Family Disruptions

Many contemporaries of Malthus and Ricardo revealed an intuitive under­standing of the effect of capitalist development on the logic of the patriarchal family. As Peter Gaskell put it in 1833, the individual wage led to a ‘‘crying and grievous misfortune, namely that each child has ceased to view itself as a subordinate agent in the household; so far indeed loses the character and bearing of a child, that it pays over to its natural protector a stated sum for food and lodging, thus detaching itself from parental subjection and con- trol.''⁴⁹ The view that Andrew Ure expressed—that it was fortunate, in the long run, that women did not earn higher wages in the factories—would later be developed by the neoclassical economist Alfred Marshall in consid­erable detail.

Alice Clark feared that the capitalist wage employment would simply undo family ties, to ill effect. But capitalist institutions often reinforced gender inequalities that were already in place. The emergence of wage employment almost certainly gave women and young people more room to bargain over their family roles. Were women better or worse off as a result? The answer to this question depends on who they were and what they did. It also depends, obviously, on how individual welfare is defined. Most debates over trends in living standards focus on real wages. But changes in the value of non-market work are also relevant, as are changes in the distribution of family income over the lifecycle. Young women who managed to find good jobs almost certainly fared better than widows left upon the mercy of dispersed kin.

Those who had fared well in the old patriarchal order were frightened by its looming obsolescence, but even those who stood to gain were threatened by new forms of economic insecurity. The rise of factory technologies led to rapid shifts in relative prices, reducing the viability of cottage industries. The nineteenth-century economy grew in fits and starts with uneven and unpredictable effects. While a new class of investors grew rich, most work­ers did not, no matter when they married. Not surprisingly, the discourse of self-interest moved beyond issues of vice and virtue to more direct consid­eration of the interests that aligned individuals into groups.