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A systematic sample of the petitions presented to the English Divorce Court from 1858 through 1908 makes it possible to assess the differential contribution of discrete social and economic subgroups to the litigation the Court oversaw. An examination of four of these -- the titled aristocracy, those employed in the theater, those in receipt of financial aid, and laborers -- shows that English divorce litigants exhibited a broader social profile than commonly attributed to it by the newspaper coverage of divorce litigation, which gave a skewed impression of its social profile. Analysis of these cases underscores the gendered, class, and geographically inflected demand for divorce in a judicial setting that imposed severe restrictions on access to divorce as a remedy for marital breakdown.

Grounded in literature review and an ethnographic study, this article examines contemporary Brazilian domestic life. Relations among women (employers and maids) and between women and men are analyzed with a focus on the home as a space in which gender, race, and class inequalities are constantly reproduced. The article argues that what happens in domestic life is constitutive of wider social divisions and that the domestic is a universe integral to the national social context. A case in point is the connection between the widespread use of paid domestic labor and the naturalization of black women as subservient, complementing the pairing of whiteness and class entitlement. Another case is the buffering role of maids in the development of gender conflicts in well-off homes, thus blurring gender hierarchies at a broader scale. Locating the domestic within the recent discussion on global domestic labor, the article compares particularities of Brazilian domestic life to those elsewhere.

The aim of the article is to modify our understanding of the history of middle-class marriage. It draws upon the detailed examination of one Wolverhampton couple's marriage to explore relationships between husbands and wives-and between ex-husbands and ex-wives-in early twentieth-century provincial England. It argues that patriarchal and companionate marriages co-existed alongside one another; that even in patriarchal marriages wives were prepared to seek legal redress for their grievances; and that even in insular and unfashionable regions of the country such as the Black Country the courts, both civil and criminal, policed masculinity and femininity in their assessment of where fault lay.

This article statistically analyzes quantitative data from numerous sources in order to assess changes in marriage patterns, family structure, and rates of social mobility during the period from 1282 to 1494. During this period, three systems of social stratification coexisted -- wealth, political office, and age of family -- but these contending status systems were not consistent in their rankings of families. Each status system was conservative in the sense that elite families at the top of that hierarchy married each other in order to stabilize their position. But because of inconsistency in rankings, contradiction within the elite opened up the Florentine marriage system to widespread upward social mobility by new men. In their own families, successful new men aggressively imitated their economically and politically declining status superiors. Sharp class divisions thereby blurred into continuous and negotiable status gradients. These open-elite patterns of social mobility, present throughout the early Florentine Renaissance, were most extreme during the Albizzi regime, immediately following the Ciompi Revolt.

This article studies partner selection according to three dimensions: social origin, age, and place of birth. The authors use micro-level data from local population registers in five parishes in southern Sweden from 1815 to 1895. The results confirm that all three aspects were important but that socioeconomic status was the most important characteristic, structuring much of the selection process. The importance of social and age homogamy remained stable over the period, while geographic exogamy became more frequent, which could be interpreted in terms of an increasing openness of rural society. The authors also find some indications of exchange of characteristics in the partner selection process.

This article examines the nature of emotional exchange among the siblings who were the children of William the Silent, leader of the nascent Dutch Republic. Using evidence from extensive familial correspondence, it asks how the language of emotions could constitute forms of power within the family, by analyzing how actions and expressions of emotion were presented, discussed, and interpreted in epistolary form, to whom, and with what intention and impact. The article studies social, geographic, linguistic, and other distinctions between siblings in their use of affective discourses in correspondence and argues that attention to affective language can help to elucidate the agentive force of emotions in both reflecting and informing notions of power within the family.

This study explores the legal aspects of dowry provision in the Romanian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in the period 1750-1830. Drawing on the period's law codes, dowry papers, testaments, and court records, it highlights the legal and emotional difficulties created by the affective/patrimonial nexus within couples, families, and stepfamilies in a society where divorce and up to three remarriages were allowed by both church and state. A growing body of research into the history of the Romanian family suggesting that the prescriptions governing dowry provision in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the consequent exclusion of dowered girls from the family inheritance led to increased cohesion within the nuclear family and to the legal empowerment of women, while providing economic security to divorced women, widows, and children.