ABSTRACT
Working-class strategies were designed to preserve family structures in the new conditions of urbanisation and industrialisation. It was the complex interaction of the two factors that shaped the sexual mores of the majority of the population. A woman's sexuality indeed was in ways the key to her economic survival. There was a general distrust of middle-class interest in sexuality and the whole export of the moral apparatus to the working class. This can be traced in the working-class response to birth-control propaganda, which was extremely hostile. Some sections of the working class, especially where child labour was a necessity, prefer evidence of a woman's fertility, but even when such utilitarian motives were absent. The situation changed with the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834, which ended the system of subsidising wages, and imposed draconian penalties for women with illegitimate children. Labourers began to scramble for the available employment; unemployment increased; while labourers still continued to anticipate marriage.
