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To understand the family economy of the working class in the period of early industrial capitalism it is necessary to go beyond a simple consideration of the sufficiency of wages, to put aside the equation of work with wage labour and to examine other ways in which survival could be enhanced. This paper begins an examination of non-wage-based survival strategies. It focuses on animal raising, gardening, the taking in of boarders and house sharing in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Montreal. These particular survival strategies can be ascertained to some extent from people's responses to the census taker. Analysis of their responses as found in the manuscript schedules of 1861 and 1871 constitutes the core of the paper. Professionals and proprietors were most likely to keep cows, the semi- and unskilled pigs. Pigs were outlawed in this period, while cows remained legal. Gardening, too, was largely eliminated on the narrow, densely built lots of the working class. The outlawing of pigs represents one of a complex of changes that, over the length of a generation, severely curtailed the proletariat's access to means of supplementing their wages and altered the contributions a wife and children could make to the family economy.
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This article reviews the book, "Never Done: A History of American Housework," by Susan Strasser.
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The family economy of the working class in the period of early industrial capitalism is examined in this thesis. Changes in the involvement of family members in wage labour, in education, in non-wage and domestic labour at home as well as in patterns of marriage, childbearing and residential arrangements are assessed. Analysis is based on data collected from the manuscript censuses for two working class Montreal wards, Ste. Anne and St. Jacques between 1861 and 1881. This is complemented by information from other contemporary quantitative and descriptive sources. The roles of fathers, children and mothers are examined in separate chapters for age and gender combined with class position to determine people's roles in the family and in the wider economy. Within the working class, the level and regularity of men's wages set the contours of the family economy conditioning the need for and the nature of other survival strategies. Differences of around 25 cents a day translated over a year into the possibility of divergent standards of living, roughly dividing the working class into separate, identifiable fractions. Each favoured particular survival strategies and exhibited different patterns of family labour commitment, marriage, reproduction and residence. Over this period the contours of working class youth were reshaped. Growing numbers of children aged six to twelve attended school. An increasing proportion of older children were drawn into wage labour. Boys were more likely to work for wages than girls. Girls worked in a narrower range of jobs and for a shorter span of their lives. On marriage most ceased wage earning. With whatever money others earned, they tried to ensure that the family's wage labourers faced each day sufficiently fed, clothed and rested to work. And, in abysmal living conditions they produced and socialized the next generation of workers. Occasionally seeking wage labour themselves, raising animals or gardens, or sharing their homes helped some women to come closer to balancing family budgets. Working class women remained, however, both economically and legally dependent on their husbands. This dependence was highlighted in the problems that widows faced when they tried to raise and feed a fatherless family.
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