late at night (many worked twelve- or fourteen-hour days in the nineteenth century), the whole structure of their lives changed.
Pre-industrial family life was filled with plenty of hard work, but it also came with communal leisure activities. These gathering included regular community and church events where food was shared, games were played, and folks of all ages danced to reels and jigs. There were many dance events that were intergenerational and traditional. These events were monitored by older members of the community and allowed for the free play of courtship within the bounds of historic, traditional, and moral bounds. The traditional dance forms they followed communicated the proper relationship between men and women and could include the very old and very young without sexual embarrassment or irony.[9]
Less formal and private leisure time was casual and noncommercial. Regular family entertainments included, among other things, walks through the countryside or city park, visiting friends, reading as a family, listening to street musicians, playing cards, weaving, sewing, and quilting.[10] For those who lived near urban centers, there were occasional trips to amusement parks like Coney Island, movie theatres, or riding the trolleys across town. Regardless of the activity, they were family centered. Even as late as the early twentieth century, two-thirds of skilled working men claimed they spent their leisure time with their family.[11]
However, progressive reformers at the turn of the twentieth century found that these modes of life were beginning to change significantly. Many male factory workers began using the money they earned outside of the home to engage in non-family leisure, including going to bowling alleys, pool halls, shooting galleries, gymnasia, cigar stores, barber shops, lodges and clubs, and saloons where women and children were not welcome, unless the women were prostitutes. These places of leisure sold bright, open, clean spaces filled with entertainment to men who sought relief from the loud and dangerous work of the factory and the opportunity to escape the overfilled, dingy, and cramped tenements where their families and house chores were. They tended to spend what little free time and spending money they had commiserating with fellow laborers about the floor boss at work or the ever-present threat of layoffs.[12]
Married women were left at home to shoulder the entirety of the household chores and to care for children. Even though housework began to be mechanized, and more food and clothing could be purchased outside the home, the standards of cleanliness rose, meaning that the overall time women committed to housework remained close to fifty hours per week even into the mid-twentieth century.[13]
Interspersed among housework and tending to children, women’s leisure was largely limited to the home. In urban centers, they could visit with other women at the window or doorstep, walk in the park, visit relatives and friends, attend occasional dinner parties, decorate the home, or take part in ladies’ auxiliaries to fraternal orders, mutual aid societies, and philanthropic organizations.[14] In rural areas, many of these same leisure activities were also available with the added layers of traditional communal activities like quilting circles and deep family networks.
However, with the birth of modern suburbia in the late 1940s, married women were abandoned by their husbands who took the family car into town for work while the children went to school, and she remained isolated in an abstracted housing allotment without tradition, family, or communal identity.
Second-wave feminist leader Betty Friedan’s screed against the life of a housewife in The Feminine Mystique was deeply informed by these deleterious changes to society brought on by industrialization. Many women agreed with her assessment and began joining the workforce, though the shift was slow to gain momentum. In fact, Friedan found women so unenthusiastic about the prospects of working outside the home that she began working through the state to undermine the financial security of marriage by eliminating barriers to divorce and promoting the Equal Rights Amendment.
How Should We Then Live as a Family?
Perhaps this glimpse of how our world has been transformed by industrialization helps to explain why Wendell Berry is so insistent that those of us who wish to defend the nuclear family cannot ignore the economic assumptions of our day. Preserving the family will require more of us than careful voting or family prayer time, though both of those activities are necessary. Rather, we need to assess how the marketplace has invaded our homes and atomized our families into free-floating individuals who come together only briefly each day and primarily to sleep in our own rooms.
As much as I might wish that we could somehow return to a preindustrial world, I do not think we are going to see that until Jesus returns (but I do suspect the new earth will be a preindustrial earth). So, here are some recommendations for ways that we can alleviate the worst of the suffering in our current context:
- Seek out jobs and careers that allow for significant family time and flexibility. This path may mean owning your own business or farm but does not demand it.
- Carefully consider living on a single income at least while children are living at home. This option does not mean that wives and mothers cannot or do not contribute to the family income, only that their contribution will be largely carried out from the context of the home and can often include the children.[15]
- As much as possible, keep the financial decisions of the family as family decisions rather than individual ones, even if both parents work outside the home.
- Be intentional to share the burdens of housework with the whole family.
- Be extremely intentional about celebrating and making the most of family leisure time and strictly limit screen usage during this time.
- Give serious consideration to homeschooling to give your family more time together.
To be clear, these recommendations are not laws. There is significant room for disagreement on these matters. Further, the way each family practices these principles will look different based on their individual context. Still, I think these starting points are good ones for ameliorating the destructive changes flowing from the industrial revolution and creating atomized industrial families.
[1] With his characteristic penetrating perceptiveness, Berry points out that no one has ever claimed that men were liberated by entering the workforce away from home. Wendell Berry, “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community,” in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays by Wendell Berry (New York: Pantheon, 1993),122–23.
[2] For an overview of female anti-feminist thought and activity, see Thomas Jablonsky, “Female Opposition: The Anti-Suffrage Campaign,” in Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited, ed. Jean H. Baker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Sally G. McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 136–39.
[3] Even Mary Wollstonecraft and John Godwin decided it was better to abandon their libertine sexual ideals and wed one another in the face of the practical results of having children out of wedlock. See Carrie Gress, The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2023), 11.
[4] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007), 171–72.
[5] See Thomas P. Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture, Science.culture, ed. Steven Shapin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Beth Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); David E. Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century in England: Popular Addresses, Notes, and Other Fragments, 2nd ed. (London: Rivingtons, 1887), .
[6] Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876–1915 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 63–64; and Gavin Weightman, The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776–1914 (New York: Grove, 2007), 3.
[7] This new independence was grounded in a sense of autonomy that had not existed in the Roman Catholic convents that provided a means for women to live independent of familial connections but still within the context of a tight-knit community.
[8] Nye, Consuming Power, 52, 153.
[9] Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986), 89.
[10] Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 13.
[11] Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 15–16.
[12] The prohibitionist social reformers were not just exaggerating when they claimed that many men spent and drank up the family’s rent and food money. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 16–18, 21.
[13] Nye, Consuming Power, 153.
[14] Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 22–26.
[15] Part of our culture’s dismissive attitude toward homemakers is grounded in a false determination that housework is not productive labor because it does not have a paycheck tied to it. Interestingly, American communist women in the 1940s , who were looking to overthrow the free market and the American government, had an extended debate about the value of housework. They concluded that housewives were not producers of wealth, and , thus, housework was rejected by them as legitimate labor. See Gress, The End of Woman, 69.
Recent Comments