Making Masters Moral: Household Subordinates and Upward Social Discipline in Late Medieval Basel

This article examines how late medieval non-nuclear household relationships shaped the pursuit of honorable social status. It examines in detail several witness depositions from the Basel municipal court (Schultheissengericht) in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Historians have long noted the concern of householders to regulate the morality of their servants and apprentices. However, the study will demonstrate that subordinates could and did defend their own household honor by policing the morality of their masters and other household members, both through verbal shaming and through the distinctive strategic option of refusing to work. The importance of subordinates as arbiters of honorable status was recognized and exploited by individual masters, guilds, and courts; in the region around Basel, it could even be formalized in the written genre of a Schelmbrief (shame-document). Social discipline was not simply a question of householder-masters controlling their subordinates, but also the reverse.

Between Microhistory, Demography, and Rural Studies: The Settlements and Household of the Inhabitants of Kražiai and Užventis Parishes in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

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.

Households of the Nobles and Peasants in Užventis Parish, 1836–1861

The article deals with the households of the nobles and peasants in the first half of the nineteenth century in Užventis parish, 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 foundations for household analysis and encouraged other historians and demographers to undertake similar studies. The researchers who analysed the households of Central and Eastern Europe either refuted or corrected many of the statements proposed by John Hajnal and Peter Laslett and established that the most common household in Central and Eastern Europe was a nuclear household, although in many cases it was also possible to find an extended household. However, it was not clarified at what age people started building new households and which household model dominated in Samogitia. Also, it was not known what the difference between a household of nobles and a household of peasants was. The data on the households of the nobles and peasants also interconnected. The households of landlords were bigger than the households of peasants and the petty nobility, because the menage of a landlord used to be part of the household. After analysing the aforementioned data, it has been discovered that in the first half of the nineteenth century, nuclear household dominated Užventis parish. Extended household models were often found as well. The Catholic inhabitants of Užventis parish married late and had a child every two years. Around 3500 Catholic residents lived in Užventis parish in the first half of the nineteenth century. The analysis of the data showed that nuclear household dominated the Užventis parish in the first half of the nineteenth century.

From Brides to Business Owners: Microfinance and Women’s Entrepreneurship

Women’s entrepreneurship through microfinance programs has been celebrated as a model for reducing poverty and empowering women. Yet, evidence of the incidence of women’s entrepreneurship has been disappointing, leading to much critique and controversy. This article presents case narratives of women enrolled in microfinance programs in rural India who took the leap onto entrepreneurship and used microcredit loans to expand or start their small-scale livelihoods enterprises. These narratives illustrate the particular economic and social conditions that are found in cases where women have transitioned from being dependent, gender-compliant housewives to sole-earners or main breadwinners. Marital failure, functional absence or retreat of husband, economic distress, living in a nuclear household, and absence of an adult son are consistently evident in all cases of women’s entrepreneurship. This qualitative analysis helps us understand why women’s entrepreneurship is not more widespread despite the availability of microcredit loans.

The “Dark Side” of the EMP?

This chapter addresses several issues, with the aim of refining and reorienting the debate about the nuclear hardship hypothesis. Several indicators show that the primacy of the European nuclear household did not lead to more hardship; in fact, the evidence points in the contrary direction. Nor would it be fair to claim that this outcome is entirely due to top-down provisions, and in particular charity. The authors stress the institutional diversity of solutions for hardship, and focus on one particular group in society, the elderly. They demonstrate that the elderly had more “agency” than usually expected and that a combination of institutional arrangements, besides the top-down provisions, in which the elderly participated actively offered more resilience so as to deal with “hardship.”

Family Structure and Severe Food Insecurity in Maputo and Matola, Mozambique

The rapid growth of Maputo and Matola (neighbouring cities in Mozambique) has dramatically shifted the vulnerability profiles of these cities. Poor neighbourhoods across these two cities may now face the prospect of becoming food deserts. Scholars have defined African urban food deserts by the co-occurrence of poverty and food insecurity. This study aims to assess the assumed relationship between resource poverty and food insecurity in the African urban food desert concept and to assess the contribution of household demographics to this relationship. Using household survey data collected in 2014 across Maputo and Matola, this investigation demonstrated that inconsistent access to water, electricity, medical care, cooking fuel, and cash was associated with increased odds of severe household food insecurity across both cities. In addition, a nuclear household family structure was associated with reduced odds of severe food insecurity in both cities (even when taking limited resource access into account). These findings suggest that the severe food insecurity vulnerabilities associated with African urban food deserts may differ according to the family structure of households in Maputo and Matola.

The Good Person and the Bad Citizen: History, Class, and Sociality

Chapter 2 introduces the building blocks of an alternative political–moral order, as viewed from the perspective of council estate residents. It argues that official understandings of deservingness and respectability have at times dovetailed with, but more often diverged from, what residents understand to be a righteous person and by extension also a rightful citizen who is deserving of public resources and protection. In the post-war period, a fragile moral union existed between paternalistic welfare policies that prioritised the white, male-headed nuclear household and tenants’ aspirations for respectable homes and neighbourhoods. This fragile moral union, however, became dismantled in the decades that followed, when the ideal of the worker-citizen was replaced by that of the consumer-citizen and those renting on council estates increasingly seen as subjects of failure and lack. Today, working class residents’ own understandings of what makes a good person, based on their reliance on informal networks of support and care, stand in stark contrast to classed portrayals that see them as citizens of lack.

Special Issue: Caring for Children Outside the Home – From Institutions to Nations

This special issue began its life in 2015 in a series of workshops funded by the University of Adelaide that ran under the theme ‘Dis/located Children: Children in/and Care’. The goal of the workshops was to take seriously the concept of ‘care’ as it applied to the lives of children. The workshops had a particular focus on childhoods that were in some sense beyond the normative, whether that was migrant or refugee children adapting to a new culture, children who lived outside the nuclear household, or children whose identities marked them as ‘different’. They were underpinned by developments in both childhood and emotions studies that seek to destabilise the ‘naturalness’ of both childhood and emotion by exploring the ways that both are contingent, shaped by culture, and situated in historical time (Davin, 1999; Rosenwein, 2010). Over four events, the workshops brought together over 40 scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplines, including history, literature, gender studies, law, education, social work, and psychology. The articles brought together in this special issue reflect this diversity of disciplinary approach.

Gender-Role Interaction in Activity Participation between Nuclear Household Heads: A Case Study of Suzhou

Based on the 1235 cases of data collected in the survey of Suzhou, a structure equation model is developed to evaluate how gender-role interactions occur in two levels: attribute-activity and activity participation itself. The results show that those two kinds of interactions between two household heads do exist and strongly affect each other’s subsistence, maintenance and leisure activity participations. Household attributes and children’s age are found to have different effect on male and female heads. It indicates that one important reason for male and female differ in activity-travel behavior is that they receive different interactions in household from counterparts. As expected, those results show that different TDM policies should be made aiming at women and men. It will help to better reflect the behavioral responses of household heads to changes in demographic characteristics and to get a deeper understanding of gender difference in activity behavior in developing countries.