During the course of the nineteenth century, the parameters defining ‘youth’, marking its beginning and its end, were becoming more precise and more institutionally defined for both girls and boys in Europe. More than any other phenomenon or institution, elementary schooling (and leaving school) contributed to a certain ‘normalization’ of the life cycle for young people. By the end of the nineteenth century, most girls as well as boys attended school at least intermittently until at least age 12 or 13; at school-leaving a new phase of life began. Throughout much of Europe a select minority of middle-class and upper-class young women joined their brothers at universities, as higher education became first a possibility and then a routine for them in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century.

The distribution of property in any community reflects a variety of cultural, economic and social influences including, not least, a legal framework that defines property and the rights to use and transfer it. Legal change, in turn, has the capacity to reshape distribution and the complex matrix of culture, society and economy that surrounds access to property. The articles that have been brought together for this special issue of Continuity and Change document and analyse the gendered patterns of ownership in a variety of times and places. Each of the contributors has encountered some difficulty in determining the relevant legal framework, the extent to which laws were enforced, who owned what, patterns of inheritance and the meaning of ownership itself. The authors respond by examining a range of sources with imagination, ingenuity and methodologies that originate in different disciplines. The precise shape of the research of course depends on the circumstances of the particular historical context.

The family system prevailing among a small ethnic group towards the end of the pre-industrial era is examined on the basis of data from a parish in Northern Russia. Identification of the factors shaping this system is facilitated by a comparison with descriptions of ethnic Russian family systems in Southern and Central European Russia, which have been studied more extensively. The characteristics of the family system in the community described here conform most closely to the latter. Since little microstructural research has been done on Northern Russia, the data presented here will serve as an example of the development of the family system in the region in the nineteenth century.

Just before the First World War, German agricultural economists and social-welfare experts constructed a new social category – rural female youth, whose mobility provoked growing alarm. Framing rural flight in terms of gender and generation allowed experts to focus on its demographic, economic, and moral threats, and rural female youth became a target for reform. These debates presaged a wave of popular anxiety over rural female youth that expanded dramatically during the Weimar Republic. However, prewar court testimonies of runaway maids in rural Saxony suggest that some rural girls understood their mobility in terms of ‘getting ahead’, and resisted efforts to restrict their occupational, social, and spatial horizons.

This article investigates the antecedents, experience and consequences of service in the lives of rural-born Dutch women within the urbanizing and industrializing context of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. The decision to enter service was often taken by the girl's parents against the background of a distress-ridden household. From the latter part of the nineteenth century, the migration fields of servants widened, with women more often serving in middle-class households in the growing large cities. The consequences of out-migration to these urban and more diverse labour and marriage markets, and for some women also the educational work setting of urban service itself, were that larger proportions of women contracted advantageous marriages and settled outside their rural region of birth.

Recent research on both contemporary and historical societies argues for the importance of women's independent access to credit as a positive force for empowerment of the women concerned and for wider economic development. This article investigates this issue for rural England between c.1290 and c.1380 using debt litigation records from two well-documented manor courts. The article concludes that involvement in credit networks brought little female empowerment in medieval English villages because relatively few women acted as independent lenders and borrowers. However, local credit networks featured women more prominently in some places than others, and reasons for this are advanced.

This article discusses how widows and widowers were provided for in early modern Sweden, focussing in particular on the use of wills. The investigated area is the parish of Undersåker in Jämtland, northern Sweden, and the period c. 1750 to 1915. The point of departure is the fact that Swedish medieval and early modern law did give quite strong property rights to widows and widowers. Therefore, if these rights were respected by family members and enforced by the courts, it was hard to see any good reason for taking extra precautions, like making a will to the benefit of the spouse who lived longest. In view of this, the fact that wills were nevertheless set up, albeit rarely, needs explaining. During the period 475 wills were set up, according to the archives. Of these 240 were mutual wills; approximately 3 per cent of all couples set up a mutual will, with the intention of letting the surviving spouse retain the estate undivided. Often, there was a connection between the decision to set up a will and lack of children and/or remarriage. Will-makers came from all social strata, the affluent as well as the quite poor. Sometimes, a series of wills from the same couple has been preserved, indicating that will-making could be part of a long-term strategy of planning for old age and adapting to new circumstances. The general conclusion is that wills can often be seen as a sign of fear: fear that the legal rights with which widows and widowers were invested would not, after all, be respected. This fear appears to have been particularly strong if the couple lacked offspring.

This article deals with changes in the management of industrial labour in Catalonia between 1830 and 1925. In the absence of state welfare, families developed a number of strategies to try and secure an adequate standard of living. During the nineteenth century labour markets were informal, and working contracts implicit. However, with the advent of scientific organization of labour in the 1920s, hourly wage agreements began to be recorded. The application of cooperative game theory illuminates the processes by which households in this era managed to generate income. Both kin- and non-kin-related networks were used to improve the living standards of the household. Strategies of co-residence initially developed by migrants were later imitated by locally born inhabitants. Initially the living standards of migrants were thus higher than those of natives.

This article describes a comparison of two groups of women, one German and one French, who were able to use the expanding educational opportunities for women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to forge a new path to public influence. The comparison highlights the different socio-political and institutional contexts of Imperial Germany and Third Republic France, in order to explain the very different career patterns of women with similar research interests: national economists who trained in Berlin and lawyers who trained in Paris. Although the greater emphasis is on the German case, I explore the possibilities for (and limitations to) women's claims to public influence in both contexts.

The decades around the turn of the twentieth century mark a critical transitional moment in the history of European girlhood. These decades witnessed a significant expansion in educational opportunities for girls and young women, while a broad range of new jobs provided previously unknown options in the labour market. Based on 1,100 unpublished memoirswritten by Danish women, this article explores how these changes affected the lives and experiences of three successive generations of women who came of age from the 1880s to the 1930s.

This study examines the role of women in headship and succession in early modern Kyoto using the population registers of two Kyoto neighbourhoods of differing economic status and the private documents of a family business. The private documents allow an examination of the processes and reasons behind inheritance decisions. I find that women could inherit when sons were absent, incapable or unwilling, and heiresses were used to recruit capable outsiders into the bloodline. More than these roles, women played an active part in making and carrying out inheritance decisions even when the heir was male, as well as providing alternatives to the usual succession rules.

This article explores the policies of the Bulgarian socialist regime (1944–1989) towards the family. Initially, the Bulgarian Communist Party focussed on the abolition of the patriarchal family, the emancipation of women and the struggle against ‘bourgeois residues’ in family life. However, the dramatic decline of the birth rate – a result of rapid urbanization and increasing female employment – led to a re-direction of official discourse. Reproduction became heavily politicized, as the 1968 ban on abortion makes evident. Despite pro-natalist measures, the government was unable to stop the fertility decline. This article demonstrates how socialist family policy was gradually modified through negotiation between the Party and the population.

In spite of Mexico's numerous efforts at liberal land reform and privatization in the nineteenth century, Totimehuacán (Puebla) maintained significant continuity in land-holding on a family basis. This undermines confidence in the pauperization hypothesis, the view that privatization necessarily dispossessed the indigenous peasantry. Mechanisms of social control and dispute resolution did change, and particular groups such as women and children lost an important defence in property matters. The effect of legislative changes was protracted, however, and mediated by the customary role of patronym groups, an issue which most other studies have ignored. The article concludes that the impact of property reform on women cannot be understood apart from customary, local forms of social organization.

This article makes use of the rich deposits of pre-trial documents in the court archives of early modern Wales, focusing on the county of Denbighshire, to investigate attitudes and responses to theft. Qualitative research on this subject tends to emphasize or privilege actively law-enforcing behaviour that led to trials; while that is the inevitable emphasis of court records, I argue that we need to examine witness testimonies more closely in order to understand responses that did not match up to the ideals of vigilance and communal responsibility. Drawing on modern criminological research, I explore ‘suspicion’ and the decision-making processes leading to various outcomes: non-action; investigation and prosecution; alternative resolutions that bypassed the courts. Finally, I explore the everyday ‘world of stolen goods’ and its social and economic rewards in local networks of reciprocal favours, gifts and alliances.

Boarding out and fostering poor children was a favoured method of poor relief in many rural areas in northern Europe. This article discusses children who were boarded out to foster-parents by public auction in a rural parish in northern nineteenth-century Sweden. Poverty was the main reason why children were boarded out, frequently associated with loss of parents and difficulties in providing for a large household. It is suggested that the Swedish system of boarding out poor children must be understood in the context of a welfare system where cost efficiency was important. The auction method was used in spite of the risks involved because it was considered to be the best way to provide poor children with food, clothes, shelter and care, while keeping the compensation to the foster-parents at a reasonably low level.

I examine wealth-holding and the share of household wealth owned by women married in the years surrounding the 1870 Married Women's Property Act. The Act, which gave women married after 1870 the right to own and control personal property, serves as a natural experiment to examine the extent to which individuals respond to the law. I link wealth-holding data to census information and find that, as a result of the Act, women married after 1870 shifted their wealth-holding away from real property to personal property. Moreover, women married after the Act owned a larger share of household wealth than women married before the Act.

This article examines patterns of property-holding in an Ontario town before and after legislation in 1872 and 1884 that permitted married women to hold property in their own name. The experience of Guelph follows that of other North American urban communities in which women substantially increased their share of urban property during this period. Single and widowed women achieved most of the gains although married women also increased their holding of real property. Indicators of long-term change derived from assessment records, census manuscripts, wills, mortgages and property transfers support the hypothesis that the legislation was instrumental in the rise of female ownership. The effect of the law was felt through various channels of causation, including a change in inheritance practice that favoured women.