::: 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)

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)

Lloyd Bonfiled, “European Family Law” in Family Life in the Long Ninenteenth Century 1789-1913 (2001), 109-154 (551-574).

Legal histories focus, as does this one, on the effects governments have on familied. It is, undeniably, important, especially when one begins to talk about legal custody of children. This article talks about the change of the legal status of women.

By the nineteenth century, many reforms had already taken place, giving women more right to the legal custody of their children, and of the legal status of married and divorced women.

This definitely falls under the category of Law, Church, and State, as well as Family Economy and Marriage and its Dissolution.

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).

Suzanne Desan, “Reconstituting the Social After the Terror” in The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (2004), 249-282 (355-388).

In the aftermath of the French Revolution there was a lot that was changed back to something more similar to what it had been than what it became. In other words, there was a complete revolution and things changed, and then changed back again. Desan analyses this as it applies families and the changes that had been instituted.

It should be noted that most of the changes brought on by the French Revolution were changes in the laws of the land concerning a given topic, and not as much the underlying facts or pressures.

The laws were then changed back, in many cases, and over time as the underlying pressures changes, so too did the laws again. Most of the laws herein discussed have to deal with inheritance or other more legal aspects of the law as well as divorce (although Desan doesn’t talk about that as much).

One quote from the text:

“The social order is entirely overturned,” commented two voacal opponents of France’s new inheritance laws.”

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)

Anthony Fletcher, “Living Together” and “Marital Violence” in Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (1995), 173-191; 192-203. (236-251)

Anthony Fletcher, in these two chapters of his larger work, highlights the positive and negative aspects of family life, and the changes which developed over time.

Living Together

“The Restrictive ideology of sermons and conduct books, it is suggested, contrasts with a more permissive reality in the way that men and women conducted their married lives” (173).

“There was a sense in which this notion was something very positive and important in men’s conception of how a marital relationship should work in practice. There was something of their manhood which they wanted women to share, while at the same time they wished to see their ultimate authority over women jealously guarded” (174).

“Many marriages in this period were broken prematurely by the death of one of the partners: the documentation associated with such personal tragedies affords further insight into the depth of emotional attachments. ‘I want her at every turn, everywhere and in every work. Methinks I am but half myself without her,’ wrote Oliver Heywood in his diary” (175).

“Lady Ann Fanshaw… wrote [about her husband after his death], ‘we never had but one mind through our lives, our souls were wrapped up in each other, our aims and designs one, our love one and our resentments one’” (176).

“Many gentry married girls who had been well trained for the role of household manager in adolescence. It was very common to send teenage daughters away to stay with relatives or friends to learn this art with a view to their marriage” (177).

“How particular partnerships worked depended, of course, upon personality and relationship. There were strong women with great drive who might seem intractable but whose organising abilities persuaded their husbands to tolerate their failure to be submissive” (180).

“On the other hand, there were sad quiet women who had no stamina for their practical tasks of ordering a household and hardly coped without their husband’s presence” (181).

“A wife’s overriding duty was to be fruitful. Moreover in a patrilineal society there was tremendous emphasis on the importance of the birth of sons” (181).

“Lady Hutton told her husband in 1678 that she would gladly have laid down her life to procure hm a son” (182).

“So failure to conceive brought anxiety and in some cases anguish” (182).

“Women who persuaded their husbands to allow them to breast feed were exceptional in the upper levels of society… Breast feeding and sex were seen as incompatible by clerical moralists and men were in general unwilling to forego sexual pleasure for the sake of the relationship of mother and child” (183).

“The biological and social role of a fertile married woman made her life arduous. ‘All the time of their lives is ensnared with troubles,’ declared the Duchess of Newcastle, who was herself childless: ‘what in breeding and bearing children… and if they have children, what troubles and griefs do ensue? Troubled with their frowardness and untowardness, the care for their well being, the fear of their ill doing, their grief for their sickness and their unsufferable sorrow for their death.’… Women approached pregnancy expecting to be ill and if they were not so at some stage it was regarded as something to worry about” (184).

“By and large, though, men faced the fact, in a way that modern husbands cannot imagine, that their whole future — of their marriage, of a health brood, of inheritance — was on the line when their wives’ confinements came. Sometimes a difficult pregnancy was a prolonged agony for both partners and men’s emotions could be really stirred” (185).

“Parents, it has been argued convincingly, made a very large emotional investment in their children in early modern England and expected little in return” (190).

“Judith Bennett has described marriage at this time as based upon a ‘voluntary egalitarianism shadowed by inequality’. Even in sharing, she notes, the husband’s greater material resources bespoke inequality; even in sharing, she argues, ‘the husband’s power remained merely suspended, not fully yielded’” (190).

“Theory, legal precept and the rhetoric of puritan clerics in their conduct literature, despite its lyrical passages about conjugal love, were all stacked against women’s being allowed to contemplate the realisation of loving mutuality in their marriages. Yet we cannot dismiss all the anecdotal evidence of wills, monuments, letters, memoirs and diaries which testifies to many people’s happiness int he married state at this time” (190).

“It does seem that where all parties had the chance of consent there was a better chance of contentment” (191).

“The whole success of early modern English patriarch, it can be argued, lay in its flexibility and its capacity, as a gender system, to sustain modifications, cushioning and mitigation” (191).

Marital Violence

“We are concerned in this book with a society suffused with personal relationships of dominance and submission, a society in which the use of violence was accepted as a necessary means of maintaining order in hierarchical relationships, both within and outside the household. Wife-beating is an issue at the core of early modern patriarchy and it relates to personal dynamics at the innermost level of marital relationships. We must set beside everything that has been said in the previous two chapters some deeply entrenched beliefs about the relative power of husband and wife. England was no different from other European countries at this time in having a legal code which allowed husbands to inflict what was called ‘moderate corredtion’ on their wives, besides beating children and servants when they found it necessary. There were some guidelines, such as that the violence should not draw blood and that if a stick was used it should be no thicker than a man’s thumb, the original source of the idea of a rule of thumb. This doctrine was reiterated by a judge as late as 1782. It was assumed that correction meant punishment and the law in this sense did not give men a right to beat their wives at random or on a whim. But such limitations still left the question of what was ‘lawful and reasonable correction’ wholly open” (192).

“In so far as men may have been learning in the period between 1500 and 1660 that force was not the answer, that they had to rely instead upon persuasion and the strength of their personalities to get their way with their wives, outside puritan circles the contribution of the religious message to changing attitudes was probably small” (200).

“Around 1800, a very significant shift in function of charivari occurred. While the humiliation of unruly women remained a prominent theme in some regions in the nineteenth century, it was wife-beaters who became the principal target of the ritual” (202).

“How far there was an actual decline in the employment of violence by men as they enforced patriarchy in England between 1500 and 1800 is an open question. What is clear is that charivari remained over these centuries a legitimate way of saying that violence in the home has real limits and that during the period after 1700 it became a men’s violence rather than women’s which was the focus of community attention. Puritan teaching may have played some part in changing attitude to domestic violence, but what we are seeing here is long-term and deep-seated change at the grass roots of English society” (203).