Preliminary Programme

This paper examines the household and family patterns for widows and spinsters. The paper will look deeper into their situation divided on age groups, regions and urbanization. The information on occupation is unfortunately sparse for the group in question but when available it will be used to evaluate the socioeconomic circumstances. Previous research has shown that about 90% of the widows did not live alone but further investigations of their coresidents have not been done. Were they living with their children, servants or other relatives? Did the pattern change with growing age and did it have any influence whether they lived in an urban or rural area? This paper examines the censuses for 1801, 1845 and 1880 and will therefore be able to follow the development during the 19th century.
This paper will fill a gap in the knowledge of the situation for widows in Denmark and it is the aim to compare the situation in Denmark with other European countries where research has been done.
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As a part of my long-term project which scrutinizes the patterns of wealth, demographic trends and social change in Ottoman lands in the early modern era, my proposed paper for your network panel at ESSHC 2016 seeks to analyze the link between the possession of wealth in the Ottoman Balkans during the period from 1700 to 1860 and the changing patterns of family formation. The project is based on nearly 3.700 probate inventories from four different regions (Vidin, Ruse, Silistra and Sofia); and the present paper utilizes the same database. This database contains the indexes of accumulated wealth per the deceased, household size, social status of partners at the marriage and book consumption used as a reliable proxy for knowledge accumulation and skill premium in recent studies of Baten, Van Zanden and De Moor. Consistent with unified growth theory (and endogenous growth theory), Baten and Van Zanden have postulated the idea that the emergence of small nuclear families combined with increased investment in human capital set in motion a “modern” process of knowledge accumulation, which was followed by the genesis of sustainable economic growth and industrial breakthrough. This approach, however, does not address (a) what role wealth inequality has in the participation of households in learning markets at the micro-level across Eurasia, (b) to what degree economic as well as non-economic factors like social prestige and practices of conspicuous consumption shape the demographic tendencies among households and stimulate the transfer of knowledge investments across generations in the so-called non-European society. In this paper focusing on the long-term linkage between demographic patterns and wealth in four Ottoman towns, I try to investigate the relationship between, on the one hand, wealth and familial attitudes toward having children and on the other hand, knowledge investments and the likely quality of child training as reflected in the number of children and book-ownership. The paper revolves around three interrelated problématiques:
1- How (much) did Ottoman households invest in human capital and to what extent did wealth and demographic structures shape knowledge investments especially book ownership and reading?
2- How did wealth influence both the number of children and the quality of child training in four cities mentioned? So is there a correlation between the number of children per household and book ownership in the Ottoman world?
3- Did literate and wealthy households necessarily develop a pattern of nuclear family size and structures? So is there a relationship between wealth inequality and nuclear family formation in Eurasia?
The answers to these questions will constitute a first step towards exploring the contours of human capital formation and demographic trends among households in Ottoman lands and help contextualize diverse socio-regional dynamics and long-term change. They will also be a first step towards bridging the gap between the study of the Ottoman experience and the global history of demographic trends as well as the related debate on the Great Divergence in the early modern era. (Show less)

The opportunities for a widow or a spinster in an urban environment were linked to her social position. While the working class widow had to build strategies based on pooling restricted assets, women with capital could share a household with relatives of the same status or with less fortunate relatives. Households and business co-operation with kin or networks involving relatives by blood or marriage figure quite prominently in the careers of widows and single women.
Working class biographies from the early 20th century have evidenced strong economic ties between mothers and children. Particularly daughters seem to have been inclined to assist their mothers. Close knit families with adult children, pooling their resources with widowed mothers to support siblings and maintain the family have also been documented from 19th early 20th century industrial areas.
The late 19th century towns suffered from considerable shortage of housing. Scandinavia was no exception. The wages of workers, particularly female workers were sorely stretched and the cost of housing could form a critical stumbling block. As a result instead of struggling with the rent the young and unmarried tended to lodge with married couples or widows, sometimes they rented rooms together. The mean number of inhabitants per room in working class urban areas were usually higher than in other parts of the towns.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the households of women no longer or not yet in marriage. To gauge the strategies in which women engaged when trying to cope without the assistance of a male income and to see to what extent kinship strategies or other systems were adopted.
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The increasingly metropolitan character of urbanization post-WW1 in North American (and N. European) contexts was a catalyst and hub for a set of demographic, economic and labour force, cultural and technological shifts (from office equipment to apartment buildings). Some of these shifts had been underway in subtle and gradual forms since the late 19th century, others arrived more abruptly. These changes had major yet at times hidden effects on key aspects of the daily lives of non-married young and mature adults. Women were especially affected in terms of their personal autonomy and their desires and abilities to make housing choices enabling them to create 'home' beyond the physical and normative structures of the nuclear family. Unmarried women's living arrangements in the interwar period are touched on in a limited number of qualitative and localized case studies. While scattered across disciplines and cross-disciplinary fields, these studies engage with critical debates about the gendered dimensions of urban modernity. This body of research has raised intriguing questions about how 'the housing question' is evoked in gendered debates as well as in private choices weighing the balance between non-married adults' personal freedoms versus familial responsibilities, between desires for privacy versus fears of isolation and danger.

In this paper we offer a synthesis and methodological reflection on the research project Home beyond the nuclear family in Canadian Cities 1921-1951: Gender and the changing living arrangements of the non-married. Our project, now nearing completion (2012-2016), mobilizes for the first time the advantages of census microdata (for Canadian cities 1921-1951) to assess the prevalence of living arrangements offering different degrees of personal autonomy and residential independence to unmarried women and men, and the relative influence of factors such as age, ethnicity, class, occupation and city of residence on residential patterns. To complement our quantitative analysis, we have used print media sources from several cities both to help establish the validity of the conceptual framework underlying our key variable, 'residential autonomy', and to enrich our interpretation of the housing choices and constraints illustrated by the quantitative data.

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