ABSTRACT
Historians have often stressed the instrumental nature of sexual relationships and the conflicts inherent in working-class patterns of life, but this does not mean that strong feelings of warmth and mutual support did not exist. The rise in illegitimacy, a European-wide phenomenon, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, has given rise to various interpretations of working-class sexual life. Some sections of the working class, especially where child labour was a necessity, might still prefer evidence of a woman's fertility, but even when such utilitarian motives were absent, informal ties were often preferred. The fundamental problem as conceived by the middle-class moralists was the effect of industrialisation and urbanisation, and in particular factory work, on the working-class family and the role of the woman within it. A key factor seems to have been proletarianisation rather than urbanisation, that is the generalisation of the wage-labour relationship.
