Labour historians have always shown an interest in working class men and women who participated in strikes, unions, and political parties. However, even when historians are receptive to the importance of family life behind public activism these scholars continue to use the "public sphere" as an approach for studying the family.1 This approach runs counter to historical logic because the daily life of those who join social movements and organizations involves far more than merely labour activism. To understand the true causes of collective resistance among workers, it is necessary to use the "private sphere" as an approach for studying labour protests as well. While this reverse perspective may not prove a panacea for all problems associated with analysing labour history, it will provide insight into the rather obscure motives of the working class for deciding whether or not to support the development of workers' movements. Furthermore, Jean H. Quataert wrote that examining working-class households makes it possible to keep "in focus at all times the lives of both men and women, young and old, and the variety of paid and unpaid work necessary to maintain the unit".

The whole journeymen of the Metropolis who will form an irresistible phalanx and greatly superior to the united energies of the Masters.London employers to the government, 1813* The paths of historical research resemble the forces in the sea. As some topics surface and rise to ever greater heights, others may be dragged to the depths of silence and cease to affect the beating of the waves. In most western European countries, research on journeymen has suffered this second fate. Along with the decline in interest in guild-based economies, the issue of whether pre-industrial journeymen associations were predecessors (or perhaps adumbrations) of modern trade unions, 1 which had inspired widespread debate during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, faded from the agenda following World War II. This trend does not mean that the new generation of social historians has blithely ignored disputes involving journeymen. Nevertheless, many authors designate such events as crowd movements or view them as obvious forms of traditional resistance.In the 1960s and 1970s, British crowd historians painted a consistent picture of social relations on the eve of the Industrial Revolution and

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116Christian Simon work with few exceptions, too, the manufactures were the ones to gather large groups of women under one roof, thus providing a fairly solid basis for studying the difficulties of women.3 While manufactures employed fewer individuals in Europe than cottage industries and putting-out systems, justice demands consideration of the "working conditions" in the manufactures. As the various types of production should be seen as interrelated, viewing proto-industrialization exclusively in terms of cottage industries would be too restrictive.There have been several worthwhile attempts to define manufactures. 4The distinction between traditional trades (Handwerky a smaller type of business, which -as assumed by much earlier research -usually served the market for individual orders in the vicinity, and in Europe was primarily viewed by German authors as pertaining to the guild system), versus cottage industries (which often had no affiliation to guilds, like the manufactures, although production was decentralized) and the putting-out, system (Verlag) is crucial. Division of labour is an important aspect of this description of manufactures. Unfortunately, these definitions all contain some ambiguity, particularly as they are often based on inaccurate assumptions. Handwerk does not necessarily involve a guild, nor does it always serve a local market, or produce finished

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