{"title":"Who attends the wedding? Parents and witnesses of suburban brides and grooms (1880-1912)","authors":"Sandra Brée","doi":"10.1080/1081602X.2021.1918208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1918208","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT If the witnesses of 19th-century civil marriages have been the subject of several researches, especially to distinguishing related and non-related witnesses, less attention has been paid to the precise choice of family members or the non-related witnesses. Even less attention has been paid to the parents of the brides and grooms, their presence or absence at their child's marriage, and the consequences on the call to family members or friends witnesses. The idea of this article is to provide new information about the people who attend the wedding ceremony _ parents and witnesses _ with a particular focus on two cities in the Paris suburbs between 1880 and 1912. The analysis focuses on brides and grooms who had not been married before and emphasises the gendered dimension in the parental presence and the choice of witnesses.","PeriodicalId":46118,"journal":{"name":"History of the Family","volume":"26 1","pages":"377 - 404"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42680754","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}
{"title":"This house is not a home: residential care for babies and toddlers in the two Germanys during the Cold War","authors":"Felix Berth","doi":"10.1080/1081602X.2021.1943488","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1943488","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper examines the history of infant homes for babies and toddlers in the two German states after World War II. Peak capacity of these institutions was not reached in the immediate post-war years, as one might suppose, but in the early 1960s. At that time in socialist East Germany one in forty children under the age of three lived in an infant home, while the rate was about half as high in capitalist West Germany. Thus, these institutions impacted the lives of more children than previously assumed. From a comparative perspective, divided developments become clear: In East Germany, socialist legislation and media promoted the infant home; in West Germany, the expansion took place in the shadow of the capitalistic welfare state. Criticism of the homes was articulated in both states at about the same time, following publication of British psychoanalyst John Bowlby’s early attachment theory. His WHO report Maternal Care and Mental Health from the year 1951 served as a reference point for the work of several pediatricians and psychologists in both German states. It appears that Bowlby’s theory – stressing the importance of exclusive maternal care and so far described as highly impactful for Western Europe and the USA – also met with approval under East German state socialism in the 1950s. However, it had different implications: In West Germany, scientific criticism of infant homes was acted on by the authorities, who quickly disbanded the institutions from the mid-1960s onwards. In East Germany, political intervention favoring maternal employment prevented this, which is why numerous places in infant homes remained available for babies and toddlers until the end of the socialist state in 1989.","PeriodicalId":46118,"journal":{"name":"History of the Family","volume":"26 1","pages":"506 - 531"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1943488","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45702142","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}
{"title":"The Tibetan stem family in historical perspective","authors":"G. Childs","doi":"10.1080/1081602X.2021.1940238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1940238","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Despite decades of scholarly interest in the Tibetan marital practice of fraternal polyandry, very little is known about how the Tibetan family system operated in historical contexts. This study, based on a 1958 household register from Kyirong, a former district in Tibet, reconstructs nuances of family dynamics through the aid of interviews with people who were listed in the document. Kyirong’s family system is shown to be very flexible. Although patrilocality was preferred, matrilocality was a viable contingency, and although polyandry was favored, monogamy and polygyny were acceptable. Despite the heterogeneity of Kyirong’s family households, case studies demonstrate how people strove to achieve the monomarital stem family through polyandrous marriages in successive generations. Because polyandry created a surplus of marriageable women, joint families often arose, at least in form, when unmarried women remained with their natal families and had children, or when men discontent with their polyandrous unions moved into an adjunct house with a partner of choice. However, the offspring of these people had no rights of inheritance and thus were not integral to family continuity, so joint families in form functioned more like stem families in practice. Therefore, a discrepancy between etic definitions of form and emic understandings of process emerges when family typologies developed to facilitate cross-cultural research are incompatible with the way people actually understand rights and privileges associated with succession. The data and analysis demonstrate that Kyirong represents a unique version of a stem family society with an unambiguous stem family ideology.","PeriodicalId":46118,"journal":{"name":"History of the Family","volume":"26 1","pages":"482 - 505"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1940238","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46983962","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}
{"title":"An East–West dichotomy? Shifting marriage age patterns in Taiwan and Sweden over two centuries","authors":"Y. Cheng, Martin Kolk","doi":"10.1080/1081602X.2021.1931404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1931404","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Age at marriage varies greatly over time and between places. This study examines changes in age differences between spouses, as well as age at marriage, over 200 years in Taiwan and Sweden. Changes across vastly different socioeconomic and demographic contexts are explored in these two different kinship and marriage systems. Five different data sources are used to create micro-level data on spousal age differences for Swedish marriages formed between 1830 and 2006 and for Taiwanese ones that occurred between 1870 and 2015. The findings reveal two clearly distinct marriage systems that converge in some ways over time but remain divergent in other aspects. Since the 19th century Sweden has had a population that marries much later in life, when compared to Taiwan, though the pace of marriage postponement in Taiwan has made the age profiles of contemporary married couples appear more similar to those of their Swedish counterparts. In addition, the distribution of ages at marriage has also become more dispersed in the contemporary than in the historical period for both countries. While age at marriage varied greatly over the two centuries, this study puts particular emphasis on how age at marriage for both men and women interacts with age differences between spouses. Findings revealed a gendered age preference in both Taiwan and Sweden, and how this has changed over time with rising female status and development. In contrast to shrinking age differences in Taiwan over one and a half centuries, average age differences in Sweden remained relatively constant, with the dispersion of age differences following a U-shaped pattern and reaching a minimum in around 1970.","PeriodicalId":46118,"journal":{"name":"History of the Family","volume":"26 1","pages":"434 - 465"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1931404","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59641118","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}
{"title":"‘From the cradle to the grave I am my father’s daughter!’ Women and their married names in Transylvania in the second half of 19th century","authors":"Luminița Dumănescu, Ioan Bolovan","doi":"10.1080/1081602X.2021.1933126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1933126","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the common perception, the surname of a woman is a changing value of her personality as, at least in theory and customarily, she will take her husband name at marriage. For a traditional and patriarchal society like the Romanian one in the second half of the 19th Century, the common, empirical knowledge and the ancestral believes alike tempted one to argue that the woman left behind her maiden name and, from the day of her marriage till the end of her life (presumably lived with the same man), she assumed his family name and a new combined identity. When the information gathered in the Historical Population database of Transylvania was quantitatively important enough to allow some preliminary conclusions on this segment of population, it became evident, even at a first sight, that we have a wrong perception about the wife’s name after marriage: more than half of the married women were registered in different moments of their lives, in different circumstances, with their maiden name. The preliminary results entitle us to consider that a marriage contract is not automatically followed by a name change and the married woman is recognized by her own name in the subsequent papers. The Civil Code of 1853 states that the wife will take the name of the husband at marriage and, in this respect, our preliminary findings contradict the norm and raise specific research questions: what are the reasons for which the women preserve their maiden name in such a great extent, despite of legislation? Is this a personal choice related to the personal identity or a customary practice of the communities maintained with the only purpose of preserving the link between families, probably for issues concerning the property transmission and the lineage?","PeriodicalId":46118,"journal":{"name":"History of the Family","volume":"26 1","pages":"466 - 481"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1933126","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49410768","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}
{"title":"Why were infants dying and what were they dying from? Infant mortality patterns in the Greek urban centre of Hermoupolis, Syros (1860–1940)","authors":"Michail Raftakis","doi":"10.1080/1081602X.2021.1921008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1921008","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The reduction in infant mortality has been a significant component of mortality decline in all north-western European populations. Infant mortality in Greece has been studied before, though most rates refer to rural populations or short periods of time; while the national ones have been based on multiple assumptions. Only rarely there is available evidence about the evolution of infant mortality in urban Greece in a long-term perspective. This paper, therefore, fills this gap by employing individual-level data, a rare collection of oral histories and qualitative sources from the major urban centre of Hermoupolis, on the Greek island of Syros, for the period 1860–1940. Infant mortality in Hermoupolis was found to be among the highest in the country for most of the study period. Even though it had been argued that infant mortality in Greece declined in the 1930s, Hermoupolis experienced an earlier decline, situated in the late 1890s. Main factors that were found to be related to this decline include wider access to water, changes in the registration system, fertility decline, improvements in living standards and nutrition among lower strata infants and improvements in maternal literacy. Diarrhoeal diseases killed most infants especially during the hot and dry summer months. Despite the widespread practice of breastfeeding in the city, seasonality analysis indicated the early initiation of supplementary food. This paper contributes to the existing literature by extending our understanding of the factors that facilitated the reduction of urban infant mortality beyond Western Europe and North America.","PeriodicalId":46118,"journal":{"name":"History of the Family","volume":"26 1","pages":"405 - 433"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1921008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45710394","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}
{"title":"When John met Benny: class, pets and family life in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain","authors":"J. Strange","doi":"10.1080/1081602X.2021.1897028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1897028","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Histories of human-animal companionship have expanded in recent years but studies of British pet keeping prior to the twentieth century have been skewed towards the middle and upper classes. Such models risk establishing middle-class values and practices as the norm, creating the implicit assumption that working-class difference amounts to deviance or, that middle-class norms ‘trickle down’ the socio-economic scale eventually. While it is broadly acknowledged that working-class families kept birds or animals in domestic settings, there has been little consideration of what animal companionship meant in Victorian and Edwardian working-class family life or, more to the point, the ways in which pet keeping was classed and why this matters. Drawing on three principal methods, this essay explores what pet keeping meant in the financial, spatial and affective context of British working-class family life. It tries to understand how human family members could experience or, at least, articulate a sense of connection with animal members of the household. Resources of time, space and money shaped what pets were possible for people to keep, where they were kept and how relationships with those animals were forged. The choices people made in precarious or restricted material circumstances exposes the classed character of pet keeping and the ‘hierarchical entanglement’ of human-animal relations within a working-class context.","PeriodicalId":46118,"journal":{"name":"History of the Family","volume":"26 1","pages":"214 - 235"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1897028","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47116569","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}
{"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}
{"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}
{"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}