ABSTRACT
In the last two decades or so, German social history has devoted a great deal of attention to the emergence and development of the working class. Indeed, it would probably be true to say that no other group or stratum in nineteenth-century German society has attracted so much historical interest as that of the workers. Yet this attention has been overwhelmingly concentrated on the political and organisational history of the proletariat, the emergence of the labour movement, the history of the Social Democratic Party, and the development of strikes, trade unions and other vehicles of workers’ protest and self-defence.1 By contrast, our knowledge of the everyday life of the working class, of the workers’ housing conditions, material existence, culture, values and social behaviour, remains surprisingly scanty.2 Even the recent renewal of interest in the history of the family has not so far encouraged research on workers’ families, concentrating instead mainly on family life and family structures among the peasantry. Of course, there were a number of contemporary studies of working-class families in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But essentially as far as modern scholarship is concerned, research on the proletarian family inevitably exists in something of a vacuum. Detailed empirical work must necessarily be carried out on a local level; and since there are up to now very few studies of working-class families of this nature, conclusions must necessarily remain somewhat tentative.
