Academic literature on the topic 'Widowers – europe – history'

In this article the ages at marriage and remarriage of Tansoˇng men and women are examined through an analysis of census registers (hojoˇk) from between 1678 and 1789. It was discovered that the average age of Tansoˇng women at first marriage was 17.5, and that most women married between the ages of 15 and 20, much earlier than women in Europe in this period and slightly earlier than those in Japan, but at similar ages to Chinese women. Husbands were on average around 18 when they married. Roughly half of widowers remarried, with remarriage more likely for those of lower and middle status than for upper-status widowers. Many middle- and low-status widowers had probably also married widows despite the fact that there was a legal prohibition on the remarriage of widows.

In nineteenth-century Europe, the foundling hospital grew beyond its traditional purpose of mitigating the shame of unwed mothers by also permitting widows, widowers, and poor married couples to abandon their children there temporarily. In the Foundling Hospital of Madrid (fhm), this new short-term abandonment could be completely anonymous due to the implementation of a wheel—a device on the outside wall of the institution that could be turned to place a child inside—which remained open until 1929. The use of survival-analysis techniques to disentangle the determinants of retrieval in a discrete framework reveals important differences in the situations of the women who abandoned their children at the fhm, partly depending on whether they accessed it through the Maternity Hospital after giving birth or they accessed it directly. The evidence suggests that those who abandoned their children through the Maternity Hospital retrieved them only when they had attained a certain degree of economic stability, whereas those who abandoned otherwise did so just as soon as the immediate condition prompting the abandonment had improved.

The Nahua (Aztecs) of ancient Mexico lived in large, extended family households (calli). A fundamental tenet of family history is that in the past high mortality was a major obstacle to household complexity. This was not the case for the Nahua, whose life expectancy was probably worse than any seen in Europe since the Black Death. Nahua populations were characterized by patriarchy, child marriage and greater proportions of complex and more diverse households than in regions of Europe which historians have identified as containing many complex households. Among the Nahua, although relationships within the household could be either uxorilocal or virilocal (relationship through the wife or the husband), subordination of women to male patriarchs was extensive. Most girls were married (cohabiting) well before the age of puberty. Thus, childless couples were common, but males without children rarely attained headship. While neither polygamy nor abandonment was widespread, their significance for gender oppression should not be denied. Widowhood offered new opportunities for companionship, but only for widowers. For widows, remarriage was infrequent and subordination to a male relative was inevitable. In modern Mexico, few remnants of this pre-conquest household system remain. According to the 1990 census, fewer than 10 per cent of Mexicans live as extended kin or as non-relatives in a household, even in rural Morelos where four centuries ago the compound family was the norm. The few modern examples of multiple family households tend to be Hispanic-like virilocal, patrilineal extended families.

What explains the gender division of labour in preindustrial economies? Although men and women frequently do different types of labour in any given society, men's and women's tasks vary considerably across different societies. In some societies, women engaged in trade and agriculture (in parts of Africa, for example); though these were men's duties in others (in parts of Europe, for example). At the same time, European historians discovered that women often engaged in tasks, such as agricultural labour and commerce, that were often assumed to be the domain of men, again suggesting a wide variation in the gender division of labour. Understanding the division of labour in preindustrial economies is important, because these historical cases often serve as implicit or explicit referents for understanding how much – or how little – has changed in contemporary societies.A number of excellent works, such as those by Barbara Hanawalt and Martha Howell, have explored women's roles in the economy. However, often missing from treatments that focus on women's history is an analysis of the gender division of labour, that is, an explicit comparison of men's and women's activities. Undoubtedly, such a comparison is hampered by the difficulties of finding documentary sources that provide the appropriate type of evidence.This article takes up this task in a particular way, by examining single-person households, composed of either males or females in fifteenth-century rural Tuscany. This empirical evidence is useful for several reasons. First, from an analytical perspective, it makes it possible to compare explicitly the activities of men and women who are in an identical position, that is, living alone. Second, as I discuss below, the documentary record from this period makes it possible to provide the evidence for this comparison. Third, this evidence provides historical information on a relatively under-researched group, rural widows and widowers. For example, there is generally more information available for Florentine women than for female rural inhabitants. Furthermore, little research explicitly compares men's and women's tasks to examine the gender division of labour. Although Piccinni and Mazzi and Raveggi provide much information about women's duties and activities in rural Tuscany, their work does not directly address the gender division of labour. While the archival evidence presented below cannot explain the division of labour at all points in individuals' life courses, it does provide explicitly comparative information about men and women.

En el presente artículo pretendemos analizar las estrategias de supervivencia llevadas a cabo por las viudas del Reino de Sevilla en el período comprendido entre 1392 y 1550, fundamentalmente a través de los protocolos notariales disponibles para las ciudades de Sevilla y Jerez de la Frontera. Estudiaremos sus opciones vitales, su patrimonio y las diversas actividades financieras que llevaron a cabo para sacar adelante la economía familiar y preservar y aumentar los bienes heredados por sus hijos. Asimismo, reflexionaremos sobre los inconvenientes, pero también sobre las ventajas que la condición de viuda aportaba a las mujeres. De este modo, contribuiremos al conocimiento de la realidad socioeconómica de los grupos intermedios de la sociedad castellana de la Baja Edad Media y de los albores de la Modernidad. Palabras clave: viudas, actividades económicas, protocolos notarialesTopónimos: Sevilla, Jerez de la FronteraPeríodo: Baja Edad Media, siglo XVI ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is to analyse the survival strategies employed by the widows of the Kingdom of Seville between 1392 and 1550. The article is based on the affidavits available for Seville and Jerez de la Frontera. The work examines their life choices, their patrimony and the financial activities they undertook for the sake of their own livelihood and their children’s futures. There is also a reflection upon the disadvantages but also the advantages implicit in widowhood for a woman. Thus, a contribution will be made to knowledge of the socio-economic reality of middle-class Castilian society in the Late Middles Ages and Early Modern Period. Keywords: widows, economic activities, affidavitsPlace names: Seville, Jerez de la FronteraPeriod: Late Middle Ages, Early Modern Period REFERENCIASAbellán Pérez, J. 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Fatherlessness seems to be a social problem of long historical continuance. In con-temporary social research we find numerous references to studies of the social effects of the absence of fathers. Divorces and new ways to structure sexual relations are, at least in Europe of today, more common reasons for this than loss through death. However, in the long histori-cal period addressed by this publication, 1100 – 1900, there are some specific social, demo-graphic, economic and even biological features that clearly distinguish these past societies from Europe of the present day. The immense importance connected to a person’s belonging to and position within a household is one of them. A much higher mortality rate is another. Young children constituted an age group among whom the death rate was especially high. But young children were also much more often exposed to the loss of one or both parents com-pared with today. Due to this restructured families through remarriage were very common. So was single parent families headed by widows. However, the breaking up of families through the death of a father was often balanced by a partial, formal restructuring of the family, putting someone else in the father’s place even when remarriage did not occur. To make an overview of this particular kind of guardianship, when and how someone in the legal sense replaces the father to represent the child, is the focus of this article. Regulating the succession of guardianship over children was an important task for families, kinship networks and more public institutions, especially the legal sphere, throughout this long period. Nevertheless, it is not easy to even try to tell a story covering all of Europe for so many centuries. A few notes are the most that can be achieved here, with the ambition to initiate a comparative and overriding discussion of these matters.

World War I has been studied extensively by historians of France and for good reason. Waging the first industrial war required mobilizing all of France’s resources, whether military, political, economic, cultural, or imperial. Politicians from the left and the right joined forces to govern the country, priests and seminarians were drafted into the army, factories were retooled to produce armaments and other war material, and women and children were enlisted to do their part. So too were colonial subjects. More than 500,000 men from France’s empire fought in Europe for the French Army, while another 200,000 colonial subjects labored in France’s wartime workplaces. The human losses were staggering and the political, economic, and cultural reverberations long-lasting, both in the metropole and in the colonies. More than 1.3 million French soldiers and an estimated 71,000 colonial soldiers lost their lives, leaving behind approximately 1.1 million war orphans and 600,000 war widows.

AbstractResearch has emphasised the stability in female landholding between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, despite demographic shocks and fundamental economic changes. However, in this period, a new type of land exploitation emerges: leasehold. This article wants to introduce a gender perspective into the history of leasehold. It investigates women’s activities on the lease market in late medieval and sixteenth-century Flanders, a region where short-term and competitive leasehold spread early and widely. An analysis of the actual practice, making use of landlords’ manuals and accounts, demonstrates women’s decreasing participation at the lease market. Moreover, their marital status increasingly mattered: from the beginning of the fifteenth century only widows could hold land. This article also demonstrates that, next to marital status, the size of the holding had a marked influence on women’s opportunities. Finally, these results invite us to rethink the grounds of women’s growing participation at the labour market in post-Black Death Europe, since especially single women lost access to land, particularly to land offered on the lease market.

Widows as individuals and as a social group held fundamental importance to both the family and civic life of early modern Castile. Archival sources indicate that widows' influence throughout all levels of Castilian society was magnified by their relative degree of legal autonomy, combined with a tacit acceptance of women's activities in many areas of familial and municipal life. The use of documents more closely reflecting women's daily activities allows for contextualization of the complex impact of moral and legal rhetoric on the social construction of widowhood, providing concrete examples of widows' practical and often highly tactical employment, evasion, and/or manipulation of patriarchal and moral norms. The experience of widowhood both forces a re-examination of gender boundaries by questioning current theories of female enclosure and demands a re-evaluation of gendered patterns in expressions of patronage and parentage. Marital status and social class become more important that the gendered moral and legal strictures of an apparently patriarchal society in terms of early modern women's ability to take part in a wide range of activities normally not considered possible for their sex. Toledo's widows challenge public/private spheres models by giving evidence of the public nature of private lives and the private ends of public acts. Examining widows' lives provides insight into the complex mechanisms lying behind the formulation of gender boundaries in the early modern world and the pragmatic politics of everyday life at the nexus of family and community.

It is ironic that while the nineteenth-century middle class was so concerned with respectability and security, their lives were fraught with uncertainty and change. For the majority of middle-class Victorians, the delicate balance between inadequate incomes and the cost of living precluded any significant investment for the future. The shift in wealth away from land toward earned income meant that family finances were much more precarious than in the past. If the breadwinner died, so did the family's income. The historical view of widows has been narrowly skewed by a focus on the relatively small number of wealthy upper middle-class families; the average middle-class income, including the professional 'middle' group and the lower middle-class composed of clerks and small shopkeepers, was more modest by far than is often assumed. When a modest income was combined with the high costs of living demanded by middle-class status, the majority of middle-class widows were left with inadequate inheritances By the 1880s, significant changes had begun to help widows, but for most of the nineteenth century finances were a serious problem, the family and kin network was unreliable and often selfish, community support through charity was inadequate and self-serving, and there was no official governmental policy toward widows and orphans. The ones who were able to construct multiple strategies, who were able to find piecemeal jobs and combine this with appeals to family and charities, were the women who managed to survive. Perhaps the image we have of middle-class domesticity was something that was constantly aspired to, achieved only with unremitting struggle, and retained precariously
acase@tulane.edu

AbstractAfter the Great War, various pension schemes were created in Europe to assist war widows and orphans. Compared with the general European response, the Finnish Civil War of 1918 resulted in two different groups of widows and orphans and divergent practices of aid. The families of the White Army soldiers were assisted by national pensions. The widows and orphans of the Reds were stigmatized as the rebellious, defeated side of the war. The chapter focuses on the Red Widows’ encounters with the Finnish social welfare institution in 1918–1945 to answer the following questions: How did these widows interpret the measures the social welfare system directed to them? What kind of experiences of society did these measures create? How did the two-way social relationship affect the dense community of these widows? The analysis uses the concepts of emotional community and collective experience. The source material consists of the letters of complaint the widows wrote to the Ministry of Social Affairs from 1919 until the middle of the 1940s. The article proceeds via the concepts of humiliation, resistance, compensation, and wounded confidence. The letters describe the process of the experience in the life course of the Red widows, and the concepts serve as tools in the analysis.

Abstract The chapter describes the sometimes-hidden role of women in horological manufacture, including across various subindustries like gilding, balance-making, and painting watch dials with radium. It discusses the role of the woman within the family, including within the family business as it relates to horology. It also investigates the special position of widows in Early Modern Europe and their place in the horological business world. It provides case studies of some exceptional women entrepreneurs, as well as the various role played by women in strikes, union disputes, and working-related protests about wages, safety, and other aspects of employment as experienced by women.

Abstract This chapter explains the legal history of article 86 of the Edict of Nantes (1598), which defined the execrable crimes to be excluded from amnesty as including the ‘kidnapping and rape of women and girls, arson, murders, and thefts by betrayal and lying in wait, … the violation of passports and safe conducts, together with murder and pillage without command’. It demonstrates that the term cas exécrable was an invention of the Edict of Poitiers (1577), which became a more established fixture of the laws of war in the Edict of Nantes. The definition of execrable crimes had considerable resonance in the confessional politics that followed in the wake of the 1572 Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and related to wider legal and moral debates about how to restrain soldiers’ cruelty and punish their transgressions throughout sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.