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Joining the Urban World: Occupation, Family, and Migration in Three French Cities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Leslie Page Moch
Affiliation:
University of Michigan—Flint
Louise A. Tilly
Affiliation:
New School for Social Research

Extract

Historians and sociologists have long been aware of variability in family structure and behavior and curious about the effects of large-scale change on the family. Nineteenth-century social scientists from Frederic LePlay to Lewis Henry Morgan interpreted family change in an evolutionary framework: LePlay discerned what he believed was the baleful effect of changes in the law on family life, Morgan, the progress due to changing economic and environmental factors. The twentieth-century revival of family history received its impetus from Philippe Ariés, who in both his early Histoire des populations françaises and the later Centuries of Childhood maintained the evolutionary perspective.

Type
Work and Social Roles
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1985

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References

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6 See also Anderson, Michael, “Some Problems in the Use of Census-type Material for the Study of Family and Kinship Systems,” in Time, Space, and Man: Essays on Microdemography, Sundin, Jan and Söderlund, Erik, eds. (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), 6980.Google Scholar

7 Nîmes was unique among French cities because its citizens included a substantial Protestant minority. Over a fifth of the population was Protestant.

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9 Here as elsewhere in this paper, child refers to household position—relationship to head of household—rather than to an age category.

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33 Ibid., III, 156–58.

34 Bid., III, 309–10.

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36 Ironically, the statement comes from Amiens, where most textile work was specialized and skilled and the industry hired mostly adult men; only the small industrialized spinning sector employed mostly women and children. Family employment was rare in both areas. AN, series C 7318, dossier 1922, “Audition du syndicat des ouvriers tisseurs d'Amiens.”

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