ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the sorts of political changes that accompanied the shift in the family. The organization of national social systems during the later nineteenth century provided the historical context in which the revolution in the family was keynoted by the decline in fertility. The family production unit's reliance on its own labor power merely served to expose it, nakedly, when the terms of trade swung violently against it in the mid-nineteenth century. The family axis became both more narrowly construed and more attentively policed. It became the site for sentiment. The proletarian family was revolutionized in the course of the transition from early modern to modern times, when the proletariat became the overwhelming majority in the European population. Family formation strategies were not reflex actions; they represented something deeper that adapted to changing pressures by assimilating what they needed and rejecting the rest.
