LITMIR.BIZ

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in the sense of non-attendance at church or chapel, since its outlook and customs were traditionalist in many other respects.

      Above all, there is the evidence that male cotton spinners and weavers continued to have rather large families, of more than seven children, into the 1850s, and did not begin to limit them significantly until after 1871. This is, of course, at best only indirect evidence of the attitudes and behaviour of the mill women; but given that the mill was a meeting place of the sexes, it is probable that a high proportion of marriages were between cotton women and cotton men. It is possible that abortion, rather than contraception, was widespread in the textile areas. It was certainly denounced no less vehemently by the doctors, and perhaps with more reason since the risks of illness and death from illegal back-street abortions were extremely high. Abortifacients, of dubious efficacy, were prominent in the armoury of traditional remedies and popular self-medication, and in the course of the nineteenth century were taken up, commercialized, and heavily advertised in thinly disguised terms. Davies’s Emmenagogue Mixture of the 1890s, for example, was billed as ‘the best medicine … for all irregularities and obstructions, however obstinate or long standing … Perfectly harmless, never fails to bring about the desired result, as testified by thousands of married and single females.’ How many unwanted pregnancies were terminated, with knitting needles or drugs, is not known or knowable. All that can be said is that there is no evidence that abortions were more common in textile towns than elsewhere, and that if they were at all frequent among cotton women the data on family sizes indicate that they must have been the refuge of unmarried girls, not of wives.

      There is a certain irony in the fact that the doctors, who continued to denounce all forms of birth control including coitus interruptus until well into the twentieth century, and the clergy who were scarcely less vociferous, were themselves averaging families of 2.81 and 3.04 children respectively by the 1880s and 1890s, while the textile workers whom they had so uprighteously rebuked were averaging from 3.78 children for wool and worsted weavers to 4.80 for cotton spinners. Some would call it hypocritical; or at the least the muted development of a double standard of family morals, one for the rich and another for the poor. If textile workers, or indeed any other workers, were modelling their behaviour on any members of the middle classes, they were unlikely to have had much cause to emulate the doctors. Judging by results, those who did follow the preaching, but not the practice, of the medical profession were the miners; but they had good reasons of their own, that had nothing to do with outside influences, for persisting with large families for longer than any other members of society.

      Coalminers were a people apart, fiercely loyal to one another, seeing little of other members of the working classes, and conscious of the presence of other social classes chiefly in the shape of their boss, a few shopkeepers, and perhaps a local parson or minister and a doctor. Some collieries, it is true, were in towns such as Wigan or Barnsley, where miners might rub shoulders with a larger and more mixed community; but the single-industry and isolated mining villages of Lanarkshire, the north-east, the West Riding, or the valleys of South Wales were their typical habitat. Within these communities they were far from immune from religious influences, as the numerous chapels of South Wales bear witness; and the miners of Northumberland and Durham were already thought to be better educated than most workers, in the 1840s, although labelled irreligious, meaning non-Anglican. But by and large they worked out their own standards and values for themselves, not greatly influenced by the example or competition of other working-class groups, or by their masters. This mentality accepted large families as normal and did nothing very much about reducing them, largely for the negative reason that no compelling motives emerged for easing the childbearing burden of their womenfolk or reducing the number of children’s mouths to be fed. Coalmining was a continuously and rapidly expanding industry throughout the Victorian period, its expansion largely achieved by simply increasing the numbers of miners. There was always room down the pit – barring occasional years of recession – for all the sons of mining families, and indeed the growth in demand for labour was such that natural increase was rarely sufficient to supply it, the difference being made good by continual immigration from rural areas. After 1843 the law forbade the employment of women and children underground, and such work had in any case all but died out before then, save in parts of Scotland. A few brawny women continued as surface workers, sorting coal on the pithead bank, throughout the century, but they could be reckoned in thousands against the hundreds of thousands of men. In general there was little if any employment for women and children in mining communities, and they were a clear drain on financial resources, unable to add to family incomes.

      There was, of course, an extra amount of unpaid housework for the womenfolk in mining villages, given the large appetites of miners, their exhaustion after a shift and disinclination to help with the chores, and the occupational needs for extra washing and laundry. Women and girls were no doubt kept busy in mining homes, but with no prospects of local employment the girls who did not marry young miners had little choice but to move away, probably into domestic service. Having so little else to do, mining girls may very well have married young, thus helping to perpetuate the tradition of large families. Some historians have argued that in the early Victorian years it was economically rational for the generality of the working classes to have large families because ‘children raised frugally and put out to work were valuable assets’. This implies that the economic utility of children declined thereafter in some areas and occupations sooner than in others, explaining the fertility differentials within the working classes; but the argument in fact confuses this point with a different one which asserts that fertility fell first in areas where there was a good deal of female employment but remained high in the mining and heavy industry areas where there was little, because women who had worked outside the home were more interested in protecting their family’s economic stability and their own personal freedom, than women who had not. If the reasoning of women, or of married couples, had worked in this way it ought to have caused miners to lead the way towards smaller families, since the economic utility of their children, especially the girls, was low and decreasing, and they should have readily grasped the need to keep the number of their children within the capacity of the husbands’ wages. The rationality of miners’ wives, and miners, was rather that they might as well continue to reproduce much as they and their forebears had always done, since there was so little else to do, even if the result was a strain on the family budget and a spell of penury while their numerous children were too young to be earning or to leave home. It was, in other words, a consequence of the failure of urbanization to reach the mining villages, since it was town life that generated the alternative pleasures and distractions and provided a clear incentive to save on children in order to spend on other indulgences and leisure.

      Overlapping with differences in the timing and degree of exposure to industrialization as a factor explaining the fertility differentials within the working classes were differences in the availability of new forms of consumer goods and services. These, whether in the form of more varied clothing, clocks or pianos for working-class homes, commercial entertainments, organized sport, or seaside daytrips or holidays, were increasingly available from the 1850s onwards, were chiefly to be found only in sizeable towns, and needed quite a lot of cash. The higher paid workers in regular employment, with steady incomes, could afford them; these included not only the skilled workers in both traditional handicraft trades and new engineering occupations, but also many textile workers particularly where there were two wages in a family, many railwaymen, and many domestic servants. The low paid included the dockers, builders’ labourers, and, right at the bottom, agricultural workers; these, together with the miners far from the city lights, were the last groups to start limiting their families. Such a response, while in many ways it mirrored the presumed middle-class response to growing affluence and proliferation of home comforts, did not necessarily derive from it by way of example or imitation. It might be argued that these material and costly temptations were placed before the working classes by middle-class capitalist interests anxious to civilize or emasculate the workers, as well as to make profits. It is less far-fetched to suppose that those workers who could afford it were simply pursuing their happiness and pleasures in ways of their own choosing.

      Nevertheless, economizing on children in order to be able to increase parental enjoyment was accompanied by, and reinforced by, changes in attitudes to the children themselves. There had been a time when very young children, from the age of five or six, had been widely expected to start

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