Journal of Family History

Studies of rapto—commonly known as the theft of a woman by a man—in scholarship on Chile are extremely scarce. While research into the judicial–legal culture of colonial nineteenth-century Chile from a sociohistorical framework includes judicial files on rapto, scholars have neglected the specific rhetorical and judicial strategies deployed by individual elite legal actors in cases of rapto as an opportunity to explore women’s agency and to understand rapto as an avenue for intergenerational conflict about free will in marriage choice. In this article, I look into the judicial file of a trial of rapto by seduction and its appeal, which took place during the years 1823–1824 in Santiago. I examine the judicial and rhetorical strategies used by a father, his daughter, and her suitor’s public defender to make their claims in court through the lens of gender, honor, and class. Although the father uses rapto by seduction as a tool to hide his daughter’s consent from the judges, her willingness to elope with her suitor eventually comes to the fore and disrupts the trial. In this case, the parties turn to several judicial and rhetorical strategies not only to bolster their cases but also to argue about larger social issues and conflicts specific to the early nineteenth century, such as autonomy in marriage choice and honor.

Based on oral histories and diaries of women who lived in the Japanese colonial period, this article analyzes the role and transformation of “mothering” in Taiwan, examining how the Han Chinese patriarchal society in Taiwan responded to colonialization and modernization in the early twentieth century. It reveals that most Taiwanese women at that time married in their teens and began to take on the tasks of mothers before the age of twenty. Difference in social class served as a key element affecting mothering practices. Rural and lower-class mothers had no choice but to prioritize productive labor over physical childcare; women of the traditional upper class could afford nannies; the emerging group of “new women” hired lower-class women to help with household tasks and childcare while they developed their professional careers. In addition to the physical care of children, Taiwanese mothers put great emphasis on the education and future development of children, especially sons. However, as the custom of “daughters-in-law-to-be” was quite common, from an early age many girls faced only their “mothers-in-law-to-be” instead of their biological mothers. “Mothering” was thus absent in these women’s lives, complicating the meaning of “motherhood.”

In the Arab world, the recognized children of elite men and slave women could adopt the status of their father, ignoring the slave origin of the mother, owing to a system of patrilineal transmission. This regime co-existed with negative stereotypes toward slaves and blackness, despite the very fact that—as this study of notable families in Tetouan between 1859 and 1956 demonstrates—skin color was not the determinant factor to form part of this group. Rather, it was based on the social definition of filiation, leading to legal disputes between family members to delineate the boundaries of kinship.

In 1901, a small group of Norwegian immigrants relocated from Minnesota to Eastern Washington. The community grew quickly, with other immigrants coming directly from Norway. The group maintained a strong Norwegian character for several decades; for example, their church continued to hold services in Norwegian until the late 1920’s. Assimilation into American society was evidenced by the names the community members gave to their children, as traditional Norwegian names were quickly replaced by more typically American monikers. This paper examines the extent to which the assignment of forenames represents the assimilation of Washington’s Selbu community into the broader American society around it.

The present study attempts to understand how the interplay between differential stopping behavior and contraceptive use dynamics may have resulted in the convergence of rural-urban fertility in West Bengal, India. Using data from the National Family Health Surveys and employing sequential logit regressions, we were able to confirm that differential stopping behavior, particularly among the rural women—by adopting contraception at first parity after having a boy, or choosing modern methods over natural methods at second parity after having two successive boys—may be one of the factors that led to the rural-urban convergence of fertility.

Older Irish Catholics remember a metaphysical space or place called Limbo. This was the destination of unbaptized infants. They could never enter Heaven because the stain of original sin had not been removed. In addition, they were denied burial in consecrated ground. Fear of such eventualities drove parents to baptize as soon as possible. Nor was this a purely Irish phenomenon. In emergency cases, even baptism in utero was permitted in some parts of Catholic Europe. The centerpiece of this study is the testimonies of Irish mothers and their remembrances of the perils of Limbo, the disposal of infant corpses (in cillíní), and “churching.” Why belief in Limbo has become almost extinct in recent decades is explored, drawing on both demand and supply side explanations. More generally, considerations of Limbo, the unbaptized, and the afterlife give rise to challenging questions as to secularization and even the definition of childhood.