This article explores the manner in which the boundaries between state and family were negotiated in the course of parliamentary debates on school attendance legislation in the Irish Free State. Of particular interest are the representations of children and parents which informed competing ideas about the extent and limitations of state power over families. Representations of ordinary parents as ignorant and "careless" legitimized an authoritarian approach to the regulation of school attendance, albeit one in which compulsion was balanced with a degree of compassion and parents with the wherewithal to exercise choice were granted a high degree of autonomy.
Various forms of family organization among Russian peasants and urban dwellers coexisted from the sixteenth to the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The correlation of family types changed and was a function of circumstances and economic conditions. The available data indicate that from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, extended and multiple families predominated among peasants, though the relationship between single-family and multifamily households changed. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a steady process of nuclearization of family structure began, as a result of which the simple family gradually replaced multiple families at first in the cities later in the villages.
This article explores the ways in which parricide was comprehended in England and Wales, c.1600–1760, and shows that while some parallels exist with modern explanatory models of parricide offenders, they had very different meanings in the early modern context. While both lunacy and the cruelty of parents were understood as possible contexts for parricide, neither were common. The dominant explanation was the gratuitous violence of a selfish individual who lacked compassion and who saw the parent as an obstacle—to an inheritance, riches, marriage, and freedom—to be removed. The article explores these three categories and suggests ways in which this began to change in the mid-eighteenth century.
The abuse of parents is regarded to be an increasing problem in contemporary society. It is often seen as a new phenomenon marking the dysfunctional nature of the modern family. This article provides arguments to the contrary, focusing on the analysis of the abuse of parents and parricide in early modern Russia, where the concept of the patriarchal and traditional family served as a basis for the prosecution of any disrespect to parental authority. This article offers an in-depth analysis of the normative concepts of family relationships, the criminal prosecution of parricide, and the abuse of parents based on an examination of court records. This article highlights the major developments in the construction of parricides within normative legal, social, and political discourses to argue that parricide challenged the established patriarchal hierarchy; the authorities thus normalized it through normative gender-appropriate behavior, constructing responses to male and female behavior based on the common understanding of their respective abilities and limitations in respect to violence.
Prior parricide research has indicated that most killings of parents involve single offenders and single victims. While studies of one-on-one parricide incidents have revealed notable findings about offender and offense-related characteristics, the study of single offender and multiple victim—double parricides—parricides has escaped the analytical scrutiny of researchers. Such an omission is particularly notable as the temporal sequencing of attacks has implications for the dynamics of an offender’s on-scene behavior. This article examines the temporal sequencing of attacks in attempted and completed double parricides in South Korea. Results indicate that offender behavior in double parricides is shaped by time and distance between the first and second victims.
In the early modern courts of law in Finland—then a part of Sweden—physical and verbal violence by (teenage or adult) children against their parents was theoretically a capital crime. Nevertheless, in practice, extenuating circumstances were sought and punishments were mitigated. One of the common extenuating circumstances was that the parent had provoked the abuse through overdisciplining the child or misusing parental authority in the household. In the trials, each party tried to excuse and if possible legitimize their own behavior. In this article, I investigate the phenomenon of the abuse of parents in the law courts of seventeenth-century Finland and the argumentation of parental power and its refutation in those trials. In the trials, values and expectations of parenthood and parental authority were discussed, used, and played on by different parties in cases dealing with the abuse of a parent.
This article analyzes the nature and incidence of Scottish parricide from 1700 to 1850. Despite a rarity of prosecutions, parricide (or parental murder) was regarded as an extremely serious offense by the Scottish judiciary. Through an exploration of cases from the Justiciary Court, this article argues that parricide appears to have been a gendered crime in relation to both perpetrator and victim and it tended to occur in the more rural or remote parts of Scotland during the period before 1850. It is also evident that certain circumstantial triggers could act as a catalyst for the crime’s perpetration, such as excessive alcohol consumption. In offering explanations for the lack of parricidal behavior in Scotland before 1850, this article suggests that alongside the church and state working together to foster deference to familial authority, the close-knit bonds of intrafamilial relations were such that parricide was only very rarely resorted to by members of the populace.
In the medieval world, demons were considered to be active agents in daily life. They could entice people to sin, but also possess an innocent victim’s body. Demoniacs—such possessed people—were often out of their mind, violent, and aggressive. This article explores specific cases of demonic possession—those of children attacking their parents, as reported in medieval canonization processes—and argues that religious rhetoric offered a means to explain the children’s violence. In addition to providing an explanation, religion provided an outlet in an unbearable situation: attacking one’s parents was a sign of the utmost disrespect to the social hierarchies and moral teachings; blaming a demon offered a remedy without blaming the child (or the parents for bad parenting). Child demoniacs were often treated harshly: they were tied up and sometimes beaten, but they were not abandoned. Like the affliction, the cure was also spiritual: parents invoked the help of a saint, which restored the harmony and hierarchy of family life.
This article presents knowledge about adversity and the changing nature of families in early modern townships. It proposes that the shape of the family changed across Nantwich (Cheshire) townships with some neighborhoods presenting very high numbers of female heads of household. While stressing variations, it presents new evidence on the subject of close family relationships. It puts forward the view that the elevated numbers of women living together demonstrates commitment, resilience, and emotional investment in female-centered families. This finding challenges heteronormative definitions of intimate relationships and indicates the need for further research to achieve a better understanding of intimacy in early modern families. This study additionally examines subjects of charity, health, hardship, credit and debt, and the accompanying struggles that were played out in the social sphere. In an important observation concerning the ever-changing composition of the family, this investigation ascertains that the family configuration changed according to fluctuating socioeconomic circumstances. What is also offered here is a contribution to knowledge about the county of Cheshire from the Hearth Tax for which there are no available Hearth Tax studies. This study investigates wills, inventories, probate records, deeds, poor accounts, and parish records and provides an insight into hardship through a close study of all of the poor in one street in 1664. It finds that poor children worked hard and when apprenticed were also compulsorily separated from the family home and that child mortality was equally high among rich and poor people in early modern Nantwich townships.
Although Portuguese laws protected women’s right to property, the process of succession that followed a husband’s death in colonial Minas Gerais often threatened women’s economic well-being. Widows of African descent, moreover, were regularly denied custody of their children, having to defer to court-appointed guardians in matters regarding their property and education. In this context, some couples contracted the sale of the dying spouse’s meação to the surviving spouse. This understudied strategy of transmission of property empowered widows of African descent to act as heads of household and guardians to their children in ways that were not guaranteed by law.
This article examines the ways that plebeian women confessed to concubinary relationships in seventeenth-century Lima. Part One reviews complaints brought by casta and enslaved concubines to enforce matrimonial promises. Part Two analyzes the imprecise laws and policies of the canonists on concubinage. Part Three considers the Church’s inquisitorial function in policing interethnic intimacies, given the virtual synonymity of illegitimacy and concubinage. The article assesses the marriage–concubinage dichotomy from the perspective of women who, given their ethnic and social position in colonial society enjoyed limited legal standing vis-à-vis elite women, but conversely exercised greater sexual freedom in forming and dissolving partnerships.
Familism is a model of a social organization that assigns the family an important role in individual and collective identity. This article proposes a historical analysis and interpretation of the Seder celebrations of Jewish Israelis, in order to explore what is unique about Israeli familism—that it imagines the entire nation as an extended family. This ritual continues to be widely practiced today by Jews of every sector—secular, traditional, and religious. As a result, it has a significant presence in Israeli popular culture. The focus is on two questions: (1) who celebrates? That is, what forum convenes around the table? (2) How is it celebrated? That is, what ritual is conducted during the festive gathering? The historical and ethnographic analysis shows that over the course of the twentieth century, the extended family became the preferred forum for celebration, and that the conformist reading of the Haggadah and the other parts of the ceremony continue on the whole to follow the Orthodox rules, even in secular families. This mode of celebration is analyzed here as an expression of the political image of the entire Jewish people as one large extended family and as a demonstration of the extensive use of Jewish familism in the construction of Jewish identity in Israel today.
This article explores the effects of the increasing educational attainment of several cohorts of women born during the first half of the twentieth century on the historical change in their fertility. With data from the 1991 Spanish Census, we focus on the reproductive trajectories of women in these cohorts based on parity progression and marriage patterns. The conclusions point to a clear negative association between education and fertility on one hand and between education and marriage on the other. Both of these relationships prove relevant to understanding changes in fertility and childlessness in the cohorts and time span considered.
Based on an analysis of how the identities of women were recorded in legal and familial documents, this article argues that women’s social identities were primarily and permanently linked to that of their natal families, particularly to their fathers. Given the frequent shifts in women’s living positions, marital status, and legal guardianship, women’s ties to their natal families have often been seen as tenuous. However, identifying a woman through her patriline was common practice and made practical sense in that it identified the individual woman in a permanent way and reflected the enduring ties between a women and her patriline.