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The Character of Familial History, Its Limitations and the Conditions for Its Proper Pursuit
Abstract
This is a deliberately controversial piece, deriving the duties of the historian of the family from the ethical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. It criticizes the following tendencies in the treatment of the subject: the tendency to read history backwards (the Whig interpretation of history), to see it in terms of the doctrine of modernization (disastrous for the history of the family), to fail to recognize that familial change goes forward at the pace of social structural change, the slowest of all paces of change. The notion of approaches (a demographic approach, afeminist approach and so on) is rejected and the subject is defined as one of those within historical sociology, the type of all social science. An appendix deals with misinterpretations of the introduc tion to Household and family in past time.
... Although it is said that historians are subjective and biased in their interpretation of the history they write (Marwick, 2001:1, 39), Aldrich (2003 draws attention to Laslett's (1987) comments on the responsibilities of historians. These he describes as being three-fold: ...
... • historians of education fill the gaps in knowledge and capture and include the experiences and perceptions of ordinary members of society (Laslett, 1987); ...
Since the political changes in South Africa, much has been done to critically examine and review historical records and to strengthen the teaching of history in schools and higher education institutions. History of education studies is both an academic discipline and an applied field of knowledge. The latter requires developing students' research capacity in a diversity of relevant methodological approaches, including expertise in conducting oral history interviews. Key aspects of oral history research are dealing with the theoretical, procedural and practical elements of the methodological process and the contextualisation of the research within the broader historical-educational context. This paper explores the challenges of teaching oral history research in an ODL context and reports on students' perceptions and experiences in planning and conducting oral history interviews in diverse social contexts as an essential aspect of their studies in the compulsory module "South African Education in Contex" in the BEd Honours programme.
... Although it is said that historians are subjective and biased in their interpretation of the history they write (Marwick, 2001:1, 39), Aldrich (2003 draws attention to Laslett's (1987) comments on the responsibilities of historians. These he describes as being three-fold: ...
... • historians of education fill the gaps in knowledge and capture and include the experiences and perceptions of ordinary members of society (Laslett, 1987); ...
Throughout the centuries, irrespective of the nature of the society or culture, social history seems to have been narrated or written by the victor glorifying his/her own cause.1 The voice of the ordinary person is rarely captured in standard historical works and consequently research in this area is certainly warranted and has currently become a vibrant field of research. With this article the author intends to fill one of these gaps in the narrative of social history and focuses specifically on the experiences of teachers who taught under a previous education system in South Africa, namely Bantu Education.
... Depending on the time, between 60% and 90% of widows aged 45 and over shared a household with one or several of their children. The absence of a marked decline in the frequency rate in the second half of the century is in line with the Laslett expectation that family patterns evolve much slower than the forces of economic change (Laslett, 1987). The difference between 1834 and the other years is partially due to the nature of the sources. ...
Widowhood has been a strongly gendered experience, and elderly widows, in particular, have traditionally been seen as one of the most vulnerable groups in society. This article observes remarriage behaviour and widows’ living conditions in the Russian Baltic province of Livland in the post-emancipation era. Detailed findings are presented for one community in the parish of Paistu and two communities in the parish of Helme. The article combines cross-sectional and longitudinal population data with community court records. The article aims to show that if the economic situation of the widowed people improved in the post-emancipation era, older widows (>40) increasingly used possible alternatives to remarriage. The area of investigation was characterised by low propensity to remarry (less than 20%) and the likelihood of remarriage among the landless diminished over the course of the nineteenth century, but among landholding peasants, the decline became more pronounced in the second half of the century. The vast majority of the farmer widows and over half of the landless widows lived with their children, unmarried or married. The upkeep of the elderly was arranged through intergenerational cohabitation both among the farmers and the landless. Court records indicate that farmers’ widows were properly provided for and, if the children happened to be reluctant, the court compelled them to fulfil their legal obligations to their mother or stepmother. The average number of years spent in widowhood was 19 years and approximately 60% of all women widowed between 1834 and 1885 lived longer than 65 years.
... Among the pioneering works of the sixties and seventies, we find the database used by the group of researchers at the Baltimore School led by Robert Fogel and Engerman (1974) to study the development of railroads and American slavery. These works were followed by the outstanding work of the Cambridge Group, headed by Peter Laslett, for the history of population, family size and changes in social structure and demography (Laslett and Wall 1972;Laslett 1987). ...
This article discusses the application of new technologies, software coding and computer analysis in the social sciences and humanities, mainly in the field of economic history. In the last two decades, the use of new computer technologies among historians to develop theories and solve questions has fostered a vibrant historiographical debate. However, these new digital tools have largely been used as an end in themselves, rather than as a means to develop hypotheses and answer questions. This has prevented researchers from fully exploiting such technologies in their field. In this article, I discuss how I designed a new multi-relational database using the “Access” package and SQL language to test the “industrious revolution” hypothesis and present the “vicarious consumption” theory as an alternative model for analyzing the eighteenth-century circulation of Chinese goods in the Western Mediterranean region. It presents the cross-referencing method I used to analyze the historical information I collected, mainly from probate inventories and trade records. This method makes it possible to navigate through the data in a way that goes beyond the traditional use of “excel” tables.
... (For an analysis of misunderstandings see Peter Laslett's sarcastic responses. Laslett 1987) modelling experiments. The other solution, and this is what seems most acceptable to us, is to accept Philip Kraeger's proposal and give up thinking in terms of universalistic regimes and adopt instead a regionally and temporally limited frame of reference (Kraeger 1986). ...
... De talán érdemes a következő kutatások során az itt közreadott adatokon, a felvetett szempontokon, a bemutatott különbségeken elgondolkodnunk. Hogy Peter Laslett (1987) gondolatával fejezzük be írásunkat: "lehet, hogy nem tudjuk ...
1. BEVEZETŐ A történeti vizsgálatok tapasztalata szerint a népesség számát, összetételét tekintve sohasem stabil, még az iparosítás előtti korszakban sem, pedig arra nézve a legtöbb kiszámítható mutató, eltekintve a periodikusan ismétlődő ka- tasztrófáktól, viszonylag lassú változásokat jelez. Az elmúlt évtizedek kutatásai szemléletesen bizonyították azt, hogy a változások moderátorai (a népmozgalmi eseményeknek mind irányítói, mind színterei) elsősorban a családok és a ház- tartások. A társadalomtudományok (antropológia, szociológia, demográfia és történettudomány) korábbi megállapításaival ellentétben azonban a családokat és háztartásokat a sokféleség jellemezte az elmúlt évszázadokban, amit világo- san bizonyítottak azok a kutatások, melyek megindítása főként a Cambridge Group és ezen belül elsősorban Peter Laslett nevéhez fűződik (Laslett 1966, Laslett - Wall 1972). A családdal és háztartással kapcsolatos történeti demográfiai kutatásoknak az 1970-es évek elején kibontakozó első hulláma a változások feltárásán mun- kálkodva elsősorban területi és kisebb mértékben társadalmi különbségekben gondolkodott (Wall - Robin - Laslett 1983), s a szaporodó kutatásokat rendsze- rezni kívánó kísérletek főként területi alapú, Európa nagyobb régióira nézve jellemzőnek vélt modelleket vázoltak fel (Hajnal 1965, 1982; Laslett 1977, 1983). Részben az antropológiai kutatások (Hammel 1990; Hammel - Friou 1997), részben a kelet-európai forrásanyagok vizsgálatának tapasztalatai (Mitteraeuer - Kagan 1982; Kaser 1997; Faragó 1985, 2003a) azonban rávilá- gítottak arra, hogy a hagyományokra, a múlt tapasztalataira épülő kulturális (etnikai, felekezeti és szokásrendbeli) különbségeknek, illetőleg az együttélési formák kulturális diffúziójának is nagy szerepe lehet a különböző család- és háztartástípusok keletkezésében, működésében és területi/társadalmi elterjedé- sében.
... See the second paragraph ofLaslett (1987). My interest in Laslett also lies in ascertaining the meaning he gives to "questions of an ethical type." 2 See the last section on summary and conclusions inKant (2003b) 3 See the introduction ofBourdieu (1983, pp.242-243); this defense of economics by a professional sociologist/anthropologist is of interest in itself. ...
In this exploratory chapter, I examine how the disciplines of forest economics, capital theory and ethics, insofar as they
pertain to decisions taken over time, each provide a lens with which to view the other. More specifically, I read texts of
Kant, Laslett, Bourdieu, Cowen-Parfitt and Mitra-Wan-Ray-Roy and attempt to place the general theory of inter-temporal resource
allocation within a larger conversation on intergenerational justice taking place in political and sociological theory. I
thereby seek to develop a vocabulary for exploring alternative possibilities for social, political and communal bonding by
giving meaning to terms such as sustainability, efficiency and equity for the ‘ optimal’ allocation of common or environmental
(measurable or non-measurable) resources over time.
... See also the collection of articles in the volume Family History at rhe Crossroads (edited by Tamara K. Hareven and Andrejs Plakans in 1987), Stone (198 1). and Laslett (1987). ...
"The article presents a brief overview of the historical study of the family in Spain, and deals with household work patterns, labor migration, adaptive strategies of households, and property devolution. From a belated and rater timid beginnings in the early part of the 1980s, the growth of this field in recent years has been noteworthy. The articles included in this volume are fitting testimony to the maturity achieved by this discipline in a very short amount of time. There are many important methodological and conceptual challenges facing family historians in Spain today. If they are able to respond to them successfully, the future of the discipline will be a bright one indeed."
The paper analyzes family and household types in the mid. 19th century Vilnius and Kaunas gubernijy. The research is based on the large-scale dataset composed of the archival census-like listings of individuals by family units and defined as inventories. The dataset covers the inventories from 1847 and it includes around 20 thousand individuals. Based on the Hammel and Laslett (1974) methodology the research identifies nuclear, extended, and multiple-family households. The research is guided by Hajnal’s (1982) theory on the North-Western and Eastern European household systems. The former could be characterized by the dominance of the nuclear family households. Empirical analysis proves that around 40 percent of all households were nuclear family households. On the other hand, multiple-family households were not dominant. Thus, the main findings corroborate the idea that there was a transitional zone between the Eastern and North-Western household systems in the western part of the tsarist Russian empire.
This article examines the characteristics of Italian families with a female family head in the Italian Population Census of 1931. The aim is to assess the spread and distribution of female-led families in Italy, and to analyze, in demographic and socio-economic terms, the characteristics of these families and the women who led them. Differences between these female-led families and those with male family heads are highlighted in terms of demographic characteristics, social status and geographical distribution. Female-family heads were mostly widows and were particularly numerous among the very rich and the very poor. As regards territorial distribution, female family heads were more numerous in the north and south than in the centre, and they were more common in cities than in the countryside. Many characteristics of these female-led families can be traced back hundreds of years.
The article considers one of the issues of the history of everyday life and family history related to the study of childhood as a stage of life. The study is focused on the philistinism of the city of Kazan in the first half of the XIX century, being the most numerous layer of citizens. The analysis of archival documents allowed us studying such aspects of the daily history of philistinism as the age limits of childhood, attitudes toward children in philistine families, mass behavior and individual decisions, as well as the emotional side of relations between adults and children. The study of the issue allowed us coming to the conclusion that the social status of children, their attitude to childhood and children among the Kazan philistinism largely retain the features inherent in a traditional pre-industrial society. In everyday practices, childhood was not yet perceived as a separately recognized and designated life stage, which was reflected in the philistine's value system. Philistines often got rid of illegitimate children in many ways, sought to include the child early in the solution of issues of maintaining themselves and the family, as well as removed them from the family by giving them for apprenticeship or working with strangers. However, the predominance of a rational attitude towards childhood did not exclude a positive emotional color in relation to children
This article produces the first findings on changes in household and family structure in England and Wales during 1851–1911, using the recently available Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) – a complete count database of individual-level data extending to some 188 million records. As such, it extends and updates the important overview article published in Continuity and Change by Michael Anderson in 1988. The I-CeM data shed new light on transitions in household structure and family life during this period, illustrating both continuities and change in a number of key areas: family composition; single parent families; living alone; extended households; childhood; leaving home and marriage patterns.
Történeti demográfiai évkönyv
Enumeration, even the contemporary census, cannot be characterized as neutral and objective data collection; official categories both shape and are shaped by national cultures. This article examines the forms, laws, and procedures of Japanese household registration (koseki) and national censuses in three cases from the modern period (1868 to post-World War II). Each case isolates a particular time period to show how broad political cultures, such as Westernization, the development of state welfare, and democratization, were codified or reflected discursively in enumerative programs. In each case, categories shifted the substantive and practical meanings of individuals in families and of household heads in relation to the state. In the early Meiji period (1868-1912), an aristocratic, head-centric social order was imposed on all classes through household registration. By the late Meiji and through the Taisho (1912-36) and early Showa periods (1936-89), census categories reflected a new household model based on economic and spatial relations. In the reconstruction period following World War II, the household register embodied the dramatic changes to the civil code that established equality of sexes and the nuclear family as the fundamental social unit. By the 1960s, however, census forms reflected a return of national cultural discourse to hierarchical, extended-stem family households.
In 1819 José Ignacio do Couto Moreno composed this sentimental poem about his adopted hometown, a small river port in the interior of Minas Gerais. He felt compelled to write it after suffering considerable ribbing by his colleagues during a festive occasion in Rio de Janeiro. Couto Moreno was homesick, and his fellow partygoers could not resist teasing him for demonstrating nostalgia for home and hearth. They challenged him incredulously, “What possible attraction could such distant and brutish backlands hold?”
In this study of landownership, life-cycle effects, and household composition in a rural Appalachian community, we examine the nature of family strategies in a subsistence-oriented economy. Baseline ethnographic data from 1942 are linked through genealogical information to data on households from the manuscript agricultural and population censuses of 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900, and 1910. The great variability in household composition over this period indicates the necessity of observing household arrangements at many points in time. In 1880 and 1900 there was a relationship between landownership and household composition, controlling for age of the head of household, with young owners twice as likely to head complex households as young nonowners. This suggests that the family strategy of bringing additional kin into the household--usually as farm laborers--was a privilege of property ownership. Data on surplus food production show that this strategy of family extension primarily represented a way to stave off economic disaster rather than a response to increased economic opportunity. In addition, strong family group networks, observed in the 1942 ethnography, provided another survival strategy, making possible the reproduction of marginal and below-subsistence-producing farms through interhousehold economic cooperation.
The articles in this special issue of Continuity and Change arose from a workshop held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, between 9 and 11 September 1999, hosted by the Universitat de les Illes Balears. The workshop was called to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of another conference, that held in Cambridge at the Faculty of History and at Trinity College in September 1969. It was this conference in 1969 that resulted in the publication of Household and family in past time: comparative studies in the size and structure of the domestic group over the last three centuries in England, France, Serbia, Japan and colonial North America, with further material from Western Europe , which itself has just celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. Household and family in past time (hereafter abbreviated to HFPT ), in part largely due to the ‘analytic introduction on the history of the family’ contributed by Peter Laslett, subsequently became a seminal work in the field. It not only mapped out the methodological groundwork for the quantitative study of the historical co-resident domestic group, but perhaps unwittingly helped define a research agenda into comparative familial and social structural history that was followed for many years by Laslett, his colleagues at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, and researchers from around the world. It became in a sense a manifesto, and one with which Peter Laslett personally was inexorably linked. Thus, with the sad death of Peter on 8 November 2001, this special issue of Continuity and Change took on a new double purpose: not only to mark the path-breaking 1969 conference and the subsequent publication of HFPT , but also to pay tribute to the remarkable life and work of Peter Laslett.
The long-term development of the households of landed peasants was investigated longitudinally in one village, and cross-sectionally in several parishes in northern coastal Sweden. The results showed a dominance of complex family households in a stem family system during the 1700s and development toward simpler family households in the 1800s. Demographic, economic, ecological, geographic, and, to some degree, cultural factors and their changes over time were taken into consideration in an explanation of this transition.
Enumeration, even the contemporary census, cannot be characterized as neutral and objective data collection; official categories both shape and are shaped by national cul - tures. This article examines the forms, laws, and procedures of Japanese household registration (koseki) and national censuses in three cases from the modern period (1868 to post-World War II). Each case isolates a particular time period to show how broad political cultures, such as Westernization, the development of state welfare, and democ- ratization, were codified or reflected discursively in enumerative programs. In each case, categories shifted the substantive and practical meanings of individuals in fami- lies and of household heads in relation to the state. In the early Meiji period (1868- 1912), an aristocratic, head-centric social order was imposed on all classes through household registration. By the late Meiji and through the Taisho (1912-36) and early Showa periods (1936-89), census categories reflected a new household model based on economic and spatial relations. In the reconstruction period following World War II, the household register embodied the dramatic changes to the civil code that established equality of sexes and the nuclear family as the fundamental social unit. By the 1960s, however, census forms reflected a return of national cultural discourse to hierarchical, extended-stem family households.
Periodization is a major element in historical interpretation. The remarkable changes in the American family since World War II are reviewed in conjunction with three principal frameworks—dichotomous, secular trend, and episodic schemes—for organizing the dimension of time in the historiography of the family. How these recent episodes relate to longer-run frameworks is explored. Metaphors or models of change in family history need to be used more consciously and explicitly.
This paper takes as its starting point the historical debate about the respective roles of family and state in providing, where necessary, for the elderly population. Using the original data cards from the New Survey of London it is possible to consider this in the light of the experience of the working class in London in the early 1930s by analysing data on household composition and income. This is the first time that data on household composition have been assembled for the period after 1881 and before the Census authorities themselves began systematically publishing results from 1951. The picture which emerges, supported by analyses of the income of the elderly, suggests that in this period the role of the family was small, though important no doubt in certain critical situations. It is recognised however that analyses of household structure go only part of the way in illuminating the very complex patterns of assistance which existed. We go on therefore to consider the limitations of this approach and speculate briefly on wider kinship networks, and their potential for assistance.
It is now roughly a quarter of a century since the proponents of a new social history of early modern England offered students of the period a novel agenda and an unprecedented opportunity. Prior to the 1960s social history had been variously understood as the history of everyday life, of the lower classes and popular movements, or as a junior partner in the relatively recently-established firm of economic and social history (occupied in the main with the study of social institutions and social policy). As such, it had produced more than a few pioneering works of outstanding quality and lasting value (some of them about to enjoy a revived recognition after decades of relative neglect). But it was not a field close to the centre of historical preoccupation. It was at best contextual, at worst residual.
From the early 1960s, however, came a call for a social history of a new type, one conceived as the history of social relationships and of the culture which informs them and gives them meaning. The new agenda was deeply influenced by the social sciences and envisaged an ever closer relationship with sociology, social anthropology and demography. Peter Laslett wrote of ‘sociological history’ or ‘historical sociology’ and Keith Thomas of the need for a ‘more systematic indoctrination’ in the concepts and methodologies of the social sciences. As applied to history, all this was both radical and liberating. In the face of an established curriculum which appeared in many respects restrictive and in some dessicated, it proposed a massive and necessary broadening and deepening of historical concern: the creation of a range of historical enquiry appropriate to the preoccupations and understandings of the late twentieth century.
This article examines the family and household patterns of widowers and widows in England and Wales between 1891 and 1921 in terms of the proportion of widowers and widows who lived with never- or ever-married children, servants, or inmates, with nonrelatives only, or on their own. The absence of marked change between 1891 and 1921 in the frequency with which elderly widowers and widows lived with a married or never-married child are in line with the Laslett [J. Fam. Hist. 12 (1987) 263.] expectation that family patterns evolve only slowly, certainly much slower than the forces of political and economic change. Where changes can be detected, as in the decline in frequency of coresidence with servants or inmates, these changes were experienced by the younger as well as the older widowed and by married people. Apparently, the residence patterns of the elderly widowed changed due to the introduction of means-tested old-age pensions in 1910. A second investigated is the extent to which the socioeconomic environment influenced the residence patterns of the widowed in a given time period. The effect in general proves to be weak with little difference between one environment and another in the frequency with which widowers coresided with their children and evidence of gender balancing of the household (relatively more widows living with sons and more widowers with daughters) visible only in agricultural environments.
In this article, the author explains how the support of new technologies has helped historians to develop their research over the last few decades. The author, therefore, summarizes the application of both database and genealogical programs for the southern Europe family studies as a methodological tool. First, the author will establish the importance of the creation of databases using the File Maker program, after which they will explain the value of using genealogical programs such as Genopro and Heredis. The main aim of this article is to give detail about the use of these new technologies as applied to a particular study of southern Europe, specifically the Crown of Castile, during the late modern period. The use of these computer programs has helped to develop the field of social sciences and family history, in particular, social history, during the last decade.
The family forms of historic Europe have been fascinating in their variety. Their importance for the historical development of our continent would be difficult to exaggerate; for our relationship with the peoples of the other continents of the world as well. This book is an attempt to recover the different familial systems and compare them with one another. The studies range from Russia, Poland, Hungary and Austria to Scandinavia, Flanders and Britain. All the influences which have affected the character and composition of European households are taken into account. The analysis covers their function as productive work groups, in the procreation and bringing up of children, and in the support of the elderly, and their relationship with the wider society and its norms along with its political organization, central and local. Claims that inheritance customs and inheritance practice and the occupation of the household head exerted a powerful influence on the size and composition of households are subjected to rigorous and systematic investigation.
This is an extremely important collection of essays in historical social structure. The volume represents the first attempt to examine in historical and comparative terms the general belief that in the past all families were larger than they are today; that the nuclear family of man, wife and children living alone is particularly characteristic of the present time and came into being with the arrival of industry.
The author reviews the findings presented by Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber in their analysis of trends in the incidence of and age at marriage in fifteenth-century Tuscany. The validity of their findings is evaluated by a comparison of Tuscan marriage patterns with those of morthern and northwestern Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century (ANNOTATION)
Richard Wall in collaboration with Jean Robin and Peter Laslett (eds), Family Forms in Historic Europe (1983) (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £39.50).
Because of the importance of the family and household in all societies and at all historical periods, it is essential to be able to make comparisons between varieties of domestic groups. If we wish to comment on the extent to which the household is affected by social change and especially by the process of modernization, industrialization, social mobilization, or whatever that vague but ubiquitous phenomenon is called, it must be clear what would consitute such change. This means knowing how domestic group structure differs from country to country as well as from period to period.
In this article I compare King and Malthus in respect of their ability to penetrate what is here called social opacity, the resistance of all social structures to objective analysis by contemporaries, demographic and other forms of analysis. It accords to King the distinction to have been the first person ever to have recognized the issue, to have set out to penetrate social opacity as it was in his generation, and thus to have been the first to write out a systematic account of any social structure in what, in his age, could be called objective terms. His attitude is described as one of Gregorian realism. Malthus is equally distinguished by realism, but in a very different, much more theoretical mode, reminiscent of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. His attitude is named Malthusian realism in contrast to Gregorian. It is insisted that both Gregorian and Malthusian realism are equally parts of the required equipment and outlook of all social scientists, demographers especially. On the way to the conclusion that David Glass, in whose honour the paper was delivered as a lecture, was a Gregorian, it is shown that the originator of the notion of deliberate, redistributive transfers from the propertied to the poor by means of the national taxation system was Tom Paine in Rights of Man (1790).