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Remarriage, gender and social class: a longitudinal study of remarriage in southern Sweden, 1766–1894

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2007

CHRISTER LUNDH
CHRISTER LUNDH
Affiliation:
Department of Economic History, Göteborg University.
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Abstract

Remarriage was common in Sweden in pre-industrial times, especially among men, although over the nineteenth century the number of remarriages declined. This article analyses remarriages in southern Sweden between 1766 and 1894. Data are derived from family reconstitutions in five rural parishes in southern Sweden, which makes it possible to follow individual widows and widowers from the year of the death of the spouse. The focus here is on the influence of individual characteristics, household composition, food prices and time period on an individual widow's or widower's probability of remarriage. For some variables the effect was quite general, for example the negative effect on remarriage of the individual's age and the decrease in the likelihood of remarriage in the nineteenth century. The influence of other variables was not this straightforward. Socioeconomic status interacted with all variables, especially gender, food prices and the presence of minor or adult children in the household.

Type
Research Article
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , December 2007 , pp. 373 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

ENDNOTES

1  There were alternative strategies, for example to remain the head of household, replacing the labour of the deceased partner with that of their own children or hired servants, to join the household of one of their children; to move in with somebody else; or to migrate. See Martin Dribe, Christer Lundh and Paul Nystedt, ‘Gender strategies of well-being in widowhood: the case of 19th century rural Sweden’, forthcoming in Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2007).

2  Lundh, Christer, ‘Remarriages in Sweden in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, The History of the Family 7 (2002), 423–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3  For an overview of the international research, see Grigg, Susan, ‘Towards a theory of remarriage: a case study of Newburyport at the beginning of the nineteenth century’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8:2 (1977), 183–220CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bideau, Alain, ‘A demographic and social analysis of widowhood and remarriage: the example of the Castallany of Thoissey-en-Dombes, 1670–1840’, Journal of Family History 5 (1980) 28–43CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Dupâquier, Jacques, Hélin, Etienne, Laslett, Peter, Livi-Bacci, Massimo and Sogner, Sølvi eds., Marriage and remarriage in populations of the past (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Knodel, John and Lynch, Katherine, ‘The decline of remarriage: evidence from German village populations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, Journal of Family History 10 (1985), 34–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blom, Ida, ‘The history of widowhood: A bibliographic overview’, Journal of Family History 16 (1991), 191–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Poppel, Frans van, ‘Widows, widowers, and remarriage in nineteenth-century Netherlands’, Population Studies: A Journal of Demography 49:3 (1995), 421–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4  Lundh, Christer, ‘Households and families in pre-industrial Sweden’, Continuity and Change 10 (1995), 33–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Mitterauer, Michael and Sieder, Reinhard, The European family (Oxford, 1982)Google ScholarPubMed.

5  Lundh, Christer, ‘Servant migration in the early nineteenth century’, Journal of Family History 24 (1999), 53–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lundh, Christer, ‘Life-cycle servants in nineteenth-century Sweden: norms and practice’, in Fauve-Chamoux, Antoinette ed., Domestic service and the Formation of European identity: understanding the globalization of domestic work, 16th–21st centuries (Bern, 2004), 71–85Google Scholar.

6  Lundh, ‘Households and families’.

7  Dribe, Martin and Lundh, Christer, ‘Gender aspects on inheritance strategies and land transmission in rural Scania, Sweden, in 1720–1840’, History of the Family 10 (2005), 293–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8  Lundh, ‘Households and families’; Lundh, Christer, ‘Husmän och torpare under Duveke gods 1766–1894’, in Lundh, Christer and Sundberg, Kerstin eds., Gatehus och gatehusfolk i skånska godsmiljöer (Lund, 2002)Google Scholar.

9  David Gaunt and Orvar Löfgren, ‘Remarriage in the Nordic countries: the cultural and socio-economic background’, in Dupâquier et al., Marriage and remarriage, 49–60; Mitterauer and Sieder, The European family.

10  For more detailed information on ownership and management of land, see below.

11  Dribe, Martin and Lundh, Christer, ‘Retirement as a strategy for land transmission: a micro-study of pre-Industrial rural Sweden’, Continuity and Change, 20:2 (2005), 165–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12  Lundh, Christer and Olsson, Mats, ‘The institution of retirement on Scanian estates in the nineteenth century’, Continuity and Change 17:3 (2002), 373–403CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

13  Grethe Banggaard, Fattigforsorgen på landet 1763–1894: fem sogne i Skåne, Lund Papers in Economic History, 75 (Lund, 2002).

14  Löfgren, Orvar, ‘Arbeitsteilung und Geschlechterrollen in Schweden’, Ethnologia Scandinavica 5 (1975), 49–72Google Scholar.

15  All of the surviving children inherited land from a deceased parent. Until 1845 sons inherited twice the amount of daughters, though after 1845 the inheritance was distributed equally among the siblings although the oldest son could buy out the siblings if he was able to. A woman owned the land that she inherited from her parents as private property, and if she was married one third of the matrimonial property (i.e. property that was acquired during the marriage). Since unmarried and married women were not legally competent, their property was at the disposal of a guardian, most often the father or husband. Only as a widow was a woman legally competent and allowed to manage her own property. See Winberg, Christer, ‘Familj och jord i tre västgötasocknar. Generationsskiften bland självägande bönder ca 1810–1870’, Historisk Tidskrift 101 (1981), 278–310Google Scholar; Ågren, Maria, ‘Fadern, systern och brodern. Makt- och rättsförskjutningar genom 1800-talets egendomsreformer’, Historisk Tidskrift 119 (1999), 683–708Google Scholar; and Dribe and Lundh, ‘Gender aspects’.

16  Christer Lundh, Swedish marriages: customs, legislation and demography in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Lund Papers in Economic History, 88 (Lund, 2003).

17  Dribe, Martin and Lundh, Christer, ‘Finding the right partner: rural homogamy in nineteenth-century Sweden’, International Review of Social History 50 (2005), Supplement, 149–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18  Lundh, ‘Remarriages in Sweden’.

19  In the area of investigation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, unmarried men who married a widow were generally 3–5 years older than those who married another single person. The corresponding age difference for women was 2–3 years. See Lundh, Christer, The world of Hajnal revisited: marriage patterns in Sweden 1650–1990 (Lund, 1999)Google Scholar, 13, and new calculations based on data from the Scania Demographic Database (see note 24, below).

20  Lundh, ‘Remarriages in Sweden’.

21  Dribe and Lundh, ‘Gender aspects’; Dribe and Lundh, ‘Retirement as a strategy’.

22  Lundh, ‘Remarriages in Sweden’. See also de Putte, Bart van, ‘Homogamy by geographical origin: segregation in nineteenth-century Flemish cities (Gent, Leuven, and Aalst)’, Journal of Family History, 28 (2003), 364–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23  Dribe and Lundh, ‘Finding the right partner’.

24  The Scanian Demographic Database is a collaborative project between the Regional Archives in Lund and the Research Group in Population Economics at the Department of Economic History, Lund University. The source material is described in Elisabeth Reuterswärd and Franceska Olsson, Skånes demografiska databas 1646–1894: en källbeskrivning, Lund Papers in Economic History, 33 (Lund, 1993), and the quality of the data is analysed in Tommy Bengtsson and Christer Lundh, Evaluation of a Swedish computer program for automatic family reconstitution, Lund Papers in Economic History, 8 (Lund, 1991).

25  Tommy Bengtsson and Christer Lundh, Life events in a peasant society in transition, Lund Papers in Economic History, 1 (Lund, 1990); Tommy Bengtsson and Martin Dribe, Economy and demography in Western Scania, Sweden, 1650–1900, EurAsian Project on Population and Family History, Working Paper Series, 10 (1997); Martin Dribe, Leaving home in a peasant society: economic fluctuations, household dynamics and youth migration in Southern Sweden, 1829–1866, Lund Studies in Economic History, 13 (Lund, 2000).

26  Dribe and Lundh, ‘Gender aspects’; Lundh and Olsson, ‘The institution of retirement’.

27  Tommy Bengtsson and Christer Lundh, Name-standardisation and automatic family reconstitution, Lund Papers in Economic History, 29 (Lund, 1993); Bengtsson and Lundh, Evaluation of a Swedish computer program.

28  For the combination of time series and event history analysis, see for example Bengtsson, Tommy, ‘Combined time-series and life-event analysis: the impact of economic fluctuations and air temperature on adult mortality by sex and occupation in a Swedish mining parish, 1757–1850’, in Reher, D. and Schofield, R. S. eds., Old and new methods in historical demography (Oxford, 1993), 239–56Google Scholar.

29  Cox, David R., ‘Regression models and life tables’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, B 74 (1972), 187–220Google Scholar. Model estimations were made using the library ‘eha’ of R, a software designed to integrate time series and event history analysis.

30  Lundh, ‘Remarriages in Sweden’, 426.

31  Bengtsson and Dribe, Economy and demography, 29.

32  The mantal was a fiscal measure of the farm's capacity to pay tax, not a square measure. Sommarin estimates, however, that one mantal in the area of investigation was about 226 acres in 1820. See Emil Sommarin, Det skånska jordbrukets ekonomiska utveckling 1801–1914, parts 2–3 (Lund, 1939), 25.

33  The price series was constructed by Bengtsson and Dribe and consists of three linked series at the most local level that was possible, depending on the available sources. The prices used came from 1766–1779: Landskrona, 1780–1802: Harjager härad (Malmöhus county was divided into 15 härader), 1803–1811 Malmöhus county; and 1812–1894: Harjager härad. See Bengtsson and Dribe, Economy and demography, 37. The Hodrick Prescott (HP) filter is used to obtain a smoothed non-linear representation of a time series that is more sensitive to long-term than to short-term fluctuations. The ‘deviation from the HP trend’ was chosen in preference to yearly changes in prices since it is hypothesized that it was not the increase or decrease in prices that influenced remarriage, but rather whether the price of foodstuffs was over or below the usual price level.

34  See Dribe, Leaving home.

35  This is due to the fact that the variables are overlapping to a large extent. Individuals who had minor children when their spouse died were generally younger than those whose children were already grown up. When controlling for age, the direction of the effect of minor and adult children is the same but the effect is not statistically significant, which is probably due to the fact that the population was quite small.

36  Probably these effects were more relevant for peasants than for non-peasants, since peasants more often had servants and retirement agreements. The presence of servants on a farm should probably be interpreted as an indication of the farm being large: the widow or widower was a good match in the marriage market and may have had their own benefits to gain from remarriage. It is also possible that a servant was recruited to be a prospective marriage partner for the widowed person or to replace the work unit of the deceased spouse. From the data it is not possible to distinguish these alternatives. Since the general effect of the presence of servants on the likelihood of remarriage of a widowed household head was positive, one could conclude that the replacement alternative was not the predominant one.

37  Lundh, ‘Remarriages in Sweden’.