Daily Life in the Nineteenth Century449ment of babies at public institutions in France reached a
recorded peak of 164,319 in 1833. Thus, abandonment
of infanticide may have claimed 40 percent of all babies
in some years.
Abandonment was most common in regions where
effective contraception was not well known, especially
in eastern Europe. Catherine the Great had established
foundling homes in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but
abandoned babies soon overflowed these institutions,
which then became processing centers for shipping un-
wanted babies to the countryside. In the 1830s the
foundling home of St. Petersburg had twenty-five thou-
sand children on its rolls with five thousand being
added each year; by the 1880s the home in St. Peters-
burg was receiving nine thousand abandoned newborns
per year and the home in Moscow, seventeen thousand.
The problem was most urgent for the large numbers of
women who were domestic servants in the cities—25
percent of women in Moscow, 37 percent in St. Peters-
burg. Marriage was difficult for these women and eco-
nomic survival virtually impossible if they lost their
posts, as they would if they had a child. Children who
reached the foundling homes suffered terribly: Between
75 percent and 90 percent of them died each year. Sim-
ilar patterns existed in western Europe, and critics were
not totally wrong when they called foundling homes a
system of “legalized infanticide.”
The Life Cycle: Youth
No stage of the life cycle experienced a more dramatic
change in daily life than the young did. The history of
childhood and adolescence in nineteenth-century Eu-
rope saw the conquest of contagious (“childhood”) dis-
eases, which changed childhood from a world in which
50 percent of the population died to one where less
than 10 percent did; the emergence of the idea that
youth was a distinct phase of life and the consequent
new attitudes and laws about different treatment of the
young; and the industrial revolution, which changed
the primary activities of the young, first shifting their
economic roles and later requiring schooling instead
of work.
The British led Europe toward a new legal treat-
ment of the young by defining new borders between
youth and adulthood. Nineteenth-century laws limited
the maximum number of hours that children could
work and the minimum number of years that they must
attend school; laws defined the age at which the young
could consent to sex or to marriage and the age at
which they could be sentenced to death. For most of
the nineteenth century, the age of sexual consent for
girls was twelve; a reform of British criminal law in
1875 raised this to thirteen (the French standard), and
another reform in 1885 set the age of consent at six-
teen. A study of French criminal justice has shown that,
despite such early ages of consent, the single most
common felony against persons in the late nineteenth
century was the molestation of young girls. The young
similarly received at least nominal protection in penal
law. For most of the century, British prison populations
were segregated by gender, social class, and types of
crimes committed, but they were not segregated by
age; a ten-year-old thief would be imprisoned with
adult criminals. British penal reforms of 1854 created
reformatories for youthful offenders, with fifteen being
considered the age of adulthood. A Children’s Act of
1908 created separate prisons (borstals) for the young
and set the age of adulthood (for hanging, for example)
at sixteen, to match the sexual statutes.
Industrialization and urbanization transformed the
economic life of the young. For many, life shifted from
being farm workers in a household economy, or urban
apprentices already separated from their families, to
working in mines and factories and contributing to a
family wage economy. By the 1840s child labor had be-
come so common that governments began to regulate
it. In France, for example, 18 percent to 24 percent of
all workers in textile factories were children, and theBirths per one thousand population
Year England France Germany Russia
1840 32.0 27.9 36.4 n.a.
1850 n.a. 26.8 37.2 n.a.
1860 35.6 26.2 36.4 49.7
1870 34.6 25.9 38.5 49.2
1880 33.6 24.6 37.6 49.7
1890 30.4 21.8 35.7 50.3
1900 28.7 21. 3 35.6 49. 3
1910 25.1 19.6 29.8 45.1
1914 23.8 18.1 26.8 43.1
Percentage decline
from 1840 to 1914 –25.6 –35.1 –26.4 –13.3
Source: B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1950–1970(Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 105–20.
n.a. = Not available.TABLE 23.6The Declining Birthrate in Europe, 1840–1914