A collection of essays on a wide range of topics, from New York Quaker marriage lengths in the 1800s to a review of feminist literature from the 1970s. Naturally some were more interesting to me than others, but overall this was a very informative collection. Here are some of the notes I took while reading it.

Emily Coleman--Drawing from the Polypytch of the Abbot Imminion, which describes the lands and families belonging to the monestary of Saint Germain-des-Prés. In the 9th century in France, there were four categories of peasants: liberi, coloni, lidi and servii. The Liberi were legally free, the coloni mostly descendents of Roman peasants, the Lides were originally laeti (barbarians introduced into Gaul by Diocletian) who started as farmers and soldiers, then became servile laborers, and the servi who were the descendents of slaves. Children took their mother's class. There were few women on the land at the time, so one might assume that women would be able to pick and chose, thus generally marrying up in class. But actually, records show the opposite was true: among marriages between people of different classes, 76% were women marrying a man of lower class. Coleman's hypothesis is that since women maintained their class status regardless of who they married, and generally passed their own status on to their children, they married for land while men married (at least partly) for social status. No way to prove this, sadly.

Pierre Goubert--A review of the current state of knowledge and theories about early modern French history (17th century). Short and violent demographic crises, caused by epidemics and high prices for cereals. Large variability in fertility (women of some areas, like Brittany, French Flanders, gave birth every year, while other areas like the South-Western provinces gave birth every third year)and death rates (especially among children--on Normandy's sea shore, infant mortality was as low as 15%, while among abandoned children of Paris it exceeded 80%). Girls generally married around 25 or 26, and 95% were not pregnant (very unlike 18th century England). Coitus interruptus began really making an impact on the French birth rate, which fell from 39/1000 in 1780 to below 25 in 1880. "No other country in the known world experienced so early and so rapid a decline." The cause is mysterious, because no one wrote about such behavior at the time. In the 2nd half of the 18th century, when contraception was starting to get used more, mobility also increased 2 or 3 fold.

Peter Laslett--Tried to determined age and menarche for 17th century Europeans. tried to use age at marriage or age at 1st childbirth to get some idea, but really it's impossible.

Edward Shorter--"Starting in the mid 18th century a dramatic increase in the proportion of illegitimate births commenced all over Europe." Probably not just a rise in reporting, since priests were very careful to distinguish per-maritally conceived babies in the 17th century. Shorter proposes that it could be due to less abortion. He says it isn't just that women had a harder time getting their lovers or rapists to marry them, because premarital conception increased just as illegitimate births increased. A few more points: Half of all illegitimate births in 17th century Grenoble were fathered by women's masters or employers. "A distinctive feature of factory worker life in the 1800s was staggering rates of illegitimacy...The single group most prone to illegitimacy was urban domestic servants." "In every city in England and the continent for which data are available, the upsurge in illegitimacy commenced around 1750 or before." "In most German-speaking areas from Austria to Pomerania, legal restrictions on marriage were reinforced in the 19th century" because they feared that allowing the poor to marry would lead to loads of children being born and having to be supported by welfare. But in fact, marriage restrictions just meant there was an explosion in illegitimate births. When the laws were repealed in the late 1860s, illegitimacy ratio sagged in the space of a year or two.

Robert Wells--American life expectancy at birth doubled between 1800 and 1970, while the birth rate fell by over 50%. Wells wanted to see how these demographic changes affected the family, so he compared Quaker NY families in the early 1800s to families in the mid 1900s. Women married at about the same age (20 to 22), and in most cases in both eras, they had their first child within a year or two of marriage. But modern women stopped having babies after about 30, whereas Quaker women didn't--so Quaker women spent about 17.4 years bearing children. (This is, if anything, an underestimation of average 18th century Americans, since Quakers were among the first to deliberately limit the size of their families.) Because mortality fell, length of marriage rose over time. For early Quakers, the last child only left home when the woman was around 60, and half the marriages were broken by the death of a partner less than a year after that. By the 20th century, longer life expectancy and fertility decline meant that for the first time, couples could expect a life together after their children were gone. Before, marriage was virtually synonymous with children. After, it was also about companionship.

Joseph Kett--When the range of choices available to people was very narrow, no need for a period of indecision. Population concentration in US after 1800 led to decline of family as the working unit (especially in urban settings) and separation of children from adults. Around this time came the Second Awakening, where the majority of converters were teenagers. This drew people's imaginations to the idea of youth as a time of plasticity and instability; you can start to see this in medical texts from the 1830s onwards. Focus of literature is one men of around 20, when they were leaving home, but for girls focused on puberty, when their sexual purity became at risk. "Youth" wasn't a well defined age, more dependent on whether someone was working or in school. Since men were educated seasonally (after harvest, before planting), they'd be considered adult part of the year, and a youth or a child for others. The loose and informal nature of 19th century academics and ease of switching from one occupation to another created a sort of built-in period of indecision. But Protestants got anxious that if someone converted later in life, they might choose the "wrong" church, and so started pressuring people to convert earlier, around puberty.

Virginia Yans McLauglin--Looked at families of South Italians in Buffalo between 1900 and 1930. Although it's generally assumed that immigration in industrial America caused radical changes in traditional male-dominated family structure, McLaughlin argues that this depends on A)what culture they're coming from and B)the industry available where they move to. For instance, there was mostly heavy industry in Buffalo, with few jobs for unskilled women. But Italian women also sought out jobs on the fringes of industry, which let them maintain customary family arrangements. They were able to do this because there were sufficient occupational opportunities for them to pick and choose. (They mostly worked at home, or seasonally, for example in canneries or vineyards. They didn't go into service professions.) South Italians took boys out of school early so they could start earning early, girls early to maintain their purity and get help with housework. This, plus the little money that women brought in, restricted social mobility upward but also maintained traditional family structures. When families did need extra income, it was daughters, not married women, who went to work in factories, and this didn't challenge male power.

John Demos--Examined the possible psychological effects of Puritan child-rearing techniques and customs.

Kenneth Keniston--Called for more studies of psychological effects of wide-scale historical changes.

Lois Banner--Overview of feminist histories that came out in 1970.

Etienne van de Walle--review of 2 books focusing on English and French children in the past.

David Rothman--Review of books from 1970 dealing with children and youth via various methods--psychology resting on assumptions based on architecture and furnishings; literature on child-rearing; a theory that decreased family size led to increased family tension; the history of public policies toward children in America.

Henretta--Review of books published in 1970 on early settlers in New England. (see page 193 for hilarious smackdown) In 18th century, consensus was necessary for laws because otherwise people would simply not obey the laws. However, with the rise of population and absentee land ownership, decline in religious cohesiveness led to more migration and creation of offshoot communities. Zuckerman views this as disintegration, but Henretta wants to frame it as increase of kinship links (a lot of new communities were made up of intermarried or related families) and growth.

Hareven--Historians have taken theories, models, and investigative methods from anthropologists and psychologists, but while using these interdisciplinary tools historians have noted that with historical context and data, many of these sociological assumptions don't hold up. Too many of them rely on the idea of a modern Western family as the best/natural/default family structure, without acknowledging diversity and changes over time. (pg 221 for insane sentence beginning "Consequently this family form infringed...")

Sommerville--Cites works from 1950s-70s on the image and importance of children, from toys to the child as a symbol of irrationalism in philosophy to public policy toward child labor. ( )