Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/1081602X.2021.1905022
H. Jaadla, K. Lust
ABSTRACT This article explores the impact of parental loss and subsequent remarriage on child survival in the nineteenth century, by drawing on the example of post-emancipation rural Estonia. We utilize a novel, individual-level longitudinal dataset combining data from parish registers, poll-tax lists and migrant listings from 1826 to 1891, to examine: (1) how parental loss effects were differentiated by the gender of the parent; (2) if the loss of parents could be compensated by remarriage; (3) how parental loss effects were felt differently by the socioeconomic status of the household. Our results indicate that the effects of parental loss in this setting played in distinctive ways compared to those found in existing literature examining these processes in historical populations. Consistent with the literature, we find that parental loss effects were stronger when mothers died, but unlike other settings, these effects were felt longer in the Estonian setting and even among children aged 5–9 years. Also, paternal loss was associated with elevated mortality, especially among early childhood. We found no evidence to support the idea that remarriage for mothers improved survival prospects for children. However, there is clear support for improving prospects for children with the remarriage of fathers. When it comes to child health outcomes, stepmothers were not as ‘evil’ as they have been depicted in Estonian folklore, although the resources in families were generally limited and stepchildren might have been discriminated against in the resource allocation within the household.
{"title":"The effect of parental loss on child survival in nineteenth century rural Estonia","authors":"H. Jaadla, K. Lust","doi":"10.1080/1081602X.2021.1905022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1905022","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the impact of parental loss and subsequent remarriage on child survival in the nineteenth century, by drawing on the example of post-emancipation rural Estonia. We utilize a novel, individual-level longitudinal dataset combining data from parish registers, poll-tax lists and migrant listings from 1826 to 1891, to examine: (1) how parental loss effects were differentiated by the gender of the parent; (2) if the loss of parents could be compensated by remarriage; (3) how parental loss effects were felt differently by the socioeconomic status of the household. Our results indicate that the effects of parental loss in this setting played in distinctive ways compared to those found in existing literature examining these processes in historical populations. Consistent with the literature, we find that parental loss effects were stronger when mothers died, but unlike other settings, these effects were felt longer in the Estonian setting and even among children aged 5–9 years. Also, paternal loss was associated with elevated mortality, especially among early childhood. We found no evidence to support the idea that remarriage for mothers improved survival prospects for children. However, there is clear support for improving prospects for children with the remarriage of fathers. When it comes to child health outcomes, stepmothers were not as ‘evil’ as they have been depicted in Estonian folklore, although the resources in families were generally limited and stepchildren might have been discriminated against in the resource allocation within the household.","PeriodicalId":46118,"journal":{"name":"History of the Family","volume":"26 1","pages":"336 - 351"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1905022","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45970738","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/1081602X.2021.1897029
Claudia Soares
ABSTRACT This article uses two of the largest children’s residential welfare institutions operating in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a lens through which to explore the significance of animals and pets in the domestic and familial life of poor children. Using institutional periodicals, the article examines how institutions employed animals as pedagogical and politicised tools to shape children’s emotions and behaviours and to construct idealised notions about family life and childhood. Examination of institutional photographs and children’s correspondence highlights how animals featured in the everyday lives of institutionalised children, and the meanings that young people invested in their relationships with these animals. By examining working-class children’s engagement with animals, the article makes an important contribution to the rapidly expanding scholarship exploring inter-species relationships in nineteenth-century Britain, which has hitherto largely focused on middle-class pet keeping. Meanwhile, consideration of the use of pets as pedagogical tools for poor children in the institutional setting has further implications for and makes new contributions to the history of emotions and the history of the family, providing new insight into the social, emotional and material experiences of childhood in the out-of-home and alternative ‘family’ setting.
{"title":"‘The many lessons which the care of some gentle, loveable animal would give’: animals, pets, and emotions in children’s welfare institutions, 1870–1920","authors":"Claudia Soares","doi":"10.1080/1081602X.2021.1897029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1897029","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article uses two of the largest children’s residential welfare institutions operating in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a lens through which to explore the significance of animals and pets in the domestic and familial life of poor children. Using institutional periodicals, the article examines how institutions employed animals as pedagogical and politicised tools to shape children’s emotions and behaviours and to construct idealised notions about family life and childhood. Examination of institutional photographs and children’s correspondence highlights how animals featured in the everyday lives of institutionalised children, and the meanings that young people invested in their relationships with these animals. By examining working-class children’s engagement with animals, the article makes an important contribution to the rapidly expanding scholarship exploring inter-species relationships in nineteenth-century Britain, which has hitherto largely focused on middle-class pet keeping. Meanwhile, consideration of the use of pets as pedagogical tools for poor children in the institutional setting has further implications for and makes new contributions to the history of emotions and the history of the family, providing new insight into the social, emotional and material experiences of childhood in the out-of-home and alternative ‘family’ setting.","PeriodicalId":46118,"journal":{"name":"History of the Family","volume":"26 1","pages":"236 - 265"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1897029","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49114541","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/1081602X.2021.1944894
Jane Hamlett, J. Strange
ABSTRACT In Britain today, pets are often at the heart of family life, but we know relatively little about the roles they played in families in the past. From the early nineteenth century, pets were a central focus of middle- and working-class homes in Britain but are almost completely unremarked in historical studies of the home and family. In this mini-special issue we present four new essays, developed from papers given at the panel, exploring the evolving relationship between pets and family life in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taken together they demonstrate the relationship between changes in the way the family was understood and experienced and the development of pet keeping practices. In our introduction we bring together two important strands of recent scholarship – the history of the family and histories of animals. We will review the development of animal histories – paying attention to how they might usefully be brought to bear on the study of the family. As there has been significant research on the role of pet animals in family life across the social sciences, we will also review some of the key work in sociology, social geography and psychology, thinking through the implications of these studies for historians. Finally, we reflect on the cumulative findings of the four essays – and how they add a new dimension to our understandings of modern British family life.
{"title":"Animals in the family mini-special issue introduction and historiographical review","authors":"Jane Hamlett, J. Strange","doi":"10.1080/1081602X.2021.1944894","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1944894","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In Britain today, pets are often at the heart of family life, but we know relatively little about the roles they played in families in the past. From the early nineteenth century, pets were a central focus of middle- and working-class homes in Britain but are almost completely unremarked in historical studies of the home and family. In this mini-special issue we present four new essays, developed from papers given at the panel, exploring the evolving relationship between pets and family life in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taken together they demonstrate the relationship between changes in the way the family was understood and experienced and the development of pet keeping practices. In our introduction we bring together two important strands of recent scholarship – the history of the family and histories of animals. We will review the development of animal histories – paying attention to how they might usefully be brought to bear on the study of the family. As there has been significant research on the role of pet animals in family life across the social sciences, we will also review some of the key work in sociology, social geography and psychology, thinking through the implications of these studies for historians. Finally, we reflect on the cumulative findings of the four essays – and how they add a new dimension to our understandings of modern British family life.","PeriodicalId":46118,"journal":{"name":"History of the Family","volume":"26 1","pages":"173 - 185"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1944894","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49615133","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/1081602X.2021.1944895
Jane Hamlett, L. Hoskins, R. Preston
ABSTRACT During the twentieth-century British family life was transformed through changes in family size, relationships and the development of new expectations about emotions and behaviour. But in this important social transformation one factor has gone almost entirely unremarked by family historians – the role of animals in family life. Sociologists and psychologists have demonstrated that pets played an important and complex role in British family life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. However our investigation of the interactions between household members and their pets up to 1960 shows that the personal and familial relationships of pet-keeping could be just as charged and multi-valent. We use three long-run diaries from 1925 to 1960 to investigate the place and role of pets in the family. In spite of some methodological problems, diaries remain a crucial source for investigating pet-keeping in family life. Although, in these cases, the entries were sometimes perfunctory they were also at times rich in expressions of emotions and affinities in relation to animals, allowing us to explore the role that animals played in family dynamics. The long chronological coverage of each diary has provided the opportunity of examining the role that pets played at different stages in the lives of the writers, and how animals became more or less important for the families at different times. All three diaries demonstrate the emotional attachment that individuals had with their pets but also, crucially, how bringing animals into family narratives adds to our understanding of the relationships and interactions in modern family life.
{"title":"Pets and family relationships in twentieth-century British diaries","authors":"Jane Hamlett, L. Hoskins, R. Preston","doi":"10.1080/1081602X.2021.1944895","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1944895","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT During the twentieth-century British family life was transformed through changes in family size, relationships and the development of new expectations about emotions and behaviour. But in this important social transformation one factor has gone almost entirely unremarked by family historians – the role of animals in family life. Sociologists and psychologists have demonstrated that pets played an important and complex role in British family life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. However our investigation of the interactions between household members and their pets up to 1960 shows that the personal and familial relationships of pet-keeping could be just as charged and multi-valent. We use three long-run diaries from 1925 to 1960 to investigate the place and role of pets in the family. In spite of some methodological problems, diaries remain a crucial source for investigating pet-keeping in family life. Although, in these cases, the entries were sometimes perfunctory they were also at times rich in expressions of emotions and affinities in relation to animals, allowing us to explore the role that animals played in family dynamics. The long chronological coverage of each diary has provided the opportunity of examining the role that pets played at different stages in the lives of the writers, and how animals became more or less important for the families at different times. All three diaries demonstrate the emotional attachment that individuals had with their pets but also, crucially, how bringing animals into family narratives adds to our understanding of the relationships and interactions in modern family life.","PeriodicalId":46118,"journal":{"name":"History of the Family","volume":"26 1","pages":"266 - 287"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1944895","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47292934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/1081602X.2021.1946834
I. Tague
ABSTRACT Pets became increasingly common members of British families over the course of the eighteenth century. This was also a period of change in the meaning and makeup of the human family, and attitudes toward pets reflected differences in the ways the family was defined. This article draws on literary, archival, and visual sources to trace the variety of ways pets were depicted throughout the eighteenth century, with attention to continuity and change over time. In Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), animals form the basis of a patriarchal political family, with pets acting simultaneously as subjects, servants, and companions. In the most common analogy of the eighteenth century, animals were servants within the family, yet pets complicated this analogy because they did not engage in visible labor. Pets thus might be seen as toadies – useless and potentially dangerous companions to women – or as competitors to human servants. Elite pet owners might instead depict their pets as part of an aristocratic family network of lineage and kinship, relying on parallels between animal and human breeding. The rise of the cultures of sensibility and domesticity in the later eighteenth century fostered a model of pets as family members that heightened their emotional roles in the realm of a family also defined by close emotional ties.
{"title":"Pets and the eighteenth-century British family","authors":"I. Tague","doi":"10.1080/1081602X.2021.1946834","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1946834","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Pets became increasingly common members of British families over the course of the eighteenth century. This was also a period of change in the meaning and makeup of the human family, and attitudes toward pets reflected differences in the ways the family was defined. This article draws on literary, archival, and visual sources to trace the variety of ways pets were depicted throughout the eighteenth century, with attention to continuity and change over time. In Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), animals form the basis of a patriarchal political family, with pets acting simultaneously as subjects, servants, and companions. In the most common analogy of the eighteenth century, animals were servants within the family, yet pets complicated this analogy because they did not engage in visible labor. Pets thus might be seen as toadies – useless and potentially dangerous companions to women – or as competitors to human servants. Elite pet owners might instead depict their pets as part of an aristocratic family network of lineage and kinship, relying on parallels between animal and human breeding. The rise of the cultures of sensibility and domesticity in the later eighteenth century fostered a model of pets as family members that heightened their emotional roles in the realm of a family also defined by close emotional ties.","PeriodicalId":46118,"journal":{"name":"History of the Family","volume":"26 1","pages":"186 - 213"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1946834","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44792011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-03DOI: 10.1080/1081602X.2021.1888767
Giulia Corti, Maurizio Pisati
ABSTRACT Marriage patterns are a key element in the social reproduction of inequalities because, through marriage, socio-economic resources are distributed among individuals and households. Furthermore, the measure by which individuals from different groups marry each other can be considered as an indicator of the grade of openness of a society. From a historical perspective, modernization theory has traditionally predicted a decrease in marital homogamy by social origin. Long-term trends in social homogamy have been investigated in the social history field, and empirical evidence is quite diverse across contexts and periods. We analyzed patterns of social homogamy in Milan using new couple-level data on marriages between the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Following the modernization framework, we hypothesized that the transition towards an industrial society should be accompanied by an increase in social heterogamy. Results show that, net of changing marginal distributions across social classes, patterns of couple formation remain substantively the same across time. Men appear less mobile than women, who have a higher tendency towards upward marital mobility. As for intermarriage among social classes, boundaries between the top and bottom classes, and barriers between manual and non-manual workers remained strong across time. These results, as previously found in other contexts, do not fully corroborate the modernization theory.
{"title":"Marriage choices, social homogamy and modernization in Milan, 1890-1899 and 1950-1959","authors":"Giulia Corti, Maurizio Pisati","doi":"10.1080/1081602X.2021.1888767","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1888767","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Marriage patterns are a key element in the social reproduction of inequalities because, through marriage, socio-economic resources are distributed among individuals and households. Furthermore, the measure by which individuals from different groups marry each other can be considered as an indicator of the grade of openness of a society. From a historical perspective, modernization theory has traditionally predicted a decrease in marital homogamy by social origin. Long-term trends in social homogamy have been investigated in the social history field, and empirical evidence is quite diverse across contexts and periods. We analyzed patterns of social homogamy in Milan using new couple-level data on marriages between the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Following the modernization framework, we hypothesized that the transition towards an industrial society should be accompanied by an increase in social heterogamy. Results show that, net of changing marginal distributions across social classes, patterns of couple formation remain substantively the same across time. Men appear less mobile than women, who have a higher tendency towards upward marital mobility. As for intermarriage among social classes, boundaries between the top and bottom classes, and barriers between manual and non-manual workers remained strong across time. These results, as previously found in other contexts, do not fully corroborate the modernization theory.","PeriodicalId":46118,"journal":{"name":"History of the Family","volume":"26 1","pages":"353 - 376"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1888767","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48394641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-15DOI: 10.1080/1081602X.2020.1869056
Eunbin Hong, Sangkuk Lee, Jane Yoo
ABSTRACT Socioeconomic homogamy is a prominent process for reproducing the social structure in preindustrial societies including East Asian countries. Although Joseon Korea was a centralized bureaucratic state under a king, the stratification system was unique by its ambiguity such that the previlege of an upper class was not officially confirmed. Since the social status was rather conferred by the reputation of the family, the quality of marriage relation was important for a man to be ranked as a central official. In this paper, we investigate patterns of social homogamy among elite families in the early Joseon Korea through empirical evidence of the relationship between official rank and spousal family background. We created a novel dataset by compiling the marriage network and official rank information of 14,508 individuals from the jokbos (族譜, genealogy) of 15 elite families and conduct an ordinal logit regression analysis to investigate whether spousal family background increases the probability of an individual being promoted in the bureaucracy. We find that the socio-political power of affinal kin has a greater effect on promotions than the descent and meritocratic effects. Particularly, the empirical evidence shows that marrying into a queen consort’s family increased the likelihood of an individual being ranked in a high position, which was beneficial for retaining the political power of him and the family. The study shows that marriage as a means of managing the socio-political inner circle of elite families, shaping the elites’ socio-political inner circle, built on the marriage network around a queen consort’s family to benefit the royal authority and the elite group.
{"title":"Strengthening the inner circle: the marriage networks of elite families in Joseon Korea","authors":"Eunbin Hong, Sangkuk Lee, Jane Yoo","doi":"10.1080/1081602X.2020.1869056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2020.1869056","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Socioeconomic homogamy is a prominent process for reproducing the social structure in preindustrial societies including East Asian countries. Although Joseon Korea was a centralized bureaucratic state under a king, the stratification system was unique by its ambiguity such that the previlege of an upper class was not officially confirmed. Since the social status was rather conferred by the reputation of the family, the quality of marriage relation was important for a man to be ranked as a central official. In this paper, we investigate patterns of social homogamy among elite families in the early Joseon Korea through empirical evidence of the relationship between official rank and spousal family background. We created a novel dataset by compiling the marriage network and official rank information of 14,508 individuals from the jokbos (族譜, genealogy) of 15 elite families and conduct an ordinal logit regression analysis to investigate whether spousal family background increases the probability of an individual being promoted in the bureaucracy. We find that the socio-political power of affinal kin has a greater effect on promotions than the descent and meritocratic effects. Particularly, the empirical evidence shows that marrying into a queen consort’s family increased the likelihood of an individual being ranked in a high position, which was beneficial for retaining the political power of him and the family. The study shows that marriage as a means of managing the socio-political inner circle of elite families, shaping the elites’ socio-political inner circle, built on the marriage network around a queen consort’s family to benefit the royal authority and the elite group.","PeriodicalId":46118,"journal":{"name":"History of the Family","volume":"26 1","pages":"313 - 335"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1081602X.2020.1869056","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49268858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1081602x.2020.1853587
Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia, Santiago de Miguel Salanova
ABSTRACT Relying on an extremely rich data set of individuals living in Madrid in 1880 and 1905, this article explores the relationship between class, literacy and social mobility. Focusing on children, we find that the probability of being literate varied significantly according to parents’ socio-economic status. Although this social gap declined during the period under study, it was still substantial in 1905. We also show that, although the expansion of the supply of schools improved the literacy rates of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, the public effort was clearly insufficient to overcome the challenges these families faced. Lastly, matching the children existing in our sample in 1880 with their corresponding adult-selves in 1905, our analysis shows that getting literate enhanced their chances of moving up the social ladder.
{"title":"Class, literacy and social mobility: Madrid, 1880–1905","authors":"Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia, Santiago de Miguel Salanova","doi":"10.1080/1081602x.2020.1853587","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602x.2020.1853587","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Relying on an extremely rich data set of individuals living in Madrid in 1880 and 1905, this article explores the relationship between class, literacy and social mobility. Focusing on children, we find that the probability of being literate varied significantly according to parents’ socio-economic status. Although this social gap declined during the period under study, it was still substantial in 1905. We also show that, although the expansion of the supply of schools improved the literacy rates of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, the public effort was clearly insufficient to overcome the challenges these families faced. Lastly, matching the children existing in our sample in 1880 with their corresponding adult-selves in 1905, our analysis shows that getting literate enhanced their chances of moving up the social ladder.","PeriodicalId":46118,"journal":{"name":"History of the Family","volume":"26 1","pages":"149 - 172"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1081602x.2020.1853587","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42364924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-28DOI: 10.1080/1081602X.2020.1864755
Einat Lavee, A. Megged
ABSTRACT What is the ability of poor single women today to maintain an economically autonomous household? In the context of gender power relations, the literature often employs the concept of de-familialisation, which is the degree to which a woman is able to maintain an autonomous household without having to depend on a male breadwinner. Scholars argue that current welfare reforms deliberately aim at re-establishing the family as the primary source of economic security and encourage a traditional model of gender relations where women have to be dependent on male breadwinners. By reinstating the nuclear family as the primary source of economic security and a comprehensive alternative to the welfare state, women’s ability for agency and resistance becomes narrower and heavily limited by their inferior gender and class positions. Today, studies clearly indicate the problematic condition of poor women. It seems that without a massive reform in the labour market as well as welfare state expansion, de-familialisation among poor women will become almost impossible. In the current article, we explore the possibility that low-income women, whose common survival strategies are very limited, nonetheless could engage in alternative ways of providing for themselves and their children. We ask to learn from the experience of poor Mexican women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries about the ability of de-familialisation. Drawing on historical data, we argue that the formation of alternative household arrangements – sisterhoods – women-only households, enabled women to develop new family models and to maintain an extended household headed by women, without the need to depend on a male breadwinner. By learning from history, this article offers insights that may enhance poor women’s economic and social conditions today, and suggests that women’s joint power can resist traditional patterns of gender relations, even in times when conservative values are reemphasized.
{"title":"Learning from poor single women’s autonomous households in Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries","authors":"Einat Lavee, A. Megged","doi":"10.1080/1081602X.2020.1864755","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2020.1864755","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT What is the ability of poor single women today to maintain an economically autonomous household? In the context of gender power relations, the literature often employs the concept of de-familialisation, which is the degree to which a woman is able to maintain an autonomous household without having to depend on a male breadwinner. Scholars argue that current welfare reforms deliberately aim at re-establishing the family as the primary source of economic security and encourage a traditional model of gender relations where women have to be dependent on male breadwinners. By reinstating the nuclear family as the primary source of economic security and a comprehensive alternative to the welfare state, women’s ability for agency and resistance becomes narrower and heavily limited by their inferior gender and class positions. Today, studies clearly indicate the problematic condition of poor women. It seems that without a massive reform in the labour market as well as welfare state expansion, de-familialisation among poor women will become almost impossible. In the current article, we explore the possibility that low-income women, whose common survival strategies are very limited, nonetheless could engage in alternative ways of providing for themselves and their children. We ask to learn from the experience of poor Mexican women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries about the ability of de-familialisation. Drawing on historical data, we argue that the formation of alternative household arrangements – sisterhoods – women-only households, enabled women to develop new family models and to maintain an extended household headed by women, without the need to depend on a male breadwinner. By learning from history, this article offers insights that may enhance poor women’s economic and social conditions today, and suggests that women’s joint power can resist traditional patterns of gender relations, even in times when conservative values are reemphasized.","PeriodicalId":46118,"journal":{"name":"History of the Family","volume":"26 1","pages":"288 - 312"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1081602X.2020.1864755","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43870756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1080/1081602x.2020.1853586
M. van der Heijden, A. Schmidt, G. Vermeesch
ABSTRACT This special section presents new research on the ways in which unmarried parents – particularly women – negotiated illegitimacy, how they interacted with urban institutions, and what legal resources they had. Throughout the early modern period, extramarital pregnancies were an important issue of concern to urban authorities and city dwellers. In line with recent historiographic strands, the two articles in this section approach the topic of unwed motherhood from below. The articles pay particular attention to the interactions between institutions and unwed mothers, the diversity of identities of unmarried parenthood, and the agency of unwed mothers in early modern Europe. Geographically, the contributions cover evidence from cities in Italy, Germany, Holland and Switzerland. In this introduction, we contextualize the most important issues addressed in the contributions. We explain why early modern societies regarded unwed motherhood as such a serious problem and expound the concept of ‘agency’ in relation to illegitimacy. We then elaborate on the institutions that dealt with unmarried parenthood in early modern Europe and their possible effect on the agency of unmarried mothers. This includes the impact of changes on the treatment of illegitimacy by institutions, and the North-South divide with regard to attitudes towards unwed parenthood.
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