Family life in the 18th century

Introduction: In the 18th century families began to express affection more openly, children were no longer seen as small adults, but as people with special needs. It was also demanded to show more gentleness in the handling with children.

Rich families:
Girls were forced to have slim bodies, so they only got little food to avoid an unfashionably healthy appereance, they also had to have tight waists and a pale face.With all that, they had better chances of a good marriage. Marriages were arranged by the parents, often their sons and daughters had to marry against their wishes. But also love and companionship were slowly becoming accepted reasons for a marriage. If there were loving feelings, they were less openly stated, maybe because they weren´t expected. Their new affection might be caused on their expectations on longer lives, which resulted from improved diets and also from the greater cleanliness of cotton as underwear. For the first time in their life, people remarked that cruelty was wrong. It didn´t prevent bad factory conditions, but it helped to end slavery. They began to see every human as an individual.


Middle-Class Families:
This growing individualism showed itself in a desire for privacy. In the 17th Century, middle class families were served by servants, who were always with them. Later on, in the 18th Century, they preferred to serve themselves, so they had no servants any more. They rebuilt the insides of their homes, p.e. in putting in corridors. The political and economic strength of the middle class and their individualism helped Britain to succeed in trade and to be ahead of all the other european countries. The most successful in trade were the nonconformists. They could be hard on their families, like the Puritan fathers have been a century earlier, but they were also ambitious of their sons in sending them to boarding schools. Many of these boys grew up to put all their energy into power, either helping to build the empire, or helping to build trade and industry.

Poorer Class families:
There was no individualism in those classes, women and children had still to work if only possible to get on well, otherwise, if only the father would work, they´d live on the edge of starvation. The Speenhamland Act was not practised everywhere, many families had no other choice than to go to the parish workhouse. Babies were killed or left to die, pregnant women were sent out of the parish workhouse, so that feeding both became the responsibility of another workhouse. The use of child labour in the workhouses and factorioes increased towards the end of the century, because they were very useful: easy to handle and cheap.
Suddenly, at the end of the century, child labour was seen as shameful. This resulted from the growing dislike of cruelty and from the fact, that hard child labour became more visibly, because there were more people who worked in workhouses than ones who worked on fields. Two men campaigned for almost 30 years to persuade Parliamnet to pass a regulating act in 1788 to reduce the cruelty involved. In th 19th century, the condition of poor children was to become a main area of social reform, because their sufferings became more and more public.