Isabelle Devos

Lost in registration? Missing occupations of single women in the Bruges countryside, c.1814

The absence of occupational titles for women in historical censuses has stymied numerous scholars. Various authors have explained this phenomenon as carelessness or bias on the part of the census-takers. Womens work was of little interest to the authorities and census officials focused their efforts upon the activities of the head of household. While source triangulation can be a useful tool for uncovering ‘hidden’ employment of women, it is often a complex and time-consuming process. In this article we outline an alternative to deal with the issue of missing occupations of single women in censuses by exploring their living arrangements. We identify four aspects of co-residence that can highlight the roles played within the household by single women without registered employment: their relation to the head of the household, and that individuals occupation, property and marital status. Comparing data from the 1814 population census regarding two social agro-systems and the city of Bruges, we argue that occupational titles of single women were not randomly omitted by the census officials, but reflect the embeddedness of these women in the family economy and household. While we do not refute recent research that stresses single womens economic independence during the long eighteenth century, our findings suggest that for a subset of singles this was not the case. We claim that by studying registered labour only, the historical picture of single womens work is biased or at the very least incomplete.

Introduction: unmarried and unknown: urban men and women in the low countries since the early modern period

This essay introduces a special issue on The Lure of the City that examines the attraction of towns to unmarried men and women in the Low Countries during the early modern period and the nineteenth century. The issue has the relation between singles and cities as its main focus. Singles were present in disproportionately large numbers in urban areas, but the question is why? This essay sets out the historiographical framework for the contributions in the issue, discusses the sources and methodologies used, and provides a brief overview of the evolution of singleness in the Low Countries. The contributions all demonstrate the relevance of a comparative approach. It is revealed that towns and cities not only attracted but also created singles, that they offered different opportunities for different groups of unmarried people and that they affected men and women differently. Finally, it appears that not every town and city was attractive to men and women without a spouse.

Introduction to special section on the biological standard of living

In December 2008 the WOG Historical Demography organised a workshop at Ghent University that covered a wide range of topics from fertility trends and kinship characteristics to health issues. The presentations and discussions that took place at the workshop provided the inspiration for this special section on the biological standard of living. The articles in this section offer valuable contributions for three of those biological measures: height, mortality and cause of death. The introduction to the section demonstrates the significance of this particular kind of evidence for our understanding of social and economic history. Exploring and analysing the well-being of populations is one of the most interesting and main challenges of social scientists. As the articles in this special section show, using historical evidence on the health and height of a population is extremely important for our understanding of certain socio-economic processes, but also extremely complex.

STREAM (Spatiotemporal Research Infrastructure for Early Modern Brabant and Flanders): Sources, Data and Methods

This article presents the technical characteristics of the Belgian STREAM-project (2015–2019). The goal of STREAM is to facilitate and innovate historical research into local and regional processes...

User-Centered Design of a Collaborative, Object Oriented Historical GI-Platform

The project STREAM (Spatio-Temporal Research Infrastructure for Early Modern Flanders and Brabant) aims to create a research infrastructure that will allow spatio-temporal analyses in order to improve our understanding of the demographic, social and economic changes that occurred in Flanders and Brabant (Belgium) between 1550 and 1800. The Carte de Cabinet of count Joseph de Ferraris (1771–1778) offers information on various subjects for that time period and is considered one of the most important products of Belgian cartographic history. Hence this historical map was used as the main source document to develop a vectorial geographical database that constitutes an important step towards the creation of a research infrastructure. To build this geographical database a retrogressive method was used in order to interpret the historical map and its related data in an absolute geographical reference system, which the Carte de Cabinet lacks. Since STREAM results from a collaboration between researchers from different disciplines a specific user-oriented editing platform was developed to support the different actors. This platform allows the digitisation of the historical road network in a geographic reference system based on the current road network by means of a slider, a shift tool and an editing tool. Initial analyses have confirmed the strong geometric distortions of the Carte de Cabinet but also the multiple possibilities for spatio(-temporal) research when combining the information of the Carte de Cabinet with cartographic analyses of other cartographic documents.

Introduction Single and the City: Men and Women Alone in North-Western European Towns since the Late Middle Ages

The history of single people, be they divorced, widowed or never married, has rarely been considered a happy one. Until the late twentieth century, the single status was not a desirable state in most cases. In a society that expected everyone to marry, singles were stigmatised, marginalised and had a hard time making ends meet. This image of vulnerable singleness dominates the historiography and permeates all early modern and nineteenth-century literature. In Jane Austen’s work, for instance, a woman with no fortune could not hope to survive if she did not have a husband. This is in sharp contrast to the image in contemporary mainstream culture and media. Fiction and films, such as “Bridget Jones” or television series like “Ally McBeal” that emphasise the singleness of the main characters, depict unmarried women, and to a lesser extent men, living in trendy cities, making their own money, answering to no one and living life to the fullest. The sitcom “Sex and the City” especially celebrates the urban single lifestyle. In their representation of empowered, confident singles, these series, which invaded our screens in the late 1990s, are indicative of how the status of singles has changed over the years.1