Louise A. Tilly

Individual Lives and Family Strategies in the French Proletariat

his sister-in-law Tatiana in 1928, he remarked, &dquo;If you’re not able to understand real individuals, you can’t understand what is universal and general&dquo; (Lawner, 1973:136). This aphorism strikes at one of the central problems of the practice of social history. In their commitment to seeking out the history of the inarticulate popular classes, social historians have necessarily turned to sources which tell about people rather than sources created by the people themselves. The typical records used by social historians-censuses, marriage, birth and death registers, tax records, police and court records-and the typical methods of analysis of these records produce collective, not individual biographies. The historical product is description and analysis of behavior patterns by categories of individuals. Alan Macfarlane (1977:204-205) contrasts the data which are the stuff of social

The Family Wage Economy of a French Textile City: Roubaix, 1872-1906

**Louise A. Tilly, associate professor of history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. She and Joan Scott co-authored Women, Work and Family (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978). She is presently writing a comparative study of family and industrialism in France. Jack Goody, with Joan Thirsk and E. P. Thompson, has recently edited Family and Inheritance, a volume of essays from the 1974 Past and Present Conference on the

The Social Sciences and the Study of Women: A Review Article

J. Stanley Lemons. The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1973. Lee Holcombe. Victorian Ladies at Work. Middle-Class Working Women in England and Wales, 1850-1914. Newton Abbot: David and Charles. 1973. Etienne Van de Walle. The Female Population of France in the Nineteenth Century. a Reconstruction of 82 Departements. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1974. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, editors. Woman, Culture and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1974.