JOURNAL OF FAMILY HISTORY

United States of America (Newark, Delaware) 12

JANUARY 1998 - VOLUME 23, NUMBER 1

99.12.1 - English - Maureen E. MONTGOMERY, Department of American Studies, University of Canterbury (New Zealand)

Female rituals and the politics of the New York marriage market in the late 19th century (p. 47-67)

This article reevaluates the role of society women in the late 19th century in the formalization of New York's high society and in shaping class identity. In doing so, it takes issue with studies that have regarded this period in New York's social history as aberrational and, instead, evaluates women's involvement in the marriage market as a determined attempt to modulate the merger of rival elites and bring stability to a metropolitan society disrupted by urbanization, industrialization, and demographic growth. It argues that female social leaders complied with, and reinforced, the dominant male class structure while at the same time expanding their participation in a public social life and enhancing their status within the family. (UNITED STATES, WOMEN'S ROLE, UPPER CLASS, MARRIAGE CUSTOMS)

99.12.2 - English - Stewart E. TOLNAY, Center for Social and Demographic Analysis, State University of New York, Albany (U.S.A.)

Migration experience and family patterns in the "promised land" (p. 68-89)

The relationship between migration experience and family patterns among residents of the North and West is examined for three time periods -- 1940, 1970, and 1990. In general, an inverse association is observed between duration of residence in the North or West and family stability among African Americans. Although selective return migration to the South contributes to this association, it can account for only a minor part of the variation in family patterns by migration history. It is concluded that there is no evidence to support previous assumptions that southern migrants carried a dysfunctional family culture with them to the North and West, and thereby destabilized the nonsouthern African American family. Rather, changes indigenous to the North and West were responsible, for example, structural changes in the economy or the emergence of an inner-city "appositional culture" that does not emphasize traditional family patterns or transitions. (UNITED STATES, FAMILY STABILITY, FAMILY COMPOSITION, INTERNAL MIGRATION, SOCIAL CHANGE)

99.12.3 - English - Arthur P. WOLF and Hill GATES, Stanford University (U.S.A.)

Modeling Chinese marriage regimes (p. 90-99)

In some parts of China people commonly raised their sons' wives. In other parts they rarely did so. This article compares evidence from two widely separated localities and suggests that the frequency of marriages involving home-raised daughters-in-law was correlated with the age at which these girls entered their future husband's household and the extent to which the practice was class related. It also suggests that this correlation was the product of marriage market forces. (CHINA, MARRIAGE CUSTOMS, WOMEN'S STATUS, EARLY MARRIAGE)

APRIL 1998 - VOLUME 23, NUMBER 2

99.12.4 - English - Avner GILADI, University of Haifa (Israel)

Breast-feeding in medieval Islamic thought: A preliminary study of legal and medical writings (p. 107-123)

The way medieval Islamic writings discuss breast-feeding reflects not only general attitudes of adults toward children but also concepts that adults held of the first stages of socialization, the status of women, and the power relations that obtained within the family. The nursling's well-being was a central point of deliberation among Muslim religious scholars as well as physicians, whose understanding of the nursling's needs and of parental sentiments is impressive. Moreover a mother's rights to breast-feed her own children and have custody of them, as formulated by Muslim jurists, constituted the foundations of a sort of female autonomy within the patriarchal domain. By having nonmaternal breast-feeding create a complex and ramified network of impediments to marriage, Islamic law made this natural activity play an important role in social life -- it influenced the way relations between different families were established, reduced the occurrence of endogamous marriages, and created semiprivate spaces. (ISLAM, HISTORY, HISTORICAL SOURCES, BREAST FEEDING, SOCIAL ROLES, WOMEN'S STATUS)

99.12.5 - English - Jörg BATEN and John E. MURRAY

Women's stature and marriage markets in preindustrial Bavaria (p. 124-135)

The authors investigate marital patterns among Bavarian women born 1819 to 1886. In particular Becker's hypothesis concerning heights and probability of marriage, namely, that likes tend to marry likes, is considered. The authors find to the contrary that the shortest women were at a distinct disadvantage in the marriage market. Other characteristics that lowered the probability of ever marrying included birth in northern Bavaria, lower class status, and illegitimate birth. It is concluded that the height-marital status relationship sheds light on the wage premium paid to married workers: The premium probably reflects greater productivity that (1) existed prior to marriage and (2) increased the likelihood of marriage. (GERMANY, HISTORY, ANTHROPOMETRY, BODY HEIGHT, MARRIAGE)

99.12.6 - English - Sylvia SCHAFER, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (U.S.A.)

Between paternal right and the dangerous mother: Reading parental responsibility in nineteenth-century French civil justice (p. 173-189)

With the enactment of the law of 25 July 1889 on the divestiture of paternal authority, French civil courts were for the first time allowed to divest parents they deemed "morally dangerous" of all rights over their children. These rights were widely perceived as belonging to fathers alone, in accordance with the provisions of Napoleonic civil law. Although the masculine foundation of parental rights appeared indisputable, the law's definition of moral danger was extremely ambiguous. This ambiguity was most apparent in the instance of poor single women. In making cases about morally dangerous mothers, authorities constructed narratives that reconfigured gendered conventions defining the distribution of authority and responsibility in the family. Only through these narrative reworkings could magistrates transform legislation centered on the codified authority of the male head of household into an effective means of regulating a feminine parental power that had no recognized status in 19th-century civil law. (FRANCE, HISTORY, LEGISLATION, PARENTAL AUTHORITY, PATERNAL RESPONSIBILITY, PATRIARCHY, MOTHER'S RIGHTS)

JULY 1998 - VOLUME 23, NUMBER 3

Children in the History of Latin America

99.12.7 - English - Ann S. BLUM, Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University (U.S.A.)

Public welfare and child circulation, Mexico City, 1877 to 1925 (p. 240-271)

Nineteenth-century trends in abandonment to Mexico City's foundling home, the Casa de Niños Expósitos, reflected changing social, economic, and political entitlements to family life. Even as liberal governments rewrote family law and reorganized welfare, abandonment remained linked to constructs of family honor and ritual kinship dating from the colonial period. But by the late 1890s, migration and economic stress had created a new poor who relied on ritual kin to resist permanent relinquishment of children to the state. The welfare bureaucracy, in turn, facilitated the acquisition of children by households of means through adoption. After the Mexican Revolution, the emerging revolutionary state centered child welfare on medicine and social hygiene but continued to rely on internment. Without social services providing material support to families, however, single mothers remained at riskfor separation from their children. (MEXICO, HISTORY, CHILD CARE, ABANDONED CHILDREN)

99.12.8 - English - Donna J. GUY, University of Arizona (U.S.A.)

The Pan American child congresses, 1916 to 1942: Pan Americanism, child reform, and the welfare state in Latin America (p. 272-291)

The Pan American Child Congresses provided a catalyst for child-focused welfare policies in Latin America. Originally organized by Argentine feminists in 1916, the congresses soon attracted many physicians and legal specialists concerned with topics such as infant mortality, child abandonment, and juvenile delinquency. Although feminists insisted more than their male counterparts that Latin American governments solve all the problems of children, both groups agreed in principle on many issues. Furthermore, women's views became evident when Latin American male physicians met with their U.S. counterparts at a 1927 eugenics conference in Cuba and refused to endorse highly racist and authoritarian measures. Instead, they worked through the child congresses and with women from the U.S. Children's Bureau. This led to protective legislation for children as well as a hemispheric Children's Code in 1948, indicating a shift in focus from the obligations of the state to the rights of children. (LATIN AMERICA, UNITED STATES, HISTORY, CHILD CARE, CHILD'S RIGHTS, CONFERENCES)

OCTOBER 1998 – VOLUME 23, NUMBER 4

99.12.9 - English - Matthew RESTALL, Pennsylvania State University (U.S.A.)

The ties that bind: Social cohesion and the Yucatec Maya family (p. 355-381)

This analysis of unstudied census materials and Maya-language notarial records explores the nature of maya familial organization and identity in colonial Yucatán, Mexico. At the intersection of the two primary units of maya society, the community and the patronym-group, existed the extended family, which was formed through marriage alliances within largely endogamous communities between strictly exogamous patronym-groups, expressed as a multiunit patriarchal household of about ten members, and given cohesion by community and patronym-group identities and by familial participation in working and owning property. Marriages may have been later and separate newlywed households less commom than previously suggested. (MEXICO, HISTORY, EXTENDED FAMILY, MARRIAGE, SOCIAL ORGANIZATION, HOUSEHOLD COMPOSITION)

99.12.10 - English - Cheryl ELMAN, Department of Sociology, University of Akron (U.S.A.)

Intergenerational household structure and economic change at the turn of the 20th century (p. 417-440)

Most older persons at the turn of the 20th century in the United States lived with a child. Family theories stress kin affiliation or joint family survival strategies as motives for coresidence. This article uses exchange theory to examine whether hierarchical and noncollectivist "elder strategies" shaped coresidence. Analysis of the 1910 Public Use Sample and linked macrolevel census data finds that the coresidence of elderly males with adult children was a function of local economic opportunities, old-age dependency, economic resources (including Civil War pensions), and remarriage alternatives. Specifically, local economic opportunities led to more coresidence, but remarriage, older men's robustness, and greater material resources led to less coresidence with a child. Older men as those in previous cohorts, held onto the resources they possessed -- including headship -- for their own use and perhaps to maintain leverage over kin. (UNITED STATES, HISTORY, MEN, AGED, COHABITATION, HOUSEHOLD COMPOSITION)

99.12.11 - English - Sheila D. ARDS, Center of Excellence for Community Development, Benedict College, William A. DARITY Jr., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Samuel L. MYERS Jr., Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota (U.S.A.)

'If it shall seem just and proper': The effect of race and morals on alimony and child support appeals in the district of Columbia, 1950-1980 (p. 441-475)

This article tests the hypothesis that judicial arbitrariness dominated alimony or child support appeals in the pre-no-fault era by analyzing data on all alimony and child support appeals in the District of Columbia from 1950 through 1980. Censored regression analysis is used to isolate the impacts of race and morals grounds for divorce on changes in alimony and child support awards from trial to appeal. The results show large race effects but small morals effects. Judicial discretion -- measured by unexplained gaps in awards -- dominated relevant economic factors in determining changes in alimony and child support awards during the pre-no-fault era. (UNITED STATES, ALIMONY, DECREE OF DIVORCE, JUSTICE)

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