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The article examines marriage behaviours, household patterns and household formation rules prevailing among the population of the Upper Silesian parish of Bujakow during the late 18th and the first part of the 19th century. Their character, it is argued, is crucial not only for the proper understanding of European family systems in the past, but also for accurate comparisons of family systems in Europe and Asia. The family pattern prevailing in this part of central Europe exhibited a 'hybrid' nature in many respects. The pattern's chief characteristics were a moderate age at marriage, the dominance of simple family households and the high incidence of lifecycle servants. Serial household lists revealed, however, the significant diversity in proportions of household types between censuses and between villages. Despite the strong indication of a stem family pattern in the parish, the analysis of headship transmission revealed the concurrent co-existence of various modes of household formation among families. Some of these formation processes did not vary much from neo-local principles or followed exactly this type of pattern. This study also made it possible to reconsider the supposed relationship between the seigneurial authority and family behaviours in the parish pointing out the considerable degree of autonomy of the peasant subjects.

In their modelling and classificatory ventures western scholars have usually mistakenly included family forms in historical Eastern Europe by induction in well-established generalizations about Russian or Balkan populations. At the same time, well into the late 1990s, most of Eastern European historians have shown no interest in studying domestic groups in socio-historical perspective. This article attempts to restate that picture through a thorough analysis of an unprecedented collection of historical household data for the late eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largests political entities in Europe of that time. Through an application of a variety of methodologies three regional family patterns have been distinguished on the historical Polish territories, their main characteristics described and then juxtaposed against the major features of paradigmatic examples of the 'Eastern European family type'. The results indicate that the existing models of household systems in preindustrial Europe are far too rigid to meet the diversity of residential patterns of the Eastern European serfs. Analysis of the data set on spatially, culturally and socioeconomically diverse regions has also facilitated a preliminary identification of the factors shaping these family systems. The data presented here suggests that the conventional wisdom regarding the institutional mechanisms of the Eastern European manorialism of the second serfdom as sufficient to create a homogenous pattern of family residence must be seriously questioned. In particular, what must be meticulously revised is a sweeping generalization still in practice that posits a functional link between coercive forms of labor control and complex household structures among peasant subjects.

Working papers of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research receive only limited review. Views or opinions expressed in working papers are attributable to the authors and do not necessarily refl ect those of the Institute.

In this article, we present a new measure for use in cross-cultural studies of family-driven age-and gender-related inequalities. This composite measure, which we call the Patriarchy Index, combines a range of variables related to familial behaviour that reflect varying degrees of sex-and age-related social inequality across different family settings. We demonstrate the comparative advantages of the index by showing how 266 historical populations living in regions stretching from the Atlantic coast of Europe to Moscow scored on the patriarchy scale. We then compare the index with contemporary measures of gender discrimination, and find a strong correlation between historical and current inequality patterns. Finally, we explore how variation in patriarchy levels across Europe is related to the socio-economic and institutional characteristics of the regional populations, and to variation across these regions in their degree of demographic centrality and in their environmental conditions. Overall, the results of our study confirm previous findings that family organisation is a crucial generator of social inequality, and point to the importance of considering the historical context when analysing the current global contours of inequality.

This essay represents an attempt at a re-examination of the Western scientific evidence for the existence of the divergent "Eastern European family pattern." This evidence is challenged by almost entirely unknown contributions of Eastern European scholars, revealing the stark incompatibility of the two discourses. This paper is informed to a large extent by R. Wall's voluminous research on European household and family systems. Wall's original observation of non-negligible spatial variation within the supposedly homogenous North-Western European marriage and family pattern is used here as a starting point to show the true diversity of familial organization in Eastern Europe, which had been placed at the other end of the spectrum of what was long believed to be a dichotomous division in European family systems. The diversity of family forms and the rhythms of their development in historical Eastern Europe presented in this literature should finally free us from a simplistic view of the continent's familial history, and especially from the perspective implied by the notion of a "dividing line."

Working papers of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research receive only limited review. Views or opinions expressed in working papers are attributable to the authors and do not necessarily refl ect those of the Institute.