Journal of Family History

This article eavesdrops on testimonies of court cases seeking damages for adultery in the late 1800s in colonial Thembuland, South Africa. It explores issues of gender, power, agency, and sexuality in this period and region. These testimonies suggest a picture that sounds a corrective to that of available studies. The article finds that domestic conflicts, especially their dramatic manifestation in extramarital relationships, were already features of life before the social disruptions brought on by late-nineteenth-century industrialization and the migrant labor regime and twentieth-century urbanization in South Africa. Family tensions, and extramarital relationships especially, were rooted in contradictions inherent in the changing gender relations of power within African families themselves. These testimonies also reveal that the precolonial ideal that constructed women as chattel and without legal standing, contrasted sharply with the very different picture of women’s freedom that the prevalence and conduct of extramarital relationships suggest.

This article reviews the wills recorded in a rural county in southern West Virginia over a seven-decade period. It analyzes changes through time in the division of property by gender and implications about the meaning of gender within the context of the history of the United States and the women’s movement. The analysis is grounded in studies of Southern Appalachian culture and argues briefly for an ecological model in the examination of inheritance and property distribution.

The aim of this article is to study the bourgeois family in liberal Spain. It contains an analysis of aspects such as the concept of family transmitted by liberalism; the relation between public and private life; and the different roles attributed to men and women in the family, in society, and in the economy. A unique insight into these phenomena can be gained from the author’s main research source, the private archives of the Olózagas, an important bourgeois family in the historical context of the establishment of liberalism in Spain. Revealing conclusions can be drawn from an analysis of these private records about the liberal conception of the family, the significance it acquired, the new moral values extolled by the bourgeoisie, and the objectives sought with the implantation in society of this model of the family.

This article examines child adoption discourse to investigate the changing cultural conceptions of children, family, and individual rights. Through an analysis of Irish child adoption debate from 1949 to 1999, the author explores the relationship between the worldwide individual rights imperative and culturally specific, national ideals of family. This analysis reveals two general policy dynamics. First, these debates reveal how policies are often “discursively dependent.” The seemingly arbitrary framing of a social problem in one era sets the agenda, language, and framework for debate in future periods. Second, they demonstrate how state social policies are complicit in the changing social construction of family and help constitute “motherhood,” “fatherhood,” and “childhood” as core social categories and as inalienable individual rights and identities. Concretely, in the case of Ireland, these dynamics have together yielded an otherwise unanticipated history of adoption policy and policy discourse.

In the spring of 1672, in Milan, Angela Visconti was convicted for having forced her fifteen-year-old daughter, Margherita, into prostitution. The case of Angela and Margherita Visconti demonstrates the ways in which sexuality and prostitution could and often needed to be employed by large strata of poor women to escape misery and to reduce the gap between their standard of living and that of the higher classes. In the life of the lower orders, it did not represent an exceptional and disturbing feature; rather, it was a necessary survival strategy to adopt in particularly difficult periods. The trial also offers intimate insight into how the moral norms of the Counter-Reformation, despite their permeation in all aspects of seventeenth-century society, could be challenged for the pursuit of material benefits.

Using account books and household registers from a production team of Qin village in Jiangsu Province, China, this article examines the changing laborer-to-dependent ratios in the peasant households over the family life cycle and their effects on income disparity within the collective in the 1970s. It demonstrates that birth control in the late 1970s caused remarkable changes to the family cycle of the households, which in turn affected their economic situation in different phases of the cycle. Moreover, the changing family cycle interwove with different labor remuneration systems to shape economic differentiation in the collective. Income inequality among the households was the greatest in the early 1970s under the egalitarian system and greatly reduced in the late 1970s when work incentives were introduced to the village.