Collecting and analysing marriage and birth data: Women in pre-revolution Rheims, France

Abstract

Based on her earlier work on the city of Rheims in Champagne, France—a Family Reconstitution study covering all social scales—the article proposes a new comprehensive classification of reconstructed female life courses from the author’s existing and refreshed nominative database (1668–1802). This fresh scrutiny of digital files will allow series of qualitative and quantitative approaches, making hopefully preindustrial urban women at last visible along their individual life-trajectory. Thanks to rich archival sources, socio-demographic trends are better known, including a general early shift to contraceptive behaviour in pre-1789 Rheims. At the end of the Ancien Régime, there was growing individual female labour migration to this major town of Western Europe. It was attracted by domestic service and the textile sector. The sex ratio became so unbalanced that many women remained single, and only a few widows remarried. Numerous women managed their living without a husband, through the many economic and sanitary crises which characterised the period.