The first demographic transition changed the face of the western world as thoroughly as did the Industrial Revolution. As couples began to have fewer children, women were released from the heavy burden of endless pregnancies and extended periods of child care. Even though this profound process of change has been extensively researched, women were rarely pictured as decision-makers concerning fertility and family. Moreover, men and women were mostly not perceived as having potentially differing interests in sexuality and child-bearing. This volume contains papers delivered at the conference Were Women Present at the Demographic Transition? which was held at the Radboud University Nijmegen, 20-21 May 2005. The contributions throw light on the active role women played in the fertility decline as well as on the complex process of decision-making between husbands and wives.

This book is a quantitative study into the influence of the process of industrialisation on the nature and strength of family relationships in a Dutch community between 1850 and 1920. The study makes use of the unique and unusually rich source of Dutch population registers, which enables the author to trace the history of individual households. The study closely relates aspects of family and household with the social processes characteristic of an industrialising society, such as increasing rates of social and geographical mobility and the shift of production from the home into the factory. Results reveal a striking continuity in the strength of nineteenth-century family relations despite the gradual but profound process of social change surrounding these families. Changes in behavioural patterns did occur, however, under the influence of changes in demographic rates, regional geographical mobility systems and local developments in the housing market. Nevertheless, these changes cannot be taken as a weakening of family relationships.

This book examines the effects of nineteenth-century industrialization on the strength of relationships within the family and between generations. Dr. Janssens' quantitative approach, based on Dutch population registers, reveals a new perspective: although family life did go through some changes, early industrialization did not lead to the destruction of nineteenth-century family life, as the traditionally dominant view contended. This innovative study also illuminates wider social issues--the nature of hierarchies, class structure and household organization.

This volume deals with the question of inequality through race, class and gender. Most studies only concern themselves with either class and gender, or with the combination of race or gender. What happens if we throw all three concepts into the analysis? The volume seeks to explore how race, class and gender are interrelated in the study of topics such as social transformation, national identity, sexuality and work. The volume should be of interest to both students and scholars in gender and race studies, labor history, sociology, history, non-Western history.

This collection of essays looks at the origins and expansion of different patterns of breadwinning in both western and non-western history. As a collection it provides new insights into the historical and cross-cultural development of the male breadwinner family and its determinants, and, as such, it provides an important contribution to the ongoing debate on patterns of breadwinning. An important range of factors previously undervalued in the debate are considered: the effects of local labour markets in interaction with family strategies and family values; employers’ strategies and the effects of capital accumulation and the rise of international commercial networks; the effects of egalitarian communist ideologies; and the differential ways in which modern welfare states were constructed. The volume calls for a renewed research effort in order to reconstruct the male breadwinner family as the norm and to work towards the integration of different explanatory models.

Labouring Lives unravels the huge changes which have so fundamentally altered the life courses of ordinary women over the past one hundred and fifty years, namely the changes in marriage and fertility patterns. Using dynamic data from Dutch population registers and analytical techniques from the life course approach, the book offers new evidence on women's changing position in the labour market, their role in pre-nuptial sexuality, and their contribution to marriage and fertility change in the Netherlands between 1880 and 1960. The author reconstructs the socio-economic and demographic worlds of different groups of working and non-working women, and by doing so she is able to locate the various groups driving the changes. Advanced statistical tools enable the author to analyse differences in fertility strategies, stopping versus spacing, employed by various social and cultural groups in the Netherlands. This book leads to conclusions which challenge a number of orthodoxies in the field.