What does well-being mean when we talk about men and women in the past? Their sheer chances of survival, their protection from want, their social status, their individual agency and their self-esteem were all strongly mediated by the family, the pre-dominant social institution. Family laws and customs of family formation created differences between insiders and outsiders in terms of well-being. Within families, there were strong differences in autonomy, status and freedom between the genders and generations. The book offers a fascinating exploration of gender differences in well-being in many regions of historic Europe, with some comparative perspectives. It explores how historic family systems differed with respect to choosing a marriage partner, transmitting property, living and care conditions of widows and widowers and the position of children born out of wedlock.

At the XXIst World Congress of the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS/CISH) in 2010 in Amsterdam, the International Commission for Historical Demography (ICHD) decided to write an overview of its own history. Fifty years had gone by since the CISH XIst World Congress in Stockholm 1960, when historians took the first tentative initiatives to create a wholly new interdisciplinary commission for historical demography, a meeting place for a budding discipline where researchers in letters and science could meet, exchange ideas, cultivate and develop a new field. This book is the outcome of that decision. Demography, past, present and future is a common concern for all inhabitants of this planet. The variation is great, however, with regard to sources, social and political conditions, state of the art, technological development, national and local initiatives. In the course of half a century many changes take place. Keeping abreast of the gigantic streams of information and innovation in the field is demanding, even more so for a discipline with global dimensions and ambitions. The book makes fascinating reading, and preparing it has been a rewarding and thought provoking experience. The thirty-seven articles in the book represent as many different stories.