Recently, I attended a seminar at which a historian of women presented a dazzling interpretation of the polemical writing of Olympe de Gouges and its (not to mention her) reception during the French Revolution. A crusty old historian of the Revolution rose during the question period and inquired, in his own eastern twang, “Now that I know that women were participants in the Revolution, what difference does it make!” This encounter suggested to me what I will argue are two increasingly urgent tasks for women’s history: producing analytical problem-solving studies as well as descriptive and interpretive ones, and connecting their findings to general questions already on the historical agenda. This is not a call for integrating women’s history into other history, since that process may mean simply adding material on women and gender without analyzing its implications, but for writing analytical women’s history and connecting its problems to those of other histories. Only through such an endeavor is women’s history likely to change the agenda of history as a whole.

The theme of this year’s meeting, “International Perspectives on Social Science History,” rises out of two realities. The first is the recognized international character of phenomena under study, such as fertility decline, political contention, family strategies in response to changing conditions, gendered work, migration, labor, and policing. The second is the way in which the Social Science History Association (SSHA) operates across borders and among scholars in the Americas, Europe, and Asia to investigate common scholarly problems. The attention of migration scholars is now focused on global movements of people and international migrations, particularly immigration. The politics and policies of receiving newcomers are very important now–in the Americas and in Europe. The SSHA is giving its attention to the old and new international immigrants to the United States, as in last year’s session on Nancy Foner’s fine book on New York, From Ellis Island to JFK (2000), and the presidential address by Caroline Brettell (2002) on the quantitative and qualitative methods by which we can understand human movement.

This article shows that late-nineteenth-century wealth inequality was associated with rising wealth levels supporting the existence of a Kuznets-type curve, but this curve is not unconditional.The tendency of wealth inequality to vary with age means that wealth inequality was also a function of the changing age composition of the population and may have been the result of portfolio allocation decisions across the life cycle. Canada's population “aged” during the late nineteenth century, with the proportion of population under age 20 dropping from 53% in 1871 to 43% by 1911. The general aging of the population could have increased inequality in both wealth and income. These results follow recent work by Jeffrey Williamson (1998), who argues that Kuznets curves are not unconditional. In other words, as the results of this article confirm, wealth inequality is the outcome of a complex economic process, not a single determinant cause.

The essays by Hans Marks and Don Kalb represent important contributions to a growing literature on class formation. Much of the current attention to class formation flows from the contemporary concern with larger processes of identity formation (Hanagan 1989; McNall 1988; Tilly 1992). Scholars such as Ira Katznelson and Adam Przeworski have emphasized the contingent character of class identity while, at the same time, reminding us of the need to understand why millions of people in the late nineteenth century chose to band together and fight under banners labeled proletarian (Katznelson 1986; Przeworski 1977).

The unique feature of geographic information systems (GIS) and other forms of historical data visualization is the capacity to hold and display large amounts of data associated with spatial reference points. This software can display all data for a given point, a single variable for all points, or, most important, any combination of variables across all reference points. In doing so, these systems bring to the screen instantly and cheaply a display of information once visible only in paper form, drawn slowly and expensively, first by cartographers and then by vector plotters. This project deploys GIS to help us understand the intersection of social and political life in nineteenth-century Alexandria, Virginia, and Newport, Kentucky—medium-sized cities with populations under 20,000. Commercial Alexandria, with a race-based labor system, and industrial Newport, with an immigrant labor system, present an analytically useful mix of commonalities and differences.

The history of health has increasingly attracted attention from both economic and demographic historians. This interest is reflected in a growing body of empirical data on mortality trends for western Europe and North America dating from before the eighteenth century. The decline in historical mortality, a central concern in this work, has been recognized as primarily attributable to falling death rates from infectious disease, and this development requires interpretation that addresses two factors: changes in levels of exposure to infection and changing levels of human resistance to infectious disease.

More than 7,000 assaults were reported to the magistrates of Portsmouth, England, between 1700 and 1781. Time-series analyses were run to see (1) what effects, if any, war had on levels of aggression and (2) whether overall levels of aggression decreased over time. Aggression was measured in two ways: (1) the extent to which assailants ganged up on adversaries and (2) levels of violence in individual confrontations (whether a weapon was used, and if so, what type; whether assailants refrained from using a weapon; and whether they stopped short of physical violence and instead merely insulted or threatened their enemies). Neither measure showed a significant variation over time. The participation of women in brawls decreased, but the aggressiveness of those who continued to brawl actually increased. Complaints about insults and threats declined, while complaints of a more serious nature showed a modest increase, reflecting, among other things, the emergence of new definitions of actionable behavior.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, for the first time in American history, a movement based on a broad agenda of political reform arose to dominate the political discourse. It inspired the growth of the regulatory state, the doubling of the size of the electorate, many reforms that were aimed at weakening the grip of machine politics, and other changes too numerous to list here. According to influential studies, the period gave us a “new American state” (Skowronek 1982) combined with the “onward march of party decomposition” (Burnham 1970).

For both major parties, we are told, there were clear divisions associated with support for or opposition to the progressive movement. Within the Democratic Party, William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson held high the banner of progressivism, while Alton B. Parker, John W Davis, and other heirs of Grover Cleveland spoke for conservatives.

Political boundaries are the criterion scholars use most often to define American suburbs; a problematic approach when applied to the late nineteenth century. Annexation distended the boundaries of nineteenth-century cities so far as to obscure broad swaths of suburban and rural districts within their limits. The absence of a literature about these “suburbs in the city” is problematic, because it encourages historical researchers to consider newly annexed territory as urban equivalents of older city districts. This article argues that under the generally accepted definition of suburb, the condition of nineteenth-century urban overbounding obstructs a full appreciation of the historical breadth, ubiquity, and composition of working-class residence outside the urban core. Analysis of the socioeconomic characteristics of regions with suburban population densities within the 1880 city limits of Cleveland, Ohio; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Newark, New Jersey; and St. Louis, Missouri, indicate that researchers have underestimated the degree and diversity of blue-collar suburbanization during this period.

Many scholars have noted the theoretical importance of remarriage in twentieth-century American life (Burch 1995; Cherlin 1998; Furstenberg 1980; Glick 1980; Thornton 1977; Uhlenberg and Chew 1986), yet few historical studies have examined remarriage in the United States empirically. This gap in the literature is noteworthy for two reasons. First, the turn of the twentieth century seems to have marked a crossover in the remarriage transition of the United States, reflecting changes in the pool of persons eligible to remarry. This transition was characterized by decreases in remarriage resulting from declines inmortality and probability of widow(er)hood, followed by increases in remarriage resulting from higher divorce rates. The crossover in the transition was likely to have occurred when the pool of eligibles was at or near its nadir. Second, there is ongoing debate about the implications of remarriage for families and individuals (Booth and Dunn 1994), and about the impacts of remarriage on family functions (Cherlin 1978; Cherlin and Furstenberg 1994). In the light of these considerations, we believe it is important to examine remarriage and its consequences in the United States at the turn of the century so that we may better understand the ways that remarriage influences family life and shapes the life course of persons within families (see London and Elman 2001).

We seem, as social science historians, to have become increasingly interested in the way that we present our evidence or tell our story or narrative. Donald McCloskey’s address last year cajoled us, or perhaps exhorted us, not to separate the scientific from the humanistic approach to writing history. As he pointed out, metaphor even creeps into economics, which is, by its earliest accounts, a dismal science. Metaphor influences the way one argues even with numbers (McCloskey 1990). I share his interest in rhetoric and add an interest in narrative.

One of the most vexing social debates of the late twentieth century in the industrialized West has centered on the complex of questions regarding the paid participation of women in the labor force. Which women engage in paid work, and for what reasons? For how many hours in a week, or weeks in a year, do they work for wages? What kind of work is it appropriate for women to do or, as some would ask, are they even capable of performing? How should the compensation for that work be established or evaluated? Joyce Burnette–s book Gender, Work, and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain is an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship that seeks historical answers to these questions. In this roundtable discussion three historians and two economists respond both to Burnette’s book and to the larger scholarly debates about the nature of women’s work in the past. The themes that have most piqued the interest of these respondents lie primarily along three lines: the problem of evaluating the relative strength of male and female labor, and the importance of strength to wage setting; the struggle to properly define power relationships, either between men and women in the household or workplace or between owners of capital and sellers of labor; and the problem of the thinness or thickness of markets or, more specifically, the problem of limited female mobility.

The world-systems perspective was invented for modeling and interpreting the expansion and deepening of the capitalist regional system as it emerged in Europe and incorporated the whole globe over the past 500 years (Wallerstein 1974; Chase-Dunn 1998; Arrighi 1994). The idea of a core/periphery hierarchy composed of “advanced” economically developed and powerful states dominating and exploiting “less developed” peripheral regions has been a central concept in the world-systems perspective. In the last decade the world-systems approach has been extended to the analysis of earlier and smaller intersocietal systems. Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills (1994) have argued that the contemporary global political economy is simply a continuation of a 5,000-year-old world system that emerged with the first states in Mesopotamia. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall (1997) have modified the basic world-systems concepts to make them useful for a comparative study of very different kinds of systems. They include very small intergroup networks composed of sedentary foragers, as well as larger systems containing chiefdoms, early states, agrarian empires, and the contemporary global system in their scope of comparison.

Even when historians disagree profoundly over causation, periodization, and perhaps the ultimate purpose of historical inquiry, they may still be able to find common ground in the discussion of primary sources and of the appropriate methods of extracting from them accurate information about a vitally important but heretofore neglected dimension of past social life. Such an impression emerges when Heldur Palli‘s account of the historical demographic research at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Estonian SSR is placed in the context of Western inquiries into the history of European populations. The methodological adjustments required in the application of well-known demographic techniques to unusual data sources should be better understood when the Estonian researchers conclude their work of family reconstitution from multi-lingual evidence about a peasantry with highly unstable naming practices. Also, Coale and Anderson (1979) described how the demographic characteristics of the Baltic area (including Estonia) in the late nineteenth century distinguished it from Russia proper, thus raising the question of when, in the distant past, these characteristics first appeared and how they can be described quantitatively before the first modern Baltic census of 1881. The sources being used by Palli and his colleagues no doubt will contain at least the beginnings of a concrete answer to these questions. Furthermore, the research by Peter Laslett and others on a regionalized model of premodern European household structure has suggested that the Baltic area stands somewhere between the West—with its high proportion of simple family households—and Russia—with its impressively high incidence of multiple family structures, a proposition which the cadastral revisions and fiscal censuses of Estonia should help to refine. There are also the questions of population turnover and social mobility, to which the frequent enumerations of the Estonian population ought to bring considerable quantitative evidence illustrating Eastern European patterns. Finally, Estonian peasants, like many other peasantries in the centuries discussed by Palli, were serfs; but, unlike all but a very few peasantries elsewhere, the Estonian population continued to be precisely enumerated by state authorities even after the abolition of serfdom in 1816-1819. The availability of detailed household-level data before and after legal emancipation will be of interest to Western scholars who have had to deal with the social structural consequences of emancipatory measures among servile agricultural populations in their own societies.

This article studies how policy on venereal disease participated in the construction of twentieth-century Swedish citizenship. Contact tracing and mandatory medical treatment, the two cornerstones of the Swedish attempt to eradicate venereal disease, became part of the contemporary citizenship discourse. Policy on venereal disease in Sweden was administered by infectious disease officers in every county and provincial physicians in every district. These civil servants were helped by the local police, who searched for recalcitrant patients. To be fully entitled to the rights of free medical care required extensive cooperation from the ill, some of whom found it impossible to comply. In Stockholm women were more frequently targeted by this legislation and were often treated more severely.

Recent years have witnessed an intensification of interest in research on family behavior. Economists have increasingly turned their attention to analysis of the determinants and consequences of family decisions, and historians have become more concerned with charting trends in the composition and behavior of families in the past. Considerable study has been devoted to some key decisions in the life-cycle of individuals that affect the family, including the determination of the age at marriage and the timing of fertility. Another such decision that has been recognized but has received relatively little attention is that of when children departed from the parental home.