Collective Action and Domestic Practices: England in the 1830s and 1840s

In recent years our understanding of domestic practices and relations of intimacy have made enormous advances (Giddens, 1992; Jamieson, 1998; Gillies, 2003; Gabb, 2008; Morgan, 2011). However, our grasp of the broader social and economic processes within which intimate relations are constructed, and the interplay between the two, has not kept pace. In this chapter I argue, through an historical case study, that in exploring this interaction we need to pay more attention to social movements because of the important part they play in mediating between macro socio-economic change and the practices of individual families. To date, studies of family practices have paid little attention to the role of social movements (Staggenborg, 1998) while scholarship on social movements has, with a few notable exceptions, paid scant attention to movements directed towards family change (Della Porta and Diani, 2006; Snow et al., 2004).1