Article

Stigmatized cohabitation in the Latvian region of the eastern Baltic littoral: nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Authors:
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the authors.

Abstract

The social history of coresidence arrangements in the Latvian region suggests that forms of cohabitation without marriage were present in the Latvian population since the eighteenth century when empirical evidence became available. Before the twentieth century, however, these forms remained marginal and seldom involved choice. The subject of severe criticism until the 1960s-1970s, such forms become more widespread thereafter as the Latvian population began to exhibit many key features of a second demographic revolution. Post-Soviet censuses now suggest that such coresidence patterns in the Latvian population approach the levels of those in most western European states, including the Scandinavian countries.

No full-text available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.

... Cohabitation has become more prevalent since the 1960s and 1970s, but its roots go deep into history and are associated with the history of marriage (Kok and Leinarte, 2015;Lesthaeghe, 2010). The communist regime in Eastern Europe was not sympathetic to extramarital partnerships, so these partnerships were not treated as existing in census data (Hoem et al. 2009;Plakans and Lipša, 2014). From the late 16th to the 20th century, religions and governments prohibited or at least condemned cohabitation between unmarried partners. ...
Article
Full-text available
Marriage and cohabitation are the two most common forms of partnership in Europe. We examined the extent to which marriage and cohabitation are studied from a demographic perspective and to identify differences across European countries. The methodology was established on a keyword search and four phases of preference indicator, based on which we selected 85 articles and incorporate them into the literature review. As determined by the literature review, we identified seven areas: Cohabitation, Marriage, Union Formation, Migrant Partnership Behavior, Fertility, Divorce, and Second Demographic Transition. The influence of society plays a significant role in forming the attitudes and aspirations of individuals in each area of life, and for some, even in the most important, which is starting a family and getting married or not, and on the other hand, in individual aspirations and modern lifestyles.
Article
(Introduction to Special Issue): Providing the conceptional framework of the special issue and discussing its main hypotheses, the introductory article points out that extraordinary vivid discourses on birth control in journalism emerged during East Central Europe's interwar period. They fought for more liberal attitudes towards birth control, but were combined with a peculiar emphasis on the nation, since they were more intensively colored by and integrated in nationalizing discourses. Thus, they became an essential part of the question of how the society should like, so that they were only partly a reflection of female self-empowerment. Thus, birth control as a core method of family planning at that time had become an issue of national survival.
Article
The article analyses family history and memory in the post-WWII period, as reflected in photo albums compiled by women living in what had become the Soviet-occupied country of Latvia. The content analysis method is used to examine twenty photo albums. The results indicate that such albums served as an autobiographical instrument for women in the private sphere of everyday life. The principal thematic categories of photographs in the albums were everyday scenes, portraits of individuals, photos of infants and children, pictures of family rituals, portraits of young men performing their obligatory military service in the Soviet armed forces, group photos of families, and groups photos of festive family events. Generally, the women compilers of the albums sought to place photographs in chronological sequence, but interruptions of a sequence are visible by the inclusion of photographs from the pre-Soviet decades. Most of the albums are incomplete and contain many unmounted photos, which testifies to autobiographical instability and the need for editing to make albums conform to the ideological demands of the Soviet decades. Interpretation of the albums from the post-memory viewpoint suggests the necessity for contextual historical information, since their female compilers were evidently creating their own mythology about these post-war decades. The albums portray a society with strong family values, orderly networks of family relationships, mutual trust, prosperity, and ‘the good life’ – all of which stood in sharp contrast with the everyday realities of Soviet-era existence.
Book
Full-text available
Story of Adam: Life, Habits and Virtues of Mazsalaca Parish Inhabitants in the autobiography of Adams Purmalis ca. 1900. Adams Purmalis was uneducated peasant born born in 1847 who wrote a diary about his life found by Sanita Reinsone. The autobiography is rich of ethnographic details of his household and local society. The book provides full publication of the Purmalis life story along with extensive Reinsone's foreword, comments and foreword analyzing linguistic peculiarities of his written speech (the latter co-authored by prof. Lidija Leikuma). The book was staged by the theatre director Indra Roga at the National Theatre of Latvia in season 2010/2011. https://teatris.lv/izrade/adama-stasts
Article
Full-text available
This article examines the transformation of first union formation in the Baltic countries between the late 1960s and early 1990s, in the context of societal and family-level gender relations. The analyses employ microdata from the European Family and Fertility Surveys program. Our results on the trends indicate that in Estonia and Latvia the shift from direct marriage to cohabitation started well before the fall of socialist regime. Event-history models provide support for a hypothesised association between union formation and gender system, with Lithuania showing more traditional features in both respect, plausibly embedded in long-standing cultural differences between the countries.
Chapter
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.
Article
Cet essai étudie le rapport entre la vie familiale et la corvée au domaine foncier à servage de Pinkenhof, dans la province de Livonie de la Russie balte au cours des deux premières décades du 19ème siècle. Une analyse du type d'obligations de travail agricole et comment elles sont adaptées par les paysans nous révèle des activités à peu prés les mêmes autant par les propriétaries que par les serfs. Cette etude semble indiquer d'abord que les historiens ont peut-être sous-estimé fortement dans quelle mesure les serfs ont pu utiliser le servage à leur profit, même dans les provinces bakes pourtant réputées plus strides que partout ailleurs en Europe Orientale, ensuite que la façon d'aborder les relations entre famille et économie sous servage, centrée essentiellement sur la personne qui avait le contrôle définitif de la terre et du travail, neglige les moyens qu'avaient les paysans de faire valoir leur propre volonté.
Article
Although the empirical basis for the comparative study of the history of European family life is expanding, there remain extensive areas of Eastern Europe about which almost nothing is known. This situation weakens all generalizations about Europe as a whole, especially since those localities of Eastern Europe from which family data are available reveal formations very different from what obtains in the West. The most ambitious comparative study to date, Household and Family in Past Time (1972; edited by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall) has taken a long step in the direction of providing a comparative methodology, but even in this excellent volume Eastern Europe is represented by only three essays dealing with the best known of its areas, the Balkans. In the Preface of the work, Laslett suggests that future historical evidence from the eastern regions ‘may possibly go to show that the extremes of familial organization, from the simplest to the most complex, may have once existed within the confines of the European continent itself’.
Article
The 1881 census of the Russian Baltic provinces of Livland, Estland, and Kurland was the first modern-type systematic population enumeration in the Baltic area. It had been preceded by enumerations of other kinds—land cadastres that included aggregate population counts (during Swedish control of the area) in the 17th century, and fiscal revisions (during Russian control of the area) that did list residents by name but did not follow any principles of modern census-taking. The Baltic German politico-economic elite, which controlled public affairs in the Baltic provinces, decided to carry out a census of a modern kind, and produced the 1881 count. Although initially the initiative was coordinated by the statistical specialists of the three provinces, the publication of results was decentralized, resulting in a series of volumes that supplied different tables for each province. The article analyzes the contents of the census, some of its shortcomings, as well as its strengths.
Biostatik der Stadt Libau und ihrer Landgemeinde in the Jahren 1834-1882 [Demographical analysis of the city of libau and its district
  • E Kaspar
The unfolding story of the second demographic transition
  • R Lesthaeghe
Latvijas saimniecības vēsture
  • A Aizsilnieks
Annual statistical data: Fertility. Table 4 IDG022. Marital births and extra-marital births in regions and cities under state jurisdiction by sex
  • Annual
Latvijas rūpniecības strādnieku sociālais portrets 1900 – 1914 [A social portrait of Latvian industrial workers]. Rīga: Latvijas vēstures institūta apgāds
  • J Bērzinš
Riga in den Jahren 1866-1870
  • F Jung-Stilling
Jaunības laiki Atminas no Vidzemes vidienas ap gadsimtu mainu [Adolescence. Memories from Mid-Vidzeme around the turn of the century]
  • K Lapinš
Izklaides kultūra Latvijā: Morāles komunikācijas aspekti (1918-1934) [Entertainment culture in Latvia: Aspects of moral communication
  • I Lipša
Padomju Latvijas demogrāfija: Struktūra, procesi, problēmas [The demography of Soviet Latvia: Structure, processes, problems
  • B Mežgailis
Riga: Latvijas PSR Statistikas pārvalde [The Statistical Bureau of Latvian SSR
  • Statistikas Tabulas
Pirmā republika [The first republic
  • A Šilde
Latviešu literatūras vēsture [The history of Latvian literature
  • V Hausmanis
Land und Leute der Mitausichen Oberhauptmanschaft
  • A Heyking
Padomju Latvijas iedzīvotāji [The inhabitants of Soviet Latvia
  • B Mežgailis
  • P Zvidrinš
Family and economy in an early-nineteenth century Baltic serf estate The European peasant family and society: Historical studies
  • A Plakans
  • C Wetherell
Ādama stāsts Mazsalaciešu dzīve, ieradumi un tikumi Ā. Purmala autobiogrāfijā 19. un 20. gs. Mijā [Adam's Story. The life, habits and mores of the inhabitants of Mazsalaca in the authobiography of A. Purmalis at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries]
  • S Reinsone
Latvijas statistikas atlass [The atlas of Latvian statistics]. Riga: Valsts statististikā pārvalde [The State Statistical Bureau
  • M Skujenieks
Latviešu avīžniecība: Laikraksti savā laikmetā un sabiedrībā
  • V Zelče
Demogrāfija [Demography]
  • P Zvidrinš
Latvijas 2000.g. tautas skaitīšanas rezultāti [The results of population census of Latvia
  • Census
Latvijas vēsture 1710-1800 [The history of Latvia 1710-1800
  • E Dunsdorfs
Latyshskaia krest'ianskaia sem'ia v Latgale 1860-1939 [The Latvian peasant family in Latgale
  • L Efremova
Latvijas statistiskā gada grāmata, 1922 [The statistical annual for Latvia
  • Gada Grāmata
Latvija: Pārskats par tautas attīstību [Latvia: Survey on human growth]
  • B Zepa
  • E Klava
Latvieši: Statistiski demogrāfisks portretējums [The Latvians: A statistical-demographic portrait
  • P Zvidrinš
  • I Vanovska
Latvijas statistiskā gada grāmata, 1927 [The statistical annual for Latvia
  • Gada Grāmata
Annual statistical data: Population and social processes
  • Annual
Population and Housing Census
  • Census
Latvijas statistiskā gada grāmata, 1925 [The statistical annual for Latvia
  • Gada Grāmata
Latvijas statistiskā gada grāmata, 1926 [The statistical annual for Latvia
  • Gada Grāmata
Latvijas rūpniecības strādnieku sociālais portrets 1900 - 1914 [A social portrait of Latvian industrial workers
  • J Bērzinš
Latvijas statistiskā gada grāmata, 1932 [The statistical annual for Latvia
  • Gada Grāmata
Latvijas statistiskā gada grāmata, 1923 [The statistical annual for Latvia
  • Gada Grāmata
Latvijas statistiskā gada grāmata, 1924 [The statistical annual for Latvia
  • Gada Grāmata
Latvijas statistiskā gada grāmata, 1930 [The statistical annual for Latvia
  • Gada Grāmata
Atminas no Vidzemes vidienas ap gadsimtu mainu
  • K Lapinš
Baltic eugenics. Bio-politics, race and nation in interwar estonia, Latvia and lithuania
  • I Lipša
Seksualitāte un sociālā kontrole Latvijā
  • I Lipša