Childhood and Industrialization in Italy

Author(s): David I. Kertzer

Source: Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 4, In Memory of Michael Kenny (Oct., 1987),
pp. 152-159
Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3317654
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CHILDHOOD AND INDUSTRIALIZATION IN ITALY
DAVID I. KERTZER
Bowdoin
College
This article heeds Michael
Kenny's
call
urging anthropologists of
Mediterranean
Europe
to
pay
more attention to urban
life and, whether
they
work in mountain hamlets or cities, to
incorporate
a
historicalperspective
in their work. It examines the
impact of
industrialization
on the
family
lives
of
children in
Europe.
Casalecchio di
Reno,
a
sharecropping community
near the
city of Bologna,
is the
focus.
From 1861 to 1921 a
large
textile
factory employed
many
children in the town, and other
nonagricultural
work became available. Major social
and
political changes
also took
place.
I examine
effects of
these
changes
on children's
living
situations in a
society,
where
patrilaterally
extended households had
long
been the norm.
[childhood,
industrialization,
Italy, sharecropping,
social
change]
Michael
Kenny
was one of the
pioneers
in
extending
Mediterranean
anthropology
from mountain hamlets
to
cities,
from the
agricultural
to the urban.
Recognizing
the
centrality
of the urban
experience
in
this
part
of the
world, Kenny pointed anthropologists
in new directions. A related theme that he
passionately expounded
was the
importance
of
plac-
ing
the Mediterranean
experience
in historical
perspective
and
examining
themes that
go beyond
a
single country
to embrace the area more
generally
(Kenny
and Kertzer
1983).
In
paying
tribute to
Michael, I take
up
some of these themes in consider-
ing
the
impact
of industrialization on childhood. I
follow his
example by grounding my study
in a
par-
ticular
locality-an industrializing sharecropping
community
of northern
Italy-while examining
the
larger
historical and cultural
implications
of this
case.
Although
vivid
popular images
of the effects of
European
industrialization on childhood
abound,
the
actual nature of this
impact
is still not well
understood.
Indeed,
one scholar
charges
that the
whole
historiography
of childhood is "dominated
by
myths" (Pollock
1983:
viii).
The
legacy
of indus-
trialization is
typically
seen
against
a baseline
por-
trait of the wholesome farm
environment, with
?children
pitching
in
alongside
their
parents
and
siblings.
This bucolic scene is contrasted with the
horrors faced
by
the small child
who,
with
grease-
streaked
face,
is closed in a
sweltering,
foul
factory
for twelve hours or more each
day,
six
days
a week.
Common, too,
is the
image
of the
beleaguered
tod-
dler,
whose
mother,
instead of
remaining
on the
family
farm to care for her
offspring,
must
go
off to
the textile
factory
for
seventy
or more hours each
week, leaving
her children to fend for themselves.
And these
children,
rather than
romping
over the
verdant fields of the
family farm,
remain in a
dank,
tiny apartment,
surrounded
by strangers,
not
kinsmen.
152
According
to one account
picked up by
numerous
historians,
the
"reign
of the machine"
entailed the transformation of children's work to
conditions of
slavery.
Radbill thus writes of "child
martyrs
to
industry,"
whose
living
conditions he de-
scribes in
chilling
terms:
children from five
years
of
age upward
worked sixteen hours
at a time, sometimes with irons riveted around their ankles to
keep
them from
running away. They
were
starved, beaten,
and in
many
other
ways
maltreated.
Many
succumbed to
occupational diseases,
and some committed
suicide;
few sur-
vived for
any length
of time
(1968: 12).
Nor is it difficult to find
contemporaneous
blood
curdling
accounts
by
social reformers
telling
of life in
the factories.
Typical
of this school are the com-
ments of Richard
Oastler,
a British reformer of the
nineteenth
century,
who
spoke
of child
factory
workers as "sacrificed at the shrine of
avarice,
without even the solace
of
the
negro
slave. . ."
(quoted
in Nardinelli 1980:
739).
Historians who have dared to
question
this view
of the role of the advent of
factory
labor in the
history
of childhood have been the
subject
of virulent attack.
E. P.
Thompson (1963:
332),
whose
writings
on this
subject
have
occupied
an influential
position
for a
quarter century,
writes
menacingly
of a
suspected
"conspiracy
to
explain
child labour
away."
He cas-
tigates
those who
downplay
the
novelty
of child
labor
exploitation
in the factories. While
willing
to
admit that children had
always
been
put
to work
from a
young age,
and that
aspects
of this work were
often arduous.
Thompson
claims that there was a
major
difference with child labor before indus-
trialization, namely,
"the work was within the
family
economy
and under
parental
care"
(1963: 334).
"The crime of the
factory system," Thompson
writes,
"was to inherit the worst features of the
domestic
system
in a context which had none of the
domestic
compensations." Admonishing
the revision-
ists who would
deny
the dramatic
worsening
of
children's lives with the
coming
of
factory labor,
CHILDHOOD AND INDUSTRIALIZATION
153
Thompson
states: "We
may
be allowed to reaffirm a
more traditional view: that the
exploitation
of little
children,
on this scale and with this
intensity,
was
one of the most shameful events in our
history"
(1963: 335, 349).
Although
no one would
deny
the inhumane con-
ditions in which
many
children worked in
European
and American factories in the nineteenth
century,
proper
historical
understanding
of the
significance
of
factory
labor
and,
more
generally,
of related
pro-
cesses of urban
expansion
and the movement out of
agriculture, requires
a different
perspective.
The
danger
is that in their zeal to denounce the evils of
industrialization for children's
lives,
scholars
pro-
mote an
overly
romantic
portrait
of childhood in
pre-
industrial
times,
while
failing
to
grasp
some of the
positive implications
of the advent of industrializa-
tion for children's lives.
Recent
studies,
for
example,
have shown how
widespread protoindustrial,
home-based manufac-
ture was in earlier centuries in
many parts
of
Europe
(Kriedte,
Medick and Schlumbohn
1981;
Mendels
1972, 1984).
In such a
system
children were often
given
laborious work to
perform
for
long
hours in
adverse
conditions,
albeit
alongside
other
family
members.
Indeed,
Medick
(1981: 88)
concludes that
"infants and children turn out to be the true victims
of the
proto-industrial system.
..."
Nor was life in the
agricultural
world
necessarily
pleasant
for children. We do not have to
go
so far as
deMause
(1974:
1),
who
argues
that the
"history
of
childhood is a
nightmare
from which we have
only
recently begun
to awaken" or that the "further back
in
history
one
goes,
the lower the level of child
care,
and the more
likely
children are to be
killed,
aban-
doned, beaten, terrorized,
and
sexually
abused."
Yet,
we must
recognize
that in the
preindustrial
period
the wholesome
family-owned
farm cannot be
assumed to be the norm. Even
many
of those
families who owned some farmland were too
poor
to
provide adequate support
for their
children,
while in
many
areas of
Europe
a
large portion
of the rural
population
owned no land. In such
settings
of rural
poverty
children were
commonly expelled
from the
parental
home at an
early age
to be taken in as ser-
vants in the homes of
others,
often outside the com-
munities where their
parents
lived. In earlier
centuries in
England,
but also in France and
Italy
and
elsewhere,
it was not uncommon for children to
be extruded from their
parental
families and sent to
work before
reaching
their tenth
birthday.
In
any
case,
after
age ten, increasing proportions
of children
were forced out of their
parental
home
(Aries
1962:
365-366;
Gillis 1974:
8).
With our
understanding
of the
impact
of indus-
trialization on children's
family
lives still so unclear,
and the literature filled with
contradictory claims, we
look to
Italy
to see what
light
we can shed. This is
especially appropriate because, though many
have
made
general
claims about the
impact
of indus-
trialization on childhood in the West, almost all the
studies on which these
generalizations
are based
come from further north in
Europe
and from North
America. The
community
we focus
on,
Casalecchio
di
Reno,
lies
just
outside the
city
of
Bologna.
We
examine the
period 1861-1921, during
which this
once
overwhelmingly agricultural, sharecropping
community
was transformed
by
the advent of a
large
textile
factory, by
the
expansion
of the
city
of
Bologna, by
the
growth
in urban
wage
labor
oppor-
tunities,
and
by major political
and educational
changes.
Casalecchio
The commune of Casalecchio lies
just
outside what,
for
centuries,
had been the rural belt
surrounding
the
walled
city
of
Bologna.
Located in the
region
of
Emilia-Romagna,
the
province
and
city
of
Bologna
were at the center of land that had been share-
cropped
for centuries. It was at the northern
edge
of
the classic
sharecropping
area that
enveloped
Tus-
cany,
the
Marches,
and Umbria. Landowners lived
in the cities and let their land out in small
parcels
to
sharecropping households,
either
directly
or
through
middlemen. The
produce
was
split (often evenly)
between landowner and
sharecropper.
A contract bound the entire
sharecropping family
to the extent that landowner consent was
required
before a
family
member could
get
married. Since
landowners stood to
gain by maximizing
the number
of adults on each
farm,
hence
maximizing
their half
of the
produce,
households
composed
of more than
one kin-related
family
were the rule.
Indeed,
the
sharecroppers quite closely
followed the cultural
norm of
patrilocal postmarital residence,
with sons
(not just
a
single son) bringing
their brides into their
natal
household,
and
daughters joining
their
groom's
household at
marriage.]
With the
sharp
rise in the rural
population
in the
Bologna
area that
began
in the late
eighteenth
cen-
tury,
and with the move
by
landowners to start
plac-
ing
more land on a
wage
labor
basis,
the nineteenth
century
saw a
surplus
rural
population
that could not
be absorbed in the
sharecropping
sector
(Bellettini
1978).
This
population
was funneled into both
agricultural
and
non-agricultural wage
labor. Thus
the late nineteenth and
early
twentieth centuries
were a watershed
period,
when
wage
labor
began
to
CHILDHOOD AND INDUSTRIALIZATION 153
154 ANTHROPOLOGICAL
QUARTERLY
replace sharecropping
as the backbone of the rural
economy (Sereni 1961;
Masulli
1980).
Casalecchio reflects these
patterns,
its
popula-
tion
swelling
from 2400 to 6000 in the six decades
from 1861 to 1921. At the
beginning
of this
period,
when
Bologna
had
just
been liberated from
papal
state rule and made
part
of the unified
Italy,
a
majority
of the Casalecchio
population
worked
directly
in
agriculture,
and
seventy percent
of these
were
sharecroppers.
But
changes
were
already
evi-
dent,
for the
largest
textile
factory
in the
province
had
just
been established in
Casalecchio, employing
large
numbers of
men, women,
and children.
By
the
end of the
sixty-year span,
little over a
quarter
of the
workforce was in
agriculture,
with half
composed
of
non-agricultural wage laborers, alongside
a
growing
number of small merchants and artisans.2
This was also a time that witnessed
major politi-
cal
changes.
This area was at the heart of a
powerful
socialist movement
and,
over the course of these
years, expansion
of
suffrage
increased the franchise
from the
privilege
of the few to the
right
of all men.
The advent of universal
public elementary
education
in these
years
also
produced
dramatic
changes.
In
1861
just
a
quarter
of all Casalecchio's children
aged
10-19 were
literate,
while
sixty years
later 97%
were.
In short, over the
period
1861-1921 Casalecchio
witnessed
many
of the dramatic
social, economic,
and
political changes
associated with the nineteenth-
century
transformation of western
Europe:
the
movement
away
from
agriculture,
the
spread
of
pro-
letarianization,
socialism and
literacy,
and the
growth
of
nearby
cities. Casalecchio thus serves as a
reasonable
setting
for
asking just
what effect all these
changes
had on children's
family experiences.
Here
we
pay particular
attention to
changes
in where
children
lived,
the
implications
of the decline of ser-
vice,
and
changes
in children's labor
patterns.3
Where Children Lived
Until the mid-nineteenth
century
when
sharecrop-
ping
still dominated the hills and
plains
of
Bologna,
most Casalecchio children
grew up
in
large
households
together
with their
parents, siblings,
grandparents, uncles, aunts,
and cousins. If this is
the household of Western romantic
nostalgia,
as
Laslett
(1977)
once called
it,
it is not
simply
a
myth
of a
past gone by,
but an accurate
portrait
of
family
life in
sharecropping Italy.
Before
looking
at the kin contexts in which the
children of Casalecchio
lived,
we should set the
stage by considering
their
changing
household
economic contexts over this
period.
In 1861 almost
half of all Casalecchio children lived in
sharecropper
households,
a
proportion
that
gradually
declined to
just
a
quarter by
1921. The mirror
image
is seen in
the
growth
of the
non-agricultural wage sector, for
whereas
just
a
quarter
of the children of Casalecchio
lived in households headed
by
a
non-agricultural
laborer at the
beginning
of the
period,
over 40% did
so
by
the end of the
period.
For the most
part
there
was considerable
constancy
in the household
economic circumstances of the other
portions
of
the
population.
It is
striking
that at both ends of our
period
over a
quarter
of the small children
(under five
years old)
lived in households headed
by
their
grandfather.
In
other
words,
at the time of their
birth,
their mothers
lived as
daughter-in-law
of the household head. Des-
pite
this
constancy through
a time that saw
great
social
changes,
the
proportion
of children who were
born into a household headed
by
their father rose
from 55% to 65% over the 1861-1921
period
This
increase came at the
expense, then,
not of
living
in a
three-generation household; rather,
it was linked to a
decline in the
proportion
of small children
living
in
households headed
by
a kinsman other than their
parent, grandparent,
or uncle and a
drop
in those liv-
ing
with non-kin. The latter
category
reflects the
decline in the
practice
of
shipping Bologna
found-
lings
out to wetnurses in
Casalecchio,
for
through
much of the nineteenth
century
a few such infants
were sent to Casalecchio mothers for care each
year.
As children
got beyond
the toddler
stage, they
still stood a
good
chance of
living
in households
headed
by
their
grandfather, although
the
majority
throughout
the
period
lived in homes headed
by
their
parents.
As
sharecopping declined,
the
proportion
of
children
living
in households headed
by
their fathers'
brothers also
declined,
for this
arrangement
is
characteristic of the
sharecropping
household of co-
resident married brothers.
One of the
major changes
in childhood over this
period
becomes
apparent
when we look at children
over
age
10. In the earlier
years
children of
poorer
households often left their
parental
home at this
stage
of their lives and found
lodging
as servants or
apprentices
in the homes of others. In
1861,
for
example,
15% of all Casalecchio children
aged
10-
14 lived in households headed
by non-kin, yet
this
proportion
fell to
just
3%
by
1921.
Similarly,
over
21% of the older children,
aged 15-18,
lived with
non-kin at the
beginning
of the
period,
while fewer
than half as
many
did so in 1921.
Along
with this
change,
and the decline in the
proportion living
in
households headed
by
extended
kin,
the
proportion
154 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY
CHILDHOOD AND INDUSTRIALIZAT~~~
~
~~~~~~~IN15
of older children
living
in households headed
by
their
parents
increased
substantially.
While
just
half of
the older children had lived in
parent-headed
households in
1861, three-quarters
did so
by
the end
of the
period.
We find a mixture of
expected
and
unexpected
results in
examining
the household context of
children in this
period
of
change.
The kind of
urbanization and industrialization
experienced by
Casalecchio led to an increase in children
remaining
in the
family home,
not to the
breaking up
of the
family
that has so often been theorized.
Despite
the
sharp
decline in the
agricultural
sector of the
popula-
tion, moreover,
children were as
likely
to be born
into households headed
by
their
grandfathers
at the
end of the
period
as at the
beginning. However,
on
the
whole,
children were
increasingly likely
to
spend
their
early years
in nuclear
family
households.
A more sensitive view of the
changes
in the co-
residential circumstances of children in this
period
is
provided by dividing
the children
by
the economic
characteristics of their households.
Here,
as seen in
Table
1,
a rather different
picture emerges. Only
a
minority
of children
(aged 0-18) living
in
sharecrop-
ping
households lived in households headed
by
their
parents,
with a
larger proportion living
in households
headed
by
their
grandfathers
or uncles. The
changes
that took
place
in Casalecchio
during
these
sixty
years
had little
apparent
effect on the
principles
of
household formation and kin
organization
in the
sharecropping
sector.
Interestingly,
while most children of
agricultural
wage
laborers
(braccianti)
lived in nuclear households
throughout
these
years,
this
proportion actually
declined somewhat in this
period,
and the
proportion
of children
living
in households headed
by
their
grandfathers
rose
substantially,
to 23% in 1921.
This is in
part
due to the fact that bracciante
employ-
ment was
increasingly becoming
an
occupation
of
the older
segment
of the
community.
Yet it also
reflects a more
important change.
Since the brac-
cianti' s
young
children were no
longer being
sent out
of the
parental household, they
were more
likely,
at
marriage,
to be still
living
with their
parents and,
hence, they
were more
likely
to be
living
with one or
both
parents
when their own children were born. At
the same time increased
longevity
made it more
likely
that the
baby's grandfather
would still be
alive.
A different
pattern emerges
when we look at the
non-agricultural segment
of the
community.
In each
of the three
occupational categories
examined-
elite, artisans/merchants,
and
non-agricultural wage
laborers-the
proportion
of children
living
in nuclear
family
households increases over the
period.
In all
categories
the
proportion
of children
living
with their
grandparents
or other kin is under 10%
by
1921.
Except
for the
elite,
where
figures
are skewed
by
the
practice
of
keeping
domestic
servants,
and hence
children
living
as non-kin in the
household, by
1921
the
proportion
of children
living
in households
headed
by
their
parents
had risen from about three-
TABLE 1
Children's Relation to Household Head
by
Head's
Occupation
(by percent,
for all Casalecchio residents under
age 19)
Sharecropper
1861 1921
Agric. Wage
1861 1921
Elite Artis. & Merch.
1861 1921 1861 1921
Non-agric. wage
1861 1921
38 41 79 70 57 78 74 86 74 87
29 40 9 23 8
8 10 5 11 7
15 10 3 0
16 0 3 1 1 1
18 10 8 7
20 14 12 7 14 5
(452) (539) (117) (223) (51) (170) (97) (252) (243) (895)
SOURCE:
Manuscript censuses,
municipal
archives of Caselecchio.
Relation
Child
Grandchild
Sibling's
child
Other
N
CHILDHOOD AND INDUSTRIALIZATION 155
156 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY
quarters
to about 87% in the
non-agricultural
sector.
The Decline of Service as a
Life
Stage
One of the hallmarks of childhood in much of
prein-
dustrial
Europe
was the
experience
of
leaving
the
parental
home at an
early age
to live elsewhere as a
servant or
apprentice.
McBride
(1974: 63-64)
estimates
that,
in the nineteenth
century,
a third of
all French
girls
served as servants before their
marriages.
In
1880,
she
reckons,
one of
every
six
households in France
employed
at least one servant
In France much of this
employment brought girls
from rural areas to the
city.
In
England
service was
also a common
experience, antedating
the mass
migration
of rural dwellers to the
cities,
and charac-
terizing
a
large portion
of the rural
population-both
male and female-in the
preindustrial period
(Schofield 1971;
Kussmaul
1981).
Service was common in both rural and urban
Italy
in
preindustrial
times. It was
responsible
for the
movement of both
boys
and
girls
out of their
parental
homes and meant that a
large proportion
of children
from
poorer
families
spent
much of their
youth
out-
side their own
family
context Service took two
major
forms.
One,
associated with
sharecropping,
involved a circulation of children
primarily
from
braccianti households to work on
sharecropped
farms where
they
lived in the household of the host
sharecroppers.4
Such
youths
were termed
garzoni
and were not domestic servants but
primarily
worked
in the
fields,
the barns and
co-ops. Boys
were
heavily
favored for this work.
Employment
was often short-
term,
not
infrequently
under a
year,
so that the same
farm
typically
had a succession of servants over the
years,
while a
youth might
move
annually
from farm
to
farm,
able to
get
more
compensation
as he
grew
older.
Wealthier
households, particularly
those of the
landowners, property owners,
and
professionals,
typically
had domestic servants. These were most
often
female, particularly by
the nineteenth
century,
and involved a wider
age range
and more
per-
manency
than was found in the
agricultural sphere.
A much
higher proportion
of these domestic servants
were over
age 20,
but few were married. The market
for such domestic servants was
especially
concen-
trated in the
city,
where so
many
of the
wealthy
lived,
and this served as one means
whereby girls
from the
countryside
were drawn to the
city.
For
those who did not
subsequently marry,
life as a
domestic servant was one of the few
possibilities
for survival.
Back in the sixteenth
century
a
large proportion
of the
young people spent
a
segment
of their lives liv-
ing
as servants in their
employers'
homes. In Parma
in
1545,
31% of all households had a resident ser-
vant,
with similar
proportions
found in Siena and
Verona;
in Florence in
1552,
40% of all households
had servants.
Correspondingly,
over 14% of the
entire
population
in these cities lived as servants in
the households of others. But
many
of these
people
might
better be described as
apprentices, for,
especially among
the
males,
their labor involved
market-oriented work and not
primarily
household
tasks. Service
typified
all
age groups, although
a
high
point
was reached in the
age range
16-20. Indeed, in
Verona in
1545, nearly
a third of all residents
aged
16-20 lived as servants in their
employers'
homes
(Barbagli
1984:
216-233).
With the transformation of the
apprenticeship
system,
and fewer individuals
living
in the household
of their
employer,
the
huge proportions
of urban ser-
vants
began
to
decrease;
in
Parma,
for
example,
the
proportion
of households
having
servants declined to
18% in 1851. At the same
time,
domestic service
became
increasingly
feminized.5 These trends are
evident in the situation found in the small central
Italian
city
of
Perugia
in the mid-nineteenth
century.
Three-quarters
of the domestic servants-who num-
bered 6% of the
city's
entire
population-were
females over 14
years
of
age,
with a mean
age
of
33,
yet
almost 90% of these women were unmarried.
About 15% of all households had at least one ser-
vant
(Tittarelli 1985).
At the time of Unification in the
1860s,
a sub-
stantial number of
youths
from the rural areas
around
Bologna
were still
spending
a
portion
of their
lives
working
as servants and not
living
with their
own families.
They
either found work as
garzoni
and
lived in the homes of
sharecroppers
in the rural area
or were hired
by
wealthier individuals in the coun-
tryside or,
more
commonly,
in the
city,
to work as
domestic servants.
The servants who lived in Casalecchio were
primarily
from other rural communities of the
prov-
ince of
Bologna,
while the
majority
of
youths
who
grew up
in Casalecchio families and entered service
found work outside the
town,
either on farms in
nearby
areas or in the
city
of
Bologna. Among
the
servants who resided in
Casalecchio, major changes
in the
prevalence
of service as a life
stage
are evi-
dent In
1861,
22% of all
boys aged
10-14 and 9%
of all
girls
of that
age
lived as servants in the houses
of non-kin.
Among
those
aged 15-19,
17% of the
boys
and 14% of the
girls
lived as resident servants.
This
proportion
declined
precipitously through
our
period. By
1921
just
2% of the
boys
and 3% of the
ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY 156
CHILDHOOD AND INDUSTRIALIZATION
157
girls
were servants.
Although
there were still some
servants,
service was no
longer
an
important part
of
the childood
experience
for
any significant portion
of
the
community.
To understand the
impact
of these
changes,
we
first need to find out where these servants lived and
who
they
were. At the
beginning
of the
period
almost
two-thirds of all servants lived with
sharecroppers,
and these were
overwhelmingly
male
(72%),
as was
customary
for the
garzoni
Three-fifths were under
age 20,
and another 30% were in their 20s. The
landowners and
professionals
accounted for another
16% of the
servants,
with 12%
living
with artisans
and merchants and the
remaining
7% elsewhere.
These households
similarly preferred
males: in
all,
71% of the servants were male in 1861.
The decline in the
practice
of service in
Casalecchio is linked not
only
to the
declining
rela-
tive
importance
of
sharecropping
to the town
economy,
but also to the erosion of the
practice
of
service
among
the
sharecroppers.
The 95
sharecrop-
per
households in 1861 had 64
servants,
but there
were
only
four servants in the same number of
sharecropper
households
sixty years
later. Now that
young
males had an
opportunity
to earn
higher
wages
elsewhere in the
developing
urban
economy,
they
were not attracted to life as a
garzone.
These
other
opportunities
also must have driven
up
the
wages
of
garzoni, making
them less attractive to
sharecroppers.
One
implication
of this
development
is that children from
poorer
families were now able
to
spend
their entire childhood in their
parental
home
rather than be forced out at an
early age.
Child Labor
It has been
commonly
assumed that the advent of
factories- and
especially
textile factories of the kind
found in Casalecchio--had a
major negative impact
on the
quality
of life of children and on
parent-child
and
family
relations.
According
to this
popular
image, peasant
children who had
previously
lived in
the
protective
bowels of their
parental home,
work-
ing alongside
their
parents
and
siblings
on the
family
farm,
were cast into the
forbidding
and
degrading
environment of the
factory.
There
they
worked from
sunrise to sunset and
beyond
in
squalid conditions,
lacking
education and wrenched from the moral
socialization
traditionally provided by
the
family.
It is not hard to find sources of
support
for
aspects
of this
viewpoint.
There is no
question
that
conditions for children
working
in factories in this
period
were
poor.
In the nineteenth
century Italy
had
no
safety
or
hygiene
code
covering
factories
and,
as a
result, space
was
cramped,
ventilation and
lighting
poor,
and cleanliness rare. Unification itself, rather
than
bringing
about an
improvement
in these con-
ditions, undermined what little
protective legislation
for children existed in the
pre- Risorgimento states of
the
peninsula (Merli 1972).
Before we conclude that the introduction of fac-
tory
labor led to the
undermining
of the
family
and
the
corrupting
of the children of the nineteenth cen-
tury,
we should recall what the alternatives were for
these children in earlier
days.
For the most
part,
the
children who went to work in the factories were not
those who lived in the traditional
peasant households;
rather,
their
parents
were
already engaged
in
wage
labor,
often as braccianti. The
prospect they faced,
then,
was not a childhood
spent
at home
working
alongside
their
parents, brothers,
and sisters on the
farm,
but a childhood in which
they
were
likely
to be
sent off at a
young age
to work as a servant in some-
one else's household. Should
they
remain in the
parental household, moreover,
their diet would not
be
any
better than that of the children
working
in the
factories. This is not to
deny
the dreadful conditions
of
factory
labor for children. But we cannot under-
stand this
development
in the romantic context in
which so
many
have viewed the
question
of the
impact
of
factory
labor on childhood.
Casalecchio's
hemp factory
was in
many ways
typical
of the kind of child labor conditions found in
the factories of northern
Italy
in the
period
of
early
factory employment
Until the mid-1870s the
pre-
ferred child
employees
were
just aged 10-12,
while
after that time there was a
tendency
to hire
girls
who
already
reached
age
12 or 13. Few
boys
were hired,
for the
girls
were seen as
especially adept
at the
needle-threading
and other
weaving-related
tasks for
which children were
employed.
If we take a
step
back and look at the course of
children's
employment
in Casalecchio over the
sixty
years
from 1861 to
1921,
we see both
change
and
stability.
The most notable
change
is the
steep
decline in service as a life
stage.
Whereas 22% of all
boys aged
10-14 in 1861 worked as servants and
lived with their
employer,
this number declined to
just
1%
by 1921,
and a similar
drop,
from 17% to
3% is seen in
boys aged
15-19.
Among girls
a similar
pattern
is
found, though
it had been less common for
young girls
to work as servants in Casalecchio.
Thanks to the
preference
of textile factories for
young
female
labor, girls
had entered the non-
agricultural wage
labor force in
greater
numbers than
had
boys
in the
early years
of
factory
labor in
Casalecchio. In 1861 in the 10-14
age range,
17% of
the
boys
and 16% of the
girls
worked as non-
agricultural wage laborers; however, among
the
157 CHILDHOOD AND IND USTRIALIZA TION
158 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY
older
children, aged 15-19,
23% of the
boys
but
35% of the
girls
had such
employment.
While the
proportion
of
girls
in the
wage
labor force
changed
little over the
following decades,
the
proportion
of
boys
in
wage
labor
grew markedly
in the older
years
of
childhood,
so that
by
1921,44% of the 15-19
year
old
boys
of Casalecchio had such
employment
com-
pared
to 37% of the
girls.
In some
respects, then,
the
changes
that took
place
in this
period
were
greater
for
boys
than for
girls,
a
development
related both to
the
growth
of non-textile
wage
labor and to the
decline of service.
Conclusions
Far from
tearing
children
away
from a
nurturing
parental family environment,
industrialization often
permitted
children to
grow up
in their
parental
household to an extent that would not have other-
wise been
possible.
In north-central
Italy
children of
sharecroppers
had
long customarily
lived all their
childhood with their
parents and, indeed,
were sur-
rounded
by
a
variety
of other kinsmen.
However, by
the time
factory
labor and
moder urbanization
affected the
people
in this
area, steep population
growth
and the
capitalist
transformation of
agricul-
ture were
already producing
an
increasingly pro-
letarianized
populace.
Children
growing up
in
poor
families,
with no
rights
to
land,
were often
expelled
from the
parental
household at an
early age
to live as
servants in the homes of others who were better off.
In this
they
shared in a
pattern
of behavior that
extended
through
much of western
Europe.
For the
youngsters
of
Casalecchio,
as for those in
England
and
France,
industrialization meant
preserving
a sta-
ble home environment rather than
entering
a round
of
vagabondage taking
them from household to
household in search of a
position (Anderson
1971:
75-76;
Gillis 1974:
58-59; Tilly
and Scott 1978:
142-145;
Wall 1987:
91-94).
Acknowledgments
This article is the
product
of research conducted
in collaboration with Dennis
Hogan
and assisted
by
Massimo Mar-
colin, supported by grants
1 R01 HD13415 from NICHD and BNS-
8519310 from NSF.
For a fuller discussion of the
political economy
and
family sys-
tem under central Italian
sharecropping,
see
Kertzer( 1984)
and Bar-
bagli (1984).
2 All
occupational, literacy,
and household
composition
data for
Casalecchio
reported
here come from
manuscript
censuses located
in the communal archives of Casalecchio. These
sources,
and the
computerized
data base in which
they
have been
entered,
are de-
scribed in
Kertzer( 1986).
Creation of the
original
unedited data base
Moreover,
even for those children from
poor
rural families who remained at
home,
life involved
sharing
in the
poverty
of their
parents,
whose work
was
sporadic
and seasonal. It was
just
these children
of the
poorer
families who were the first to enter fac-
tory labor,
not
only providing sorely
needed income
to the
household,
but
permitting
the children to
reside with their
parents.
Whether the conditions of
work for children were worse in the factories than in
other kinds of work is not
yet
clear. The
tendency
of
reformers to focus on the most
outrageous examples
of child
exploitation,
while
slighting comparable
examples
from outside
industry,
makes a determina-
tion of this issue difficult
Certainly
child
factory
labor was
unpleasant
and unhealthful, but in such
historical contexts as found in this
part
of
Italy,
and
elsewhere in
nineteenth-century Europe,
the alter-
natives were
generally
no
better,
and sometimes
worse.6
If the
history
of childhood is filled with
"myth,"
we are at least a little closer to
understanding
one
important phase
in this
history,
the
impact
of
factory
labor in
Europe.
Our
knowledge
of what children
were
doing
in the
preindustrial period
is
certainly
on
firmer
footing now,
with an increased
appreciation
of
the
complexity
of
family economy
in
Europe
of the
past,
and a movement
away
from the idea of the
omnipresent peasant family
farm. What is
perhaps
most needed at this
point
are not more studies of con-
ditions of children in the factories- a
topic
that has
attracted a considerable amount of attention
already-but inquiry
into what children's lives were
like in the
agricultural sector, especially
in
poorer
families and
among
those
living
as servants in the
households of others.
Factory
work
may
have been
oppressive,
but
working long
hours in the hot sun or
in the cold rain on the farms of an
employer
in this
era was not
necessarily any
better.
OTES
was
supervised by
Andrea Schiaffino.
Subsequent
addition of data
and data
editing
are the author's
responsibility.
3For consideration of other
aspects
of the
changes
in children's
lives in Casalecchio in these
years,
see Kertzer and
Hogan (1989).
4
Many
of these children were
foundlings,
a mass
phenomenon
in
nineteenth-century Italy.
See Corsini
(1976).
Data on servants in urban
Italy
in the 1545-1850
period
are
taken from
Barbagli (
1984:
216-233).
6
Nardinelli
(1978)
makes a similar
generalization, responding
to those who denounced the evils of children's
employment
in the
British textile
industry.
See also Pinchbeck and Hewitt
(1973)
for
similar views.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY 158
CHILDHOOD AND IND USTRIALIZA TION 159
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