Marriage market in early modern Kyoto, 1843–1868

This study uses the population registers of 17 Kyoto neighborhoods to address marriage in Kyoto. Our analyses focus on the age differences between spouses and intermarriage between Kyoto natives and migrants from other provinces. Our previous analysis showed that the median age at marriage was tightly linked to life-cycle service in Kyoto with male and female ages at marriage corresponding to the end of the service period. Later analyses have shown that a third or more of the live-in employees listed as “servants” were migrants to Kyoto from other provinces, and males predominated in the migrants in the Kyoto population at ages after the service period ended. We find that migrants who remained in Kyoto married and all others left. We also find that those who remained were likely to marry Kyoto natives and the age differences between spouses was often relatively small.     

Survival strategies of widows and their families in early modern Holland,c. 1580–1750

This article analyses the impact of widowhood upon women in early modern urban society in Holland. Widows were able to maintain their households and to minimize the discontinuity with their lives when married. A remarkably egalitarian inheritance and marital property law, access to a broad range of occupations, a privileged status, an extended poor relief system, institutionalised mutual assistance and new forms of financial provisions for widows enabled widows to survive after the loss of an adult male breadwinner. However, legal rights, social provisions and economic opportunities available to women in the Dutch Golden Age and thereafter, could not prevent social polarization after women lost their spouse.     

Female serial killers in the early modern age? Recurrent infanticide in Finland 1750–1896

This article examines multiple infanticide in early modern Finland in which the same woman killed several newborns after repeated hidden pregnancies and childbirths. A well-documented case in Lohja, Nummi and Pusula Court of Assizes in 1874 is compared with nine other recurrent infanticides in Finland in the period 1750–1896. The context of the series of crimes and the reasons why it took so long to apprehend the murderers differed from the majority of reported infanticides, which were quite unplanned and the perpetrators of which were apprehended within days of the act. These offenders were serial killers who experienced a need to kill even if they were not literally serial killers according to modern conceptions of male-oriented serial killing. They did not deliberately get themselves pregnant with men in order to obtain psychological gratification from killing newborn babies. Rather, they resorted to killing several of their illegitimate babies as a solution of birth control because their first such crime went unreported or unprosecuted, probably as a result of the complicity of others. Such a perpetrator in the early modern age is labeled a ‘love-child murderess’ or a ‘burker of newborns’, depending on her relationship with the father or fathers of the victims. Serial killings of newborn babies as a solution of birth control continue to exist in modern times as serial neonaticide. It is suggested that a perpetrator of this category of crime in all ages be labeled a ‘birth controller’.     

Managing a large household. The gender division of work in orphanages in Dutch towns in the early modern period, 1580–1800

Early modern social institutions were modelled analogous to the family, and work within these institutions strongly depended upon the co-operation of women and men. This type of organization seems to be contradictory to processes of professionalization and bureaucratization. This article investigates to what extent professionalization and bureaucratization took place in early modern orphanages and how this influenced the gender division of work. By analyzing various occupations, remuneration and access to work in three Dutch orphanages it becomes clear that the frequently mentioned characteristics that made ‘typical’ women's work combinable with women's reproductive tasks, were not all applicable and cannot wholly explain female access to these occupations. Work was characterized by an increasing differentiation, hierarchy and, to a certain extent, bureaucratization tendencies. At the same time, the gender division sharpened. However, the late eighteenth century ideology of women as nurturers and the strong analogy to the role women were supposed to play within the household prevented exclusion from this domain.     

‘Rioting in goatish embraces’: Marriage and improvement in early British Jamaica

Marriages were relatively infrequent among the white population of early British Jamaica. This article examines the ideological implications of the failure of whites to marry with sufficient regularity to ensure that white population increase would allow Jamaica to become a settler society on the British North American model. It looks, in particular, at the tendency of whites to live in irregular unions, either with other whites or with black or brown concubines, and the effect that such arrangements had on perceptions of white Jamaicans as especially immoral. It connects these views with other discourses on settler societies in which improvement and frequent marriage were linked.     

The Jews of early modern Marburg, 1640s—1800

This article examines Jewish household and family organization in a middle-sized German city, the Upper Hessian regional center of Marburg, the population of which ranged from 2500 to 6000 from the Thirty Years War to the end of the 18th century. Some general hypotheses about population development, household structure, and family life conveniently summarized by Toch [Toch, M. (1995). Aspects of stratification in early modern German Jewry: Population history and village Jews. In R. P. Hsia & H. Lehmann (Eds.). In and out of the ghetto: Jewish-Gentile relations in late medieval and early modern Germany (pp. 77-89). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] serve as an organizational frame for the case study. In Toch's view, Jews' comparative wealth, as well as governmental restrictions on their settlement and marriage in central Europe, led to their having larger and more complex households than those of the Christian majority. While household enumerations over time confirm several of Toch's observations, especially the larger size of Jewish families, neither Hessian settlement policy nor local Marburg opposition prevented the Jewish minority of about 1% from keeping pace with general population growth. Moreover, Jews did not respond to their regulated living conditions and status as cultural outsiders with a family organization exhibiting remarkably more internal complexity than did Christian households.     

Violence or justice? Gender-specific structures and strategies in early modern Europe

This article aims at getting a deeper understanding of gender-specific justification of violence in early modern legal discourse and practice. The analysis focuses on structures and strategies concerning women's supposed misconduct, disobedience and sexually suspicious acts, and violence related to this. The legal cases referred to originate from the secular lower courts' proceedings of the cities Stockholm and Munich in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

In addition to acts perceived as crimes, such as rape, the term violence refers to those not necessarily qualified as wrong, such as domestic castigation. Furthermore, in this study, the subject violence also applies to discriminatory legal structures and customs. The core questions therefore are: To what extent were disciplinary and penal methods as well as other acts upon a woman's body understood as just and legitimate, to what extent and in what circumstances were they seen as violent and wrongful, and how did this reflect the contemporary gender roles?     

‘Till Death Us Do Part’: spousal homicide in early modern Russia

The history of domestic violence, let alone domestic homicide, in Russia has yet to be written. This article focuses on the legal attitudes to domestic and especially marital homicide in early modern Russia and explores types of and methods used in spousal killings. The research is based on court records in addition to laws, legal documents and other sources. Its preliminary conclusions include assumptions about scale of domestic violence, gender of perpetrators and victims, main trends in domestic homicide and their connections with available explanatory frameworks. The study reveals that Russian households were violent places accounting for different types of assaults and homicides, but in all these acts women died more frequently than men. Marital homicide occurred in all social groups in Russia. Motives and methods for marital homicides were consistent with gendered theories of power relations. Penal policies also reveal harsher treatment of women than men, pointing to the gendered definitions of power disciplining methods.     

Smallpox vaccination and the limits of governing through contagion in the Straits Settlements, 1868–1926

Vaccination involves the encounter of nonhuman biological matter and human bodies, recalibrating our susceptibility to illness and death. This boundary-crossing act has been caught in conflicting webs of moral significance, including the normalizing frameworks of public health governance and its corresponding forms of resistance. Such tensions and dynamics were a feature of smallpox vaccination - the first modern, systematic state-driven project to build population immunity. Focusing on smallpox vaccination in the British-ruled Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang, and Malacca) between 1868 and 1926, we examine the recurrent features of contentions over vaccination from the tentative beginnings of the 1868 Vaccination Ordinance to the systematic extension of vaccination in the 20th century. Engaging science and technology studies of nonhuman agency and social theories on security, we argue that such contentions demonstrate the limits of a power formation we call governing through contagion (GTC). GTC centralizes law and other technologies to normalize public health measures that combat contagious diseases, while dysconnecting populations by its strategies of control. Our history of smallpox vaccination reveals: (i) GTC relies on the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman actors in protecting populations against viral threats; law is essential but does not necessarily drive vaccination or other strategies of control and (ii) resistance to GTC, in which law plays an integral role, reinforces inequalities and differentiated treatment, what we term endemic inter/dysconnectedness.     

The Competition–Violence Hypothesis: Sex,Marriage, and Male Aggression

Sexually active men, who are not in a monogamous relationship, may be at a greater risk for violence than men who are sexually active within monogamous relationships and men who are not sexually active. The current study examines changes in sexual behavior and violence in adolescence to early adulthood. Data on male (n = 4,597) and female (n = 5,523) respondents were drawn from four waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent and Adult Health (Add Health). HLM regression models indicate that men who transition to a monogamous, or less competitive, mode of sexual behavior (fewer partners since last wave), reduce their risk for violence. The same results were not replicated for females. Further, results were not accounted for by marital status or other more readily accepted explanations of violence. Findings suggest that competition for sex be further examined as a potential cause of male violence.     

Beyond the Visible Pattern: Historical Particularities,Development, and Age at First Marriage in Transylvania, 1850–1914

The present study focused on age at first marriage in Transylvania between 1850 and 1914, a time of both social-economic change and resilient historically entrenched particularities. Based on data extracted from the Historical Population Database of Transylvania we constructed an extensive sample from settlements with a broad range of social-economic characteristics, which allowed for a comparative view into the influence of various factors on marriage timing. We examined in this sense both individual-level co-variates, such as denominational affiliation, migration background, and social-occupational status, as well as broader factors, such as the development level attained by certain settlements and the time frame. We found that the area level of development measured according to a heuristic index was in many cases more decisive than individual characteristics in shaping individuals’ constraints and opportunities on the marriage market. More significantly, the analysis showed that the ways in which the development level worked to transform marriage timing for both men and women could be explained by historically entrenched differences and specificities. At the same time, these patterns in age at first marriage, given by factors such as denomination, might be the result of other largely still invisible factors, for which the variables used are merely imperfect proxies.     

‘Civilised domesticity’, race and European attempts to regulate African marriage practices in colonial Natal, 1868–1875

This paper examines a controversy that erupted in the 1860s over attempts by European settlers in the colony of Natal to regulate African marriages. In 1869 the Natal government promulgated a law enabling the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal to regulate African marital customs. The regulations proclaimed under Law 1 of 1869 imposed a tax on every marriage contracted by Africans, restricted the practice of lobola (bridewealth) and required that brides publicly express their assent before an official witness for marriages to be valid. The implementation of these measures unleashed a storm of protest that eventually forced the government to abandon the marriage tax in 1875. Intriguingly, however, while there was African resistance to the law, it was principally the outrage of the colony's European settlers and missionaries that forced the government's hand. This paper explores the creation and implementation of Law 1 of 1869, the subsequent controversy and the abandonment of the marriage tax. In doing so it argues that in the 1860s and 1870s few white Natalians embraced the idea of innate differences between races, and instead employed environmentalist discourses of ‘civilisation’ and ‘savagery’ to explain distinctions between themselves and Africans. These discourses were gendered, for domestic family arrangements in African and European societies were used as the benchmark against which the relative levels of ‘civilisation’ of whites and Africans were measured. This attempt to regulate African family life and the controversy it provoked therefore highlights the extent to which British views of marriage and proper gender roles influenced the practice of colonialism in nineteenth century southern Africa.     

Beyond the census. Reconstructing Dutch women's labour market participation in agriculture in the Netherlands,ca. 1830–1910

Many historians have pointed out for various countries that nineteenth-century national censuses do not accurately reflect women's economic activity. This was no different for the Dutch national censuses. In this article, we argue that under-recording was especially severe in agriculture, and that this problem increased towards the end of the century. The rise in under-recording was partly due to an increased irregularity of women's work on farms, but it also reflected changing living standards and ideologies, in which work was increasingly defined as undesirable for women. In relative terms, agriculture did become less important to men and women alike because of mechanization and industrialization. Nevertheless, agriculture continued to employ many women, especially married women and daughters working on their husbands' and fathers' farms. By offering additional source material and methods for estimating women's labour force participation in agriculture on a regional level, such as relating their occupational status to their husbands', and estimating the number of days worked, we aim to offer an enhanced methodology for gauging the work of women in agriculture, which may be applied to future research.     

Faulty genes or faulty parents? Gender,family and survival in early and late childhood in the Netherlands, 1860–1900

According to the famous economist and Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen women have a significant biological advantage over men. Despite this fact women do not always live longer. In today's third world, but also in some areas in Europe at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century we find so-called excess female mortality. In this paper we examine child mortality in The Netherlands in general and gendered patterns of child mortality in particular. The focus is on differential mortality patterns by gender for infants, older children, and young adults up to age 20 in the second half of the 19th century. The analysis takes place at three levels. We start off with an exploration of sex differentials in mortality at the national level, based on the existing literature. We next examine gender differentials in mortality at the level of several Dutch communities, in the region called Twente, focussing on the differences between the city and the countryside. The final part of the analysis focuses on the micro level of the individual and his or her family in the rural community of Lonneker located in the Twente region. In this part of our study we make use of longitudinal individual level data which are analysed with event history methodologies. Our analysis clearly demonstrates that young women and girls in The Netherlands were not always in a position to fully capitalise upon their greater biological advantage and suffered instead considerable excess mortality. Especially in the rural parts of the country girls had lower survival chances. The individual level analysis confirms the importance of sex in explaining child and adolescent mortality. These gendered mortality risks can however not be attributed to social and economic household characteristics. The analysis also shows that, when death came, it literally affected the entire family. This phenomenon, better known under the label ‘death clustering’, may have been an effect of parental incompetence.     

Conflicting norms in modern British kinship: Case studies of domestic violence and competition for care in North Wales, 1920–1996

Sociologists have characterized the norms of British kinship as weakly encoded, with kin defining their mutual obligations in an ad hoc way on the basis of very general principles. This article draws a distinction between the articulation of norms and the non-verbal enactment of norms. Weak verbal encoding need not imply weak standardization or weak emotional commitment to internalized norms. The examples discussed concern the link between care of the elderly and expectations of inheritance. The study uncovered strong but unverbalized norms in five case studies from North Wales. In each case the invocation of unarticulated norms proved emotionally potent enough to undermine self-esteem as based on more conventional constructions of gender and family roles. It is argued that the conflicting norms derived from different streams in British culture and that more attention should be given to understanding the different sources of the varieties of ‘family values’, even in societies where ethnic and other ‘sub-cultural’ differences are not obvious.     

The role of information asymmetry in the market for university–industry research collaboration

This study concerns the market for research collaboration between industry and universities. It presents an analysis of the population of all Italian university–industry collaborations that resulted in at least one international scientific publication between 2001 and 2003. Using spatial and bibliometric analysis relating to scientific output of university researchers, the study shows the importance of geographic proximity in companies’ choices of university partner. The analysis also reveals inefficiency in the market: in a large proportion of cases private companies could have chosen more qualified research partners in universities located closer to the place of business.     

A note on the facticity of animal trials in early modern Britain; or,the curious prosecution of farmer Carter’s dog for murder

For a century or so there has been a lively debate on the meaning of animal trials in early modern and medieval Europe. One unresolved issue in this debate is the geographical and jurisdictional incidence of animal trials, including their facticity in Britain. This essay explores some neglected evidence in this regard, namely, three British animal trials identified in E.P. Evans’ (1906/1987) authoritative text The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals.     

Developments in household patterns in three towns in Navarre,Spain, 1786–1986

Contrary to what has been observed in other regions of Spain, the households of Sangüesa, Yesa, and Lesaca have undergone a set of transformation in their composition and structure in the last 200 years. These changes are closely linked to the economic changes that have taken place in Navarre during this period. The chief characteristic of the developments over the past two centuries has been the rise of the household with a simply structure (married couples with or without children), to which category most households now belong. A further noteworthy features is the fact that domestic servants have now almost completely disappeared.     

Developments in household patterns in three towns in Navarre,Spain, 1786–1986

Contrary to what has been observed in other regions of Spain, the households of Sangüesa, Yesa, and Lesaca have undergone a set of transformation in their composition and structure in the last 200 years. These changes are closely linked to the economic changes that have taken place in Navarre during this period. The chief characteristic of the developments over the past two centuries has been the rise of the household with a simply structure (married couples with or without children), to which category most households now belong. A further noteworthy features is the fact that domestic servants have now almost completely disappeared.