Journal of Family History

Through cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of two samples of families living in Indianapolis from 1860 to 1880 and from 1900 to 1920, I test several hypotheses on how families adjusted their use of three income- generating strategies (wives' employment, children's employment, and taking in boarders) to their social, economic and demographic milieu as well as to their changing needs and opportunities as they moved through the family life cycle. The bulk of families in both periods used at least one of these strategies at some point, relying on strategies of wives early in the life cycle and/or strategies of children later. Relative to families in the post-1860 period, families after the turn of the century relied more on the paid work of wives and daughters and less on boarding and sons' employment as sources of income.

Sharp controversy still exists over whether the Russian proletariat on the eve of the 1917 revolution comprised an urbanized, class-conscious community or a mass of semi-urbanized peasants rebelling against an alien industrial regime. We use published and archival data (church marriage records, county council statistics, and St. Petersburg worker blacklists) to argue against the "peasant" school. Specifically, we demonstrate the existence of an urban, working class community by analyzing the association among (1) frequency of urban marriage with spouses coming from different geographical origins, (2) industrial militance, and (3) rural socioeconomic conditions that turned peasants into proletarians.

Analysis of the fertility decline in Bulgaria shows that the perception of Bulgaria as an 'anomaly' in terms of its demographic development is based on a conservative interpretation of the demographic transition theory. The features that distinguish Bulgaria from the western European countries (faster decline, persistence of early and universal marriages, etc.) are generally accounted for by the specific social, economic, cultural, and political conditions. These findings suggest that the speed of the fertility decline and the means through which it is achieved are affected by a complex interaction between cultural and economic factors that are often difficult to distinguish in terms of primacy.

The focus of the study is the population of the Cycladic island of Mykonos, Greece, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. An overwhelming preponderance of nuclear households was found there in the mid- nineteenth century. The inheritance system facilitated the observed rules of neolocality. At the same time, the marriage pattern was clearly Mediterranean, i.e. with rather low age at first marriage for females, high for males, and low levels of permanent celibacy. Over the period of the study a gradual move away from this pattern was observed, mainly due to an increase in the female age at marriage. These findings are in line with other evidence from southern Mediterranean Europe, and indicate the strong influence of common socio economic and probably cultural elements.

While cultural rules are important in determining the structure and size of households in populations, economic and demographic constraints are of equal, if not of greater, importance in determining household characteristics. This paper argues that the demand for labor having certain characteristics (related to skilling, monitoring costs, and the capacity to signal trainability to prospective employers) has played an important role in shaping household structure and size in prewar Japan both through its indirect impact upon the vital rates and through its direct impact on who stays in the household and who goes out on a temporary and/or permanent basis. The diffusion of rice cultivation agriculture and by-employments during the Tokugawa period changed the demand for farm household labor and led to a regime of moderate sized stem family households. Analysis of a data set with economic and demographic data for approximately 1,000 towns and villages circa 1930 bears out the importance of the demand for labor in conditioning household size and structure in prewar Japan.

In order to study geographical mobility at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, we construct the biography of two cohorts of individuals born in the villages of Chezery and Forens during the periods 1871–1880 and 1901–1910. We seek to define the boundaries of emigration from that area and look for successive migrations. Movers are identified in the census schedules of a set of 580 communes surrounding the place of birth. Migration is studied according to sex, age, familial history and individual activity; and the features of movers and stayers are compared.

An important line of research concerning historical fertility patterns in currently developed countries of Europe has concluded that, prior to the fertility transition, marital fertility was essentially constant over time, and deliberate fertility control was virtually unknown. It has been argued that variations over time in overall fertility were largely the consequence of variations in nuptiality. Other researchers have challenged these views and present evidence for the existence of a significant minority of fertility controllers in pretransition populations. In this article, we find support for this second view and argue that (1) there was significant, non-random variation in marital fertility over time, prior to the transition; (2) in many cases, this variation in marital fertility was large relative to contemporaneous variations in nuptiality; and (3) in a substantial minority of the cases, the variation over time in pretransition marital fertility was so large that it is suggestive of deliberate fertility control. Thus, our findings question the view of fertility transition as an innovation in deliberate marital fertility control. While most of our evidence is based on data from England and Wales, we find corroboration of our key results in other European data.

Retirement possibilities in nineteenth-century Iceland were largely restricted to residing within the household of an offspring. Using evidence extracted from the national census of 1901 we attempt to evaluate the importance which the availability of offspring played the household position of elderly married women and widows. The results indicate that women who were forced to give up headship without the possibility of retirement within the household of an offspring had on average fewer children alive than those who managed to exchange headship for residence within the home of a married child. However, married women tended to retain headship long past the age of 60, whereas the loss of a spouse usually resulted in changes in household position. We find that there existed a closer correlation between the number of surviving children and the household position of widows than was the case as regards married women.

Was polygyny stopped by the Christian Church? Probably not. In the Middle Ages, as in other ages, powerful men married monogamously, but mated polygynously. Both laymen and church men tended to have sexual access to as many women as they could afford. But first-born sons were allowed a legitimate wife, on whom they got legitimate heirs. And latter-born sons were often celibate—that is, ineligible to sire heirs, though not chaste—that is, ineligible to sire bastards. Church men, like laymen, sought wealth to provide for their women and children. To get it, church men used canon law. Authorities like Gratian and Lombard insisted that “mutual consent” made a marriage. That undercut parents' ability to impose celibacy. And church bans against incest, divorce and remarriage, concubinage, wet nursing, and maybe even incontinence kept laymen from rearing heirs. That let the men who filled the monasteries come into their fathers' estates by default. In short, both church men and laymen practiced polygynous mating. At the same time, both approved of monogamous marriage. There was no conflict in either case. The conflict came when they tried to sow their seeds on the same finite plot. Neither wanted to get cut out of an inheritance.