JOURNAL OF FAMILY HISTORY

United States of America (Newark, Delaware) 12

JANUARY 1996 - VOLUME 21, NUMBER 1

97.12.1 - English - John CASHMERE, La Trobe University, Melbourne (Australia)

Sisters together: Women without men in seventeenth-century French village culture (p. 44-62)

It is often assumed that the institution of the family and all that implied in terms of patriarchal power, settlement patterns, and inheritance customs restricted women within village communities. This article sets out to explore the possibility that there were female-centered households in seventeenth-century France, based on sibling relationships, that these households did not require male suzerainty, and that they may have survived in village communities with the support of female networks operating through the evening spinning bees. The article focuses on texts that represent a legal dispute over a village fire in Normandy toward the end of the seventeenth century and on the complex ways in which male voices in these texts constituted the lives of the female villagers involved. (FRANCE, HISTORY, HOUSEHOLD COMPOSITION, WOMEN'S STATUS, SISTERS)

97.12.2 - English - Jeffrey R. WATT, University of Mississippi (U.S.A.)

The family, love, and suicide in early modern Geneva (p. 63-86)

Analysis of criminal proceedings and death records for early modern Geneva reveals an explosion in suicides after 1750. New attitudes toward courtship, marriage, and the family contributed to this dramatic increase, as unprecedented numbers of people took their lives because of family concerns, such as marital breakdown, unhappy love stories, and deaths of family members. Greater interest in the companionate marriage was central to these changes. After 1750, marriage, even more than parenthood, offered immunity to suicide, as married people were underrepresented among those who took their lives. Although men constituted the large majority of suicides, women and men shared the growing emphasis on conjugal sentiment, which cut across class lines. (SWITZERLAND, HISTORY, SUICIDE, MARRIAGE, VALUE SYSTEMS)

97.12.3 - English - Barray REAY, University of Auckland (New Zealand)

Kinship and the neighborhood in nineteenth-century rural England: The myth of the autonomous nuclear family (p. 87-104)

There is an influential strand in the history of the English family, casting its shadow over interpretations of the nineteenth century and rapidly becoming sociological orthodoxy, which stresses the centrality of what has been termed the autonomous nuclear family. In this interpretation, the nuclear family dominates household structures, kinship is weak, and the community rather than family or kin is the main source of support for the needy sections of society. This article, which employs the technique of total reconstitution, examines the role of kinship in three adjoining rural communities in nineteenth-century Kent to question some of these orthodoxies. It shows that as many households in the area went through an extended phase as experienced only the simple family structure, and that kinship links in the immediate area were strong. Any separation between kin and community would have been meaningless in these rural parishes where kinship was part of neighborhood. (ENGLAND, HISTORY, EXTENDED FAMILY, NUCLEAR FAMILY, KINSHIP, COMMUNITIES)

APRIL 1996 - VOLUME 21, NUMBER 2

97.12.4 - English - Muriel NAZZARI, Department of History, Indiana University (U.S.A.)

Concubinage in colonial Brazil: The inequalities of race, class, and gender (p. 107-124)

Colonial society's requirement that marriage must be endogamous meant that the only possible long-term sexual relationship between a man of superior status in regard to class and/or race and a woman of inferior status was concubinage. Focusing on racial differences, this study documents such inequality within concubinage and also demonstrates that despite the strong Christian endorsement of marriage, the church also subsribed to the idea that marriage had to be endogamous. Thus, when confronted by single sexual partners who were highly unequal, the church did not oblige them to marry but instead attempted to separate them. (BRAZIL, HISTORY, CONSENSUAL UNION, ENDOGAMY, RACIAL DISCRIMINATION, RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS)

97.12.5 - English - Charlotte NEFF, Department of Law and Justice, Laurentian University, Ontario (Canada)

Pauper apprenticeship in early nineteenth century Ontario (p. 144-171)

The Primary formal mechanism for dealing with orphaned and abandoned children in Ontario before Confederation was apprenticeship. This legally recognized form of homeplacement originated in the English Poor Law and was provided for in provincial legislation in 1799 and, in detail, in 1851, as well as in a Toronto municipal statute in 1846, despite the rejection by Ontario of the English Poor Law. Surviving apprenticeship indentures and court records suggest that individuals were aware of and made use of this legislation. Aside from its use privately, pauper apprenticeship was used as early as the 1830s by organizations arranging for the immigration of poor British children and by organizations assisting the orphans of immigrants. Home placements, including apprenticeship, were also used extensively by children's homes after mid-century, even for quite young children. Pauper apprenticeship thus emerges as highly significant in the history of provision for dependent children. (CANADA, PROVINCES, HISTORY, ABANDONED CHILDREN, ORPHANS, APPRENTICES, CHILD CARE)

JULY 1996 - VOLUME 21, NUMBER 3

97.12.6 - English - Lynn ABRAMS, University of Glasgow (U.K.)

Whores, whore-chasers, and swine: The regulation of sexuality and the restoration of order in the nineteenth century German divorce court (p. 267-280)

This article suggests that in a society experiencing economic and political upheaval, marriage, and especially the language used to talk about marital breakdown, was placed at the forefront of an attempt to bolster the idea of the sexual balance of power and proper gender role division. An analysis of the depositions presented at divorce cases in one court in the Prussian Rhine Province between 1814 and 1871 demonstrates that social organization was dependent on sexual and productive categories, which in turn held the key to marital stability. Those couples who appeared in the divorce court illustrate how gender relations within marriage were being negotiated and contested around these two poles and how abusive language and violence were used to reassert or undermine power and authority within the marriage relationship. (GERMANY, HISTORY, INTERSPOUSE RELATIONSHIPS, DIVORCE, VIOLENCE)

97.12.7 - English - Gordon A. CARMICHAEL, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University (Australia)

From floating brothels to suburban semirespectability: Two centuries of nonmarital pregnancy in Australia (p. 281-315)

The sexual revolution that through the 1950s and 1960s saw nonmarital fertility and marital childbearing following premarital conception rise rapidly in Australia, especially among women in their teens and early twenties, received considerable research attention. Now, in the mid-1990s, childbearing following nonmarital pregnancy has assumed a very different character. The pregnant teenaged bride is almost a thing of the past, and nonmarital births occur mainly at normative reproductive ages within consensual unions. Similar trends have occurred in other developed countries, but Australia boasts an unusual precedent for this newphase, in that during its early years of colonial settlement, convictism also gave rise to widespread childbearing within consensual unions. This precedent and the distinctive circumstances that produced it are explored in the context of tracing the full and varied history of fertility associated with nonmarital coitus in Australia. (AUSTRALIA, HISTORY, ILLEGITIMATE FERTILITY, PREMARITAL CONCEPTIONS, CONSENSUAL UNION)

97.12.8 - English - Barrie M. RATCLIFFE, Université Laval, Québec (Canada)

Popular classes and cohabitation in mid-nineteenth-century Paris (p. 316-350)

This article aims to show that we do not know what we believe we do about the extent and meaning of recourse to cohabitation among popular classes in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century. Discourse on cohabitation and illegitimacy is deconstructed, revealing that analyses of popular behaviour are based on problematic data and flawed methods. If cohabitation was widespread, this was because of the legal and economic constraints imposed on workers, particularly migrants, rather than a symptom of cultural breakdown or the emergence of a counterculture. The article interrogates serial data, and especially marriage records, as well as the archives of charity organizations, to argue that Parisian workers were anxious to marry, to marry in church, and to marry respectably. It suggests that we should dedramatize cohabitation and recognize that popular-class attitudes and behaviour were more conformist and traditional than we have been led to think. (FRANCE, CAPITAL CITY, HISTORY, COHABITATION, WORKING CLASS, POPULAR CULTURE)

97.12.9 - English - Elinor A. ACCAMPO, University of Southern California (U.S.A.)

The rhetoric of reproduction and the reconfiguration of womanhood in the French birth control movement, 1890-1920 (p. 351-371)

Birth control movements that emerged in Europe and the United States during the last third of the nineteenth century lost their emancipatory and feminist potential in the twentieth century as they succumbed to control by the medical profession, eugenicists, and institutionalized goals of planned parenthood. The neo-Malthusian movement in France, however, retained a radical character and became a focal point for the convergence of libertarian, feminist, and anarchist concerns. By emancipating women from their "biological destiny" and separating sexuality and reproduction, neo-Malthusian rhetoric reconfigured womanhood and established the basis for women's development as full individuals and citizens. (FRANCE, HISTORY, FAMILY PLANNING, WOMEN'S EMANCIPATION, ORGANIZATIONS)

97.12.10 - English - Jane LEWIS, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford University (U.K.), and Kathleen KIERNAN, London School of Economics and Political Science, Londres (U.K.)

The boundaries between marriage, nonmarriage, and parenthood: Changes in behavior and policy in postwar Britain (p. 372-387)

This article suggests that there have been two major changes in the pattern of development of lone motherhood since the Second World War. First there was a widespread separation of sex and marriage. The second shift has been more recent and arguably more radical, involving the separation of marriage and parenthood. Whereas the first set of changes was regarded with considerable optimism by commentators, the second has given rise to moral panic about lone motherhood. The result, we suggest, has been a recasting of family law, putting the emphasis on the responsabilities of parenthood rather than marriage. (UNITED KINGDOM, ILLEGITIMATE FERTILITY, MARRIAGE, SEXUAL BEHAVIOUR, CULTURAL CHANGE, LEGISLATION)

OCTOBER 1996 - VOLUME 21, NUMBER 4

97.12.11 - English - David M. STARK, Indiana University (U.S.A.)

Discovering the invisible Puerto Rican slave family: Demographic evidence from the eighteenth century (p. 395-418)

Traditional notions that family life among slaves during the pre-plantation period in the non-Hispanic Caribbean was necessarily unstable are fading in light of new research. Although marriage among this segment of the population in Caguas, Cayey, San Germán, and Yauco -- rural parishes in Puerto Rico -- involved only a fraction of the overall number of marriages in these communities, the marriage of slaves was much more frequent than previously assumed. Family life among the eighteenth-century Puerto Rican slave population appears to have been quite stable, as shown by the reconstruction of birth intervals for both married and unmarried mothers. Married and unmarried mothers exhibited similar reproductive behaviour. These results strongly suggest that a majority of the unmarried slave mothers lived in unions that were not institutionally recognized, but that were nevertheless stable, as indicated by the high percentage of their children born at intervals comparable to those of married mothers. If unmarried mothers were living in stable consensual unions, then our understanding of these slave family units during the colonial period must be reassessed not only for Puerto Rico but possibly for the rest of the Caribbean and Latin America. (PUERTO RICO, SLAVES, FAMILY STABILITY)

97.12.12 - English - Joshua COLE, University of Georgia (U.S.A.)

"A sudden and terrible revelation": Motherhood and infant mortality in France, 1858-1874 (p. 419-445)

In 1874, legislators in France passed a law regulating the wet-nursing industry. Citing recent medical research into the causes and social costs of high infant mortality, the law's supporters met little opposition, despite the fact that the law challenged the tradition of paternal authority and familial autonomy that had been inscribed in French law since the promulgation of the Civil Code of 1804. Extending state power into the familial realm required a concerted effort by reformers, who concentrated on two issues: maternal responsibility for newborn infants and the social costs of early death. Because working women in urban areas used wet-nurses to preserve their wage-earning capacity, reformers capitalized on widespread opposition to women's labor outside the home. The law met little opposition in part because the issues of paternal authority had already been thoroughly debated several months earlier in the child labor law of 1874. (FRANCE, LEGISLATION, WET NURSES, FEMALE EMPLOYMENT, INFANT MORTALITY)

97.12.13 - English - Sharon SASSLER, Department of Sociology, Wellesley College

Feathering the nest or flying the coop? Ethnic and gender differences in young adults' coresidence in 1910 (p. 446-466)

Children's contributions were an important component of the family economy at the turn of the century. This article uses data from the 1910 Census Public Use Sample to disentangle gender and ethnic variations in coresidence with parents. Bivariate results indicate greater coresidence of women; this reverses after controlling for gainful employment and ethnicity. Work outside the home bought freedom from parents to a significantly greater degree for women. Young men who were best able to contribute financially to the family were more likely to be coresiding, suggesting that they received stronger incentives to remain in the home. Irish and German families benefitted from the presence of sons, whereas Jewish households stood to gain from the contributions of both sons and daughters. Relative to the "new" immigrant groups, Black families relying on the contributions of coresident unmarried children were at a disadvantage. (UNITED STATES, PARENTS, CHILDREN, COHABITATION, SEX DIFFERENTIALS, ETHNICITY)

97.12.14 - English - Marilyn MORRIS, University of North Texas, Denton (U.S.A.)

The royal family and family values in late eighteenth-century England (p. 519-532)

The idea of a royal family developed in England during the latter half of George III's reign. The increased press coverage of the royal family's activities that began during the Regency Crisis of 1788-1789 coincided with a court that featured stunning displays of both bourgeois family values and aristocratic libertinism. An examination of the discourse on the royal family in the London daily press in the era of the French Revolution reveals different marital models in conflict as well as considerable anxieties regarding the preservation of the social hierarchy and women's role in the domestic sphere. The British royal family was placed in an impossible situation when they attempted to embody a conjugal ideal that transcended both class difference and the ongoing tensions between the sexes. (ENGLAND, HISTORY, FAMILY LIFE, VALUE SYSTEMS)

JANUARY 1997 - VOLUME 22, NUMBER 1

97.12.15 - English - Kristin E. GAGER, Department of History, University of New Hampshire (U.S.A.)

Women, adoption, and family life in early modern Paris (p. 5-25)

This article examines a series of notarized contracts that describe adoptions of daughters and sons as heirs undertaken by "independent" women in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Paris. Despite concrete legal barriers against adoption, a general cultural rejection of adoptive kinship, and the centrality of a patriarchal model of the family, widows, separated women, unmarried women, and even a deserted wife turned to "adoptive reproduction" to continue their family lines. The adoptive mothers were childless and had all gained a degree of independent control over their property, which, in turn, allowed them to name an heir of their choice. The evidence of adoption enriches our portrait of relations between mothers and children, women's legal status, and the diversity of family life in early modern France. (FRANCE, CAPITAL CITY, HISTORY, ADOPTION, WOMEN'S STATUS)

97.12.16 - English - Marie-Pierre ARRIZABALAGA, University Studies Abroad Consortium Program, Université de Pau (France)

The stem family in the French Basque country: Sare in the nineteenth century (p. 50-69)

Land-owners in Sare continued to practice impartible inheritance in the nineteenth century in order to protect the family house and the eco-demographic equilibrium of the community. But these practices, which in the Ancien Régime prescribed the selection of the first-born male or female child (aînesse intégrale), evolved in the nineteenth century as a great number of household heads opted for the selection of any male or female child to inherit the family house and property. These new practices perpetuated a stem-family system in which two conjugal units, with or without unmarried siblings, coresided in the earlier and later stages of the life cycle of their households, and sometimes changed into conjugal units halfway through the cycle. Stem-family households thus continued to evolve in three phases, from stem to conjugal to stem-the stem-family phases being longer among the wealthier households that could afford to support one or several unmarried siblings, and shorter among the poorer households whose farmstead was too small to feed more than two conjugal units. (FRANCE, PROVINCES, HISTORY, STEM FAMILY, FAMILY LIFE CYCLE, INHERITANCE)

97.12.17 - English - M. Nabil EL-KHORAZATY, Research Triangle Institute, Rockville, Maryland (U.S.A.)

Twentieth-century family life cycle and its determinants in the United States (p. 70-109)

Fertility schedules, one of the most important vital statistics, are used to construct a new period and cohort time series macro-level data set of family life cycle/childbearing and fertility-inhibiting indices for the United States in the twentieth century. Calculation of these macrolevel indices on an annual basis is accomplished by the application of recent demographic methodologies, which require only knowledge of age-specific fertility rates. These annual sets of indices, which otherwise would require detailed biographical information on the dates of such events, are needed to fully capture demographic change and to quantitatively as certain changes infertility behavior and attitudes and, hence, describe family structure and the timing and speed of child production for better understanding of American society. (UNITED STATES, FAMILY LIFE CYCLE, FERTILITY MEASUREMENTS, DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS)

APRIL 1997 - VOLUME 22, NUMBER 2

97.12.18 - English - Anna ZARNOWSKA, Department of Social History, Institute of History, Warsaw University, Varsovie (Poland)

Social change, women, and the family in the era of industrialization: Recent Polish research (p. 191-203)

Within a framework provided by recent Polish scholarship on modernizing social change, women, and the family, the author of this article attempts to answer three basic questions: (a) Are changes in the structure of the family, resulting in the relative decline of the multigenerational family in favor of nontraditional family norms, including the nuclear family, directly related to industrialization? (b) Does the model of the urban family of the industrial era actually differ in a structural sense from the preindustrial urban family? and (c) Do changes in the economic function of the family as a consequence of industrialization lead to corresponding changes in the structure of the family, particularly in terms of gender roles? In analysing the Polish case, the author points to a number of paradoxical, yet parallel, developments that challenge many conventional assumptions about the impact of modernization on the preindustrial, patriarchal model of the family. (POLAND, SOCIAL CHANGE, INDUSTRIALIZATION, FAMILY COMPOSITION, WOMEN'S STATUS)

97.12.19 - English - Laurie BERNSTEIN, Rutgers University, Camden, NJ (U.S.A.)

The evolution of Soviet adoption law (p. 204-226)

This article traces the evolution of legislation affecting adoptive relationships in the USSR from the promulgation of adoption law in 1926 until its reform in 1968. The author argues that reforms in adoption law and legal practice mirrored political and ideological developments in Soviet history. Outlawed in 1918, adoption was reintroduced in 1926 as a stopgap response to the overwhelming problem of child homelessness, with the law taking shape in a climate hostile to the family. Consequently, adoption law did not even attempt to replicate biological relationships. Attitudes toward adoption changed in response to post-1936 profamily policies, as well as in response to problems created by World War II. By the time Soviet lawmakers revised the law in 1968, adoptive and biological families had been given legal equality. (USSR, HISTORY, ADOPTION, LEGISLATION)

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