The myth that industrialization broke down traditional family ties has long pervaded American society. Professor Hareven, a leading social historian, dispels this myth and illustrates how the family survived and became an active force in the modern factory. In this book, Hareven examines the multiple roles that the workers' families fulfilled in facilitating their adaptation to the pressures of changing work patterns and new modes of life in an industrial city. She reconstructs family and work patterns among immigrants as well as native textile laborers over two generations during a crucial period in the transformation of American industry from the late nineteenth century. A case study based on what was the world's largest textile plantóthe Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Manchester, New Hampshireóthe book integrates a wide array of documentary evidence with oral testimony. It examines the lives of real peopleóthe way they acted, the way they perceived their lives, and the kinds of decisions they made when pacing their lives in relation to the demands of the industrial system. Originally published in 1982 by Cambridge University Press.
In a panoramic study that draws on diverse sources, Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson explain why and how time pressures have emerged and what we can do to alleviate them. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that all Americans are overworked, they show that time itself has become a form of social inequality that is dividing Americans in new ways--between the overworked and the underemployed, women and men, parents and non-parents. They piece together a compelling story of the increasing mismatch between our economic system and the needs of American families, sorting out important trends such as the rise of demanding jobs and the emergence of new pressures on dual earner families and single parents. Comparing American workers with their European peers, Jacobs and Gerson also find that policies that are simultaneously family-friendly and gender equitable are not fully realized in any of the countries they examine. As a consequence, they argue that the United States needs to forge a new set of solutions that offer American workers new ways to integrate work and family life. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Trends in Work, Family, and Leisure Time 1. Overworked Americans or the Growth of Leisure? 2. Working Time from the Perspective of Families Part II: Integrating Work and Family Life 3. Do Americans Feel Overworked? 4. How Work Spills Over into Life 5. The Structure and Culture of Work Part III: Work, Family, and Social Policy 6. American Workers in Cross-National Perspective with Janet C. Gornick 7. Bridging the Time Divide 8. Where Do We Go from Here? Appendix: Supplementary Tables Notes References Index Jacobs and Gerson present the most fine-grained analysis yet offered of working time and its impacts on families. They successfully combine sophisticated analyses of quantitative data with breakthroughs in the conceptualization of work time. Their focus on household work time and their incorporation of subjective aspects of work-family conflict are welcome additions to the study of work time. As a result of their nuanced treatment, they avoid making simplistic generalizations that have marked many previous treatments of this topic. --Rosalind Chait Barnett, Brandeis University, and co-author of Same Difference: How Myths About Gender Differences Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs This is an outstanding book. It offers powerful arguments in the debates over work-family conflict going on in academia and society. The data the authors bring to bear on the subject offer new insights that support their analysis and policy recommendations. Scholars of the workplace and of contemporary American society as well as public policy advocates must read this book! --Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, City University of New York, and co-author of The Part-time Paradox: Time Norms, Professional Life, Family and Gender The Time Divide makes a substantial contribution to the work-family literature and will be cited often by those with an interest in women's employment, children's well-being, family functioning, and work in America. Its appeal will be broad and capture the attention of policy makers along with academics in a number of disciplines including sociology, family studies, and public policy. The book is engagingly written and the logic of the analysis is sound. --Suzanne Bianchi, University of Maryland, and co-author of Continuity and Change in the American Family The main thesis is original and important: that Americans are not, in general, overworked; rather, they can be divided into both the overworked and the underworked. The former are usually found in the upper half of the occupational distribution, the latter in the lower half. The overworked wish they could work less, and the underworked wish they could work more. Overall, The Time Divide significantly advances our understanding of just where the time divide lies. And that's an important contribution. --Andrew J. Cherlin, Johns Hopkins University, and author of Public and Private Families
One of the prevailing myths about the American family is that there once existed a harmonious family with three generations living together, and that this "ideal" family broke down under the impact of urbanization and industralization. The essays in this volume challenge this myth and provide dramatic revisions of simplistic notions about change in the American family. Based on detailed research in a variety of sources, including extensive oral history interviews of ordinary people, these essays examine major changes in family life, dispel myths about the past, and offer new directions in research and interpretation. The essays cover a wide spectrum of issues and topics, ranging from the organization of the family and household, to the networks available to children as they grow up, to the role of the family in the process of industralization, to the division of labor in the family along gender lines, and to the relations between the generations in the later years of life. While discussing family relations in the past and revising prevailing notions of social change, these interdisciplinary essays also provide important perspectives on the present.
Small businesses were at the heart of the economic growth and social transformation that characterized the industrial revolution in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain; this monograph examines the economic, social, and cultural history of some of these forgotten businesses and the men and women who worked in them and ran them.
A reader for a sociology course, reprinting 23 articles from professional journals. They cover work as social interaction, socialization and identity, experiencing work, work cultures and social structure, and deviance at work.
Since its original publication in 1987, Like a Family has become a classic in the study of American labor history. Basing their research on a series of extraordinary interviews, letters, and articles from the trade press, the authors uncover the voices and experiences of workers in the Southern cotton mill industry during the 1920s and 1930s. Now with a new afterword, this edition stands as an invaluable contribution to American social history. "The genius of Like a Family lies in its effortless integration of the history of the family--particularly women--into the history of the cotton-mill world.--Ira Berlin, New York Times Book Review "Like a Family is history, folklore, and storytelling all rolled into one. It is a living, revelatory chronicle of life rarely observed by the academe. A powerhouse.--Studs Terkel "Here is labor history in intensely human terms. Neither great impersonal forces nor deadening statistics are allowed to get in the way of people. If students of the New South want both the dimensions and the feel of life and labor in the textile industry, this book will be immensely satisfying.--Choice
Why do people rebel? This is one of the most important questions historians and social scientists have been grappling with over the years. It is a question to which no satisfactory answer has been found, despite more than a century of research. However, in most cases the research has focused on what people do if they rebel but hardly ever, why they rebel. The essays in this volume offer an alternative perspective, based on the question at what point families decided to add collective action to their repertoires of survival strategies, In this way this volume opens up a promising new field of historical research: the intersection of labour and family history. The authors offer fascinating case studies in several countries spanning over four continents during the last two centuries. In an extensive introduction the relevant literature on households and collective action is discussed, and the volume is rounded off by a conclusion that provides methodological and theoretical suggestions for the further exploration of this new field in social history.
During the last few decades the study of the family has flourished, and in the process many myths about what life was like two or three centuries ago have been debunked. For example, contrary to popular belief, we now know that most women in the preindustrial West did not marry before they were twenty-five. Most households consisted of no more than four or five people, usually including unrelated young people working as servants. And perhaps most surprising of all, multigenerational households were not very common. Pulling together much fascinating information about the family in the preindustrial Western world, Beatrice Gottlieb presents every aspect of this rich subject with clarity and fairness. Her generously illustrated book deals with the households of the wealthy and the poor, courtship and marriage, the care and training of children, and the bonds (and strains) of kinship. The matter of inheritance receives special attention, as it played a substantial role in a world permeated by rank and status, and its importance gave the family a peculiar social and economic significance. With a focus on the ordinary people whose everyday lives strike a responsive chord in all of us, as well as brief appearances by famous people and important events in history--Henry VIII's divorce, Benjamin Franklin's apprenticeship to his brother, and Mary Wollstonecraft's death in childbirth--this remarkable, eminently readable work brings to vivid life the wives and husbands, servants and masters, children and parents of a not too distant past.
