The influence of popular beliefs about childbirth on fertility patterns in mid-twentieth-century Netherlands
Titelübersetzung:Der Volksglauben über Geburten als Einflussfaktor auf Fruchtbarkeitsmuster in den Niederlanden Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts
Autor/in:
Bras, Hilde
Quelle: Historical Social Research, 39 (2014) 1, S 76-103
Inhalt: "Ever since the Princeton European Fertility Project on the decline of fertility, the question of how (changes in) cultural beliefs have influenced the historical fertility transition has been in the forefront of historical demographic research. Previous research has however mostly assessed the influence of religious denomination and has not examined the impact of wider beliefs or 'cultural life scripts'. On the basis of a folklore questionnaire, this article examines the occurrence, content, and geographical patterning of popular beliefs about childbearing in relation to fertility patterns in 1.022 rural Dutch communities during the nineteen forties. Beliefs in isolation and churching of women existed in almost half of all communities, particularly among Catholic populations, while fear of enchantment of infants was still alive in about a fifth of all municipalities. To be sure, such popular beliefs were rapidly vanishing and remnants were still found in isolated and strongly religious areas. A multivariate analysis shows that in communities where beliefs in churching and witchcraft still existed, birth rates were significantly higher. The study shows the salience of including popular beliefs in studies of fertility behavior and fertility decline. Moreover, it extends the concept of cultural life scripts beyond that of age norms to include prescriptions on social contexts, conducts, and practices surrounding important life passages." (author's abstract)
Schlagwörter:20. Jahrhundert; Netherlands; Geburtenrückgang; fertility; Katholik; birth; reproductive behavior; determinants; kulturelle Faktoren; declining birth rate; faith; Fruchtbarkeit; Glaube; cultural factors; Roman Catholic; generatives Verhalten; Ritual; Aberglaube; ritual; woman; Geburt; superstition; Religion; religion; gender-specific factors; Determinanten; twentieth century; Niederlande; cultural life script; popular beliefs
SSOAR Kategorie:Religionssoziologie, Sozialgeschichte, historische Sozialforschung, Bevölkerung
Sportlife: medals, media and life courses of female Dutch Olympic champions, 1928-1940
Titelübersetzung:Ein Leben für den Sport: Medaillen, Medien und Lebensverläufe niederländischer Olympiasiegerinnern, 1928-1940
Autor/in:
Derks, Marjet
Quelle: Historical Social Research, 39 (2014) 1, S 144-162
Inhalt: "Starting from the assumption that cultural historical analyses can help our understanding of changes in life cycles and life courses, this article explores the way in which a specific socio-cultural phenomenon, sport, changed and defined the life courses of women in pre-war Netherlands. While similar questions are often being researched from a psychological or sociological and hence short-term perspective, here a long term and biographical analysis is being applied. Focusing on a group of medal winning participants in the Olympic Games, the leading question is whether their physical talent allowed these women to pursue a different life course. A second question is how their international careers matched with dominant cultural life scripts, which stated that young women should prepare to become wives, mothers and homemakers. It can be concluded that the presented biographies reveal an ambiguous reality. On the one hand, sporting successes opened up several possibilities for the women concerned, who became public figures and their country's first national female sport heroes. Thus, they embodied the beginning of a new cultural feminine ideal that opened up existing scripts. Their personal life course underwent profound changes as well, albeit of a confusing nature. All coming from lower class families, they saw their social careers set off because of their swimming, but also getting disrupted because of it. Sport-related disagreeing life scripts were tensional rather than advantageous. At least in hindsight, the women blamed their sporting career for the strenuous course their lives took." (author's abstract)
Schlagwörter:Netherlands; Olympische Spiele; cultural factors; sports; life career; Berichterstattung; image of women; Sport; Medien; Olympic Games; kulturelle Faktoren; Frauenbild; Karriere; woman; Lebenslauf; career; reporting; media; Niederlande; cultural life scripts, inter-war era, sporting careers, female sport heroes, biographical method
SSOAR Kategorie:Freizeitforschung, Freizeitsoziologie, Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Sozialgeschichte, historische Sozialforschung
"At age 27, she gets furious": scripts on marriage and life course variation in The Netherlands, 1850-1970
Titelübersetzung:"Mit 27 Jahren wird sie unruhig": Skripte über Ehe und Lebenslauf-Variation in den Niederlanden, 1850-1970
Autor/in:
Kok, Jan
Quelle: Historical Social Research, 39 (2014) 1, S 113-132
Inhalt: "Marrying too old, too young, or not at all could elicit scorn from all sides: family, friends and neighbours. The same could occur when a partner was much younger or older. During modernization new societal norms on marriage are supposed to have emerged and to have become more pervasive, as individual access to and timing of marriage became less dependent on family fortunes and family strategies. In this article, life courses of more than 15.000 Dutch individuals are studied in order to answer the question: was their timing of marriage and choice of partner related to (changing) life scripts - and what social or cultural groups were the carriers of these scripts - or still predominantly determined by family dynamics?" (author's abstract)
Schlagwörter:20. Jahrhundert; Netherlands; 19. Jahrhundert; soziale Norm; Ehe; cultural factors; marriage; wedding; Heirat; kulturelle Faktoren; socioeconomic factors; social norm; sozioökonomische Faktoren; woman; Partnerwahl; choice of partner; gender-specific factors; age; twentieth century; Lebensalter; nineteenth century; Niederlande; celibacy; late marriage; early marriage; age homogamy; life scripts
SSOAR Kategorie:Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Familiensoziologie, Sexualsoziologie, Sozialgeschichte, historische Sozialforschung
Life scripts and life realities: women in nineteenth-century Nijmegen
Titelübersetzung:Lebensskript und Lebenswirklichkeit: Frauen im Nimwegen des 19. Jahrhunderts
Autor/in:
Engelen, Theo
Quelle: Historical Social Research, 39 (2014) 1, S 104-112
Inhalt: "On average, more than one fifth of the 19th century Nijmegen brides were pregnant at the date of marriage. In a society where extramarital sexuality was explicitly forbidden, and where the success of marriage restriction depended on following that rule, this finding is remarkable. Obviously, the cultural life script that allowed sexuality only within marriage was not a script all inhabitants lived up to. A remarkable secondary finding is that the protestant population had a much higher proportion of bridal pregnancies than the Roman Catholic population, although both the Protestant and the Roman Catholic clergy strongly opposed sexual activities, unless within marriage. Therefore, when bridal pregnancy among Protestant couples was twice as high as among Catholics, this points either at a stricter control by the Catholic clergy, or at more deviance among Protestant youngsters. In any case, when studying cultural life scripts on sexuality, it is always important to note that it can be countered by human agency." (author's abstract)
Schlagwörter:Netherlands; 19. Jahrhundert; Protestant; Ehe; cultural factors; marriage; Roman Catholic; Katholik; Schwangerschaft; kulturelle Faktoren; sexuality; pregnancy; Protestant; Sexualität; woman; Lebensbedingungen; living conditions; nineteenth century; Niederlande; cultural life script; bridal pregnancy; extramarital sexuality
SSOAR Kategorie:Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Sozialgeschichte, historische Sozialforschung, Bevölkerung
Titelübersetzung:Geschichte des Wissens, Terrorismus und Gender
Autor/in:
Grisard, Dominique
Quelle: Historical Social Research, 39 (2014) 3, S 82-99
Inhalt: This article focuses on 20th-century terrorist phenomena as gendered objects of knowledge produced and disseminated through history books, mass media and state institutions. By taking 1970s West German terrorism as my field of inquiry, this article will critically discuss how a bourgeois understanding of violence as fundamentally masculine has shaped the way terrorism has been represented, conceptualized and historicized thus far. I will go on to problematize the mas-culine gaze of mass media and state institutions and their tendency to objectify the terrorist. Last but not least, I will delineate how mass media and historiog-raphy of terrorism have relied on a narrative structure that pits rebellious sons and masculine daughters against figural and literal fathers, a frame that is overtly masculine and familial. In so doing I will point to blind spots in the study of 1970s terrorism, namely masculinity and the gender of state institutions. My goal is thus to show how not just individual and symbolic, but also institutional facets of the bourgeois gender order influence the way terrorism has been conceptualized and historicized thus far.
Schlagwörter:Massenmedien; Diskurs; discourse; gender role; Federal Republic of Germany; Geschlechtsrolle; historiography; RAF; Geschichtsschreibung; feminism; masculinity; mass media; gender; Stereotyp; Gender; stereotype; woman; Feminismus; political violence; Männlichkeit; terrorism; politische Gewalt; Terrorismus; RAF; oedipal narrative
SSOAR Kategorie:Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Sozialgeschichte, historische Sozialforschung
Titelübersetzung:Politikwissenschaft, Terrorismus und Gender
Autor/in:
Herschinger, Eva
Quelle: Historical Social Research, 39 (2014) 3, S 46-66
Inhalt: This contribution aims to give an overview on the state of the art of research on terrorism and gender in the field of Political Science and International Relations (IR). Contemporary analyses of terrorism have begun integrating gender aspects into their frameworks. This article supports the call for a much more coherent use of gender as an analytical category as this is beneficial for the analysis of ter-rorism in a threefold manner. First, gender as an analytical category in the study of terrorism exposes the gender blindness of the term terrorism; second, gender challenges the political myth of protection central to international politics, i.e. that states can legitimately fight wars to protect the vulnerable – vulgo women and children. Third, gender also challenges the myth of an intrinsic peacefulness/vulnerability of women. The paper closes with the plea to integrate a coherent historical dimension into a gendered analysis of terrorism in order to potentially achieve a more empirically attuned theoretical understanding of terrorism and political violence in current times.
Schlagwörter:international relations; gender; Stereotyp; victim; Opfer; violence; stereotype; Gewalt; woman; political violence; Täter; internationale Beziehungen; gender-specific factors; terrorism; politische Gewalt; Terrorismus; political science; Politikwissenschaft; offender
SSOAR Kategorie:Friedens- und Konfliktforschung, Sicherheitspolitik, Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Sozialgeschichte, historische Sozialforschung
Escaping/transgressing the feminine: bodies, prisons and weapons of proximity
Titelübersetzung:Weiblichkeit überwinden/überschreiten: Körper, Gefängnisse und die Waffen der Nähe
Autor/in:
Agra Romeo, María Xosé
Quelle: Historical Social Research, 39 (2014) 3, S 115-134
Inhalt: Assuming that gender relationships are essential to any analysis of terrorism and political violence, I shall examine how the sex-gender stereotypes work, as well as their transgressions. The female military protagonists in the Abu Ghraib media scandal and the women prisoners of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the dirty protest in Armagh (1980) are used as a framework in which issues of visibility/invisibility, independence/ dependence, invulnerability/ vulnerability of women will be addressed. The paper pays particular attention to both the violence against the body and also to the use of the body as a political weapon. From this perspective I analyse both the differences and similarities of menstrual blood as a weapon of proximity in both contexts. The two cases have in common the fact that they occurred in prisons and that women embodied non-traditional roles: soldiers, women political prisoners, allowing for reflection from feminist perspectives on the female inclusion in the citizenship, on participation in political violence and terrorism and on agency and autonomy.
Titelübersetzung:Individualisierung und Fertilität
Autor/in:
Ehrhardt, Jens; Kohli, Martin
Quelle: Historical Social Research, 36 (2011) 2, S 35-64
Inhalt: "In this paper, the authors discuss individualization theory as a parsimonious framework concept to describe and explain core points of fertility change in Western societies since the end of the 19th century. They emphasize two dimensions of individualization: firstly, the increase in status of the individual in cultural, social, economic and legal respects (human dignity); secondly, the increase in autonomy and freedom of choice. In contrast to other approaches based on individualization theory, the authors do not use the concept of self-realization in the sense of an increased orientation towards purely individual interests, not least because this concept has failed before the renewed rise in fertility that has recently been observed in some advanced societies. They discuss the relevance of these two dimensions of individualization in the context of the first transition and the 1960s with its declining fertility rates. Whereas the first demographic transition can be mainly explained by the rising status of children, which increased the costs of parenting and thus changed the interests of (potential) parents to have children, the transition in the 1960s resulted mainly from the rising status of women in education and the labor market. An important but hitherto neglected change was the increasing divorce rates, as the possibility to dissolve a marriage devalued the traditional gender contract of the breadwinner/ housewife model and decreased the willingness of women and men to invest in marriage and children. The contrast between the recently growing fertility rates in Sweden, France and the US with the continuously low fertility in the German-speaking countries can partly be seen as a result of different divorce regimes. Whereas the first group of countries has limited the entitlement to spousal support through alimonies, the second group has institutionalized extensive entitlements for mothers." (author's abstract)
Schlagwörter:Fruchtbarkeit; fertility; demographischer Übergang; demographic transition; historische Entwicklung; historical development; Individualisierung; individualization; Federal Republic of Germany; internationaler Vergleich; international comparison; Ehescheidung; divorce; Theorie; theory; westliche Welt; Western world; 19. Jahrhundert; nineteenth century; 20. Jahrhundert; twentieth century; Geburtenrückgang; declining birth rate; Bevölkerungsentwicklung; population development; woman; Bildung; education; Arbeitsmarkt; labor market; Geschlechterverhältnis; gender relations; Schweden; Sweden; Frankreich; France; USA; United States of America; Nordamerika; North America
SSOAR Kategorie:Sozialgeschichte, historische Sozialforschung, Bevölkerung
The evolution of labor relations inside a Russian firm during late tansition: evidence from personnel data
Titelübersetzung:Die Entwicklung innerbetrieblicher Arbeitsverhältnisse einer russischen Firma in Zeiten der Transformation: Evidenz von Personaldaten
Autor/in:
Lehmann, Hartmut
Quelle: Historical Social Research, 35 (2010) 2, S 334-361
Inhalt: "Diese Studie bespricht drei Arbeiten, die sich mit dem internen Arbeitsmarkt einer russischen Firma in den Jahren 1997 bis 2002 befassen und sich dabei auf drei Themenbereiche konzentrieren. Die Arbeiten analysieren bisher nicht zugängliche Personaldaten, die die Arbeitsgeschichte jedes einzelnen Beschäftigten sowie monatliche Löhne und Gesamtvergütung im Jahresdurchschnitt beinhalten. Da diese Arbeiten Teil eines größeren Forschungsprojektes über interne Arbeitsmärkte in Russland und der Ukraine sind, beginnt unsere Studie mit einer generellen Einschätzung, wie die Analyse von Personaldaten aus Transformationsländern zur allgemeinen Literatur über interne Arbeitsmärkte beitragen kann. Kurzen Beschreibungen der analysierten Firma und der benutzten Personaldaten folgen die Motivierung und ausschlaggebenden Resultate der drei Arbeiten. Die erste Arbeit untersucht die Frage, wie die Kosten der russischen Finanzkrise des Jahres 1998 auf die Beschäftigten innerhalb der Firma verteilt werden und ob langjährig beschäftigte Arbeitnehmer von negativen Schocks abgeschirmt werden. Das zweite Papier betrachtet die Diskussion über die Lohnbestimmung in Russland und analysiert die engere Fragestellung, ob lokale Arbeitsmarktbedingungen einen wichtigen Faktor im Lohnbestimmungsprozess darstellen oder ob stabile interne Arbeitsmarktstrukturen von vorrangiger Bedeutung für das Personalmanagement der Firma sind. Die letzte besprochene Arbeit liefert einen Beitrag zu der Literatur über die Arbeitsmarkterfahrungen von Frauen während der Transformation, indem sie die Entwicklung und die Determinanten des geschlechtsspezifischen Lohndifferentials innerhalb der Firma aufzeigt." (Autorenreferat)
Inhalt: "This paper surveys three studies on the internal labor market of one Russian firm spanning the years 1997 to 2002 and focusing on three different issues. The studies use unique personnel data that were collected by us and that include the work history of each employee as well as annual averages of monthly wages and total compensation. Since the three studies are part of a larger project on internal labor markets in Russia and Ukraine during transition, the paper starts off with a general assessment of how the analysis of personnel data from transition countries can contribute to the general literature on internal labor markets. After short descriptions of the investigated firm and the personnel data at our disposal, the motivation and the pertinent results of the three studies are presented. While the first study looks at the question how the costs of a financial crisis are spread over the workforce and whether incumbent employees are sheltered from negative shocks in the economy, the second study is tied to the discussion of wage determination in Russia and analyzes the narrower question whether local labor market conditions are an important factor in the wage determination process of the firm at hand or whether stable internal labor market structures are of primary concern for its human resource managers. The third study contributes to the literature on the labor market experience of women in transition by analyzing the evolution and the determinants of the gender earnings gap in the firm." (author's abstract)
Die unsichtbare Generation: Kinder sowjetischer Besatzungssoldaten in Österreich und Deutschland
Titelübersetzung:The invisible generation: children of Soviet occupations soldiers in Austria and Germany
Autor/in:
Stelzl-Marx, Barbara
Quelle: Historical Social Research, 34 (2009) 3, S 352-372
Inhalt: 'Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg kamen in ganz Österreich und Deutschland sogenannte 'Besatzungskinder' auf die Welt: als Folge freiwilliger sexueller Beziehungen zwischen einheimischen Frauen und Besatzungsangehörigen, aber auch als Folge von Vergewaltigungen. Sie galten als 'Kinder des Feindes', obwohl die Väter de jure keine Feinde mehr waren, und waren - gemeinsam mit ihren Müttern - meist unterschiedlichen Formen von Diskriminierung ausgesetzt. Gerade Kinder sowjetischer Besatzungsangehöriger bildeten eine 'ideale' Angriffsfläche für rassische, ideologische und moralische Vorurteile, was zum Teil auch eine Folge der NS-Propaganda darstellte. 'Russenkind' oder auch 'Russenbalg' war noch in den 1960er Jahren ein gebräuchliches Schimpfwort. Gemäß Stalins Politik waren Eheschließungen zwischen sowjetischen Soldaten und österreichischen bzw. deutschen Frauen so gut wie ausgeschlossen. Die meisten Armeeangehörigen wurden sogar zurück in die UdSSR versetzt, sobald eine derartige Liaison publik wurde. Jahrzehntelang war ein Kontakt beinahe unmöglich. Somit wuchs die Mehrheit der 'Besatzungskinder' als eine vaterlose Generation auf. Die Suche nach dem Vater ist für viele der Betroffenen Zeit ihres Lebens ein Thema. Im Vordergrund steht die Ergründung der eigenen Identität, die Frage nach den persönlichen Wurzeln.' (Autorenreferat)
Inhalt: 'After the Second World War, so-called 'children of occupation' were born all over Austria and Germany: as a result of voluntary sexual encounters between local women and foreign occupation troops, but also as a consequence of rape. They were often regarded as 'children of the enemy' and - together with their mothers - were frequently discriminated against. Especially the children of Soviet occupation troops were confronted with racial, ideological and moral prejudice that can be traced back to the Nazi era. 'Russenkind' ('Russian child') or 'Russenbalg' ('Russian brat') were common abusive words up to the 1960s. In accordance with Stalin's policy, weddings between Soviet soldiers and Austrian or German women were practically impossible. Most soldiers or officers were even sent back to the USSR when their liaisons with local women became known. For several decades hardly any contact was feasible. Thus the majority of 'children of occupation' grew up as a fatherless generation. Many of them have been in search of their biological fathers, regardless of the difficulty of obtaining any reliable information. This is linked with the desire to explore one's own identity and look for one's personal roots.' (author's abstract)