Oh dear, I should have realized that simply throwing out a laundry list of
questions (as in my post from a couple of days back) is not always conducive
to discussion.  Allow me to try this again, by posing a series of postulates
regarding industrialization and family life:

1) Just as Britain provided nineteenth-century Europe with its paradigm of
Industrial Revolution, so too our understanding of the changing nature and
role of the family due to industrialization remains strongly tethered to
British experience.  Or so I would assume by looking at a number of American
university-level textbooks and European history surveys (which represent a
kind of consensus, at least, in respect to popularizing history).   

2) The British experience strikes me however as somewhat atypical in that
the moral debate over industrialization, from the 1830s onwards, focused so
heavily upon family issues, and upon perceived norms regarding family life
and gender roles.  There was of course a roughly parallel rise, over much
this same period, of a bourgeois familial "intimate sphere," grounded in
very different behaviors and norms regarding child-rearing and family
relations.  This new middle-class family life was to some extent a reality,
to some degree however represented a powerful ideal construct--which gained
in definition and normative influence precisely as it was contrasted to the
presumed moral laxity and deviance of working-class family life over this
period.  
        Although one finds this moral discourse over family norms recurring
within other national contexts, it appears to me most concentrated, and
drawn out, within British life over the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.  I know of no other countries in which national political
attentions were so focused as with Britain's Sadler Commission, for example,
although (as discussion over child labor issues on this list earlier this
year revealed) cognate themes regarding childhood innocence and morality
were certainly raised within other national contexts.  

3) Precisely because the British debate over the Industrial Revolution was
so charged with moral valuations and prejudice, I am skeptical when I read
certain generalizations that are made in respect to nineteenth-century
industrialization and its social consequences.  For example, the argument is
raised that the frequent preference for child and female labor in the
textile industry led to a general underemployment of adult males, and that
this chronic unemployment wreaked havoc upon working class family
structures.  To some degree this appears to have been the case, though I
wonder how much our perceptions even today remain influenced by the views of
contemporaneous reformers whose social vision fixated obsessively upon
"idlers," paternal neglect and alcoholism as the principal causes of working
class misery.  Speaking very much as an outsider to this historical field, I
wonder to what extent recent local studies have tended to support, or
undermine, such conventional arguments as these regarding industrialization
and its social consequences.    

That should suffice.  All of the above postulates are, of course,
essentially questions once removed.  Any disagreements or other comments
would be greatly appreciated.  
  
best, John Abbott
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