The large-scale abandonment of infants in the European past has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years. Its staggering dimensions in many countries of Europe, as recently as the nineteenth century, have prompted some uncomfortable rethinking about family life and parent–child (and especially mother–child) relations in the past. Studies of abandonment have contributed to our understanding not only of gender ideology and gender relations, but also of the roles played by state and Church in regulating sexuality and family life.

Yet research on abandoned children to date has had a limited focus. The great bulk of the literature looks at the process of abandonment itself, the terrifyingly high mortality of the foundlings in infancy, and the process by which foundling homes placed their wards in rural foster homes. Perhaps because of the notoriously high mortality of the abandoned babies – though also no doubt due to the greater difficulty of generating suitable data from the archives – little attention has been paid to those foundlings who survived childhood. Typical is the admission found in the major study of foundling homes in Portugal: ‘The fate of the few foundlings who reached adulthood is unknown.’

Yet through the nineteenth century – which provides our focus here – large numbers of foundlings did reach adulthood, and a variety of public authorities were very much concerned about just what kinds of adults they became. Even in determining the placement of infants with wetnurses, foundling home authorities considered the long-term implications for their future as adults. The widespread aversion to placing abandoned infants with wetnurses in the cities was linked to both a belief that the city was corrupt and was likely to produce less wholesome adults than a rural upbringing and to a concern that concentrating a large number of propertyless, family-less foundlings in the city might well create an adult population that would pose a threat to public order.

In a quest to establish the principles behind various migration currents, a great body of research has shown that there is keen interest in the differentials in socio-economic conditions between the places of origin of migrants and their destinations, with special focus laid on wage rates, employment opportunities and availability of information. Although useful in explaining some of the elements involved in the migration process, this conventional approach based on the functional analysis of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors often fails to give adequate attention to the peculiar historical contexts in which individual migration events have occurred. Recent advances in research into the inter-parochial migration of the labouring poor in rural England under the laws of settlement have clearly illustrated how inappropriate the conventional approach can be. From surviving settlement material such as examinations, certificates and removal orders, historians have successfully identified distinctive features of pauper migration and of the settlement material from the migration has been traced. (For those unfamiliar with the laws of settlement, some basic terms are explained in the Appendix.)

First of all, the settlement material is not, strictly speaking, direct evidence of actual migration. Examinations may have been used just for information-gathering purposes, and removal orders could be issued to cajole the immigrants' parish of settlement into producing certificates or agreeing to non-resident relief. What the settlement documents show is, therefore, not so much actual mobility as inter-parochial tensions over the cost of employment and poor relief. Secondly, those who moved to other parishes under the laws of settlement hardly achieved equality with the native parishioners. Many parishes had strict village regulations giving priority to the parishioners in the allocation of work in the harvest fields, in the chances of partaking in gleaning, in access to local charity and in the exercise of various common rights. Thirdly, these migrants were particularly vulnerable to changes in the social and economic conditions of the parishes in which they resided. The parishes of residence were inclined to force non-parishioners to return to their parishes of settlement when there was no further need of their labour or when they became less useful due to decrepitude, injury or other circumstances. Migration through the process of the laws of settlement was not permanent in many cases, and return migration was usually forced rather than voluntary. Finally, it was not uncommon for a conflict of interests to develop between pauper migrants, parish officers and magistrates. Over such issues as employment, poor-relief expenditure and the social cohesiveness of local communities, they often had different interests as waged labourers and peasant workers, as tenant farmers and other ratepayers and as landowners, respectively.

These features highlight the point that the functional explanation, which rests on the notion of the autonomy of the parishes of origin and destination as decision-making units, can be seriously misleading. A more important issue is whether the framework of pauper settlement hindered ‘free’ labour circulation and, if so, to what extent, in what way and in whose interest it did so. These are crucial questions for understanding not only the structure of the English labour market but also the political contours of rural society between different classes, and for further evaluating the overall role of the laws of settlement for the industrial and urban growth of the time. Focusing on the critical period 1751–1834, this article seeks to answer the questions through a careful reconsideration of the Oxfordshire settlement material.

The image of the nagging woman being ducked as a scold is firmly ensconced among popular images of women in the past, but the historical phenomenon of prosecutions for scolding, though it has been briefly touched on in many studies, has been the subject of only two substantial contributions, those of David Underdown and Martin Ingram. Underdown has maintained that from the 1560s there was increasing concern with scolds, which he links with the rise in witchcraft prosecutions and growing anxiety about domineering and unfaithful wives. Accepting the notion of a ‘crisis of order’ in the decades around 1600, he postulates as an aspect of this a ‘crisis in gender relations’ which he attributes to a decline in neighbourliness and social harmony resulting from the spread of capitalism. He bases his argument partly on literary sources, including plays, sermons and popular pamphlets (though conceding that literary evidence is not conclusive and that the misogynistic tradition in literature is a long one) and partly on a somewhat impressionistic survey of court records from around 1560 to around 1640. This period, he claims, witnessed an intense preoccupation with women perceived as threatening the patriarchal order, manifested by greater numbers of prosecutions of scolds and other disorderly women than in the preceding and subsequent periods, and by more severe punishments, notably the cucking-stool. Women accused as scolds, he maintains, were usually poor, widows, newcomers, social outcasts or ‘those lacking the protection of a family’, and were likely to vent their frustration on local notables as the nearest symbols of authority. He suggests that both the prosecution of scolds and their punishment by ducking were more common in towns and wood-pasture villages than in arable areas (such as that around Fordwich in Kent, the borough we will be looking at); however, he admits that rural records have survived less well than urban, and gives no quantified evidence for the alleged lenience of the authorities in arable villages towards ‘disorderly’ women.

In 1776, in the parish of Puddletown, Dorset, Sarah Dibben, an elderly, impoverished widow, was examined as to her place of settlement by the local justice of the peace to determine whether the parish should pay for her poor relief. At the same time, the JP interviewed her son, Melchizedeck, with whom Sarah had been living, to shed further light on Sarah's situation. Melchizedeck told the justice that because Sarah was his mother he ‘thought it his Duty to assist her if he could without injuring his family’. However, he was at the marginal level of poverty himself, ‘having nothing but what he can earn to support his family’. As a consequence of these examinations, Sarah was removed to the neighbouring parish of Piddlehinton, where she had borne her children over forty years earlier.

The case of Sarah Dibben's settlement highlights the main issues surrounding provisions for the elderly in eighteenth-century England. (Here, the elderly are defined as those aged 60 and above.) The provisions of the poor law of 1601 meant that both the local community and the family had a legal obligation to support the aged. This law stated that ‘the aged and decrepit’ of every parish were to be supported by a tax, collected from all those who held property in the parish. At the same time, the law dictated:

The father and grandfather, mother and grandmother, and children of every poor, old, blind, lame and impotent person, or other person not able to work, being of sufficient ability, shall at their own charges, relieve and maintain every such poor person, in that manner, and according to that rate, as by the justices in sessions shall be assessed: on pain of 20s. a month. [I will be referring to this clause as the family-support section of the poor laws.]

In medieval and early modern England, men's and women's rights to land were not equal. Sons were preferred over daughters in the inheritance of land. Marriage removed rights of property ownership from women and placed them in the hands of their husbands. Yet land stood at the heart of the economy and society in rural England in a period when agriculture was the main employer and land the main source of wealth, social status and political power. Ordinary women's inferior rights to land were a key aspect in women's subordination as a whole. The study presented here is a detailed examination of women's acquisition and possession of land in north-east Norfolk in the period 1440–1580, using data from manorial documents and wills. Erickson has noted that ‘it is relatively easy to compile information on how women as a sex were supposed to act in early modern England, and lists of the legal restrictions placed upon them. It is much more difficult to ascertain exactly how women did behave and how they responded to their legal disabilities.’ This study emphasizes actual practice rather than legal theory.

Attempts to account for the pattern and progress of mortality decline in England and Wales in the nineteenth century have produced a literature in which something of a general accord exists over key factors involved. Historians acknowledge the influence of two broad trends of change: environmental improvements as a result of sanitary reform initiatives and nutritional improvements as a consequence of a rise in the general standard of living. Where discord has arisen is in the degree of attachment of individual historians to one or other of these trends as primary contributor. The study of mortality decline, which was the product of a complex amalgam of factors, has proved a complicated task. It is one whose outcome ultimately depends upon efforts to disaggregate and measure the influences of different factors involved. To date, attempts at the systematic measurement of certain key factors associated with mortality decline have lagged considerably behind acceptance of the importance of their measurement. An important omission has been a measure of the timing and dimensions of sanitary reform programmes which, via infrastructure development and environmental controls, had the potential to decrease the rate at which infectious diseases were transmitted. This article examines the trends which emerge from a quantification of local government expenditures on sanitary infrastructure and from attention to its phasing over time. We are concerned with two main issues: to what extent do public health expenditure data describe the public health effort, and how do trends in public health expenditure relate to the decline of mortality? Our subject is local authority sanitary reform as a factor in mortality decline and our focus is on the impact of the timing of public health expenditure rather than the reasons for that timing. We do not examine inter-relationships between sanitary reform and other factors contributing to mortality decline such as income levels and density factors. A call for a more comprehensive study of the sanitary undertakings of local government has been common amongst historians of nineteenth-century mortality decline. It has been acknowledged on both sides of the ‘nutrition versus sanitation’ debate that a probable causal relationship exists between sanitary reforms and declining mortality levels. What has been lacking is a study of sufficient scale and detail to enable comprehensive evaluation.

Studies of infant mortality in both historical and modern populations from around the world have shown that the most important single factor affecting the infant mortality rate (IMR) is the way in which babies are fed. When methods of infant feeding are unsatisfactory or dangerous, mortality is high; when improvements are made in feeding practices, mortality falls, often dramatically, in a short period of time. The degree to which changes in infant feeding alone can affect IMRs depends on other factors in the population concerned, primarily the health and nutritional status of the mother; sanitary conditions both within the household and in the surrounding environment; levels of endemic and epidemic diseases; the degree of wealth, education and sophistication of the population; and, if women are employed outside the home, the provision made for infant feeding and care by the child's family and by society.

This article examines infant feeding practices in England during the first two decades of the twentieth century, arguably the most important 20 years in the fall in that nation's IMR between 1870 and 1920. The 1900s and 1910s saw many major changes in the ways in which infants were fed in all sections of society. Instigated by government, local Medical Officers of Health and their staff and voluntary organizations, the effect of the infant welfare movement in England in this period was that infants and their mothers were significantly better fed, cared for and able to resist disease in 1919 than in 1900.

Economic historians and development economists have exploited links between nutrition, health status and physical stature to argue that evidence about height can be used to supplement conventional economic indices of well-being. Evidence on stature may be available for time periods when conventional economic indices are not. It may also exist for sections of populations for which only aggregate income data is available, and so expose variations in living standards within populations: indeed this may be its most important contribution. Moreover height is an aggregate function of many aspects of well-being, including real income, work intensity and the disease environment. Unlike real income data it can reflect net environmental factors such as arduous employment at an early age that is not fully offset by inputs of food and health care.

This article exploits these potentially useful attributes of the anthropometric approach to explore a neglected aspect of inequality in early industrial Britain and to try to capture evidence of the net effect of relative deprivation through cross-sectional analyses of heights. Children in families headed by women comprise the subsample on which we focus. Considerable qualitative and some quantitative evidence exists to suggest that children in such families were relatively deprived. Female-headed households were impoverished by the relatively low earning power of women, which was only partially offset by poor relief. But oppressive poverty was not alone in making these children's lives hard. Evidence suggests that they comprised a disproportionate share of child workers in the mines and manufactories of early industrial Britain. They were put to work early and at jobs which involved long hours and although their efforts augmented family incomes, given the poverty within which such families remained it is unlikely that the children's claim on resources was sufficiently boosted to offset the energy required by their employment.

Since the early 1980s, the eighteenth-century beginnings of German mass migration to North America have been the subject of intense research and writing. In spite of the multifaceted results of this research on both sides of the ocean, the textbook explanation of early German Atlantic migration has demonstrated a striking persistence. To quote from one of the best English-language textbooks on German social history, ‘from about 1750 on, over-population fuelled…the beginnings of the exodus to North America’. This interpretation is exactly where scholars such as Wolfgang von Hippel stood more than a decade ago, and it dovetails with the migration theories of German population sociology of the 1970s. But is it right? And what alternative explanations are available? The most important alternative to the received approach is offered by the concept of networks. As Charles Tilly put it, ‘categories stay put, networks move’. If emigrants moved along lines of contacts and information, we do not need to refer to strong push or pull factors in order to explain why they were ‘uprooted’ from the territorial categories to which they belonged. Chain migration can be interpreted as a self-generating and self-sustaining process, a system in itself. In this perspective, migration becomes more and more likely because of flows of information, credit or capital between the areas involved in migration – contacts created by migration cause additional migration.

In late imperial China, as many as 10 per cent of all peasants were unfree. The most common form of unfree labour was state populations organized under the Eight Banners, an elite military organization. This article discusses household succession and household division in three such banner populations organized under the imperial household agency (neiwufu).

The banner household, called hu in Han Chinese or boigon in Manchu Chinese, was defined by common residence and common consumption. Household members lived together, ate together, and farmed together. They did so, however, on state land as hereditary state peasants, albeit elite peasants. Provided with ample land, their principal functions were to provide the state with agricultural goods, as well as with labour and military service.

The Qing state organized the banner household according to two contradictory principles. On the one hand, by encouraging late household division many banner households evolved into large joint households. On the other hand, by enforcing a system of primogenitary household headship and by granting household heads considerable power over the persons and property of all household members, banner households also resembled stem households. This combination of exclusionary headship and inclusionary membership was a source of tension and potential conflict within banner households. The purpose of this article is to compare Daoyi to two other banner populations, Dami and Gaizhou, in order to ascertain if household behaviour in Daoyi was common elsewhere in northeast China. This is of particular interest since our previous reconstruction of social organization in Daoyi, Fate and fortune in rural China: social organization and population behavior in Liaoning, 1774–1873 (1997), revealed a society dominated by multiple-family households sharply stratified by generation, seniority within generation, and gender.

Specifically, we compare headship succession and household formation rules among these three populations between 1789 and 1909. The article is divided into three sections. In Section I, we describe the three populations and the household registration system that provides most of our information on them. In Section II, we analyze household structure and the patterns of household transition. Finally, in Section III, we contrast two different rules of headship succession among these populations and discuss the consequent patterns of household division.

Comments penned in the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras leave few doubts that many contemporaries believed that women's work (in the sense of paid employment), particularly that of married women, was bad for babies. Mothers who were employed in industry received particular condemnation, accused by their critics of abandoning their children with the most inadequate of childcare arrangements. As H. Jones, a doctor, put it in 1894:

The children of women engaged in industrial occupations suffer from the effects of maternal neglect. They are handicapped from the moment of their birth in the struggle for existence, and have to contend not only against the inevitable perils of infancy but also against perils due to their neglect by their mothers, and the ignorance of those to whose care they are entrusted.

Such views did not go unchallenged, however, even at the turn of the century. Some of Jones's critics, for instance, noting his particular antipathy to women undertaking industrial occupations, argued that it was the generally insanitary condition of the towns where women found industrial employment which underlay the poor survival of their infants, rather than their mothers' employment per se.

The German voluntary association (hereafter in German the Verein, or Vereine in the plural) played an important role in the evolution of German society in the later nineteenth century and in the first third of the twentieth. This sort of association (or male bourgeois club) was a cornerstone of European Enlighenment society at the end of the eighteenth century, of the liberal society of the Vormärz, and of the German political parties in the years 1848–1849. Furthermore, the Verein was one of the main characteristics in the rise and hegemony of German bourgeoisie in the second half of the nineteenth century, and one of the cornerstones of local society as it developed in Germany towards the end of the 1890s.

Research into the German Vereine is very advanced. To this day, historical research continues to benefit from Thomas Nipperdeys' breakthrough article concerning the importance of the Vereine in the rise of bourgeois-liberal society prior to 1848. Otto Dann, Wolfgang Hardtwig, and Dieter Düding have expanded our knowledge concerning the importance of the Vereine for the rise of bourgeois nationalism and liberalism before 1848. Regional studies have also emphasized these aspects during the Vormärz period and after.

Folklorist-anthropological research is indebted to Hermann Bausinger's article on the importance of the connection between the Vereine and the development of German folklore. Similarly, Max Weber paved the way for the sociological research on the Vereine that has flourished since the 1860s, led by sociologists such as Hans Jürgen Siewert and Gerhard Wurzbacher. These are the two dominant streams in current research of the Vereine, although it is beyond the scope of this article to explore them here.

If the household head had important functions in his household and in the community, his disappearance could have major consequences for his family and members of the community. In agricultural communities in early modern Japan, where the village was organized and run by the heads of the households, and where small-scale family/household farming required the integration of family members under the leadership of the household heads, the death of the household head was a major concern for both family members and the community at large. In two Northeastern villages in Japan, for example, it has been shown that the death of the household head actually increased the probability that female members of the household would also die, even after controlling for other household and individual factors. This increased mortality was occasioned by economic stress resulting from the loss of a core labour component of the household, from psychological stress occasioned by the loss of a family member, and finally from the loss of power by the household which operated within the stem family system.

Our focus in this article is on the age at achieving the headship of a household, and to whom the headship of the household might be transferred. Japanese families in pre-industrial times are said to have followed the stem family rule, which was characterized by non-partible inheritance and succession by just one child. In this system, one child continued to live with the parents while his or her siblings all left home at some point. The eldest son was the preferred successor but some regions selected the eldest child, even if that child was a daughter, or the youngest child. Headship in this family system involved a number of specific responsibilities: to represent the family in the village organization, to sign contracts and negotiate agreements, to manage the family's labour force and finances, and to practise the religious rites of the family. The survival of the family line indicated by the continuation of household names and properties (and businesses) depended, therefore, upon obtaining and training capable heirs. Thus focusing on the transfer of headship provides a clue to the kind of strategies which were followed by peasants.

Changing established systems of government entitlement is a thorny proposition, even for popular states with sturdy holds on the reigns of power. The Russian Federation, in the throes of a severe economic downturn, extreme political instability and social crisis, has nonetheless altered the official stance toward forms of entitlement from the previous regime. Benefits cut from the ‘social contract’ have included guaranteed employment, free post-secondary education and access to state-subsidized apartments, in attempts to redefine the lines of authority and responsibility between citizens and the state. Other lines of responsibility appear sacrosanct. The Soviet pension system, more specifically the old age and service pensions, remains in place, but with extreme delays in payment, poor indexing to the cost of living and high levels of tax evasion.

In this article I examine the ways in which both the legacy of Soviet pension policies and post-1991 economic and social trends have constrained policy options concerning pension reform, particularly in reference to old age pensions, and prevented a serious re-evaluation of pension provision. The Russian Federation government inherited a pension system ill-equipped to cope with its aging population. However, the previous pension system did deliver payments on a regular basis to nearly one in five citizens before 1991. Unlike other areas of often unfulfillable social services guarantees (housing for families, quality health care and free access to higher education), the pension system represented a Soviet social programme that provided consistent direct assistance to a large proportion of the population. Pension payments were an expected entitlement.

‘The most important principle of all our inheritance and family law is the preservation of the patrimony.’

—Josep Faus i Condomines, 1907

Marriage strategies leading to the biological and social reproduction of the family were the main goal of stem family households in Catalonia. This goal was closely linked to the maintenance or increase of the family inheritance, mostly in terms of arable land. The ‘house’, which in Catalonia connotes the family household, lay at the centre of this system. The aim of this article is to analyse some Catalan marriage strategies, together with inheritance and social customs. This will be carried out through an analysis of the matrimonial behaviour of a stem family living in the village of Sant Pere de Riudebitlles over 300 years, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. We will show how this family achieved its main biological and social reproduction goals. Our inquiries use the techniques of L. Ferrer-Alòs and A. Fauve-Chamoux. As D. S. Reher has remarked, ‘The only way to flesh this out adequately is to look at the system from inside out, in terms of the way individual families sorted out their destinies within the context they had inherited…it would also be most interesting to be able to observe succession strategies of families according to their concrete demographic constraints such as number, age, and gender distribution of their offspring surviving past early childhood.’

P. Laslett – first in 1972 and later in 1983 – coined a typology for the analysis of the household. He defined a household as a domestic coresident group, wherein people with or without family ties live together, sharing the main meals. The Laslett household classification scheme has been widely used by researchers. However, Laslett's scheme has had some critics, who object to its static approach to family and household analysis. Our view is that domestic coresident group analysis should be dynamic; that is to say, we should study the household by observing its different stages, and considering the social, economic and historical framework of its geographical area. This framework helps us to determine the logic of family behaviour and the various strategies which a family might pursue in order to achieve a particular goal. We believe that these aims do not stand in contradiction to the Laslett typology.

In 1935 John Embree, an American student of Radcliffe-Brown, entered Suye mura, a village in the Kyushu island of Japan. He was to live in that village for a year and a half to conduct a field survey for his Ph.D. dissertation. During his stay there he determined that ‘The primary social unit in buraku [hamlet] life is the household’, and that ‘This household includes the small family, perhaps a retired grandfather or grandmother, and one or two servants to help in the household and farm labor.’ Since by the ‘small family’ he meant a group of ‘master, wife, eldest son (own or adopted), eldest son's wife, any unmarried children of the master, and eldest son's children (own or adopted)’, what he described is a stem family household.

Being a Radcliffe-Brownian anthropologist, Embree was more interested in the functions of various forms of interaction between households than in statistical analysis of the size and composition of the households of the village. His published monograph includes no table showing a classification of the households there, nor does it contain any information from which we can calculate, for example, the mean number of a particular kin group living within the households of Suye. Nonetheless, his account merits attention for two reasons.