ABSTRACT
An exactly parallel controversy raged amongst contemporaries, though less amongst modern historians, about the effects of the factory system on the family. ‘When women work in factories,’ wrote Engels, ‘the most important result is the dissolution of family ties.’ Babies and infants were neglected, farmed out to baby-minders who fed them badly and unhygienically or not at all, and quietened them with Godfrey’s cordial and other opiates, to their premature destruction. Older children at wages repudiated parental discipline and moral control, demanding to board at minimal charges or leaving home altogether, and the girls were deprived of the domestic education required to make a clean and comfortable home. Working wives had no time to clean and cook for and look after their families, and their husbands were driven out to seek comfort in the public house and gin shop. ‘Sometimes, when the husband is unemployed, while his family are at work, the normal structure of the family is reversed’, and the man deprived of masculinity and self-respect.2
