::: readings

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.

Victoria De Grazia — “The Family Verses the State” in How Facism Ruled Women, ITaly 1922-1945 (1992), 77-115 (625-646).

Challenging the traditional interpretation of top-down politics, De Grazia argues that families, and particularly mothers, in Italy’s Facist Regime played significant roles. Indeed, as they saw it, the State owed them something after they had given it their wedding rings, firstborn sons, and time. They demanded things in return, and were ready to organize to request them. In one sense, they had truly “married” themselves to the state, only now (as a marriage partner) they demanded something back in return.

Quotes from the text:

“…it creates for itself in what it suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it, an internal enemy–womanhikn in general.” — georg wilhelm friedrich hegel

“this rallying to the cause did indeed appear to seal a new union between Italian women, their families, and the fascist state”

“Yet the ring ceremony also generated unorthodox messgages about the realtionship between women, their fmailies, and the state. the very gesture of traind in gold bands for cheap tin substitutes cast uncertainty on whether a woman’s first obligation was to the Dice, facism, and the nation or to her spuse, children, nad kin as decreeed by suctom, sacred church vowsw, and pronatalist sloganeering.”

“The dictatorship thus became trapped in a paradox of its own making.”

“…in Wesern socieites, becomeing more nuclear and more dependent on the state and the market to carry out protective, educativce, and recreational functions they previously had not needed or had once fulfulled themselves.”

“all int he state, nothing outside the state”

“far from being incenties fo family growth, the family allowance system was thus tied to cutting wages to substandard levels.”

“the idea that their offspring belonged to the nation and that in case of war they had to be sacrificed to its well-being. The dictatorship thus combined paternalism in the familiar, humanitarian sense with a murdeous, abstract claim on the lives of dependendts; it obsessed about the pricledged bond between mothers and children, and the brutally violated it.

“Thus facism’s cult of the family in the service of the state was undercut by antistatist attutde that might be characterized as ‘oppositonal familism.’”

Susan Grayzel, “Women’s War Work: Remunerative, Voluntary and Familial” in Women and the First World War (2001), 27-50 (588-602).

Understanding the role women played in the ammunition factories and elsewhere on the “home front” of WWI is crucial to a complete understanding of how relationships between men and women changed in the 20th century. Indeed, perhaps more than anything else, the first world war propelled the Western world on a trajectory that led it to its current position. This is true even though many things went “back to normal” after the end of the war. Still, the seed had been planted and the old molds broken.

Grayzel explores this and other changes in the lives of women during the war.

Some quotes from the text:

“One of the more visible changes in women’s lives during the war came with their entrance into a wide range of occupations, some of which had never before included women.” (27)

“Women entered not only wartime factories, but also banks and places of business and government as clerks, typists, and secretaires. They were found running trams and buses, deleiving milk, and even joinly newly-created armed forces auxiliaries and become police officiers” (27)

[often they would work in the same filed of occupation as their husband who went away to war, but not always.]

“In Britain, the decision to institute conscription in 1916 followed the creation of a National Register in August 1915, recording the age, sex, and occupation of all men and women between the ages of 16 and 65.” (28)

“[Women] became important figures of wartime propoganda.”

“In either case, the question of pay became a heated one; if women earned less than men for the same job, they undercut male employment. On the other hand, paying men and women equally seemed far too radical and, some argued, unfair since male workers were undoubtedly superior. As a compromise, womena nd men were paid the same for piece work, but not for time rates.” (30)

Employment for women within medicie grew during the war bothe because of the expansion and prefessionalisation of nursing servies and of new opportunites for medical training and for women doctors” (37).

“the wartime world required this service from women, but the postwar world was not always sure what to do with the women who had performed it.” (41)

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)

Monica Chojnacka and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Ages of Women, Ages of Man (2002): “Regulation of Teachers” and  “The day of a university student” (44-47), “Regulations of a city brothel” (61-62), “Battle for the Pants” (140), “A widow reflects on her life” (272-274).

Regulation of Teachers

Students were forbidden to marry as long as they remained students.

Mandatory attendance at Church services throughout the week.

Daily schedule of a student to include lectures and reviews.

Blasphemy specifically outlawed

Regulations of a city brothel

Human trafficking is not new, sadly, to today but was practiced then as well.

“In past times and still today wanton knaves often take women and daughters from other areas and put them in or sell them to the city brothel. Then such persons are kept in the brothel against their will by the brother manager and his wife, so that they can not leave the brothel, although some of them would willingly turn away [from this life] and do penance” (61).

Battle for the Pants

Obviously there were concerns that some women were too “uppity” and would take control of the family when this was seen as the man’s role.

A widow reflects on her life

In this piece, the widow who has not taken refuge in a convent is remembering and immortalizing her husband’s goodness and hoping to pass this on their her children

Mary Hartman, “Marrying Early and Marrying Late” in The Household and the Making of History (2004), 34-69.

Hartman focuses in the both the beginning and the end of this chapter on the interesting understanding one can gain by reading between the lines of Thomas More’s Utopia. In response to this work Hartman writes:

“Yet while practices outside household in Utopia have been recognized as responses to actual sixteenth-century social ills, commentators have not attempted to analyze in the same way the households More fashioned. His multifamily residences, with each Utopian bride moving into an existing household headed by the eldest man in the groom’s family, were hardly common in England save in the upper classes. Most English households, as More well know, had but one married couple in residence. True, Utopian couples were closer in age than those in most early-marriage societies, and in this regard they resembled English ones. But the obsequious handmaidens of Utopia would never be confuse with the spirited and aggressive mistresses of real English households.”

She then goes on, continuing:

“Just as his portrait of Utopian life beyond households is recognized as More’s critique of English society, Utopian domestic arrangements need to be seen as a critique of English society, Utopian domestic arrangements need to be seen as a critique of actual English households. That More showed such exquisite care in devising a stable, almost static, household system as the foundation of all other institutions in Utopia was no accident. He obviously recognized that the single-family households that dominated in England were rather precarious. In Utopia, More could expressly invent laws and customs to shore up households. Better still, he could supply the base of enduring multifamily residences that functioned like those in more typical early-marriage societies, where adult sons stayed put from one generation to the next. He could also control disruptive demographic growth by holding population constant in each town” (37).

Perhaps one of Hartman’s most unique and insightful point is that all of the literature of this time that was against women was in reaction to the strengthening power of women in the household. If men didn’t feel threatened, she reasons, why would they employ societal pressures so pervasively to reinforce gender roles that degraded women?

“Scholars long took this pervasive misogyny for granted. Only with the rise of women’s history have they noted that women at this time were widely perceived to be gaining the upper hand within households” (38).

She points out that the obligations of both sexes began to be more similar than different, and as a result the power structure of male dominance began to be threatened in the perception of many men.

“By the sixteenth century, the experience of the sexes overlapped even more. A recent study of early modern England, for example, argues convincingly that outside the rands of the elite, there was considerable congruity between the childhoods of girls and boys. At leas up to the age of ten, ordinary laborer and small farming households devoted the same resources to daughters and sons. Also, until they went into service in the early teens, children of both sexes were educated at home” (50).

and later concludes:

“The economic contributions of young women and men as single laborers over many centuries have finally begun to be reckoned in this long period of semifreedom, or semidependency, peculiar to the northwestern European life cycle. Yet much remains to be sorted out in the chain of causes and consequences of late marriage. Not only do we not know why people married late in the first place, we understand too little about the effects on consciousness and behavior as an entire society early came to the terms with a resulting loosening of the bonds of kinship that in so any other places continued to hold the generations of peasants together, often quite literally in the same place” (57).

Commenting on the changes in sexual behavior necessitated by this change in marriage patterns, Hartman states:

“What set northwestern Europe apart was thus far more significant than sexual repression from the outside. It was instead the painful, protracted coming to terms with a new sexual order altogether, one in which real control over young women’s and men’s sexuality was ceasing to reside with the older generation, and especially with male elders acting in the larger service of family property and name. wile church, state, and local community played a part in channeling youthful sexuality, and still do, what is striking about this region in the early modern era is its adjustment to the peculiar freedoms and constraints of distinctive family structures that obliged young women and men alike to assume responsibility for their own sexual behavior” (62).

She concludes the chapter where she began, commenting on the social commentary of Thomas More’s Utopia:

“All this brings up back to Sir Thomas More, whose implied criticisms of English households in Utopia speak to shortcomings of the dominant family regime from the viewpoint of a concerned head of state trying to ensure stability in the polity, as well as of a troubled head of household trying to secure wifely obedience at home. The family arrangements More ordained for Utopia can now be recognized as those of any early-marriage regime, but with an important qualification. While mandating large multifamily households, he retained what is being argued here as the chief feature of northwestern European family arrangements, namely, later marriage for women” (68).

and continues,

“It all worked in Utopia, but only because More said so. In real life, later marriage for women appears to have been exactly what made women so uppity in the first place — and, for that matter, families so unstable, youth so unchaste, and much else that troubled him. It appears that despite his weakness for somewhat later, companionate marriage, More recognized causal links between household structures and behavior within and beyond households. In any case, his perception in these matters was keener than that of most commentators, then or since” (69).

Marzio Barbagli and David Kertzer, “Introduction” in Family Life in Early Modern Times, 1500-1789 (2001), ix-xxxii. (168-180)

In this three volume work, Marzio Babagli and David Kertzer solicit the expertise of a number of specialists in their attempt to bring together a synthesis of leading scholarship. In their introduction they write:

“Over the past 35 years hundreds of scholars from many countries, in many languages, and from a variety of disciplines–historians, demographers, anthropologists, sociologists–have published studies focusing on family life in the past. In doing so they have made use of new sources of information, new approaches, and new interpretations. These works have tremendously enriched our knowledge of Western family history, demolishing many commonly accepted stereotypes of what family life was like in the past, and undermining many commonly accepted theories of social change.

“By their vary nature, as pioneering empirical studies these works have typically focused on a very limited geographical areas–few parishes, a town, or somethings a small region–and their results have primarily been published in journals and books not easily accessible to non-experts. What has been lacking to date is a work of synthesis by the leading scholars int eh field that makes the results of this new research available to a broad public, while focusing on both a long sweep of history and on Europe as a whole.” (ix)

Topics that are covered in the introduction briefly include the myth that everyone in pre-industrial Europe married, and did so at a young age; a discussion on population growth at the end of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century; the importance of the Protestant Reformation (beginning in October of 1517); and the differences between various areas of Europe (mostly drawn along the line between Catholicism and Protestantism, which is almost identical to what is known as the Hajnal line).

The final paragraph of the introduction reads:

“We have here given only a brief overview of the nature of family life in early modern times, trying to provide a sense of how it differed from family life today and attempting along the way to dispel some common, but erroneous stereotypes. We have also emphasized the need to distinguish among different regions of Europe, and to identify those aspects of the family that changed over the three centuries from 1500 to 1800. The chapters that follow, examining a series of aspects of family life in the comparative perspective, offer a rich view of European family life in the past.” (xxxii)

My Thoughts:

There is not much for me to say, seeing how this is merely the introduction of a collection of essays, and not the essays themselves. The historiographical content is, however, of importance and serves to reinforce the things already discussed and learned, namely, that family life underwent important changes which were the results of various pressures and occurred differently at different places in Europe, largely along line of Protestantism and Catholicism following the beginnings of the Reformation in early years of the 1500’s.