Volume 30 (Winter 1996) Issue 2
Article Abstracts

Abstract: C. Dallett Hemphill, "Middle Class Rising in Revolutionary America: The Evidence From Manners"

This article analyzes the rules [or face- face behavior embedded in the various forms of conduct literature circulating in America between 1740 and 1820. It concludes that these rules reflect a rise in the status of the middling sort and the origins of the middle-class culture of self madeness that we have come to identify with the nineteenth century. In contrast to the preceding early colonial era, when conduct literature consisted of courtesy books intended for the elite and deference-demanding religious tracts for everyone else: the mid-eighteenth century saw the importation and reprinting of conduct books by British authors of the middling sort which served to disseminate the formerly elite code to their own class. But these authors did not merely emulate the aristocratic code, they reshaped it for their own purposes. Above all, they downplayed deference demands by focusing on relationships between equals, and assisted rising self-made men by taking Renaissance demands for self control to a whole new level via elaborate advice for control of the body. To a considerable extent, the code of etiquette that we have associated with the antebellum middle class dates to this period.

Abstract: Peter N. Stearns, Perrin Rowland, Lori Giarnella, "Children's Sleep: Sketching Historical Change"

Aspects of sleep change historically. This article highlights a transition between the mid-19th and mid-20th century in the United States, focusing on a great growth in concern over children's sleep. Not only was sleep not widely discussed in the 19th century, children were also not held to very demanding sleep schedules. Beginning in the 1890s, but particularly from 1920 onward, sleep became a greater problem in the eyes of popularizing experts and a parental audience. In addition, amounts of recommended sleep increased along with an effort to regularize schedules. These changes resulted from a number of radical shifts in the context of sleep, including bedding and rooms for children, and in new demands on adult attention. The results certainly heightened adult worry, while providing a new area of regulation over children; some impact on adult sleep may have resulted as well, as sleep became at once a means of defiance of childhood restrictions and a source of ongoing nervousness.

Abstract: Daniel Scott Smith, "'The Number and Quality of Children': Education and Marital Fertility in Early Twentieth-Century Iowa"

Using remarkably rich data on the extent and type of schooling collected by the state census of Iowa in 1915 and fertility information on the 1910 federal manuscript census, this essay explores the role of education in structuring the transition to low fertility in the United States. Its point of departure is a contemporary study that anticipated later theories of fertility by distinguishing between the number of children and their quality. In addition to a county-level analysis of variation in marital fertility, the article analyzes the fertility of nearly 5,000 ever-married women in four cities and ten rural areas linked between these two censuses.

Married women with more years of schooling had substantially fewer children than wives who attended longer, independent of other important influences such as religious denomination, nativity size of community, and occupation of husband. In addition, those whose experience was limited to the rural common school had more children, independent of years attended and other variables, than those who attended the more modem grammar school. Schooling mattered for the later behavior of adults with respect to family limitation within marriage.

Abstract: Kimberley L. Phillips, "'But It is a Fine Place to Make Money': Migration and African-American Families in Cleveland, 1915-1929"

The new studies on African American migration between 1915 and 1930 to northern cities like Cleveland, Ohio, have shown how family and household reformation in the North and the continued links with family and households in the South provided critical economic resources as migrants moved out of the South. Few of these studies have explored how migration and settlement might have altered family and friend relationships and patterns of obligations. While migrants pursued a variety of economic calculations to meet their needs, other goals, such as the care of children, the use of boarding to fill social and emotional needs, the desire to be near kin and friends from the South, and the need to continue cultural patterns of visiting, also significantly influenced black household formation. In addition to traditional historical documents, this article explores first-person accounts by migrants to Cleveland who demonstrate how family needs and the process of migration shaped each other. For many, moving North challenged many of their assumptions about and patterns of kinship, household, and friend obligation. In addition, this study suggests how the sometimes long process of reassembling family and friend networks in the city frequently altered gender and generational relations in families.

Abstract: Maxine Berg, "Women's Consumption and the Industrial Classes of Eighteenth-Century England"

This paper addresses questions of gender and class in consumer behaviour in early industrial England. It explores the role of new commodities and their significance to the practices of middling consumers in two rapidly expanding industrial towns of eighteenth-century England, Birmingham and Sheffield. The paper investigates qualitative questions of the social and emotional significance attached to goods, as well as quantitative indicators of ownership through the use of wills, probate inventories and insurance policies. Bequests in wills display the kinds of goods thought to be significant by a large number of consumers, and reveal, in addition, different attitudes among men and women to their possessions. Urban middling women conveyed a sensitivity to commodities which may have been the crucial factor behind the shift from an elite consumption of foreign luxuries to a broadly-based demand for consumer novelties.

Abstract: Thomas Miller Klubock, "Working-Class Masculinity, Middle-Class Morality, and Labor Politics in the Chilean Copper Mines"

This article examines the reconstruction of working-class masculinity in early twentieth century Chile through the transformation of a population of itinerant rural laborers into a permanent and trained labor force. After the 1920s, the Chilean state and the copper industry colluded to reorganize forms of working-class sociability and gender relations in order to establish a disciplined labor force for Chile's emergent industrial economy. Copper miners elaborated a complex and contradictory sense of masculinity that not only contributed to the reorganiis for workers' resistance to managerial authority. Miners' masculine work identity both facilitated their recomposition into a trained and stable labor force and channelled tradzation of gender relations, but also provided the basitions of militant labor protest.

Abstract: Leah Leneman " 'Disregarding the Matrimonial Vows': Divorce in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland"

Divorce for adultery was available in Scotland from 1560 and for desertion from 1573, on equal terms for men and women. From 1684, when a register was started by the national consistory court, and 1830, when jurisdiction was transferred to the Court of Session, 904 cases (803 for adultery and 101 for desertion) were found. Only 118 of those occurred before 1770; after that date there was a spectacular rise. Over two-thirds of the cases after 1770 were uncontested, and nearly half the suits were brought by women. Possible explanations for the sharp rise in cases after 1770 (paralleled in studies of divorce in other countries in the same period) include economic changes and new, enlightened ideas. The question of why the figures did not rise even more than they did is also asked: the evidence reveals that after the breakdown of church control many individuals simply left their spouses and set up a new household without feeling any need for the divorce which would have allowed them to remarry.

Abstract: Lynne Taylor, "Food Riots Revisited"

This paper revisits the question of food riots, a form of popular protest held to have been common since the seventeenth century and until the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Charles Tilly, anon" others, argues that the food riot disappeared in the mid-nineteenth century with the emergence of the centralized nation-state and of national markets in basic foodstuffs. It is generally assumed that strikes and other association-based protest, either regional or national in scope, replaced it. However, a review of the literature pertaining to food riots reveals the existence of numerous riots in the twentieth century of a nature similar to those of the eighteenth, a fact which challenges some of the key assumptions of the body of theory explaining the rise and demise of the food riot. This paper reviews and evaluates the theory of popular protest in light of these twentieth-century riots, by considering the implications of their existence for our understanding of the nature and shape of popular protest in general.

Abstract: Randolph Trumbach, "The Third Gender in Twentieth-Century America"

George Chauncey's Gay New York is placed by this review in long-term western history by arguing for a change around 1700 from a system in which most men had sex with adolescent males and with women to one in which an effeminate minority of men were constituted as a third gender who had sex with each other and with some of the males who were also attracted to women. Chauncey's first section describes sex between "fairies" and "normal" men; the second, sex between "fairies." The "homosexualheterosexual" distinction is therefore not a biological constant but a description of the modern western gender system. Most of Chauncey's "fairies" and "normal" men, without knowing the distinction, acted out their respective roles.

Abstract: Gregory Hanlon, "The Perils of Patriarchy"

Studies of family dynamics in Early Modem Europe frequently deepen the furrows traced out in the sources historians exploit. The dominant tendency now is to treat the evolution of the modem western family as part of a broader process of social control. Thomas Robisheaux sees the enhancement of parental and paternal power in Germany as the consequence of grim Malthusian realities. James Farr understands a parallel development in France as the outcome of intellectual elites applying their social representations about gender inequality on women and children. Oscar Di Simplicio focuses rather on how ecclesiastics and magistrates fashioned the individual conscience in Central Italy. The authors' ability to carry the reader's conviction rests with their ability to marshal! the considerable array of archival sources shedding light onto real situations.