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A remarkable variety of academic treatments of family life are in broad agreement as to the processes of development and change occurring within families in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A wide range of authors regard the following as a set of interconnected changes: family household members increasingly come to have a sense of themselves as a distinctive and sacrosanct unit, 'the family', which is separated from the wider social world; emotional relationships within the family household become very intense; gender divisions become more acute, with the sharp demarcation between a housewife/mother role and an earner/father role; respect for the rights of the individual is increased -- loyalty to oneself may take precedence over loyalty to the family. My aim in this paper is to confront this 'classical' corpus of historical and sociological analysis with a particular set of experiential data -- oral accounts of growing up in urban Scotland in the early 1900s gathered by me in 1975-77 (Jamieson 1983). As we shall see, these data cast into doubt several of the generalisations contained in the 'classical' corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]