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This paper draws upon qualitative interview data to present a historical geography of ‘homemaking’ and economic activity among Chinese Australian women during the White Australia Policy era. An ana...

Alternate food networks (AFN) in Mexico and France are seen as an anti-systemic, post-capitalist social behavior and a form of anticommodity production. We report on two local market initiatives in Mexico, comparing similar institutions in southern France. Despite the adverse situation facing peasant agriculture, consumers and producers—urban and rural—are mobilizing to vindicate the ethical, agroecological, and cultural dimensions of food and support the smallholder family economy, seeking more direct, face-to-face relationships. The participation of women in AFN is definitive, as consumers, producers, and processors, and as organizers and promoters as well. AFN are one dimension of a process of the “Return of the Peasants,” that is, ideological spaces where farmers and consumers collectively are redefining the values of the agro-food system.

This paper examines a view that the traditional stem family system was one of the preconditions for Japan's modern economic development, focusing on labour markets and skill formation practices. The paper begins with a brief look at the Japanese stem family household formation rules. Then, exploration is made, first, on the self-employed, the largest sector of the early modern economy; second, the merchant house and its employment patterns as an origin of present day large corporations' employment system and skill formation and human capital management practices; and third, workshop industries, which formed middle and lower layers of the manufacturing sector in the period of industrialisation. Finally, women's marriage behaviour is examined in relation to labour markets, especially changes in real wages. All this is an attempt to go some way towards a better understanding of the ways in which the family economy and corporate firms worked in economic development, rather than to suggest an alternative hypot...

Due to their role in discussions on community solidarity and social security in rich and poor countries alike, informal transfers between households have gradually become established as a research topic in economic and social history. Qualitative research has tended to emphasize the female-dominated nature of informal assistance. While research on intra-household resource allocation has demonstrated the potential for discerning gendered outcomes with household level data, quantitative research on informal assistance tends to ascribe a singular, “family” logic to transfers. Using an early 20th century Finnish household budget survey, this article analyses the differences in the statistical determinants of the reception of informal transfers in cash and in kind in the context of gendered household economy. Record linkage and statistical inference are utilized to reveal the sources of the different types of transfers and show how they were related to the position and welfare of men, women and children within...

This article compares women's and men's economic relations in East and West Germany following the 1990 reunification to exemplify the impact of varying opportunity structures on women's relative contribution to family income. West Germany's takeover set in motion a rapid transformation of East German institutions and employment structures. The analysis shows that women in West Germany became less dependent on their partners in the 1990s, largely because fewer women were housewives without earnings. In contrast, the contributions of women to the family economy in East Germany fell between 1990 and 1996. Afterwards, women in East Germany regained some of their economic power because of their partners' increasing difficulties sustaining employment. A multivariate analysis showed that the fact that women in West Germany were more likely to work less or not at all – especially if they were married or had children – accounted for much of the difference.

This study examines school enrollment in two sub-Saharan African nations, Malawi and Kenya. The article advances a refined family economy theoretical framework for understanding variations in schoo...

IntroductionThis is mine. Quilting is my reward. Once the toilets are clean and the dishes are done it is quilting time. And like tonight, I'll sit and watch the baseball game all night and quilt. (Sandy, early 4Os)1Quilting is thought by many to be a harmless, traditional, even quaint or silly feminized2 activity, although 15% of U.S. households participate in quilting (Quilting in America Survey, 2003). Most contemporary American women who quilt bring in little if any money to the family economy, and to the outside eye there are not obvious or clear professional and legitimizing outlets for this activity as other leisure pursuits have (e.g., professional golf). Because of these and other factors, quilting has been conceived of as a traditional pursuit, one that is unimportant and therefore non-threatening to regular, traditional family life. As of late, quilting has transformed from a necessary home activity to a non-essential activity, one that resembles leisure more so than work. Thus, for American women in traditional heterosexual relationships with families, serious leisure quilting takes up their already limited time and space in the household.3 Sometimes both quilters and their families feel this valuable time and space should be devoted to family needs, not women's individual creative needs that are met through quilting activities. Women quilters challenge traditional family dynamics when they take leisure time for themselves, yet they simultaneously embody feminine characteristics by engaging in what we consider a feminine and traditional activity. However, women negotiate the tensions between family and quilting demands by finding the time and space in their lives to accomplish both. Drawing upon unstructured interviews with 70 women, I address how contemporary American serious leisure quilters negotiate the constraints of time and space for quilting amidst other gendered familial duties.Women quilters resist time and space issues not by rejecting the constraints altogether, but by developing strategies to incorporate quilting into family interests. Dealing with the realities of the unpaid second shift of housework and childcare (Hochschild, 1989), women who engage in paid work blend their serious leisure interests with their second shift responsibilities-they quilt while waiting for children's doctor's appointments and sporting events, and they customize quilting projects to fit into their already hurried lives.4 Through this resistance process, quilters manage the guilt they sometimes feel while quilting because they believe that separate hobby interests "take away" from family responsibilities. For example, Denise is married and the mother of two children, and when cutting fabric for a quilt she moves to be near the family so that she can cut fabric and be with her family: "I have a little tiny space that has a cutting board and I will work in there, but I get lonesome for my family. So I will basically go where my family is." Here, Denise negotiates choosing to spend time quilting and spending time with her family. Clearly, she is making a choice to both quilt and spend time with her husband and children. However, Denise fills the role of caretaker before the role of quilter, as she places being with the family over quiltingshe does not move her family to her quilting area. Additionally, Denise's storage system for when she is working on a specific project is shaped by her husband's neat organizational style:My husband is a very precise person, he likes things tidy and I do not, so I keep all the fabric from one project in a box and then I'll carry the box with me and then put everything back in. That's helping, but not really.Note how Denise first described her husband's organizational preferences, then her own, and next she includes how she has changed her ways to fit her husband's ways. In both of these passages from Denise's interview it is clear that Denise is modifying her quilting based upon her family and her family's needs and preferences. …

This article examines the position of lone mothers within the male-breadwinner model of family economies and asks why some male-breadwinner countries have shifted more than others from treating lone mothers mainly as “mothers” toward treating them as “workers.” The countries chosen for comparison are Norway and the United Kingdom. Using a historical design, the author suggests there are different forms of male-breadwinner ideology, which may be more or less resistant to change. Empirically, the article compares policies toward widowed lone mothers, arguing that this category provides the best lens for a historical study of constructions of women's work. The analysis shows that the logic underlying widows' benefits in the two countries has been different: the key argument in Norway has been that women made a valuable contribution to the family economy, while in the UK, policy-makers emphasized the mother's continued caring presence in the home.

The position of children in the family economy changed fundamentally from the 19th century onward. In the Netherlands, the first child labor act was introduced in 1874; compulsory schooling was established in 1901. Since then, the economic contribution to the family income by children has gradually disappeared. Until the 1960s, in working-class families, the financial contribution of adolescents to the family income remained of great importance. Young workers gave their whole wage to the family in exchange for housing, food, clothes, and some pocket money. This article describes how the economic role of teenagers has changed since then. Nowadays, children and adolescents do not contribute to the family purse any longer.

The debate over whether turn-of-the-century immigrants were influenced more by their cultural heritage or by their socioeconomic circumstances when deciding to send their children either to school or to work, serves to illustrate the interplay between theory and evidence in the research process. The authors examine how ethnicity, the local economy, and the family economy affected children's participation in school and work. Using cost-of-living data from 1888-1890, they find that the effects of ethnicity on children's school participation were attenuated by local and family economy factors, and in some cases ethnic group coefficients no longer differed significantly from those of Yankees. The significant effects of ethnicity on children's work participation, however, persisted even when local and family economy factors were taken into consideration.

This essay examines childhood in a mountain village in central mainland Greece during the early 20th century and the interwar period. It gives an overview of an analytical case study conducted by the author within the context of the project “Historical Archives of Greek Youth” at the Greek National Research Center. The article draws on various sources, although principally on oral evidence. After a brief survey of the general and local socioeconomic context, it looks at children's lives and socialization inside and outside the household, focusing on family economy and interfamilial relationships within the context of home, school, community, and play, and tracing the relations of these domains to family and household. It points to the existence of childhoods rather than childhood, defined by gender and the specific socioeconomic position of the family. It argues that rural mountain society in Greece did not see its future in agriculture and examines the extent to which school education of boys functioned ...

The family enterprises of small rural entrepreneurs in proto-industrial textile production have been little studied so far. This article focuses on the ways in which family labor assists in entrepreneurial activities and nonindustrial activities within the domestic unit contribute to the creation of proto-industrial capital. The empirical material on early modern Zurich (Switzerland) documents large household economies among entrepreneurs engaging in agriculture as well as among drapers who employ their family labor in weaving or in ancillary tasks connected with the activity of putting out dependent weavers. It also demonstrates an association between proto-industrial entrepreneurship and baking, the latter often being performed by female family labor. This finding is explained by the use of bread as a means of paying workers and by the lack of access to capital markets: baking implies the creation of a surplus value within the family economy that can be directly converted into proto-industrial capital.

This study examines black families' reliance on secondary wage earners in Atlanta, GA during the early twentieth century (1900 and 1936). In periods of economic prosperity and decline, two-parent black families routinely relied on the employment of mothers, children, and extended kin to supplement the family income. These other breadwinners had different positions within the black family economy, and families' reliance on them was affected by diverse, albeit complementary factors. The employment of mothers and children was affected by economic need and the demands associated with the family life cycle. The presence of working relatives in extended family households was affected by the age of relatives, household size, and, to a limited degree, the ages of the host families' children.

Following research by a number of scholars, this article explores the structure of the proto-industrial household as a work unit. The data is used to test the theory of the ‘adaptive family economy’ formulated by Richard Wall. It reviews the evidence for the division of the framework-knitting trade into high quality and cheaper branches, and its impact on rural households. The analysis centres on two rural framework-knitting communities in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in the second half of the I9th century. It examines, through government reports and census enumerators’ books, a ‘self exploitative’ family strategy, as well as factors which made for the ‘family wage economy’ model.

This article examines the place of occupational pluralism in the adaptive family economy of rural shipyard workers in nineteenth-century Weymouth, Nova Scotia. The concept of the adaptive family economy emphasizes that families attempt to maximize economic well-being by diversifying the employment opportunities of family members. For most shipyard workers, shipbuilding was a part-time activity that complemented seasonal farming and lumbering activities. The role of space, land ownership, and the characteristics of workers reveal certain economic and sociocultural features that are associated with pluralism, including larger family size, the use of land for farming and security of food production, and the importance of job location for participation in pluralist activities. These features stand more clearly revealed by examining them within the larger economic and cultural context of shipbuilding, farming, and lumbering in the Confederation era.

The United States poses particular challenges to historians of social welfare. The division of responsibility between local, state, and federal agencies; the diversity of ethnic, religious, and rac...

This article deals with the outcomes of changes in the family labor resource allocation for family incomes and household structures. During the first stage of the demographic transition, since women worked more than men due to child bearing and child rearing, and children were the main contributors to household incomes over the medium term, there was a substitution effect whereby women 's wage labor was replaced by that of the children. With the beginning of the second industrial revolution, a contrary trend can be observed whereby child labor was replaced by that of married women, even by those reported as housewives in the Municipal Census. A smaller number of children, mandatory schooling, and an improvement of women 's position within the factory with respect to men, all seem to explain this second substitution. As a result of all these transformations, household structures and family incomes do not conform to any pre-established norms and integrate what we have defined as a family economy of mutual a...

Chile's long tradition of welfare programs included “generous” benefits for many working women. The social security system, however, perpetuated significant forms of gender and class inequality. In the 1970s and 1980s, poverty was greatly increased by sweeping market reforms. The military government responded to the high social costs with a minimal safety net which targeted expectant mothers, small children and the extremely poor, but was inadequate for most of the population. After the return of democracy, income distribution has improved in the 1990s. Yet, much needs to be done to promote family well-being through effective and participatory social policies.

While the range and nature of Canadian women's work has varied at times and places due to a variety of factors, that work has usually contributed to the family economy. The discussion here focuses on women who were married during the period from just prior to the First World War until the end of the Second World War. Data were gathered from a sample of 22 ever-married women using unstructured face-to-face interviews. Immersion and crystallization were used to analyze the data. Similarities were found in women's experiences during early transitions in marriage, including the marriage bar and making ends meet. Fairly quickly, however, the effect of socioeconomic status became more salient. Four categories of women's experiences were identified, including volunteer work, paid work for extras, necessary but hidden paid work, and family provisioning by single women. It is apparent from this study that women's work included not only paid and unpaid work, but Goffmanian labor that contributed to their families' class and status

Jewish women have played a vital role in the heritage of the Jewish community in Britain. Yet while they have been revered as good wives and mothers and held up as good models to non‐Jewish women, their history has been obscured by such idealizations and much of their contributions outside the sphere of motherhood has been ignored by historians. This article examines the reasons for this neglect and shows the valuable part Jewish women played not only as wives and mothers but also as single women in a wide range of areas including the family economy, political mobilization, organization of the workplace, education, health, leisure and philanthropic work. It questions the traditional roles Jewish men and women have been expected to play and highlights the complexity of gender and its relationship with class and ethnicity.

(1976). The pro to‐industrial family economy: The structural function of household and family during the transition from peasant society to industrial capitalism. Social History: Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 291-315.