::: readings

Paula Fass, “Children and Globalization” in Children of a New World (2007), 202-218 (707-715).

Looking into the effects of globalization on childhood, Fass explores an oft-overlooked aspect of history, the history of children. Interestingly enough, advertisements have not overlooked the effects one’s perceptions of childhood have on individuals, and contintually capatalize on both sides of the coin–the one on feeding consumerism by training kids to want and parents to give, and the other by showing images of the world’s destitute and poor children as they ask for humanitarian support.

I would categorize this under

• Childhood and youth
• Categories of Difference
• and Law, Church, and State

here are some quotes from the text:

“there are startling images that confront us regularly now as the economy becomes a global network and as our means to communicate information penetrates into and out of every village and hamlet” (202).

“It is my hope that an understanding of children’s hisotry will help to make discussions of globalization both more realistic, since many children are and will be affected and more attuned to the peculiar Western sentiments that are evoked in the media’s voverare of the conflicts over globalization.” (202)

“Children are everywhere present in this debate, but never heard from or addressed.” (202)

“In this new system of values and beleive, the child was important not for what he or she could contribute economically, but for the emotional satisfaction hsi cultivation could provide to the family.

“But since the neinteenth century for young people in the West, play has been identified not as time stole from work, but as the very structure of childhood.” (211)

“If children’s work will, as I have suggested, increasingly become a subjet of contention globnally, we can expect that play will become probably an even greater flash point.” (212)

“As a result, in the United States, adolescence became an extension of childhood rather than a preparation for adulthood, although its in-between status was meant to suggest how one could unfold into the other.” (213)

Carolyn Steedman — “Reproduction and Refusal” in Landscapes for a Good Woman (1986), 83-97 (788-794).

I was much more excited by the title of this piece and the initial quote than by the actual article itself. I was hoping that she would talk about the changes over the past 100 years more than just about her own emotions concerning pressures to reproduce or not.

It is short though and talks a lot about the emotional pressures that go along with wanting or not wanting children. She definitely falls within the first wave of feminism that was seeking to be more than “man” than it was more fully “liberated women”

Quotes from the text:

“One can hardly tell women that washing up saucepans in their divine mission, [so] they are told that bringing up children is their divine misison. But the way things are in this world, bringing up children has a great deal in common with washing up sauceopans.” [Alice Schwarzer] (83)

“Accounts of mothering need to recogize not-mothering and recognizing it, would have to deal in economic circumstances and the social understanding that arises out of such circumstances.”

“It is historical accounts like this that may be used to reveal the social sepcifictiy of wanting and not wanitng children in the first palce, and wanting and not wanting them once they exist. Ambivalence has been characterized as a mental structure unique to the borurgeois family…” (90)

Gallo, Gerard; Seifert, Wolfgang; and Strozza, Salvatore — “Immigrants In The German Labour Market: The Case of Italians, Greeks, Former-Yugoslavs and Turks” Status Emigrazione 39.148 (2002): 755-793 (686-705).

This article does an excellent job of presenting the statistics relating to immigration to Germany since the Second World War. It most certainly does not, however, provide much if any commentary nor intepretation of the events described. It would an excellent source for someone looking to interpret and simply in need of the data, however. The only real intepretation provided is the way in which they have divided up the years into three periods, namely:

“the active policies of recruitment in the period 1955-1973; the process of consolidation of foreign presence in Germay from the end of 1960’s to the second half of 1980’s; finally, the carrying aspects of more centy period, such as the fall of the Berlin wall.”

Good for demographics, but not for much else, to be honest; maybe Law, Church, and State as well.

Flora Shaw, “Belgian War Refugees” in DiCaprio and Wiesner, Lives and Voices (2001), 404-410. [783-786]

Categories:

• Law, State, and church.
• Categories of Difference

This piece is an excellent example of the growing involvement of the state in the lives of individuals. Particularly telling is the detailed description of the the organization of departments and bureaus to coordinate the massive relief effort. Lady Lugard’s account of not only the “outpouring of public generosity” (406) but also of the “machinery by which the work [i.e. the coordination and placement of displaced families and individuals] was done” (407) is telling. All of this is perhaps best summed up in her statement that “Nations, like individuals, have their moments of unconscious self-revelation. It was a moment which unmistakably revealed the heart of England” (406).

This piece also shows much of the optimism and strength of nationalism at the outset of the war, and into the first few years. As time passes, and the war drags on, this charity obviously wanes (which is evidenced in this report by the decreasing availability of accommodations and the rescinding of offers as temporary guests become something more permanent, and the hospitality of even the more philanthropic individuals is taxed, as seen on page 409).

Another important clue contained within the report is found in respect to the statements on class divisions. Lady Lugard is clear to praise the effort’s widespread support, stating that the “outpouring of public generosity… came not from one class nor from one place, bur from all classes and from all places. Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Nonconformist, high and low, rich and poor united, all unaware, in a spontaneous tribute of sympathy and respect” (406). Particularly telling, however, is not only the fact that she distinguishes here between classes but more specifically that she highlights the plight of the wealthy class of refugees and how she has given specific and personal attention and time to helping them. She first states that, once the crisis proved to be of a more enduring nature, it was needful to find employment for those of the lower classes. She then goes on to state that “since Christmas we have been most acutely pre-occupied [with] giving suitable help tot the urgent needs of the propertied and professional classes. This is a class with which I have myself been thrown into close and constant touch, and the sorrows and difficulties of their position are very vivid to me. They have suffered, of course, horribly in regard to their material possessions, and the numbers increase daily of persons accustomed to live in the comfort of comparative affluence who are reduced to absolute penury. Such cases call for the sincerest sympathy and for practical help” (409).

Mary Jo Maynes, “Class Cultures and Images of Poper Family Life” in Family Life in the Long Nineteenth Century 1789-1913 (2001), 195-226 (425-441).

Maynes herein lays out an argument that has not yet been fully understood or developed by others. It is that the development of the ideal family int he 19th century and the subsequent rejection of this by the lower class led to more tensions between the middle/upper classes and the lower class over what family life should be like. These tensions were further exaserbated as individauls within the middle class, through religious movements typically, sought to bring reform to those in the lower classes.

Some quotes from the text:

“Establishing a proper family life was an engrossing and contentious enterprise in nineteenth-century Europe.”

“If family life had been a concern of state builders in Europ at least since the Reformation, by 1900 debates avout the family had become exlicitiy and widely politizied.” (195)

“…the construction of a new model of domesticicity and family culture acorss bourgeois Europe beginning in the late eighteenth-century, and demonstrate the connection between that fmaily culture and bourgeois class formation.” (196)

“New fmily ideals were widely diffused in prescriptive literature, idealized visual images, domestic fiction, religious sources, and descriptions of middle and upper-class practices.” (196)

“attemtping to unviersalize their family values or even impose theom on the poor. Throughout the ninteenth century, representations of the contrast between middle class family life and that of the poor had been deployed as evidence for the moral superiority of the propertied and as justification for their intervention into the lives of the poor” (225).

Raffaella Sarti, “Home and Family: Bringing Things Together or Setting Up Home” in Europe at Home (2002), 42-75 (407-423).

Deciding how to organize one’s family, and especially how this would play out as families became more nuclear and the number of possessions grew, is an interesting topic and the one that Sarti decides to explore in this article.

Many factors contribute to the differences between individuals in how this process plays out, among them: class, demographics, socio-economic organization of the area, andd so.

Sarti notes that there were those who could never safe up enough to get married. This brings up some interesting points, highlight both a later age for marriage now that individauls were saving up to get married as well as the growth in those who never got married.

One of the complaints about “privledge” in Europe during this time was that with privledge came obligations to marry others of similar social class. This limiting met with resistence among some young couples but held a substantial amount of social pressure and ultimately would not be overthrown at large.

Sarti also describes the changes in women’s doweries during this time.

Susannah Ottawy, “Independent but Not Alon: Family Ties for the Elderly” in The Decline of Life (2004), 141-172, (301-332).

Ottawy explores herein the differences between generations and the general family support structure throughout the life of individual. She makes the point well that at different stages the family relatioships varied and that although families were often more inter-dependent than they are today, this is not to be equated with emotional closeness, or overall closeness. They are not, in other words, to be idealized.

Some Quotes from the text:

“this chapter supports the current conception of the eighteenth century family as bound by close emotional ties between parents and their chilfre, and it indicates that these expectations were well in place by the beginning of the 1700s, suggesting a high leel of contintueity over the centruy.”

“At the same time, however, studying the expereinces of older pople provides further evidence for the need to take into consideration the different dfamily lives that were constrctued around variations in the demographic circumstatnces and life-states of individuals.” (141)

“… focus more precicesly on the ways in which reciprocal ties between the generations led to close bond of affection and a clear snese of responsibility that was, nonetheless, not be called upon except in casese of great need.” (142)

“Of course, although such close extended families could provide mutual assistance, entertainment, and support, there is also evidence of interfamilial strfe, and we must be careful not to romanticize the eighteenth-century family.” (167)

“Once again, however, it is crucial to remember that families were not coterminous with hosueholds, and testamentary evidence reinforces the conlcusions from diaries concerning the importance of the non-conjugal family in offering mutual support and assistance trhoughout life for some individuals, especially for those who never married, and particularly in old age.” (168)

Pier Paolo Viazzo, “Mortaility, Fertility and Family” in Family Life in Early Modern Times 1500-1789 (2001), 157-187. (267-282)

In this well-researched paper, Viazzo reviews the history of demographics and sheds new light on old understandings and interpretations. The old notions of what caused shifts throughout history in the population proved to not be as true as many had suspected when a detailed picture was assertained by recent demographic work. This piece is a tremendous resource looking into the study of demographics.

“One of the changes that has characterized European society most strongly over the past two centeires is the shift from high levels of mortality and fertility to a demographic system in which mortality is greatly reduced and fertility controlled.” (157)

“This shift, which began in some parts of Europe as early as the eighteenth centure and ended only in the mid-twentieth century, is generally know by demographers, economists, and sociologist, as the ‘deomographic transition.’ Many scholars see this radical shift in the population of Europe and the West as a consequence, and also as one of the salient features, of the more general proecess of modernization. The economic growth brough on by industrialization, plus the consequent improvcement in diet, coupled with progress in medicine and public health, are beleived to have produced a decline in moretality to whicht he populations of Europe, after an initial period of rapid deomgraphic growth, repsoned by deliverately reduceing the number of births.” (157)

“…between 1500 and 1800 the population of Europe more than doubled. Yet the increase was neither contintue nor uniform; periods of intense growth alternated with periods of stagnation or decline. Moreover, changes in poulation followed different patterns and different routes in the various European countries, with trends that were often very divergent and levels of mortality and natality which presented frequent regional variations. Such variations were greater than the (more predictable) variations to be found between different socio-economic groups.” (157)

“Thomas Robert Malthus [in 1789] had not hesitation in name [hunger, epidemics, and war] as the main curbs to demographic growth. (what he called positive checks).” (158)

“Until recently, modern historian did not depart significantly from Malthus; they continued to regard famine, epidemics, and war as the three prime causes of the high mortality amongst preindustrial populations.” (158)

“[Jean Meuvret] argues that “First comes famine, then comes plague.” (158)

“Illness flourished against a ‘background of famine.’” (158)

War was a demographically significant factor only in areas that were directly in the path of the army.

“On the whole, however, the correlation between peaks in the mortality rate and food crises seems to be much less close than was previously supposed.”

“During the ‘age of the plague’ the… only ‘normal’ featuer of mortality seems to have been its instability.” (162).

“The English figures also show how mistaken it is to imagine that the futther back in time one goes, the highter the mortality rate must be.” (164)

“In pre-industrial Europe women did not have the prodigious number of children that they had always been supposed to have had… [but instead] had an average of only five or six children.” (169)

“Paradoxicall, the consignment of their babies to a wet-nurse ‘liberated’ the reproductive potential of urban woemn from the restraining influence of breastfeeding.” (172)

“The use of contraception leaves traces in parish registers which demographers have learned to identify with increasing sophistication.” (174)

“Some have attributed [the growth in illegitmacy] to growing urbanization dn the onset of industrialization, two processes of modernization which are believed to have produced drastic changes in morals.” (177)

“The investigation of the different demographic patterns and outcomes between men and women, rich and poor, city dwellers and country folk–usually called ‘differential demography’–represents an important step toward a more detailed understanding of the relationship between demographic forces and the family.” (182)

“The end of the acien regime witnessed the birth of a new concept of the reponsibilities of the state and a different way of coping collectively to solve the problems gereated within the fmaily by demographic forces.” (187)

Jeffrey Watt, “Impact of Reformation and Counter-Reformation” in Family Life in Early Modern Europe 1500-1789 (2001), 125-154. (219-234)

In answer to the question “What changes were brought by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation?” Jeffrey Watt answers at the end of this piece by concluding “All told, continuity outweighed change in the domestic life of Europeans of the Reformation era, and the similarities in the family life of Protestants and Catholics outnumbered the differences” (254). The evidence he sites throughout his arguments, however, argues exactly the opposite of this. His misinterpretations (for my opinion is that this conclusion is precisely that) stems from his narrow understanding of the Reformation. He seems to want to fit it into a neat, easily definable event, with a clear beginning and end. Similarly, his final interpretation seems to unnatural in its conclusion that the similarities between the Protestants and the Catholics outnumbered the differences. Of course they did! Protestants were not forming a new world religion based off of a brand new understanding of the universe; they were attempting to return to the undiluted roots of their already existent religious tradition.

What Watt should have focused on was the overall change that was the Reformation, comparing society against itself. His statement that “continuity outweighed change” would be accurate if he understood the “continuity” of the ages to be, as Shelley puts it, “mutability”, or, in other words, change. This does not, however, seem to be his understanding. But regardless of his intepretation, the follow are some of the points he makes throughout his text:

“Luther’s theological dispute in many ways seems far removed from the family, but the Reformation that he initiated affected the institution of the family in a variety of ways. Luther and other reformers–including John Calvin, the most important theologian of the Reformed Protestant movement–affirmed a belief in the “priesthood of all believers,” insisting that all Christians could communicate directly with God; they need not go through the medium of a priest. This notion fostered an atmosphere in which some religious education and worship was transferred from the church to the family. Protestant and Catholic reformers viewed marriage and the family as the most fundamental building blocks of society and generally attributed sundry social ills to problems in the household” (125).

“Protestantism’s most obvious impact on the family pertained to marriage” (126).

“In one sense, reformers enhanced the married state by rejecting the Catholic belief that celibacy was superior to matrimony” (127).

“Luther, however, insisted that marriage was of this world, just as women, houses, and courts were; like them, marriage was subject to the state, not the church. Virtually all areas of continental Europe that converted to Protestantism experienced to varying degrees the secularization of the control of marriage” (127).

“In Protestant areas, clerical influence over the control of marriage validity thus tended to be reduced but not eliminated. It must be noted, however, that this process had actually begun in many places before the Reformation” (128).

“Throughout continental Europe, Protestant governments not only created new tribunals to deal with matrimonial litigation but also passed laws that generally modified marriage in a variety of ways” (128)

• “they reduced the impediments to marry” (i.e. “consanguinity” and “affinity”) (128)
• “Protestant reformers railed against clandestine marriage, condemning it because it undercut parental authority and could be the source of legal complications” (129)
• “A third and, in the long run, the most significant change in marriage law was the introduction of the possibility of divorce, as opposed to annulment or separation, and subsequent remarriage” (130).

On the topic of divorce, Watt cites the following as justifiable grounds for divorce during this time, namely:

• adultery or desertion (133)
• and of these, “adultery was more often cited against wayward wives thant unfaithful husbands” (134)
• but “Conspicuously absent among recognized grounds for divorce was cruelty” (135)

The importance of parental consent, Watt observes, became far more important when the status of the two individuals was vastly different, stating “Although matrimonial ordinances usually said nothing about class, wealth and social status were in fact important factors in contract litigation” (138), and later states, “The poorer a family, the less influence parents had on their sons’ and daughters’ choice of spouse” (141), citing that “In seventeenth-century Holland, parents were apparently able to prevent marriages regardless of their children’s age; they generally used this power to veto only when there was considerable discrepancy in the social status of the two parties” (142).

Education

Developing their their understanding of the importance of the family “as the most effective means of preventing… social disorder” there developed a “[Dramatically increased] interest in early childhood” during the Reformation period. Watt continues:

“Luther became convinced that the family, not the Church, was the most fundamental ’school for character.’ … Luther and other reformers sought to encourage religious education int eh home [even] further, promoting private family devotions and exhorting parents to lead the religious education of their children. Luther viewed male household heads as ‘bishops in their own homes’ and thus responsible for the religious education of family members” (143).

“One scholar has gone so far as to describe the Puritans as the first ‘modern parents’” (145).

“Protestants on the continent and in England published unprecedented numbers of books on child-rearing” (145).

“In this era of religious strife, education was viewed as the key to securing the religious allegiance of the young. Although Luther, Calvin, and other reformers saw the family, the microcosm of society, as a most important arena for religious indoctrination, they did not always trust the judgment of individual parents in providing sufficient instruction to lead their children down the straight and narrow path.  They therefore viewed mandatory catechism classes and the creation of schools as a vital compliment to education in the family” (145).

“Following Luther’s lead, Protestant reformers and magistrates throughout continental Europe called for the establishment of schools and for mandatory school attendance” (146).

“Since they beleived that everyone–not just the clergy–should read Scripture, Protestant reformers believed that primary education ought to be widely avalaibe” (145).

“The education level of Catholics lagged behind that of Protestants for both boys and girls” (147).

Sexuality

Although canon law had condemned equally the illicit sexuality of both men and women, in practice a double standard prevailed in many parts of late medieval Europe, whereby a male’s sexual indiscretion were punished less severely than a woman’s” (148).

“[The] stricture sexual morality [of the Protestant faith] contributed to a growing intolerance of illegitimacy” (148).

Watt goes on to point out that Protestant societies placed a greater emphasis on discovering who parented an illegitimate child and then requiring at their hands a greater responsibility for the care and upbringing whereas Catholic countries tended to establish institutions of care for orphans or illegitimate children. He then concludes with the line cited above that: “All told, continuity outweighed change in the domestic life of Europeans of the Reformation era, and the similarities in the family life of Protestant and Catholics outnumbered the differences” (154).