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What does well-being mean when we talk about men and women in the past? Their sheer chances of survival, their protection from want, their social status, their individual agency and their self-esteem were all strongly mediated by the family, the predominant social institution. Family laws and customs of family formation created differences between insiders and outsiders in terms of well-being. Within families, there were strong differences in autonomy, status and freedom between the genders and generations. The book offers a fascinating exploration of gender differences in well-being in many regions of historic Europe, with some comparative perspectives. It explores how historic family systems differed with respect to choosing a marriage partner, transmitting property, living and care conditions of widows and widowers and the position of children born out of wedlock.
This book investigates marriage and divorce in the nineteenth-century European territories of the Russian Empire. It uncovers the way a peasant community employed unsanctioned marital behaviour, such as cohabitation and bigamy, among others, in order to respond to the external factors that had an impact on the family life, including transmission of inheritance and household structure. Lithuania was part of the Tsarist Empire until 1914. This case study reveals how under often restrictive laws and policies – serfdom up to 1861, and the pervasive role of the Church, in addition to deep-rooted customary practices – women and men manage to normalize their family life. The volume is based on a wide range of archival sources and uncovers familial behaviour both from an individual and community perspectives.
Looking at the experiences of women in early modern Portugal in the context of crime and forgiveness, this study demonstrates the extent to which judicial and quasi-judicial records can be used to examine the implications of crime in women’s lives, whether as victims or culprits. The foundational basis for this study is two sets of manuscript sources that highlight two distinct yet connected experiences of women as participants in the criminal process. One consists of a collection of archival documents from the first half of the seventeenth century, a corpus called 'querelas,' in which formal accusations of criminal acts were registered. This is a rich source of information not only about ...
Women, Migration, and Aging in the Americas analyzes how immigrant women have coped with life after they settled in the Americas, from the 19th–21st centuries. It explores their empowerment processes, the type of gender inequalities they faced, and their destinies as they aged; whether they resided in the destination country throughout their lives or returned to their home country. The book shows that many immigrant women were able to secure their wellbeing autonomously as they aged, after they retired, and/or when they became widows. The authors offer new research material on immigrant women’s aging experiences, their innovative conclusions contrasting with the historiography that has o...
This book explores the significance of gender in shaping the Portuguese-speaking world from the Middle Ages to the present. Sixteen scholars from disciplines including history, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, literature and cultural studies analyse different configurations and literary representations of women's rights and patriarchal constraints. Unstable constructions of masculinity, femininity, queer, homosexual, bisexual, and transgender identities and behaviours are placed in historical context. The volume pioneers in gendering the Portuguese expansion in Africa, Asia, and the New World and pays particular attention to an inclusive account of indigenous agencies. Contributors are: Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, Vanda Anastácio, Francisco Bethencourt, Dorothée Boulanger, Rosa Maria dos Santos Capelão, Maria Judite Mário Chipenembe, Gily Coene, Philip J. Havik, Ben James, Anna M. Klobucka, Chia Longman, Amélia Polónia, Ana Maria S. A. Rodrigues, Isabel dos Guimarães Sá, Ana Cristina Santos, and João Paulo Silvestre.
Before the Public Library explores the emergence of community-based lending libraries in the Atlantic World before the advent of the Public Library movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Essays by eighteen scholars from a range of disciplines seek to place, for the first time, community libraries within an Atlantic context over a two-century period. Taking a comparative approach, this volume shows that community libraries played an important – and largely unrecognized – role in shaping Atlantic social networks, political and religious movements, scientific and geographic knowledge, and economic enterprise. Libraries had a distinct role to play in shaping modern identities through the acquisition and circulation of specific kinds of texts, the fostering of sociability, and the building of community-based institutions.
Endogamy, the custom forbidding marriage outside one's social class, is central to social history. This study considers the factors determining who married whom, whether partner selection changed over the past three hundred years and regional differences between Europe and South America.
This microhistory investigates the famous and scandalous 1731 trial in which Catherine Cadière, a young woman in the south of France, accused her Jesuit confessor, Jean-Baptiste Girard, of seduction, heresy, abortion, and bewitchment. Generally considered to be the last witchcraft trial in early modern France, the Cadière affair was central to the volatile politics of 1730s France, a time when magistrates and lawyers were seeking to contain clerical power. Mita Choudhury’s examination of the trial sheds light on two important phenomena with broad historical implications: the questioning of traditional authority and the growing disquiet about the role of the sacred and divine in French so...
What is it like to be a woman living through the transition from communism to democracy? What effect does this have on a woman's daily life, on her concept of herself, her family, and her community? Birth of Democratic Citizenship presents the stories of women in Romania as they describe their experiences on the journey to democratic citizenship. In candid and revealing conversations, women between the ages of 24 and 83 explain how they negotiated their way through radical political transitions that had a direct impact on their everyday lives. Women who grew up under communism explore how these ideologies influenced their ideas of marriage, career, and a woman's role in society. Younger gene...
This volume explores familial wealth arrangements and gendered property from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries in Italian, German and Austrian territories (including Florence, Trento, Tyrol, and Vienna), Nordic countries, Western Pyrenees, and England. Family property as capital in the form of houses, land, movables, financial assets, and rights were of great importance in the past. Arrangements of such property were characterised by a high degree of negotiating competence but likewise they entailed competition between the parties involved and were highly conflict prone. Fifteen contributors from Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK address different marital property regimes in relation to the practices and legal regulations of inheritance patterns with consideration to inter-familial negotiation, conflict, and resolution. Contributors are: Marie-Pierre Arrizabalaga, Laura Casella, Isabelle Chabot, Siglinde Clementi, Simona Feci, Ellinor Forster, Andrea Griesebner, Christian Hagen, Margareth Lanzinger, Janine Maegraith, Silvia Mattivi, Beatrice Moring, Craig Muldrew, Regina Schäfer, and Georg Tschannett.