Family Life

The Industrial Revolution disrupted traditional family structures.

• Work moved out of the home, separating productive labor from family life

• Family members often worked in different factories on different schedules

• The pre-industrial extended family weakened as urban migration scattered relatives

• Middle-class women were idealized as managers of private domestic life (the "cult of domesticity")

• Working-class women had to combine wage work with household labor

• Childhood, increasingly, was redefined as a period for education rather than labor (though this took decades and required legal reforms)