Volume 29 (Summer 1996) Issue 4
Article Abstracts

Abstract: Thomas Goebel, "The Uneven Rewards of Professional Labor: Wealth and Income in the Chicago Professions, 1870-1920"

The article investigates the parameters of wealth and income inequality in the Chicago professions between 1870 and 1920. Drawing on the federal census, income tax retums, surviving account books, and biographical information on thousands of Chicago lawyers, physicians, and engineers, the article traces the extent of inter and intraoccupational inequality and stratification. All three professions were marked by a highly uneven distribution of economic resources with a small elite receiving a disproportionate share of the available income while most practitioners eamed only moderate incomes. At the same time, the older professionals were clearly better off than salaried employees. The article challenges established theories of professionalization by pointing to the varying levels of success of the monopolization strategies employed by professionals. It advances a refined concept of occupational stratification that revolves around the rising importance of occupational classifications in structuring social inequality and that acknowledges the presence of segments within the professions with sharply divergent resources, interests, and fields of practice. The article addresses issues relevant to historians interested in social inequality and to sociologists who work in the the fields of professionalization theory and the development of occupations.

Abstract: James Donnelly, "Defining the Industrial Chemist in the United Kingdom, 1850-1921"

The article is concemed with the structural location of the earliest group of scientifically trained workers in British civil industry: industrial chemists. It provides a short account of the growth and early development of industrial chemistry as an occupation based on a labour market for trained men. It identifies the key elements in this process (within the practice of chemistry, within educational institutions and within the operations of industrial firms) and their symbiotic relationship. It then focuses on one aspect of the process by which the emergent group of workers was defined: their assimilation to forms of occupational organization. Industrial chemists are shown to have been marginal within the three main generic organizations for chemists. Attempts to form new organizations during the early twentieth century are analyzed and found to embody a tension between a 'service class' and 'trade union' model. By the early 1920s the former had prevailed, in the form of the Institute of Chemistry, with a clear institutional barrier erected against lower level and more routine forms of chemical employment in industry.

Abstract: Joel A. Tarr and Mark Tebeau, "Managing Danger in the Home Environment, 1900-1940"

A growing awareness in the first decades of the twentieth century of the prevalence of home accidents threatened the concept of the home-as-haven and gave rise to the home safety movement. Organizationally, home safety began as part of the National Safety Council, but it never achieved the recognition accorded to industrial nor trafffic safety. Increasingly, safety experts as well as society at large designated women as "home safety managers," responsible for creating a risk-free environment. The rise of home economics as a professional science for women encouraged a complementary thrust towards providing the home with the efficiency and managerial values of the factory. The development of accident statistics and the entrance of the insurance industry into the home arena helped set priorities in terms of reducing accidents. The Red Cross and the General Federation of Women's Clubs both launched campaigns against home accidents, based largely on education and admonitions of proper actions, but with only limited results. Throughout these years, women remained the socially designated responsible party, given authority roles in the home that they were often denied in the outside world. Home accident rates, however, remained high, pointing to the limitations of the strategies of the various safety organizations.

Abstract: John C. Burnham, "Why Did the Infants and Toddlers Die? Shifts in Americans' Ideas of Responsibility for Accidents&emdash;From Blaming Mom to Engineering"

Changes in ideas about risk and responsibility in injuries are found in American public discourse about who was responsible for accidents that hurt or killed very young children (under six years old). Parents and, in a gendered nineteenth-century world, especially mothers were blamed for children's injuries. As the world of infectious diseases gave way to medical intervention, injuries became more conspicuous in mortality and morbidity statistics, especially for preschoolers, and home safety campaigns intensified. In the mid-twentieth century, caregivers more generally shared responsibility with mothers, and new public health campaigns emphasized educating parents and children. Child rearing authorities emphasized psychological causes of accidents. Near the end of the century, engineering solutions, emphasizing childproofing a youngster's surroundings, offered a technological fix for physical danger, as in medicine bottle caps, and much responsibility passed to purchased items in the child's environment.

Abstract: Stephen Lassonde, "Learning and Earning: Schooling, Juvenile Employment, and the Early Life Course in Late Nineteenth-Century New Haven"

The passage and enforcement of compulsory education laws during the latter half of the nineteenth century in the northeastem United States helped to refashion conceptions of how children's time should be utilized and imposed a roughly uniform course of socialization upon all children. With the gradual standardization of the early life course, children's time became an object of intense social concem, a phenomenon reflected in attempts to inculcate in children an appreciation for the value of time itself and the creation of an institutional basis for childhood as a period of formal preparation for adulthood. By 1900 compulsory education had been transformed from an unenforced statute to an effective boundary between school-leaving and work force entry for the first time. Childhood as a discrete phase of dependence and socialization then was progressively an institutionally mediated stage of life as greater numbers of children entered the classroom, were exposed to a more standardized curriculum, and remained to age fourteen. Thus, the upper threshold of childhood emerged as a regulated social fact as growing up became a markedly similar experience for all children by century's end.

Abstract: Allyson M. Poska, "When Love Goes Wrong: Getting Out of Marriage in Seventeenth-Century Spain"

In order to assert greater control over its parishioners, the Catholic Reformation Church in the wake of the Council of Trent ( 147-1563) attempted to bring relationships, especially those involving sexual relations, under its purview. This process involved the redefinition of marriage rituals, especially in terms of premarital sexual relations and the legitimization of marriage promises by a priest. The Council also strongly reiterated Church doctrine conceming the indissolubility of the sacrament of marriage. However, parishioners often proved to have little enthusiasm for such ecclesiastical regulation. I examined a variety of parish marriage records from 1550 to 1700 from the diocese of Ourense, a rural diocese in Galicia in northwestem Spain. A close look reveals that, despite the injunctions of the Council of Trent, not all promises of marriage and sexual activity led to marriage principally because local religious culture tolerated extra-marital sexuality. Moreover, from time to time even married couples separated and began new lives with new partners despite the ecclesiastical prohibitions. Contrary to historians' claims about the permanence of marriage in early modem Europe, the peasants of northwestem Spain maintained their traditional, more flexible notions of marriage throughout the seventeenth century.

Abstract: Christine Adams, "A Choice Not to Wed? Unmarried Women in Eighteenth-Century France"

Despite the fact that a sizeable minority of the population remained unmarried in early modern Westem Europe, historians have largely neglected the study of single women whose legal, social and economic condition was very different from that of their married sisters. This study focuses on the lives of Marie and Marianne de Lamothe of eighteenth-century Bordeaux, two sisters who chose to remain unmarried. The case of these two women illustrates the important role that spinsters could play in early modern family formations filling in as surrogate spouses to their brothers and stabilizing the operation of household economies. Their experiences further suggest that, despite the largely negative image of spinsterhood cast in the nineteenth century, celibacy could be an active choice and desirable option for some women. Marie and Marianne Lamothe found emotional fulfillment and satisfaction in an alternate model of family life and womanhood, despite occasional tensions and stress.

 

Abstract: Laird W. Bergad, "Demographic Change in a Post-Export Boom Society: The Population of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1776-1821"

The social and economic history of Minas Gerais in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is extraordinary in comparative perspective. It is perhaps the only known example of a large-scale Latin American slave system which successfully made the transition from a slavebased export economy dependent on foreign markets, to a more divers)fied agricultural and cattle economy oriented almost exclusively to local or regional markets within Brazil. What makes the case of Minas Gerais so unique is that through this economic transition dependence upon slave labor remained central to Mineiro economy and society. Although there was a decline in the slave population in the immediate aftermath of the export economy's collapse in the mid-18th century, during the 19th century the slave population increased dynamically and Minas Gerais became the largest slave holding province of the Brazilian empire. The documentary ev' idence suggests that this later renewed growth of slavery was based in part upon natural demographic increase rather than solely on imports from Africa or the inter-regional Brazilian slave trade, another phenomenon which may have been unique in the history of slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. In nearly every other Latin American slave system the demise of export-based economic cycles heralded the long-term decline of slavery as well. This article considers the process of demographic readjustment occurring in Mineiro society in the aftermath of the 18th-century gold mining boom. This was a critical period in the history of Minas Gerais and it provided the foundations upon which the province's economic and social order would be built during the 19th century.

 

Abstract: Herbert S. Klein and Clotilde Andrade Paiva, "Freedman in a Slave Economy: Minas Gerais in 1831"

Despite the importance of the free colored class in Brazil&emdash;some 4.2 million strong in the census of 1872&emdash;there have been few systematic studies under' taken to analyze their social and economic position prior to emancipation. We compare two communities in the province of Minas Gerais using a manuscript census of 1831 to analyze the position of the freedmen in this largest free colored region in Brazil. Our analysis of the social and economic position of free colored in the communities of Sabara and Campanha shows that the free colored population, except at the elite level, were to be found in all the occupations practiced by their contemporary white neighbors and experienced much of the same social and demographic organization as their non-slave originated peers. It will also be shown that whether they lived among predominantly Afro-Brazilian populations (Sabara) or among predominantly white ones (Campanha), there was relatively little difference for the free colored in their pattems of work and social organization from their white neighbors. In fact gender and wealth, as measured by slave ownership, usually marked socio-economic differences more strongly than color. Finally, we will show that freedmen were even significant slave owners in their own right.

 

Abstract: Ruth Wallis Herndon, "Literacy Among New England's Transient Poor, 1750-1800"

The literacy of poor, transient New Englanders can be discovered by studying the signatures or marks they left on examinations recorded by Rhode Island town authorities. The name-signing literacy rates of these poor people prove to be sign)ficantly lower than literacy rates discovered by historians using estate documents. The rates for poor men (69%) are two~thirds of previous estimates and the rates for poor women (22%) are half of the most conservative previous estimates. These transient examinations also allow racial comparison: the rates for poor men of color (21%) and poor women of color (6%) are sign)ficantly lower than those for poor white men and women; and these rates for people of color are just a fraction of the previous estimates for men and women based on estate records. These dramatic differences suggest that estimates of literacy based on property documents overrepresent the wealthy and thus present an inflated view overall of New England literacy.