Legal restrictions on marriage: Marriage and inequality in the Austrian Tyrol during the nineteenth century

Under the legal restrictions on marriage in the Tyrol and Vorarlberg region of Austria between 1820 and 1920, members of the lower classes could marry only with the prior consent of the village authorities. Local and provincial politicians justified the necessity of these laws on the basis of the overpopulation and widespread impoverishment, which, they alleged, had resulted from the rise in lower-class marriages since the onset of industrialization. An analysis of the background and objectives of these legal interventions into marital behavior, however, reveals a different picture in regard to their effect and their effectiveness. The limitations on marriage affected life most profoundly in precisely those areas where people already tended to marry less often and later in life. Where changes in marital behavior did occur, they did not conflict with traditional behavior but rather resulted from the adaptation of the latter to altered living and working conditions. Thus it was material considerations that led the group of new wage-earners to delay or even forego marriage. The analysis shows that the limitations on marriage were directed less against the supposed causes of impoverishment than towards the continuation of social inequality in marriage and the stabilization of the status quo.     

THE CONTEXT OF MARRIAGE AND CRIME: GENDER,THE PROPENSITY TO MARRY,AND OFFENDING IN EARLY ADULTHOOD*

Marriage is central to theoretical debates over stability and change in criminal offending over the life course. Yet, unlike other social ties such as employment, marriage is distinct in that it cannot be randomly assigned in survey research to more definitively assess causal effects of marriage on offending. As a result, key questions remain as to whether different individual propensities toward marriage shape its salience as a deterrent institution. Building on these issues, the current research has three objectives. First, we use a propensity score matching approach to estimate causal effects of marriage on crime in early adulthood. Second, we assess sex differences in the effects of marriage on offending. Although both marriage and offending are highly gendered phenomena, prior work typically focuses on males. Third, we examine whether one's propensity to marry conditions the deterrent capacity of marriage. Results show that marriage suppresses offending for males, even when accounting for their likelihood to marry. Furthermore, males who are least likely to marry seem to benefit most from this institution. The influence of marriage on crime is less robust for females, where marriage reduces crime only for those with moderate propensities to marry. We discuss these findings in the context of recent debates concerning gender, criminal offending, and the life course.     

Marriages among people with disabilities in 19th-century Sweden: marital age and spouse’s characteristics

ABSTRACT

While marrying was an expected event in 19th-century Western society and has been subject to much historical research, there are few studies on how disabilities influenced people’s marriage patterns and spouse selection. The aim of this analysis is to contribute clarification on this issue by examining with whom disabled men and women married and the marital age and socio-demographic characteristics of them and their spouses. In total, 188 disabled individuals born in the first half of the 19th century and who married in the Sundsvall region, Sweden, are studied. The results reveal that disabled men and women did not marry each other, and they entered into marriage at a slightly higher age than the average, although there was usually no marked age gap between them and their spouse. Endogamous patterns were primarily found regarding the socio-spatial background of the two spouses. This analysis is one of the few studies identifying the marriages among a comparatively large number of disabled people using demographic data. Their participation in the partner pool highlight their agency historically and emphasize that disability did not lead to distance from social life in past society.     

LIFE-COURSE TRANSITIONS AND DESISTANCE FROM CRIME*

Sampson and Laub (1993) provided a major contribution to the study of criminal careers by linking criminal behavior to life-course transitions, such as marriage, employment, and entry into the military. To interpret their findings, these investigators relied exclusively on control theory. In a sharp departure from that position, this study offers evidence that life-course transitions affect criminal behavior by altering relations with delinquent peers. Focusing on marriage, the analysis shows that the transition to marriage is followed by a dramatic decline in time spent with friends as well as reduced exposure to delinquent peers, and that these factors largely explain the association between marital status and delinquent behavior. The findings suggest that changing patterns of peer relations over the life course are essential for understanding criminal life-course trajectories.     

The Effect of Incarceration on Marriage and Work Over the Life Course

The current study adopts the life course framework to examine the effect of incarceration on the likelihood of becoming married and attaining full‐time employment. It is hypothesized that men who have been incarcerated will be less likely to marry and to gain full‐time employment. Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth are used to test the hypothesis. Results from the growth‐curve models support the life‐course theoretical model. Across all models estimated, incarceration is negatively associated with marriage and employment. In addition, positive milestones (e.g., education) are associated with improved chances of employment and marriage. The findings reinforce the importance of considering a multitude of life events when estimating life trajectories.     

Natural population movement and marriage restrictions and hindrances in Styria in the 17th to 19th centuries

To marry has never been an egalitarian option or everybody's wish. There have always been calculations or considerations, structural or individual hindrances and even societal restrictions for individuals to get married despite wishing to do so. Without any doubt and apart from the debate on determination or love and free choice in former times, to marry has always been a societal event, a mutual relationship between personal wishes and societal environmental expectations.And apart from all the debates on paradoxes in modernization processes, it is clear that in pre-modern times societal marriage restrictions were widespread.It is very unlikely that people should have been forbidden to marry because they should not have sexual contacts, just for morality reasons. The keys have been considerations and calculations on reproductivity, economic and social resources, social and human capital. This paper deals with aggregated vital data from four parishes in Styria, Austria, covering the outgoing 17th century until the end of the 19th century, in order to detect hints of marriage restrictions.The paper proves the well-known variety of marriage systems in pre-industrial and pre-modern times. It supports the idea that the presence of marriage restrictions hindered population growth, but the absence of such restrictions did not automatically foster more societal transparency and developmental chances in a modern sense, as mortality and inequality were very strong factors in pre-modern agrarian societies. In the end, the question of marriage restrictions was apparently posed and answered by privileged groups.     

甘肃赵村交换婚的调查

赵村是甘肃省东部地区一个典型的山区村庄.因社区闭塞,交通不便,生活条件艰苦,赵村青年男子的择偶面临很多困难.然而,为了生存下去,他们必须想出种种办法来应对其生存困境,必须通过种种变通来实现娶妻生子的目的."交换婚"等择偶形态则是赵村人适合于其生存环境的生存方式,是他们做出的一种生存的选择.     

Natural population movement and marriage restrictions and hindrances in Styria in the 17th to 19th centuries

To marry has never been an egalitarian option or everybody's wish. There have always been calculations or considerations, structural or individual hindrances and even societal restrictions for individuals to get married despite wishing to do so. Without any doubt and apart from the debate on determination or love and free choice in former times, to marry has always been a societal event, a mutual relationship between personal wishes and societal environmental expectations.

And apart from all the debates on paradoxes in modernization processes, it is clear that in pre-modern times societal marriage restrictions were widespread.

It is very unlikely that people should have been forbidden to marry because they should not have sexual contacts, just for morality reasons. The keys have been considerations and calculations on reproductivity, economic and social resources, social and human capital. This paper deals with aggregated vital data from four parishes in Styria, Austria, covering the outgoing 17th century until the end of the 19th century, in order to detect hints of marriage restrictions.

The paper proves the well-known variety of marriage systems in pre-industrial and pre-modern times. It supports the idea that the presence of marriage restrictions hindered population growth, but the absence of such restrictions did not automatically foster more societal transparency and developmental chances in a modern sense, as mortality and inequality were very strong factors in pre-modern agrarian societies. In the end, the question of marriage restrictions was apparently posed and answered by privileged groups.     

The marriage boom: Spanish and Swedish women making sense of marriage during the marriage boom

This article analyzes the marriage boom that took place during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The increase in nuptiality is analyzed in Spain and Sweden from a qualitative perspective, and the authors describe how cultural, social, economic and institutional transformations were understood by women who were in their reproductive period during the marriage boom. In-depth interviews were conducted in both places with 51 women born between 1919 and 1951. The authors argue that it is important that the ways in which the factors previously identified as decisive of the marriage boom are studied for their motivating power, and the way they were or were not made important in people's understandings of their marital practices. The results show that despite the differences between the national contexts of Spain and Sweden, three interrelated themes recurred when the interviewed women framed their marital choices: (1) the normalization of marriage as a life event; (2) religion; (3) and education and work life. The results also suggest that the women highlighted norm systems within which their choices and decisions were made, rather than describing individual choices and decisions as stemming from individual preferences and wishes.     

Marriage,Cohabitation, and Crime: Differentiating Associations by Partnership Stage

A wealth of scholarship generally finds that marriage protects against crime, but there is less consistent evidence for cohabitation. In this article, we contribute to scholarship on marriage and put forward new evidence about cohabitation by examining marital and cohabiting partnerships as transitions with distinct stages of entry, stability, and dissolution. We use within-person change models with contemporary data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to analyze these stages for the full sample and separately for men and women. The findings show differential protective associations of marriage and cohabitation depending on the stage of the partnership. Both recently formed cohabiting partnerships and stable cohabiting partnerships are associated with reductions in the level of offending, although to a lesser degree than marital relationships. Cohabiting partnerships that are stable, in that they have lasted at least a year, are associated with larger decreases in offending, particularly among women.     

‘Mixt marriages’: Ethnic and Religious Intermarriage among German-Speakers in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

Civil and religious authorities in eighteenth-century America grew increasingly concerned over the freedom with which young people chose their marriage partners. Correlating racial, religious and cultural similarity in marriage to a stable society, these authorities attempted to limit marriage and sexual choices by requiring parental authority for marriage, distributing permits to a select few to perform marriages, and criminalizing racial miscegenation. Eighteenth-century Pennsylvania German authorities supported this attitude because they associated ethnic and religious out-marriage with the weakening of the body and the destruction of society. My study uses the marriage and birth records of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania Germans to examine their marriage and sexual relationships. I discovered that Pennsylvania Germans overwhelmingly chose to marry other German-speakers, out of proportion with their population. By examining the then available works on marriage and procreation, I discovered that Pennsylvania Germans read works that emphasized the necessity and importance of intra-ethnic and religious sex and marriage for the health of their children. Pennsylvania Germans chose their marriage partners in alignment with their community’s attitudes towards those of other ethnicities and religions. A small data set further suggests that relationships with non-Germans occurred but rarely became formalized. This complicates what we know about the sexual and emotional revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; far from a linear progression of attitudes towards sex, marriage, and others, eighteenth-century Pennsylvania Germans expressed multiple, contextually-driven perspectives, and in the process they created and maintained strong ethnic communities.     

The Impact of Marital Aggression on Women's Psychological and Marital Functioning in a Newlywed Sample

The impact of husband-to-wife physical aggression on changes in wives' personal and marital well-being was examined in a representative sample of newlywed couples. The sample consisted of couples who completed baseline (time of marriage) and first anniversary assessments as part of the Buffalo Newlywed Study (n = 543). After controlling for sociodemographic variables, initial relationship satisfaction, and verbal aggression, wives who experienced physical aggression from their husbands during the first year of marriage reported increased stress and lower marital satisfaction at the first anniversary. Further, they were more likely to report separation from husbands due to marital problems during the first year of marriage. Experiences of partner physical aggression during the premarital period were associated with greater frequency of heavy drinking episodes among wives, although they were not associated with changes in average daily volume of ethanol consumed. Results suggest that among a community sample, experiences of husband-to-wife physical aggression have negative consequences for both women's psychological well-being and marital functioning.     

“…everywhere she went I had to tag along beside her”: Family,life course,and everyday mobility in England since the 1940s

Mobility is one of the most important constituents of everyday life, yet it is rarely studied historically and we know little of how it relates to changing family and life course constraints. Using data drawn from oral life histories, this article examines changes in everyday mobility over the past 60 years focusing both on changes over the life course and on the constraints imposed by family structures. We argue that, like residential migration, daily mobility has been closely related to the life course, with women especially affected by the constraints of motherhood and marriage. However, there is evidence that such constraints have changed over time, and that some older people today enjoy more mobility than they did at earlier life stages. We also argue that the independent mobility of children was closely related to the family structure in which they were situated, but that these constraints have changed much less over the past 60 years. The oral testimonies examined also highlight the variability of mobility experiences and the role of the individual in fashioning mobility behavior.     

Doing the Right Thing: Cohabiting Parents, Separation and Child Contact

Over recent years, concern has mounted at the unstable natureof cohabiting relationships compared to marital ones, and alsoabout the fact that any children from these relationships aremore likely to experience the separation of their parents thanthe children of a marital union. The discourse of the FamilyLaw Act 1996 holds that separating parents should behave ina conciliatory and reasonable way to each other, maintain contactwith their children and continue to be involved in their upbringing,and ensure that financial obligations are met. This articleuses data obtained through interviews with previously cohabitingparents who have attended pilot group meetings designed to educatethem about the needs of their children on separation, to examineto what extent parents internalize this discourse when negotiatingpost-separation parenting. The article concludes that whileparents may take on board the principles of this socially acceptablediscourse, they have their own moral rules derived from theirown histories and experiences of what it is to live their lifeand parent their child that they must marry with this discourse.The extent to which current family policy discourses and legislativeframeworks can influence the behaviour of parents is thereforemitigated by their own interpretations within the context oftheir own lives.     

EXPLAINING THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN INCARCERATION AND DIVORCE

Recent studies have suggested that incarceration dramatically increases the odds of divorce, but we know little about the mechanisms that explain the association. This study uses prospective longitudinal data from a subset of married young adults in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 1,919) to examine whether incarceration is associated with divorce indirectly via low marital love, economic strain, relationship violence, and extramarital sex. The findings confirmed that incarcerations occurring during, but not before, a marriage were associated with an increased hazard of divorce. Incarcerations occurring during marriage also were associated with less marital love, more relationship violence, more economic strain, and greater odds of extramarital sex. Above‐average levels of economic strain were visible among respondents observed preincarceration, but only respondents observed postincarceration showed less marital love, more relationship violence, and higher odds of extramarital sex than did respondents who were not incarcerated during marriage. These relationship problems explained approximately 40 percent of the association between incarceration and marital dissolution. These findings are consistent with theoretical predictions that a spouse's incarceration alters the rewards and costs of the marriage and the relative attractiveness of alternative partners.     

Jewish–Gentile intermarriage in pre-war Amsterdam

Intermarriage is generally regarded as the litmus test in the process of assimilation of ethnic-minority groups. The Jewish community in Amsterdam was a religious minority. When a Jew married a Gentile it was assumed that Judaism lost a family. Odds ratio calculations based on marriage tables for 1911–1941 show that the rate of intermarriage among Jews was much lower than among Catholics, Protestants and religious unaffiliated. Although the Jewish community might still be more homogeneous than the Protestant and Catholic communities, it was rapidly assimilating as the log odds ratios for Jews dropped more heavily. While mutual aversion is reflected in the remaining high log odds ratios for Jewish–Catholic marriages, Jewish–Protestant marriages and Jewish–unaffiliated marriages increased because of the higher propensity among Protestants to marry a Jew and the higher propensity among Jews to marry an unaffiliated spouse from the 1920s onwards. Next, we created life courses for a sample of 480 descendants from Jewish grandparents living in Amsterdam in 1941 of whom we know were married to a Gentile or to a Jew. The collected data from the Amsterdam registry allow us to test several hypotheses on preferences, opportunities and third parties in a logistic regression analysis. One's own affiliation significantly influenced the preference to marry a Gentile or a Jew. Successive marriage cohorts showed a higher chance to marry a Gentile among those who had Jewish parents at birth. A similar but weaker effect is found for those born in the old Jewish neighborhood. These differences in effect on later marriage cohorts indicate that religious and social barriers within the Jewish community had largely diminished. Opportunities like the social network of the mother and the living district during one's adolescents' age also significantly influenced the choice of a spouse.     

Jewish–Gentile intermarriage in pre-war Amsterdam

Intermarriage is generally regarded as the litmus test in the process of assimilation of ethnic-minority groups. The Jewish community in Amsterdam was a religious minority. When a Jew married a Gentile it was assumed that Judaism lost a family. Odds ratio calculations based on marriage tables for 1911–1941 show that the rate of intermarriage among Jews was much lower than among Catholics, Protestants and religious unaffiliated. Although the Jewish community might still be more homogeneous than the Protestant and Catholic communities, it was rapidly assimilating as the log odds ratios for Jews dropped more heavily. While mutual aversion is reflected in the remaining high log odds ratios for Jewish–Catholic marriages, Jewish–Protestant marriages and Jewish–unaffiliated marriages increased because of the higher propensity among Protestants to marry a Jew and the higher propensity among Jews to marry an unaffiliated spouse from the 1920s onwards. Next, we created life courses for a sample of 480 descendants from Jewish grandparents living in Amsterdam in 1941 of whom we know were married to a Gentile or to a Jew. The collected data from the Amsterdam registry allow us to test several hypotheses on preferences, opportunities and third parties in a logistic regression analysis. One's own affiliation significantly influenced the preference to marry a Gentile or a Jew. Successive marriage cohorts showed a higher chance to marry a Gentile among those who had Jewish parents at birth. A similar but weaker effect is found for those born in the old Jewish neighborhood. These differences in effect on later marriage cohorts indicate that religious and social barriers within the Jewish community had largely diminished. Opportunities like the social network of the mother and the living district during one's adolescents' age also significantly influenced the choice of a spouse.     

The demographic consequences of changing employment opportunities: Women in the Dutch Meierij in the nineteenth century

"In the nineteenth century, the demographic development of the Meierij, a region in the south-east of the Netherlands, was different from that of the rest of modernizing northern Europe. Infant mortality remained high, while it dropped elsewhere. The article shows why the current explanation for high infant mortality, which links a sustained high infant mortality to a change in feeding habits is not valid. Increased fertility due, among other reasons, to a lower marital age offers a better explanation. Changes in economic options open to unmarried women provide the clue. With fewer premarital occupational possibilities, women would have been more inclined to marry, or there would have been less pressure on them to forestall a marriage in order to profit to the full from the occupational options. More and earlier marriages meant more children were born, and also a higher infant mortality rate."     

An Economic Exclusion/Male Peer Support Model Looks at “Wedfare” and Woman Abuse

In recent years “welfare reform” has become a vehicle for many neo-conservative social commentators to invoke marriage vows as a cure for poverty and the abuse of poor women. Their basic claim is that cohabiting relationships are not only more violent than marriages, but that married couples are happier, healthier, and wealthier than cohabiting ones. A policy then of encouraging cohabitants to marry, they claim, would lead to increased family wealth and decreased family violence. We examine these claims in this article, along with the alternative argument that marriage per se is not a solution to these problems. Alternatively we propose an economic exclusion/male peer support model that explains why many cohabiting men abuse women in intimate relationships. If forcing these couples to marry is not a solution, then structural solutions are necessary, along with progressive policy suggestions that address the antecedents of poverty and abuse. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2003 Trapped by Poverty/Trapped by Abuse Conference, Austin, Texas. The authors would like to thank Desmond Ellis, Claire Renzetti, Barbara Sims, Tom VanderVen and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and criticisms.