This article examines the impact of landholding and differences in local economies on age at marriage, on frequency of service and on household size and structure in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Particular stress is placed on the role of economic rather than cultural factors as determinants of regional variations in marriage age and household structures. Households were more complex whenever land, the accumulation of capital and multiple occupations were required for economic activity. Conversely, wage work – whether in fishing or agriculture and regardless of geographical location (for example in eastern as well as western Finland) – favoured the formation of small nuclear households. Some aspects of the family system (servanthood and a late age at marriage) fit the characteristics of the north-west European household system as delineated by John Hajnal and Peter Laslett better than others (frequency of complex households). It is concluded that there is no inevitable correlation between geographic location and the characteristics of a society's family system and that the model of the north-west European household system does not accommodate those societies where people were in a position to build strategies based on the continuous possession of land.
This article presents an analysis of the levels, trends and determinants of infant mortality in various regions of Finland between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. Nursing habits were of critical importance as were diet and hygiene. It is suggested that there were differences in the frequency of breastfeeding with the landless being more and the farmers being less likely to breastfeed their children. In areas where cows milk was readily available as a substitute for breast milk other influences on infant mortality were the contamination of drinking water and the water in which feeding utensils were washed. At the end of the eighteenth century, in the south-west of Finland, the introduction of the potato created a suitable food for women and children and lowered the mortality rate of infants aged 3-6 months. By contrast, in the regions where the first solid food given to infants was chewed by the mothers, infant mortality remained high. In the part of Finland adjacent to St Petersburg infant mortality actually increased as local mothers were engaged as wet-nurses by the city's foundling hospital.
Cet article traite du mariage, du ménage, de la mobilité sociale et des modèles migratoires sur la côte et dans les îles du sud-ouest de la Finlande. Au XVIIe siècle, la famille souche était prédominante dans la population rurale: c'était la conséquence du système d'héritage et des nécessités de l'economie paysanne. Mais, avec le XVIIIe siècle, les unions neo-locales (autrement dit la résidence indépendante du jeune couple) se multiplièrent, l'âge moyen au mariage des cultivateurs augmenta alors que celui des non-cultivateurs diminuait. Ces changements résultent à la fois de l'affaiblissement du système de transmission intégrale des exploitations, de l'introduction de la pomme de terre et de nouvelles techniques de pèche. A la fin du XVIIIe siècle, pour cette région, le modèle de nuptialité se rapproche de celui qu'Hajnal a défini pour l'Europe du Nord-Ouest.La génération née au milieu du XVIIIe siècle descendait pour moitié de paysans et appartenait encore à ce groupe au moment de la mort. La génération suivante n'en était issue que pour un peu plus du tiers, par suite de l'augmentation du nombre des paysans sans terre. Cependant la proportion de la population paysanne touchée par une descente sociale ne changea pas substantiellement avant 1820, alors que 80% des descendants de non-paysans ne connurent aucune mobilité sociale. On remarque en outre, trait important du modèle de mobilité en cause, que les femmes furent socialement plus mobiles que les hommes. On suggère que c'est la crainte d'une mobilité sociale descendante qui doit avoir encouragé les enfants de paysans à émigrer.
The aim of this study is to analyze in a long-term perspective the transition from a basically patrilocal and extended household system to a neolocal and nuclear system in a number of coastal communities subjected to legal and economic constraints. Several parishes located in the archipelago of southwestern Finland have been studied for the period 1635-1895 to determine the impact of the abolition of various restrictions on family and household formation and composition, population development, and demographic change.
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