When Dad Died - Individuals and Families Coping with Family Stress in Past Societies

This volume is an important contribution to the social and cultural history of the family and documents that widowhood and orphanhood were commonplace before the twentieth century. How did the survivors cope with such tragedy? What kind of support did they receive from their community and relatives? How many widows remarried? How many children grew up as step-children or wards? And how did these circumstances influence their futures? While individual stories are frequent themes in literature, the social history of these experiences has yet to be written, especially from a comparative perspective. The 16 essays in this book provide a fresh look at the family history of widowhood and orphanhood in a dozen European and Asian countries.

List of contents

Contents: Renzo Derosas/Osamu Saito: Introduction - Michel Oris/Emiko Ochiai: Family Crisis in the Context of Different Family Systems: Frameworks and Evidence on 'When Dad Died' - Tommy Bengtsson: Why Dad Dies. The Mortality of Men in their Working Ages in the 18 th and 19 th Centuries - Paul Servais: Death and Patrimonial Descent in the Region of Liège in the 18 th Century - Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux: Strategies of Household Continuity in a Stem-Family Society: From Heirship to Headship - Richard Wall: The Impact on the Household of the Death of the Father in Simple and Stem Family Societies - Beatrice Moring: Systems of Survival. Continuities and Discontinuities after the Death of the Household Head in Pre-Industrial Finland - Andrejs Plakans/Charles Wetherell: The Death of the Father in the Complex Households of Eastern European Serf Societies: a Baltic Case Study - Olivier Faron/Jacques Renard: The Varied Repercussions caused by the Demise of the Father among Past Populations. A Comparative Analysis between Vernon, a Region of Normandy, and the Town of Milan - Erik Beekink/Frans van Poppel/Aart C. Liefbroer: Parental Death and Death of the Child. Common Causes or Direct Effects? - Noriko O. Tsuya/Satomi Kurosu: The Mortality Effects of Adult Male Death on Women and Children in Agrarian Households in Early Modern Japan: Evidence from Two Northeastern Villages, 1716-1870 - Cameron Campbell/James Lee: When Husbands and Parents Die: Widowhood and Orphanhood in Late Imperial Liaoning, 1789-1909 - Daniel Devolder: Effects of the European Late Marriage Pattern on Kinship. A Study Using a Microsimulation Model - Alain Bideau/Guy Brunet: The Family, the Village and the Orphan in the Region of Haut-Bugey during the 19 th Century - Marco Breschi/Matteo Manfredini: Demographic Repercussions in a Rural Italian Village - George Alter/Catherine Capron/Muriel Neven/Michel Oris: When Dad Died: Household Economy and Family Culture in Nineteenth Century East Belgium - Renzo Derosas: Fatherless Families in 19 th -Century Venice.

About the author

The Editors: Renzo Derosas, born in Italy in 1952, works in the Department of History of Ca' Foscari University, Venice, where he currently teaches Population History and Quantitative Methods for Historians. He has published several essays on Italian social and demographic history and historical methods.
Michel Oris, born in Belgium in 1961, worked for the Belgian National Fund for Science until March 2000. He is now professor of Population History at the University of Geneva, Department of Economic History. His publications cover both contemporary and historical demography, as well as social and economic history.

Report

"The strength of this book lies in its convincing effort to measure the efficiency of different family systems in the protection of their weaker members in crisis situations. As such, it is a major contribution to both social and family history." (Jan Kok, International Review of Social History)
"The editors and authors have done a very good job in their efforts to clarify and illustrate what is intentionally a very big field. The example chapters are packed with data and analysis of the highest quality, material which readers will find of considerable interest and which is likely to prove stimulating to a wide range of researchers in historical sociology and demography. [...] this is a highly stimulating volume; its editors and contributors are to be congratulated." (Robert Woods, Population Studies)

Product details

• Assisted by: Renzo Derosas (Editor), Michel Oris (Editor)
• Publisher: Peter Lang
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.04.2016
• EAN: 9783906768236
• ISBN: 978-3-906768-23-6
• No. of pages: 496
• Weight: 910 g
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories