Mary Jo Maynes

Urban and Rural Marriage Patterns in Imperial Germany

between proto-industrialization or industrialization and changes in opportunities for marriage. The standard historical argument was summarized a decade ago by D. E. C. Eversley (1965:45): the ability to marry was contingent, in pre-industrial societies, upon access to land in the peasant economy; in the cities guilds &dquo;were supposed to be powerful bars to marriage.&dquo; When the system broke down, so the argument goes, &dquo;an urban proletariat was created, at least in some cases, and this may have led to a lowering of the age at marriage, and the shedding of all prudential restraint.&dquo; Eversley himself disagreed with this interpretation but nonetheless expected a possible lowering of marriage age in the industrial sector &dquo;as the response ... to increased employment opportunity.&dquo; But he also pointed out that both age at marriage and proportions remaining single for life remained fairly constant over the period of European industrialization. Demographic and social historians have frequently concentrated on the specific relationship between proletarianization and nuptiality; much of the literature on this question has resulted from the attempt to explain the population growth which accompanied European industrialization. For example, W. Petersen (1960), in analysing the demographic transition in the Netherlands, emphasized the traditional importance of marriage-regulating devices. The pervasive principle &dquo;that a

Autobiography and Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Methodological Considerations

Historical social science—which I understand to be analysis of change over time that is informed by the theories, methods, and questions of the social sciences—has in the past 25 or 30 years established itself as an important area of interdisciplinary study. It emerged at a point in time when, in the United States at least, several of the social science disciplines were dominated by positivist epistemologies and models drawn from the natural sciences. In practice, much of what has been understood as social science history has centered on the recovery and analysis of largely quantifiable sources that allowed the writing of the collective biography of large populations—the ordinary people arguably under-or unrepresented in classic historical accounts of previous eras. Drawing upon social-scientific traditions provided concepts and methodologies for analyzing processes that encompassed everyone, rather than merely the events dominated by an elite, and for studying relatively anonymous collectivities rather than merely the “great men.”

Austrian women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries : cross-disciplinary perspectives

This volume, the first of its kind in English, brings together scholars from different disciplines who address the history of women in Austria, as well as their place in contemporary Austrian society, from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, thus shedding new light on contemporary Austria and in the context of its rich and complicated history.

The Past and Present of European Women's and Gender History: A Transatlantic Conversation

Ida Blom, Mineke Bosch, Antoinette Burton a.o., Facilitated and edited by Birgitte Soland and Mary Jo Maynes,

Young Women, Textile Labour, and Marriage in Europe and China around 1800

This chapter explores young women’s transition to adulthood in select regions of China and Europe from the mid-seventeenth through to the mid-nineteenth century and concentrates, in particular, on young women’s household and non-household labour (especially in the production of thread and cloth) as they move through the life-cycle transition from daughters to wives and from a natal to a marital household. The time frame of the chapter encompasses periods of important commercial and technological developments in textile production and marketing in both Europe and China and allows us to focus on an underexplored dimension of parallels and divergences—namely, family, gender, and generational relations. We also compare the apparently different relationships to labour and commodity markets experienced by young women in the two regions.

Unthinking Teleologies: Markets,Theories, Histories

This excerpt emphasizes David Byrne’s critique of the spatial and existential impact of commodification—the relentless conversion of all spaces and relations to market spaces and market relations. At the same time, it points to the unthinkability of ‘‘history going backward,’’ of the undoing of commodification—perhaps implying a kind of moral, political, and cultural as well as economic teleology in the realm of market development. Note, as well, Byrne’s deployment of the nature-market dichotomy that seems to be part

Carol Poore, The Bonds of Labor: German Journeys to the Working World, 1890–1990. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. 298 pp.

Approaches to the history of class relations in Germany as elsewhere have changed dramatically over the past two decades or so. Historical class analysis, which once pointed to the clear significance of class as a social marker, a cultural and political identity, in short, as a force of history, has became dulled in the wake of the collapse of socialism, the decline of organized labor, and the intellectual challenges associated with postmodernism, feminism, and race theory. As one student remarked in a recent seminar on the history and historiography of class relations in Europe, class has become the unexamined third pillar of the race, class, gender triad. Historians do not deny the significance of class relations; it has just that figuring out how to theorize and document the history of class is much more complicated than it used to be.

39.95 cloth.

During the course of the nineteenth century, the parameters defining ‘youth’, marking its beginning and its end, were becoming more precise and more institutionally defined for both girls and boys in Europe. More than any other phenomenon or institution, elementary schooling (and leaving school) contributed to a certain ‘normalization’ of the life cycle for young people. By the end of the nineteenth century, most girls as well as boys attended school at least intermittently until at least age 12 or 13; at school-leaving a new phase of life began. Throughout much of Europe a select minority of middle-class and upper-class young women joined their brothers at universities, as higher education became first a possibility and then a routine for them in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century. If educational institutions played a key role in creating more uniform patterns in the life cycle of young people, new cultural and scientific discourses emerging in the late nineteenth century also contributed to a redefinition of youth as a stage in life. Much of the late-nineteenth-century concern about youth initially centred on young men. The poor health of young men inducted into the military alarmed state authorities. The violence of street gangs in working-class neighbourhoods was increasingly seen as a social problem, as were stress and the suicide rates amongst male students.However, new employment opportunities for girls, the campaigns of the women’s movements for better education and vocational training for them, and the decreasing birth rate, led to interest in female youth as

Introduction: Young women in Europe in the era of ‘first-wave’ feminisms: analyses of generation and gender

In this volume, Ute Gerhard places womens rights at the centre of legal philosophy and discusses this struggle for equality as a driving force in the history of law. Focusing on Europe and taking the course of German feminism and law as primary examples, she incorporates the various social contexts in which questions of equality and gender difference have been raised into an analysis that challenges misconceptions about the principle of equality itself. Gerhard first discusses the history of womens movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. She also traces the historical development of claims for gender equality as well as obstacles to these claims, critically exploring the influence of philosophers such as Rousseau, Fichte and Kant. Gerhard concludes that women need to be recognized as both equal and different - that claims to equality do not simply eliminate difference, but also articulate it. Mindful of the social and political contexts surrounding equality arguments, Gerhard tackles in-depth three legal issues: the meaning of womens rights in the public sphere, especially the right to vote; womens legal capacities in private law, or the legal doctrine of a so-called gender tutelage; and womens human rights, a prominent concern in the international womens movement.