Divided Households

1995 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-398
Author(s):  
Kathryn M. Neckerman

The structure of the extended family is often described as a strategy for coping with poverty, unemployment, or migration (Agresti 1979). Whether extended kin relations are thought to be short-term and calculative (Anderson 1971) or bound by ties of reciprocity (Hareven 1982), the extended household itself is assumed to be adaptive to the material conditions under which working-class families live. This characterization is supported by studies of the present-day poor (Angel and Tienda 1982; Stack 1974; Stern 1993). Although Ruggles (1987) questions the importance of economic motives for nineteenth-century extended families, he suggests that by the early twentieth century there is evidence that extended households were increasingly strategic.

1970 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 303-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Stearns

Historians, in their somewhat defensive perusal of sociology for sweeping theoretical statements, perhaps underestimate the careful, often narrow, empiricism of much sociological research. Sociologists unearth facts for subsequent historians to work on and sometimes to interpret more broadly. Historical sociologists to the contrary, fact-grubbing services are mutual in the two disciplines. German sociologists were the first to study the social effects of industrialization extensively. By the early twentieth century, when masses of workers were still entering factory industry for the first time, sociologists were ready to investigate the process of adaptation through systematic interviews. British researchers in the same period, besides being dedicated amateurs for the most part, focused on the urban poor and on material conditions too exclusively still. French efforts were even more scattered. Maurice Halbwachs did some valuable studies of consumption patterns, while Le Play and his school contributed rather conservative portraits of individual workers. For purposes of understanding the working class in manufacturing, German sociological research was long unrivaled.


2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
cathy kaufman

Christmas dinner emerged for the first time as an important and distinctive meal in mid-nineteenth century America, fueled by changing attitudes towards the Christmas holiday, changing meal patterns, and the need to unify Americans after the Civil War and to assimilate waves of immigrants. Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol provided an ideal template for meals centering on turkey and plum pudding, and that model has continued to inform many middle and working class tables. But by the end of the nineteenth century, cookery writers for the more affluent market began to disdain turkey at Christmas, and the uniform tapestry of Christmas foods began to unravel. Christmas dinner in twentieth-century America became more a statement of class than of national identity.


Urban History ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
HEIKKI PAUNONEN ◽  
JANI VUOLTEENAHO ◽  
TERHI AINIALA

ABSTRACT:The article investigates the linkages between urban transformation and informal verbalizations of everyday spaces among male juveniles from Sörnäinen (a working-class district in Helsinki) in 1900–39. Sörkka lads' biographically and contextually varying uses of slang names mirrored their itineraries across the city in the search of earning and spare-time opportunities. As a simultaneously practical and stylistic street language, the uses of slang both eroded (in uniting bilingual male juvenile groups) and strengthened (as with providers and teachers, working-class girls, upper-class urbanites and rural newcomers) existing socio-spatial boundaries. Unlike in the late nineteenth century Stockholmska slang studied by Pred, openly irreverent toponymic expressions vis-à-vis the hegemonic conceptions of urban space were relatively few in early Helsinki slang.


1981 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Melling

The history of working-class housing has become an imporatnt area of urban studies in recent years, as detailed investigations of building activities and property relations uncover the origins of housing initiatives. The growth of cities in the industrial North of England created their own peculiar building styles and housing problems, whilst the great metropolis of London continued to attract thousands of families into its eternal slums. There were also the new boom towns of manufacturing Britain, specialising in particular products as a regional division of productive expertise emerged. Swindon and Crewe flourished in the railway age of the nineteenth century, whilst Barrow and Jarrow belonged to a later period of iron and steel shipbuilding. The latter settlements were dominated not only by a few vital products, but by a handful of large companies with massive resources, which enabled them to undertake the housing of their first workers. These accounts may be complemented by the evidence of working-class dwellings in the early textile villages and larger industrial colonies of Lancashire and West Riding, or by the scattered documentation on the colliery villages which persisted through the major coal fields well into the twentieth century.


Lituanistica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurynas Giedrimas

The article deals with the relation between the settlement and household of inhabitants in the first half of the nineteenth century in Kražiai and Užventis parishes, Samogitia. In the middle of the twentieth century, John Hajnal and Peter Laslett started researching the history of resident households. The researchers formulated theoretical and methodological basics for household analysis and encouraged other history researchers and demographers to undertake similar studies. Researchers who analysed households in Central and Eastern Europe refuted or corrected numerous statements by John Hajnal and Peter Laslett. They found that the most common household in Central and Eastern Europe was the nuclear household, although in many cases it was possible to find extended households. However, there is no clear relationship between the institution and the household. After analysing the aforementioned documents, it was discovered that during the first half of the nineteenth century, the nuclear household dominated the parishes of Kražiai and Užventis. However, the extended family is dominant in the towns of Kolainiai and Pakražantis. The single-person household dominated folwarks and manorial settlements. The relationship between the settlement and the household was significant. Eight types of settlements existed in the parishes of Kražiai and Užventis in the first half of the nineteenth century: the town (miestas, miasto), the township (miestelis, miasteczko, мњстечко), the manor (dvaras, dwór, majątek, имњние), folwark (palivarkas, folwark, фольварк), the manor village (bajorkaimis, okolica, околица), the village (kaimas, wieś, деревня), behind the wall (užusienis, zaścianek, застенок), and the felling (apyrubė, obręb, обруб). The smallest household was in the town of Kražiai, while the biggest household was found in the manor estate in Užventis parish.


2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-132
Author(s):  
Kristina Lilja ◽  
Dan Bäcklund

This article deals with savings banks and the extent to which they encouraged workers to save. A study of probate inventories from three Swedish towns shows that just 20–30 per cent of workers had assets in savings banks during the second half of the nineteenth century. Saving patterns differed greatly among groups of workers. Savings banks were most important for unskilled, unmarried women, but married workers were more likely to invest in, for example, real estate (1870s) and insurance (1900s). Family considerations greatly affected saving decisions, which detracted from the appeal of savings banks. Their emphasis on individual saving was more suitable for those who needed a flexible alternative to use for different saving needs. This flexibility also made it easier for savings banks to meet growing competition and can explain why they continued to attract workers in the twentieth century. Although savings banks never dominated the workers' saving arena, they probably promoted unmarried workers' awareness of the advantages of saving. Consequently, since all married workers had previously been unmarried, savings banks most likely contributed to fostering saving habits among the working class.


Author(s):  
Marion Dell

Virginia Woolf holds an unassailable place in twentieth-century literary modernism. What has been insufficiently acknowledged, not least by Woolf herself, is the profound influence of legacies from her nineteenth-century extended family which helped to shape her as a writing woman. Highly significant are the lines of descent from Anny Thackeray Ritchie. I consider Woolf’s inheritance from Ritchie in part, given our location, by exploring their shared connections with Yorkshire. I suggest that Woolf’s response to Ritchie, and to her past in general, is characterised by ambivalence and paradox. Woolf resolves her conflicting cycles of affiliation and rejection by figuring Ritchie as a ‘transparent medium’, in liminal space, obscured but always present.


2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Phelan

Until relatively recently, melodrama has been an unfairly maligned genre of theatre history; its pejorative associations based on the prejudiced assumptions that its aesthetics of excess (in terms of its extravagant emotion, sensationalism and popularity amongst predominantly working class audiences) meant, therefore, that it was for simpletons. What Walter Benjamin excoriated as the “ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator” fuelled bourgeois disdain for this theatrical form and the derision of the Theatrical Inquisitor’s dismissal of melodrama as “aris[ing] from an inertness in the minds of the spectators, and a wish to be amused without the slightest exertion on their own parts, or any exercise whatever of their intellectual powers” remained the dominant critical response throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, such views continued well into the twentieth century and certainly characterized the modernist reactions of the founding figures of the Irish national theatre in this period. Frank Fay, cofounder of the National Dramatic Society, denounced both the aesthetics of Dublin's Queen's Theatre as the “home of the shoddiest kind of melodrama,” and the intelligence of its audiences who, “wouldn't, at present, understand anything else.”


Costume ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Johnston

This article will consider how dress, textiles, manuscripts and images in the Thomas Hardy Archive illuminate his writing and reveal the accuracy of his descriptions of clothing in novels including Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Rural clothing, fashionable styles, drawings and illustrations will shed new light on his writing through providing an insight into the people's dress he described so eloquently in his writing. The textiles and clothing in the Archive are also significant as nineteenth-century working-class dress is relatively rare. Everyday rural clothing does not tend to survive, so a collection belonging to Hardy's family of country stonemasons provides new opportunities for research in this area. Even more unusual is clothing reliably provenanced to famous people or writers, and such garments that do exist tend to be from the middle or upper classes. This article will show how the combination of surviving dress, biographical context and literary framework enriches understanding of Hardy's words and informs research into nineteenth-century rural dress.


2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-54
Author(s):  
Shelagh Noden

Following the Scottish Catholic Relief Act of 1793, Scottish Catholics were at last free to break the silence imposed by the harsh penal laws, and attempt to reintroduce singing into their worship. At first opposed by Bishop George Hay, the enthusiasm for liturgical music took hold in the early years of the nineteenth century, but the fledgling choirs were hampered both by a lack of any tradition upon which to draw, and by the absence of suitable resources. To the rescue came the priest-musician, George Gordon, a graduate of the Royal Scots College in Valladolid. After his ordination and return to Scotland he worked tirelessly in forming choirs, training organists and advising on all aspects of church music. His crowning achievement was the production, at his own expense, of a two-volume collection of church music for the use of small choirs, which remained in use well into the twentieth century.


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