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Wanted: marriage partner! Partner preferences in newspaper contact adverts in the Netherlands, 1900-1955 The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Bibi Koekkoek, Hilde Bras
This study examines romantic and instrumental partner preferences in contact adverts from two Dutch newspapers, the Arnhemsche Courant (N = 283) and the Provinciale Drentsche en Asser Courant (N = ...
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‘Came to her dressed in mans cloaths’: transgender histories and queer approaches to the family in eighteenth-century Ireland The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2024-02-28 Leanne Calvert
This article engages with queer and trans scholarship to produce a methodological think-piece on how to queer the Irish family. It draws on a case study of alleged crossdressing and attempted intim...
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The Irish family, marital breakdown and the Josie Airey case, c. 1974-1981 The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2024-02-25 Deirdre Foley
Centring the role of women, particularly Josie Airey, this article outlines the activism and legal process that led to improvements in family law and the provision of civil legal aid for the first ...
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RIFNET. A new agenda for the Irish family: messy realities & messier lives The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2024-02-25 Leanne Calvert, Maeve O’Riordan
This special issue introduces new research on historical approaches to the Irish family. The articles in this collection have grown out of the Reconstituting the Irish Family Research Network (RIFN...
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Dogs in the picture: restoring the queer history of the Irish family The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Mo Moulton
Taking the Irish pianist and music teacher Dorothy Stokes as a case study, this article explores alternative formulations of kinship in independent Ireland. It analyzes Stokes’s family life from tw...
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What about the widows? Widowhood and households in Cape Town 1938/1939 The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2024-02-11 Amy Rommelspacher
At any given time, 16% of the world’s female population is made up of widowed women, though this figure varies by region. The loss of a spouse usually means the loss of economic and social support ...
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Marriages of love and convenience: The French dating market and the revolution of romantic love (19th-20th century) The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 Claire-Lise Gaillard
Did love conquer marriage between the 19th and 20th centuries in France? Does a personal choice imply a free choice? To date, no study has had access to sources that are both numerous and sufficien...
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Queering family history and the lives of Irish men before gay liberation The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2024-01-17 Tom Hulme
Historians of sexuality commonly ‘read against the grain’ of the criminal archive as a way to reconstruct both the pitfalls and possibilities of queer cruising cultures. One of the drawbacks of thi...
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Living together, loving together: pet families in the 21st century The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Joaquín Linne, Florencia Angilletta
This paper explores the configuration of families between humans and companion animals, focusing on the shifting domestic dynamics and the rise of pet families in urban milieus. These configuration...
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‘Glad to the heart to see any of my brothers’: exploring Irish family life through sibling relationships The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2024-01-07 Shannon Devlin
This article proposes using the sibling relationship as an historical lens into nineteenth-century Ireland. Often taken for granted in historiography, brothers and sisters influenced family financi...
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Did the grandmother’s exposure to environmental stress during pregnancy affect the birth body size of her grandchildren? The Polish evidence The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-12-08 Grażyna Liczbińska, Miroslav Králík
This study aimed to examine whether the exposure of grandmothers (G1s) pregnant with their daughters (G2s) to the harsh conditions of the First World War and the Great Depression influenced the per...
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Hurricanes, fertility, and family structure: a study of early 20th century Jamaica The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-12-08 Robert J R Elliott, Eric A Strobl, Thomas Tveit
This study investigates the impact of hurricanes on fertility and the role of family structure in early 20th century Jamaica. Importantly, this was a time period in which there were no storm warnin...
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Children as pawns on the national Chess board: children in Israel’s 1948 war of Independence The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-12-08 Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman
The article examines how nationalism shapes perceptions of childhood and defines the role of children in a national struggle, and the challenges of implementing these perceptions during wartime, wh...
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Dangerous liaisons, or strategies for family management in eighteenth-century Venice The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-12-08 Celeste McNamara
In 1745, a lengthy and unusual case was brought before the Venetian Executors against Blasphemy, a secular court with jurisdiction over a wide range of crimes that violated standards of morality. T...
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Personal advertising and dating culture in World War II Finland The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-12-04 Ilari Taskinen
I analyze how personal advertising affected marital and sexual culture in Finland during World War II. The practice of seeking intimate company through newspapers was nearly non-existent in Finland...
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Care and crisis: disaster experiences of Australian parents since 1974 The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Carla Pascoe Leahy, Catherine Gay
The historical influence of environmental factors on families has received relatively little scholarly attention. In this article we explore the impact of the ‘natural’ or ‘more-than-human’ world o...
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Households and communities: evolution in Homo sapiens The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-08-07 Patrick Manning
Recent developments in the theory of social evolution give support to arguments that the overall pattern of human evolution can effectively be seen through three linked but sequential mechanisms of...
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The gift of life after slavery: close-kin ownership, slavery and manumission in suriname 1765-1795 The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-06-28 Camilla de Koning
ABSTRACT Close-kin ownership, to own one’s kin, has been researched from the perspective of emancipatory strategies or economic exploitation, hereby overlooking the complexity of kinship bonds in slave societies. This paper addresses the complexities of slavery and kinship and analyses close-kin ownership from the perspective of kinship. In the process of manumission, relationships of obligation were
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Models of leaving home: patterns and trends in Sweden, 1830–1959 The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-06-20 Samuel Sundvall, Christer Lundh, Martin Dribe, Glenn Sandström
ABSTRACT In this study, we examine the development of age at leaving the parental household in Sweden between the years 1830-1959. We utilize individual-level longitudinal data from two geographically and socioeconomically different regions: the county of Scania in the very south of Sweden, and Västerbotten to the north. We use descriptive and multivariate analyses to investigate how determinants,
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The Russian peasant family in the twentieth century: a structural-typological and dynamic analysis The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-06-18 L. N. Mazur, O. V. Gorbachev
ABSTRACT The study discusses the transformation of the peasant family in Russia in the twentieth century and focuses on the materials of the budget surveys of peasant households in the Middle Urals in 1928/1929 and in 1963. The population censuses of 1926, 1939, and 1959 allow us to compare the family structure in rural areas of the Urals diachronically and to chart the evolution of the Russian peasant
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Standing on the shoulders of giants. Paternal life course effects on son’s heights outcomes in the Netherlands 1820-1960 The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-05-15 Björn Quanjer
ABSTRACT This article aims to answer the question: what makes you taller than your father? To study this intergenerational growth, conscription heights from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands are used from the period 1820–1960. A growth estimation method on the individual level is introduced to cope with the variance in growth windows in the nineteenth century, especially to estimate growth after
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Casting shadows: later-life outcomes of stature The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-05-15 Jan Kok, Björn Quanjer, Kristina Thompson
ABSTRACT The central question in this special issue is a relatively new one in anthropometric history: how did body height affect the life course? This raises the issue of whether such an effect merely captures the underlying early-life conditions that impact growth, or whether some independent effect of stature can be discerned. Further, the effects of height on later-life outcomes need not be linear
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Simulating the evolution of height in the Netherlands in recent history The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-03-23 Gert Stulp, Tyler Bonnell, Louise Barrett
ABSTRACT The Dutch have a remarkable history when it comes to height. From being one of the shortest European populations in the 19th Century, the Dutch grew some 20 cm and are currently the tallest population in the world. Wealth, hygiene, and diet are well-established contributors to this major increase in height. Some have suggested that natural selection may also contribute to the trend, but evidence
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The US baby boom and the 1935 Social Security Act The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-03-06 Gregori Galofré-Vilà
ABSTRACT In 1935, the United States passed Social Security Act (SSA) providing financial security to American families. I use the individual census data for 1940 and 1960 to show that women from states that allowed for more social spending under the SSA had substantially more children than women from states that allowed for lower social benefits. I also use a new panel of state-level fertility by parity
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Family and labour in an Angolan cash-crop economy, 1910 The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-02-25 Jelmer Vos
ABSTRACT This paper examines the composition of families in the parish of São José de Encoge, northern Angola, in the early colonial era, using a series of ‘family bulletins’ collected by the Portuguese colonial government in 1910. Encoge was one of the earliest centres of coffee cultivation in west-central Africa. While not all local families participated in this economy, the census sheds light on
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The social care-taking of the city-kids. Determinants for day-care attendance in early twentieth-century southern Sweden The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-01-09 Annika Elwert, Luciana Quaranta
ABSTRACT The introduction of a child day-care system is one of the early welfare interventions targeted towards mothers and young children that over time gained great prominence in the Swedish welfare state. Because quantitative research on day-cares in historical settings is generally scarce, in this study, we focus on the determinants of day-care enrolment in southern Sweden during the early twentieth
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Breaking secular endogamy. The growth of intermarriage among the Gitanos/Calé of Spain (1900–2006) The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-01-02 Juan F. Gamella, Arturo Álvarez-Roldán
ABSTRACT For over five centuries the Gitanos/Calé of Spain have shown a marked preference for marrying within their ethnocultural community. In the last decades, however, various Gitano groups have experienced a rise in intermarriage that is transforming their families, their identities and their interactions with mainstream society. This paper analyzes this historical transformation in an area of
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Historical trends in female nuptiality in Italy and analysis of possible underlying reasons The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2023-01-01 Jesús Sánchez-Barricarte, Roberta Pace
ABSTRACT Using a database of sociodemographic and economic variables for 16 Italian regions over a long period of time (from the late 19th century to the end of the 20th century), we analyze the historical evolution of female nuptiality. An econometric analysis (Panel Corrected Standard Errors) for the period 1900–1991 helps us to confirm the relationship established in some theories on marriage rates
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Adolescent growth and convict transportation to nineteenth-century Australia The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-11-15 Terence Donald, Kris Inwood, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart
ABSTRACT This paper explores growth patterns for British and Irish adolescents transported to Australia in the 19th century. During incarceration in Australia, the young convicts did not catch up with contemporary standards of potential stature—contrary to what we are led to expect by the existing literature and the high calorie convict diet. Rather, the experience of transportation stunted the adolescent
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‘Missing girls’ in historical Europe: reopening the debate The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-11-05 Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia, Mikołaj Szołtysek
ABSTRACT Recent research argues that discriminatory practices unduly inflated female excess mortality during infancy and childhood in historical Europe. This article reviews the existing evidence by (1) evaluating the sources that can be used to study this phenomenon; (2) providing a state-of-the-art account of the prevalence of these discriminatory practices, as well as the factors that explain them;
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Birth order, sibling size and educational attainment in twentieth century Spain The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Miguel Requena
ABSTRACT This research presents new evidence on the negative associations of the number of siblings and birth order with years of schooling among female and male Spanish cohorts born in the first six decades of the twentieth century. Special attention is given to unravelling the separate effects of both factors, sib size and birth order. Based on data from the 1991 Spanish Sociodemographic Survey (SDS)
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Nutritional status and adult mortality in a mid-20th century Gambian population: do different types of physical ‘capital’ have different associations with mortality? The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-10-04 Rebecca Sear, Andrew M. Prentice, Jonathan Wells
ABSTRACT Measures of nutritional status are often used as markers of health, at both individual- and population-level. Different measures of nutritional status – such as height or weight, for example, – may have different associations with health outcomes because they reflect both current nutritional status and the accumulation of past health experiences, but the weighting of past and present experiences
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Public unemployment relief and health during the great depression The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-09-18 Gregori Galofré Vilà
ABSTRACT This paper uses newly collected data on county-level unemployment relief recipiency in 1933 with an OLS with fixed effects and a cross-sectional border-county research design, to examine the correlation between Depression-era public assistance and contemporaneous mortality. The paper finds that in counties where the government tended to support more unemployed families, mortality was lower
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What can Europe’s history of gender bias tell us about Asia’s contemporary experience? The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-09-15 Christophe Z Guilmoto
ABSTRACT Discrimination towards females – a trait of regional demography so far deemed unique to Asian countries – has inspired historians to revisit demographic series to look for instances of gender imbalances within Europe. In this paper, we show why a proper appreciation of Europe’s experience of gender discrimination in the past may help us to understand the future of contemporary sex selection
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Infant and child sex ratios in late Imperial Russia The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-08-18 Viktor Malein, Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia
ABSTRACT This article analyses infant and child sex ratios in late Imperial Russia relying on district-level information obtained from the 1897 Russian census (489 districts). The article shows that child sex ratios were, on average, relatively low (around 98 boys per hundred girls) due to the biological female advantage: the extremely high infant and child mortality rates took a greater toll on boys
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The invisibility of Portuguese stepfamilies: the relationships between stepparents, stepchildren and half-siblings in eighteenth– and nineteenth–century Porto The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-08-07 Ana Mafalda Lopes
ABSTRACT Stepfamily relationships in eighteenth – and nineteenth-century Portugal are often invisible because of the mobility of the population. Widows and widowers did not hesitate to remarry and create blended households of first and second marriage beds even though this option was criticized by Catholic clergy and targeted by legislation penalizing widows. Portuguese legislation was harsh on stepfathers
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Health and lifespan of Swiss men born in an alpine region in 1905–1907 The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-07-25 Ella Ziegler, Erik Postma, Katarina L. Matthes, Joël Floris, Kaspar Staub
ABSTRACT Body height and body mass index (BMI) are associated with later life outcomes in present and historical populations. We examine the case study of the Swiss Alpine canton of Glarus, which was highly industrialised at the beginning of the 20th century. Our study links conscription registers to genealogical registers at the individual level in Switzerland for the first time. We analyse whether
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Remarriage and Stepfamilies in the ‘Western Islands’ of Europe: the rural Azores of Portugal in the 18th and 19th centuries The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-07-21 P. T. de Matos, Diogo Paiva
ABSTRACT This article uses parish registers, libri status animarum, and notarial records from the 18th and 19th centuries to assess the extent to which the rates of remarriage of widows and widowers in the Azores were similar to those of mainland Portugal. We consider that, despite the clear obstacles to marriage on the islands (due especially to male emigration) remarriage was in fact frequent and
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Stepfamilies across Europe and overseas, 1550–1900 The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-07-18 Lyndan Warner, Gabriella Erdélyi
ABSTRACT This special issue investigates the families arising from death and the remarriage of a parent to consider the outcomes for the children, parents and stepparents from 1550 to 1900. It investigates historical demography to establish the numbers and types of stepfamilies. The introduction sketches several themes such as: the lingering effects of parental loss; how remarriage shapes stepfamily
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Transitory inequalities: how individual-level cause-specific death data can unravel socioeconomic inequalities in infant mortality in Maastricht, the Netherlands, 1864–1955 The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 Mayra Murkens, Ben Pelzer, Angélique Janssens
ABSTRACT The decline in infant mortality played a crucial role in the health transition in the Western World. This decline among the vulnerable new-borns was however not an evenly dispersed process. Inequalities as a result of regional differences, cultural influences or socioeconomic status shaped the paths towards low mortality rates. The role of socioeconomic status in levels of infant mortality
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Gendered mortality of children and adolescents in nineteenth-century Denmark. Exploring patterns of sex ratios and mortality rates The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-06-10 Mads L. Perner, A. K. Mortensen, H. Castenbrandt, A. Løkke, B. A. Revuelta-Eugercios
ABSTRACT The relationship between gender and mortality in nineteenth-century Europe has been highly debated. In particular, historians disagree about the manner and degree to which gender discrimination affected the mortality risk of the female population. This article contributes by examining the evidence of gendered mortality differences among children and adolescents in nineteenth-century Denmark
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Indirect pathways of multigenerational persistence: the role of uncles and assortative mating in the Netherlands, 1857-1922 The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-06-08 Kim Stienstra, Antonie Knigge
ABSTRACT Recent research into intergenerational social mobility has examined the association between the socioeconomic position of grandparents (G1) and their grandchildren (G3), but it remains unclear why G1-G3 associations arise. Prevailing explanations focus on whether grandparents have a true direct influence on their grandchildren or an indirect one via omitted parental characteristics. We argue
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Years of plenty, years of want? An introduction to finance and the family life cycle The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-05-24 Christiaan van Bochove, Jaco Zuijderduijn
ABSTRACT Research suggests that until recently families in history could only avoid episodes of poverty if they put money aside. By helping to smooth consumption over the family life cycle, finance could prevent impoverishment, and is also likely to have had an effect on family life. Saving may have influenced cohabitation structures and the timing and incidence of birth, marriage, and death. That
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Height, occupation, and intergenerational mobility: an instrumental variable analysis of Dutch men, birth years 1850-1900 The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-05-19 Kristina Thompson, France Portrait
ABSTRACT Height and labor market outcomes appear to be related to one another. The taller people are, the more likely they are to have better jobs and to earn more money. This is especially the case for men. However, whether height is causally related to labor market outcomes is an open question, which instrumental variable (IV) analysis may help to answer. To our knowledge, no study has yet used IV
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Debts facing death. Discovering everyday credit practices through testaments in seventeenth-century Buenos Aires The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-05-19 Martín L. E. Wasserman
ABSTRACT To die in peace, pre-modern Catholics first had to settle their debts. They did so in debt declarations, recorded in testaments, which allowed dying men and women to indicate their creditors and debtors. We investigate a sample of 422 testaments from seventeenth-century Buenos Aires to demonstrate that debts were at the base of the local economy, and to discover some features about credit
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Financing marriage in early modern Italy: innovative dowry funds in Florence and Bologna The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-05-10 Mauro Carboni
ABSTRACT Dowering maidens was a common concern in Renaissance and Early Modern Italian cities. As urban society recognized in un-dowered young women a potential threat to its moral and social stability, what had been a pious private effort became the business of specialized agencies, with the establishment of dowry funds. This paper examines the development of marriage endowment systems from the Florentine
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The necessity of small loans: the borrowing and lending among low-income earners in early 20th century Sweden The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-05-08 Tony Kenttä, Kristina Lilja, Dan Bäcklund
ABSTRACT It is difficult for households to match a low and fluctuating income with their expenditures. One short-term strategy for managing cash-flow problems is to turn to one’s social networks for support. This article describes and analyses the borrowing and lending of small loans (corresponding to one-two days of pay) among low-income earners and the role these loans had in the household economy
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Marriage patterns of Irish convict women in nineteenth-century Tasmania The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-05-08 Isabelle Cherkesly, Rebecca Kippen
ABSTRACT Between 1840 and 1853, 4,068 Irish convict women arrived in Van Diemen’s Land, now known as Tasmania. The lives of these convicts were governed by the penal system. Convicts were kept under constant observation. While still under sentence, convicts had to follow the strict rules of the penal government. A way out of this system was through marriage. Early on, the penal government had emphasized
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Restrained freedom? Widows, blended families and inheritance in eighteenth-century urban Sri Lanka The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-05-05 Dries Lyna
ABSTRACT Challenging the optimistic thesis on female Asian agency in the early modern Dutch empire, this article studies widows’ socio-legal position in the cross-cultural setting of colonial Sri Lanka. Normative legislation and judicial records on stepfamilial feuds from eighteenth-century Dutch Sri Lanka allow us not only to understand how both litigating parties tried to work the Roman-Dutch legal
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Transgenerational effects of early-life experiences on descendants’ height and life span. An explorative study using Texel Island (Netherlands) genealogies, 18th-21st centuries The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-05-01 Jan Kok
ABSTRACT Early-life experiences can have lasting effects on health across multiple generations. The pathways of these transgenerational transmissions are difficult to explore, because of the complex interactions of social and biological factors involved. This study explores the potential role of one such pathway – inherited epigenetic modifications to gene expression – by controlling for shared environmental
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Stepmothers and stepdaughters in early modern Florence The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-05-01 Megan Moran
ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between patrician stepmothers and stepdaughters in early modern Florence. With the high rate of remarriage, stepfamilies were not uncommon though the intimate workings of these complex family relationships are often difficult to reconstruct. The account book and correspondence of Maddalena Ricasoli reveal that enduring bonds between stepmothers and stepdaughters
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Family patriarchy and child sex ratios in historical Europe The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-04-17 Mikołaj Szołtysek, Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia, Bartosz Ogórek, Siegfried Gruber
ABSTRACT Although recent findings suggest that gender-discriminatory practices unduly increased female mortality rates during infancy and childhood in historical Europe, especially in Southern and Eastern Europe, there is little research on the conditions that triggered these practices. Relying on child sex ratios (the number of boys per hundred girls in a particular age group) as a cumulative measure
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‘Missing girls’ in interwar Poland: child sex ratios and their correlates across multiple borderlands The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-04-13 Bartosz Ogórek, Mikołaj Szołtysek
ABSTRACT Our testing of the relationship between child sex ratios (CSRs) and demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural diversity across nearly 300 districts of interwar Poland around 1931 yields a picture more complicated than common explanations of high masculinization of offspring. In line with existing literature, we found district-level CSRs to be positively associated with the extent of agriculture
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‘An astonishing human failure’. The influence of gender on the image of perpetrators of infanticide in the courtroom and crime reporting in the Netherlands, 1960-1989 The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-04-12 Siska van der Plas, Willemijn Ruberg
ABSTRACT This article discusses the representation of parents who killed their children in Dutch newspapers in 1960–1989. It concludes that infanticidal women were portrayed as irrational, ill, pathetic, and passive, as well as not fully responsible for their crimes. When they displayed emotions in court and proved their love for their children, journalists pitied them, thus underlining a traditional
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Mobile land: modes of transfer – varieties of contexts The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-04-05 Janine Maegraith, Margareth Lanzinger
ABSTRACT Social and economic historical research has repeatedly shown that the buying and selling, transferring, and rearranging of pieces of land can be identified as various modes of dealing with land in many European regions from the Middle Ages onward. Land was therefore mobile. Furthermore, recent empirical studies have evidenced the existence of ‘land markets’ since the Middle Ages – not only
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A question of equity? The ‘value’ of male and female virginity in late 18th and early 19th century Athens The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-03-30 Evdoxios Doxiadis
ABSTRACT This article explores marriage payments in late Ottoman Greece through the early years of the independent Greek state and, in particular, the idea of virginity and its value in both men and women. The main focus of the article is the payment known as egenliki, paid by the bride who is entering a second marriage to a groom who has not been previously married. Engenliki is examined in conjunction
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Saving the best for last? Old age retirement among the Urban middle classes in Leiden and Regensburg (c. 1650- c. 1800) The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-03-29 Ludwig Pelzl, Jaco Zuijderduijn
ABSTRACT In pre-industrial Europe, many thousands of ‘middle-class’ individuals retired by purchasing a corrody: a contract allowing them life-long food and lodging, usually by spending their remaining years in a hospital. Given that people usually struggle to prepare for the later stages of life, this article asks whether corrodies were priced in line with the market. We study institutions that specialized
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Early-life conditions, height and mortality of nineteenth-century Dutch vagrant women The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-03-24 Kristina Thompson, Vincent Tassenaar, Sietske Wiersma, France Portrait
ABSTRACT Adult height is a remarkably accurate summary of early-life environmental conditions. Because of that, height may be negatively associated with mortality. These relationships – between early-life conditions and height, and between height and mortality – have been well-studied in modern samples of both genders, and in historical samples of men. However, these relationships are understudied
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A Re-examination of Birth Control in the First Half of Twentieth Century Japan: Yoshioka Yayoi’s Anti-birth Control Position The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-03-24 Haiying Hou
ABSTRACT The birth control movement in Japan first arose in the early 1920s. The Japanese government disapproved of birth control because it was enthusiastic about population growth to strengthen national power. Simultaneously, the movement was accompanied by a clash of ideologies among its supporters and critics in society. Existing research is especially interested in state policies and management
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Assessing gender discrimination during infancy and childhood using twins: The case of rural Spain, 1750-1950 The History of the Family (IF 1.19) Pub Date : 2022-03-21 Francisco J. Marco-Gracia, Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia
ABSTRACT This article uncovers the existence of discriminatory practices in pre-industrial Spain by examining the fate of twins. The analysis of the complete parish registers of a small rural area (17 villages) shows that female twins were discriminated both at birth and during infancy and childhood. Not only the sex ratio of twins at baptism was extremely unbalanced, but discrimination continued throughout