Mikołaj Szołtysek, Siegfried Gruber

Living Arrangements of the Elderly in Two Eastern European Joint-Family Societies: Poland–Lithuania around 1800 and Albania in 1918

This paper re-addresses the nature of joint-family systems in historic Eastern Europe. It identifies two “hotspot” areas of family complexity and uses census microdata to shed light on attributes of household organization and living arrangements of the elderly in a comparative perspective. A detailed examination of various demographic components of the joint-family systems under discussion reveals important inter-societal differences and suggests that “de-essentialization” of the notion of the “joint-family system” might be necessary when discussing the geography of family patterns in this part of the continent.

Keywords: historical demography, household structure, living arrangements, co-residence, joint-family, Eastern Europe

Clarifying the Question

The joint family has long been seen as one of the most peculiar living arrangements in historic Europe. While a preference for residential independence in adulthood (i.e. for residing in small, conjugal groups),1 has long been viewed as the norm in Europe, the underlying principles of joint-family coresidence centered on extensive family solidarity, a high degree of parental control over adolescent children, and the subordination of some groups of individuals to others within the domestic space. It therefore comes as no surprise that historians have commonly assumed that the appearance of joint families in a given area, society, or culture must have resulted from economic, demographic, and cultural constraints which prevented people from indulging in the (allegedly) universal preference for small and simple households. In their explanations of the economics of joint-family arrangements, historians assert that the landholding patterns typical of sharecroppers and some serfs and the demands of the pastoral economy in mountainous settings fostered the formation of big, laterally extended multiple-family residence groups.2 When seeking to explain the cultural factors underlying these family arrangements, scholars argue that patrilinealism, closely linked with corporate (joint) ownership structures that negate individual property rights, probably created mental structures that favored family solidarity, cohabitation, and obedience.3 It was generally assumed that in the absence of these two constraining forces, the “aversion” to joint-family living arrangements4 would find expression and the “instinctive wishes” of the population could be realized.

Despite a lack of clarity about the exact meaning of the term,5 “joint family” (or extended family) has often been used to describe laterally extended multiple-family domestic groups in societies widely dispersed across historic Eurasia.6 Early scholars of historical family patterns argued that joint families could be found in many different societies of Eurasia, from the nomadic tribes of the Middle East to the Slavic serf agriculturalists and the ancient civilizations of the Far East.7 Indeed, more recent research has revealed that legal and residential arrangements that followed joint-family rules existed in many parts of historic Europe, including in early medieval Germanic societies,8 fifteenth-century Tuscany, early modern France,9 nineteenth-century northern Italy,10 Finland,11 Russia,12 and parts of the Balkans.13 Until quite recently, the joint-household system was the most prevalent family arrangement in the world’s most populous agricultural societies, China and India. Referring to such diverse cultural areas, Berkner and Shaffer14 argue that anyone reading ethnographic descriptions of joint-family living “cannot help but be struck by the broad similarities.” These common features include the following: the coresidence of two or more nuclear families; the patrilineal succession of family titles and property; a tendency to keep the sons on the patrimony and virilocal household formation; a tendency to unify the joint domestic group around some common economic project; a tendency toward fission at some point in the developmental cycle; a marginal position of female siblings; and a tendency to recruit workers from among kin rather than from among wage laborers.15

Demographers have been fond of making such essentialist claims and have often used the concept of the extended family to explain worldwide demographic differentials. Accordingly, demographers have contrasted stylized versions of the joint-family system with nuclear or stem-family systems in order to establish a theoretical foundation on the basis of which to link different family types to various demographic outcomes. Since the work of Lorimer,16 Davis,17 and Davis and Blake18 there has been broad acceptance among scholars of the assumption that extended or joint families encourage high fertility.19 Hajnal pushed the analysis toward a specification of the rules of household formation and distinguished two main family forms. He also emphasized an East–West divide, contrasting the “joint-household (formation) system” of the major Eurasian societies with the Northwestern European system.20 To exemplify the characteristics of the joint-family pattern, Hajnal cited data from various historical periods from a wide range of countries with very different conditions, including India, Nepal, China, Italy, Croatia, Russia, and Hungary.21 More recently, Das Gupta drew “a stylized contrast between the stem-family systems of Northern Europe and the joint family of North India” in order to highlight their essential features as determinants of divergent health behaviors and health outcomes.22

While the stereotypical belief that in past centuries the elderly lived out their twilight years nestled in the bosom of their families has generally been refuted over the course of the last two decades,23 the perception that complex family societies performed welfare functions better than Western nuclear family based societies has been particularly resistant to change. Reflecting views that have been prevalent since the nineteenth-century writings of Le Play,24 family historians and demographers have continued to assert that nuclear-, stem-, and joint-family societies performed certain welfare functions for their members and coped with economic hardships in particular ways.25 The residential patterns of the elderly in joint-family societies were seen as representing a combined effect of the authority structure (with elderly males at the apex) and the associated family and kin-based approach to welfare provision.26 Regardless of when and where they lived, most joint families were portrayed as private institutions that encouraged solidarity and support for the elderly and other vulnerable individuals.27 Culture-specific values supported that system, especially those stressing family solidarity and a greater sense of obligation towards members of the kinship group.28

It is in this context that the concept of patriarchy has often been evoked, becoming a convenient shorthand for the presumed distinguishing trait of joint-family relations. The term has often included many different elements, such as the dominance of patrilineal descent, patrilocal or patrivirilocal residence after marriage, power relations that favour the dominance of men over women and the older generation over the younger generation, customary laws that sanctioned these patterns, the absence of an interfering state that could mitigate their influence, and an inert traditional society that emanated from these conditions.29 Combinations of these elements have been used to explain the peculiarity of the joint-family residence patterns in the East and Southeast of Europe relative to the West.30

Although many of these claims are no doubt accurate, the assumption that all joint-family societies are basically the same is, in our view, a gross oversimplification. Why would we think that societies that differ in terms of their cultural metrics, environmental characteristics, and place-specific historical trajectories adhere to the same rules of joint-family living, or that these rules would apply to the same extent in the everyday lives of their members? Without denying that it is possible to identify some essential and generally accepted features of extended families, this paper re-addresses the nature of joint-family systems in Europe by looking at the differences between two exemplary joint-family societies. Instead of treating them as inherently similar, we argue that a detailed examination of various demographic components of the joint-family systems under discussion may uncover important differences and hence suggest the extent to which a “de-essentialization” of the notion of the joint family might be necessary.31

Methodological Issues

This paper identifies two “hot spot” areas of family complexity in historical Eastern Europe and uses census and census-like microdata to describe the residential situations of the elderly in two populations governed by a joint-household formation regime. To compare the living arrangements of the elderly, we used measures commonly applied in demographic and family history studies of aging populations.32 However, we also proposed several indicators which have, to our knowledge, never or only rarely been used in the literature. As our focus is on the comparative morphology of residence patterns in joint-family systems, issues related to the origins of the joint family in the regions under examination or to the factors that contributed to the system’s persistence are not discussed.33

However, because our investigation of the situation of the elderly was based solely on the observation of their residential units registered in the listings, our analysis has certain limitations. The coresident family members may have represented only a small fraction of the kin to whom an elderly individual could turn for economic, physical, or emotional support, and coresidence as such may have been an imperfect proxy for the actual sharing of resources within domestic groups.34 In most developed countries, as well as in some historical societies, the coresidence of the elderly with their kin is just one of many transfer flows involving the aged. The other sources of support are generally in the form of social transfers (pensions, health payments, home care, etc.).35 While we do not wish to ignore these problems, some reservations regarding their implications for our study should be stated. In joint-family societies, household membership strategies were conventionally oriented toward an extensive recruitment of kin, which meant that many (if not most) domestic groups retained their complex structure through a continuous sequence of generations.36 Although it is unlikely that even highly complex domestic groups would encompass all of the kin available to an average “ego,” the accretion of relatives was normally substantial enough in such an environment that we can be certain that, in most cases, coresident kin would have been the most significant “others” from the perspective of an individual. Moreover, in joint-family societies in which domestic units act as property and labor cooperatives, the sharing of physical space was highly related to having the right to the use and ownership of a concrete part of the communal property. Although coresidence may not have always indicated the flow of support from the younger to the older generations, the economic and physical assistance derived from relatives who coresided was likely to have been more beneficial to the aged than the assistance provided by kin who lived close by.37 The coresidence of the elderly with kin had an even greater social and economic significance for pre-industrial rural populations, among which institutionalized social transfers were precarious and investments in human capital were low.

Our analysis relies on two additional operational assumptions. First, we assume there was a hierarchy of caring contexts within domestic groups, with different categories of relatives providing different types of support.38 Second, we assume that the more dense the environment of coresident kin surrounding the elderly—i.e. the larger the group of coresident immediate kin—the greater the potential benefits that could flow to the aged.

In this paper, we only deal with the population living in family (“private”) households. Unlike in historic western Poland, institutional households (often misleadingly called “hospitals”) were largely nonexistent in the eastern part of the country in the eighteenth century. Institutional households were equally scarce in Albania, and the few that existed were omitted from the analysis that follows.

Societies and Data39

To investigate the residential situations of the aged in the two exemplary joint-family societies, we used historical census microdata from two different regions of Eastern Europe: the eastern borderlands of the Polish–-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century and Albania in 1918. The Albanian population census of 1918 and the Polish–Lithuanian database are currently the only existing databases that are large enough to allow us to investigate the demographic conditions and household composition in historical Eastern and Southeastern Europe.

Table 1. Basic data distribution. Source: Karl Kaser, Siegfried Gruber, Gentiana Kera, Enriketa Pandelejmoni (2011) 1918 census of Albania, Version 0.1 [SPSS file]. Graz.; Mikołaj Szołtysek, CEURFAMFORM database, Version 0.1 [SPSS file]. Rostock, 2011.

On the Polish side, the present study makes use of data for 13,885 peasant households from the eastern territories of historical Poland–Lithuania (Table 1).40 These data were derived from two types of population listings enumerating individuals by residential units.41 The first group of listings (37 percent) comes from the surviving remnants of the censuses carried out by the Polish Diet (Sejm) between 1790 and 1791. The second group of census microdata for the Commonwealth came from the so-called 5th Russian “soul revision.” Designed as periodic tax censuses to be used by the central government to assess the poll tax (which all male peasants in Russia were liable to pay), the “revision” was taken in the Belarusian heartland of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania after the third partition of Poland in 1795. Despite being ordered by an alien administration for the Polish territories, the 1795 revision in Poland–Lithuania followed the traditional Polish concepts of census-taking, rather than the official Russian principles of taxation.

From January 1916 onward, northern and central Albania was occupied by the Austro–Hungarian army, and a population census was taken on March 1, 1918. The checking and the processing of the data had to be stopped due to the planned withdrawal of the army in October. The order to destroy all of the census material was ignored except in some areas in the south of the occupied territory. The surviving material, which covers the major part of the country, therefore includes people who lived in roughly 1,800 villages, towns, and cities in the territory administered by Austria–Hungary during World War I (see Table 1 and Map 2). The census director published basic tables in 1922 with funds provided by the Albanian government.

Map 2. Territory of Albania covered by the 1918 census.

The population in the Albanian census was predominantly Muslim (78.2 percent), with a Catholic minority in the north (18.6 percent) and an Orthodox minority in the south (3.1 percent). The ethnicity of the population was almost exclusively Albanian. The economy was dominated by agriculture and the urban population made up only 13.2 percent of the total. Very few Albanian adults who lived outside of the cities were literate.

The majority of individuals in our collection were listed by domestic groups comprising all of the people occupying separate residential units, consisting not only of the core family of the head of the household, but also his immediate and more distant relatives, as well as coresident servants and inmates or lodgers.

We recognize, of course, that a comparison of a phenomenon in Albania in 1918 with phenomena in Poland–Lithuania in the course of the eighteenth century may raise some questions. Sklar has noted that marriage behaviors among the populations of the Czech, Baltic, and Polish regions differed markedly from those of people in the Balkans during the demographic transition.43 However, while our country-specific data span long periods of time, from a demographic perspective both of these populations are pre-transitional. While the Belarusian population exhibited the highest fertility levels in Eastern Europe well into the 1920s, Albania was the last country in Europe to enter the demographic transition (i.e. after the World War II).44 The age-standardized marital fertility ratios of both the Polish eastern borderlands at the end of eighteenth century and early twentieth-century Albania were very similar (60–61).45 Female nuptiality patterns were also very similar (female SMAM of 18.4–18.6), although there were significant differences between the male nuptiality patterns in the two locations (the male SMAM was 27.2 in Albania and 22 in eastern Poland). Apart from the age gaps between spouses, the major difference between the two populations appears to have been the share of elderly people aged 60 and older, which was higher in Albania than in Poland (nine percent in comparison with six percent).46

The populations covered by our listings were joint-family societies per se, with a large share of individuals living in joint-family constellations at some point in their lives. Data from the Polish borderlands and Albania displayed some of the highest indicators of joint-family coresidence out of more than one-hundred census populations from around the globe.47 Further proof of the prevalence of joint-family coresidence in the areas under examination is found in ethnographic accounts and historic-anthropological research. According to Kaser, Albania historically belonged to the area of the Balkans where patrilocal household cycle complexity was prevalent.48 The area covered by Albania was characterized by a distinctive patriarchal cultural background that has been called the Balkan patriarchy.49 The basic elements of this cultural pattern were strong blood ties, ancestor worship, patrilocality, patrilineal kinship structures, the levying of a bride price, and the waging of blood feuds.50

The eastern lands of historical Poland were also characterized by the longevity of archaic forms of communal social organization based on male ancestral kinship. These familial-ancestral communes were believed to resemble closely the well-known South Slavic institution of zadruga.51 The patriarchal model of intra-familial relations prevailed, with full economic power being held by the commune’s head, usually the oldest male. When a head died, the position was passed on to the next-oldest male in the group.52 In the period under investigation, large agnatic descent groups were already at different stages of disintegration, mainly due to frequent efforts by landlords to split up large groups and create individual families.53 Nevertheless, archaic extended family patterns were still going strong in the Polish eastern borderlands, although the patriarchal family group at the time was confined primarily to individuals who jointly inhabited one domestic group (“dym”). Despite increasing tendencies toward household division, even in the second half of the nineteenth century large, multigenerational families had not yet disappeared from the Polish eastern territories.54

Table 2. Household structure in Albania and Poland–Lithuania. Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”; Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”. Hammel–Laslett scheme slightly modified. All lineally extended multiple-family households with more than two conjugal family units are treated as “joint families’.”

To further illustrate the widespread character of joint-family coresidence in the societies under examination, three measures of joint-family coresidence were applied to our data and presented in tabulated or graphical form.55 The first measure applies a slightly modified Hammel–Laslett scheme to the populations under investigation, while the other two move away from a sole concentration on the household and focus instead on the distribution of individuals and CFUs among different types of domestic groups.56

In Table 2 a canonical Hammel–Laslett scheme was used to present a distribution of households by type in Albania and Poland–Lithuania. The scheme was modified in order to give a better representation of the domestic group structures that fall into the category of joint families. All of the households that belong to Laslett category 5 were divided into two groups (stem versus joint).57 Both datasets show a high prevalence of non-nuclear residence groups. Extended, stem, and joint domestic groups account for more than half of all of the units in both Albania and Poland–Lithuania. While the overall share of multiple-family units was larger in the Polish borderlands than in Albania (38 percent and 35 percent, respectively), the number of domestic groups displaying joint structure according to our definition was slightly higher in the Balkans. The proportions of joint-family households in both datasets were very high compared to other sites in historic Europe, although they are smaller than in the Russian paradigmatic case of the joint family studied by Czap.58 Among Tuscan households in 1427—which have long been regarded as exemplifying joint-family structures in late medieval Europe—only 15 percent were multiple-family households, and only eight percent of those were composed either of two married brothers or three or more couples. Among the Indian rural households in the mid-twentieth century, no more than 12 to 13 percent would have been classified as joint families according to our definition.59 Before Mishino’s data were published in the early 1980s, the highest overall incidence of joint families in historic Europe was found for an estate in eighteenth-century Kurland, where the incidence was about 17 percent.60

Figure 1a. Household structure by age of household head (male heads only) Poland–Lithuania 1791–1795. Source: Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”.

Figure 1b. Household structure by age of household head (male heads only) Albania 1918. Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”.

It is generally understood that the distribution of households by structure can obscure the actual fluctuation over the developmental cycles of domestic groups.61 A number of scholars have asserted that these Eastern European domestic groups underwent no cyclical changes from one household form to another, but rather maintained the multiple-family form over the entire life-cycle of the group.62 However, neither the Albanian nor the Polish–Lithuanian data confirm this assumption. When all of the households are ordered by the age of the male household head (Figures 1a and 1b), then a clear upward-trend in the propensity to form joint domestic groups over the family lifecycle becomes visible, with much higher proportions of joint families found among older heads. Some differences between Albania and Poland–Lithuania are also discernable. The accretion of additional family units in Albania occurred earlier in the lifecycle of domestic groups than in the Polish borderlands. Among Polish–Lithuanians, a factor that also contributed to a sharp decline in the share of simple families among middle-aged heads was the increasing tendency to form households composed of only two conjugal-family units, some of which then obviously turned into joint-family households. It appears, however, that the number of joint families in both societies was significant enough that we can conclude that joint-household formation rules were well-integrated into the social norms regarding domestic group recruitment and membership.

Figure 2b. Population by household type membership (sexes combined), Albania 1918. Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”.

Figure 2a. Population by household type membership (sexes combined), Poland–Lithuania 1791–95. Source: Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”. Notes: Categories ‘No family’ and ‘Solitaries’ omitted (below 0.5 percent across all age groups).

While a substantial fraction of the population spent most of their lives in joint-family environments in both societies (Figures 2a–2b and 3a–3b), the percentage of people in this category was consistently higher in Albania than in eighteenth-century Eastern Poland, where the share tended to fluctuate. But in order to understand better the differences between these two joint-family societies, we need to look at the distribution of conjugal-family units (CFUs) among the different types of domestic group structures based on the age of the family unit head.63 The proportion of CFUs living in joint-family households in Albania generally held steady at around 40 to 50 percent, with only very negligible changes occurring as the CFU head grew older (Figure 3b). Household divisions were obviously occurring less frequently in this society. By contrast, a clear lifecycle pattern of joint-family coresidence can be seen in Poland–Lithuania (Figure 3a). There, the proportion of CFUs residing in joint groups decreased substantially as the head progressed from early adulthood to his mid-fifties.64 While a reverse pattern could be observed after that age, joint coresidence was never as common among units with older heads as it was among family groups with younger heads. Household divisions must have occurred at a very rapid pace among adult Polish–Lithuanians, with a large number of conjugal units gaining residential independence before their heads had reached their late forties. Then, after the head reached the age of 55, the living arrangements of a CFU often shifted again, with many of these groups moving from residing in simple units to living in stem or joint families. These differences in lifecycle developments in Albania and historic Poland may have had important implications for the living arrangements of the elderly in these two societies. It is likely that the delayed division of households in Albania resulted in a considerably higher number and wider range of relatives living in domestic groups that included older people than in Poland.

Figure 3a. Conjugal family units (CFUs) by household type membership, Poland–Lithuania 1791–95. Source: Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”. Notes: Categories ‘No family’ and ‘Solitaries’ omitted (below 0.3 percent across all age groups).

Figure 3b. Conjugal family units (CFUs) by household type membership, Albania 1918. Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania.”

Living Arrangements of the Aged

Demographers and family historians have devoted considerable attention to measures of living arrangements among the elderly.65 The most common approaches take into account household headship rates among the elderly, the relationship of the older person to the household head, the older person’s coresidence with married or unmarried children, and/or whether the household in which the elderly person lives has a simple or an extended structure.66 In the analysis that follows, we merge these approaches67 and propose a wider palette of quantified indicators for investigating the position of the elderly. After discussing the results we obtained using these standard measures, we consider some additional tools that may provide us with more insights into the morphology of the residence patterns of the elderly in truly complex family systems like the ones we are dealing with here.

When we look at the living arrangements of the elderly, kin availability plays an important role. The patterns of kin availability are determined by age- and sex-specific mortality, fertility, marriage and remarriage rates, and the age differences between spouses.68 To capture the demographic effects of the availability of kin on the residence patterns of the aged in the populations under examination we use a very simple measure that can be calculated on the basis of the age structures of our populations. The so-called “availability ratio” (AR)69 is the ratio of members of the population aged 15–59 to members of the population aged 60 and over. The former population represents the pool of available individuals with whom the elderly could co-reside. The AR was 10.1 for Poland–Lithuania, but it was only 5.8 for Albania. Assuming this finding is not entirely an artifact caused by the under-registration of certain groups of individuals or a consequence of the age heaping and age exaggeration in the Albanian population, it appears that in Albania there were fewer younger people available for potential coresidence with the elderly.

We begin our analysis by classifying elderly individuals by their relationship to the household head (Table 3). The advantage of this approach is that it allows us to look at the percentage of older people who head a household in conjunction with other features of the living arrangements of the elderly.

The headship rates were uniformly high for men in both locations, but they were much lower for women. In addition, in both datasets far more women lived as parents (or as parents-in-law) in the households of children or children-in-law than men. At this point, however, the similarities between the patterns in historic Poland and in Albania come to an end. While one-sixth of the older women in Poland–Lithuania still held a headship, the corresponding share was drastically smaller in Albania. This seems to indicate that due to a “patriarchal bias,” women in Albania had fewer chances of heading a household as widows. The fewer household divisions also explain why elderly Albanian men were found more frequently in the other household membership categories—particularly those of other relatives and siblings of the head or the head’s spouse—than elderly eighteenth-century Ruthenian men. Moreover, relative to their counterparts in Albania, both elderly men and women in Poland–Lithuania were more likely to reside in a household headed by a non-relative, even though this arrangement was still rare.

Table 3. Elderly (60+) relationship to head of household by sex. Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”; Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”. Note: Albania: weighted population.

The major patterns shown in Table 3 allow an initial, tentative hypothesis regarding gender-based differences in the well-being of the elderly in the populations under examination. Assuming the domestic groups in the societies in question were structured hierarchically—and that the household head was the key decision-maker regarding access to resources and used his or her power to ensure that other household members acted in accordance with his or her wishes—it appears that old age was much more advantageous for men than for women in both societies. As only a minority of women were entitled to head households at older ages, relatively few of them were able to exert direct control over decision-making in their domestic group, and this happened much more often in Poland–Lithuania than in Albania. Thus, the well-being of women was dependent on the nature of their membership in a household; i.e., on their placement in the overall web of intra-household relationships.

Before we attempt to deepen our understanding of this issue, we should categorize the elderly householders by sex and the structure of their domestic group (Table 4). Our goal is to determine whether female-headed households were structurally different from male-headed households and whether these structural differences translated into potential vulnerability for older women.

Table 4. Household structure of elderly heads (60+) by sex of householder. Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”; Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”.

The figures in Table 4 show significant differences between male- and female-headed households in both datasets; however, these differences are manifested in a very specific way. In Poland–Lithuania, female householders were much more likely than male ones to head extended domestic groups and were less likely to head stem families. The first gap is largely attributable to the combined effects of higher rates of remarriage among men and the excess male mortality at older ages, but it points to the relatively strong position of widowed women in the joint-family societies of historic Poland–Lithuania. It is particularly striking that, in Poland, the relative shares of heads living in solitary and joint-family households were similar among men and women. Again, the rather high number of female heads of extended and joint-family units in eastern Poland–Lithuania suggests that the widowed “matriarch” occupied a relatively strong position in the joint-family societies of historic Poland.

The Albanian patterns were quite different. Male-headed households in Albania were far more likely than female-headed households to have been extended and multiple-family arrangements. However, the most striking gender difference in terms of household structure is that women headed almost all of the solitary and “no-family” domestic groups (which represented three-quarters of all of the units headed by women). Thus, unlike in Poland–Lithuania, most of the elderly female heads in Albania were not co-residing with relatives, and they might have been detached from wider kin groups in several important respects.70 However, before we attempt to explain this phenomenon, we should point out an interesting interplay between the figures presented in Tables 3 and 4. Whereas women in Poland–Lithuania were much more prone to head independent households than women in the Balkans, women in Albania—a strictly patriarchal society at the time—were much more likely to have lived alone than their Polish counterparts.71 This issue definitely requires further investigation, but the most obvious explanation is that women were only able to act as household head in Albania in cases in which no male person was available in the household, and such households were rather negligible in number.

While they are easy to calculate and are potentially informative, the research approaches that focus on the household position of the elderly (based on the relationship to the head) and on the composition of older people’s households are obviously insufficient for a description of the entire spectrum of intra-household relationships among elderly people. Although the connection to the household head is definitely the most important principle structuring relationships within domestic groups, it is not the only one in which the coresidents were involved. To explore these issues more fully, we need a classification scheme that takes into account relationships that were not tied to the head and allows us to consider the relationships between older individuals and other members of the domestic group in which they live,72 at least in a dyadic form. For this purpose, we have used a classification scheme that allocates individuals according to whether they were members of a core-family group, which may include unmarried children living with at least one parent, married couples, and lone parents. People who were not members of families are classified in three ways, according to whether they lived with relatives, with non-relatives only, or alone. It should be emphasized that, in this classification, the category of relative is not defined by a specific relationship to the household head, but by the existence of a relationship between the elderly person and members of the household other than his or her children or spouse. The focus is therefore on the individual and not on the household, and relatives are identified not by their relationship to the head of the household, but by their relationship to any household member in the absence of closer family ties.73 The comparison of Polish–Lithuanian and Albanian populations is presented in Table 5.

Table 5. Dyadic relationships in the households by sex and region. Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”; Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”.

The allocation patterns of older persons to different categories represented in Table 5 are generally very similar in both societies, with more elderly men living with spouses and more women being classified as “lone parents.” However, the differences in the numeric intensity of these patterns are probably more important. First, it should be noted that in Albania, over 80 percent of older women were living without a spouse (potentially the most important source of support, at least in old age), compared with 63 percent in Poland–Lithuania; which again represents a clear effect of the age gap between spouses in Albania. Both men and women in Albania were more likely to live without coresident children than their counterparts in Poland–Lithuania, although the trend was stronger among women than men (14.4 percent of women versus 6.9 percent of men).

Table 6. Selected dyadic relationships by category of coresident offspring (female population only). Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”; Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”.

To better assess the potential vulnerability of older Albanian and Polish–Lithuanian women, it is useful to distinguish between the different types of children coresiding with elderly females in the two settings. For the calculations presented in Table 6, two categories of women who could have lived with children in the same premises (“spouses” and “lone parents” in Table 5) were further subdivided into those who lived with adult children, at least one married child, and unmarried and widowed children (as these categories partly overlap, the given percentages do not sum up to 100). It thus appears that, relative to their counterparts in Albania, women in Poland–Lithuania were more likely to have been living with a husband and were more likely to have been coresiding with adult and married children. The difference between these two sites is equally revealing when coresidence with adult and married children is examined for women classified as lone parents. In Poland–Lithuania, women in this category co-resided with adult and married offspring 10 to 15 percent more often than in Albania.

Table 7. Dyadic relationships of elderly women by individual household position. Source: Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”; Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”.

We can perform an even more detailed accounting of the living arrangements of the elderly if we combine the information provided above in Table 5 with the pattern of relationships to the head of household. This approach is based on the assumption that dyadic relationships between individuals within domestic groups can also be structured hierarchically. In other words, it might be assumed that lone parenting, for example, may be framed differently in terms of the flow of resources and support depending on whether a lone parent is a household head, a head’s relative, or a stranger.

Again, the cross-classifications of the various relationships of older people in the two societies are generally similar, particularly among men. However, among women, some interesting differences can be observed (Table 7). The share of women who were lone parents in Poland–Lithuania was highly concentrated among two household statuses: the head and the parental generation (including the parents-in-law). At the same time, the share of female lone parents who headed a household was almost six times lower in the Balkans, and lone mothers in Albania were predominantly clustered around the head’s parents. One possible interpretation of these findings is that Polish lone mothers were receiving more resources from the younger generation; i.e., they were receiving intra-household support. It is important to note, however, that in the Balkans, the authority of the female spouse of the head normally increased only with the age of the woman, and often culminated in the woman achieving the position of the respected mother of the new “patriarch.” This does not fit in with the image of the subordinated, vulnerable, and fully dependent elderly woman.74 Nevertheless, even if we accept that the underrepresentation of Albanian widowed mothers among household heads was counterbalanced by their equally strong position after stepping down from co-headship, we still have to explain the finding that some 10 to 15 percent of lone parents among Albanian women were not mothers or even siblings of the heads, but were more distant relatives of the head couple. It is not entirely unrealistic to argue that a widow’s relationship with her children and the flow of resources between her and her children would have been framed by the status of their respective family units with respect to the core family of the head and his close relatives. Inequality and mistreatment may have arisen in such contexts, especially given that Albanian women often were not surrounded by their adult offspring.

We have already noted that divergences in the life-cycle patterns of domestic groups in Albania and Poland–Lithuania probably had an effect on the number of coresident kin to the elderly. Unless excess mortality took a toll, older Albanians should have had a considerably higher number and a wider range of relatives present in their households. Is it possible to find hard evidence that confirms this assumption?

For the purpose of exploring this issue, the unweighted average of the distribution of households by size commonly labeled “mean household size” needs to be distinguished from another related measure, the “size of household of the average member of the population” (“mean experienced household size”) (Table 8).75

Table 8. Elderly population by sex, mean experienced household size, and mean number of adult coresident relatives (16+). Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”; Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”.

The figures in Table 8 show that the experienced household size was higher in Albania for both males and females, although for older men the difference was substantially larger. Interestingly, unlike in Albania, the size of the household of the average elderly woman in Poland–Lithuania was very close to that of the average man. Once again, this provides some additional evidence that elderly women in historic Poland had a better standing than women in Albania. In both societies, most adults who co-resided with an elderly person were the person’s relatives by blood or marriage. Far more elderly men than elderly women were living with a spouse. However, whereas men in Poland were less likely to have been living with a spouse than men in Albania, the pattern for women was reversed. These results are attributable to the higher remarriage rates of men relative to women in both societies, and to the large age gap at marriage in Albania.76 Older people in Poland–Lithuania generally had more adult children in their household, though we do not yet have enough information to determine whether this was simply an outcome of less favorable demographic conditions in Albania.77 Overall, however, we can see that in Albania, the proportion of elderly people who lived with relatives other than spouses and children was higher than in Poland–Lithuania (figures for men only). In both datasets, the mean number of adult, coresiding grandchildren was negligible.

Conclusions

Although it is still not fully acknowledged in the historical and sociological literature, a significant degree of variation has been shown to have existed within Northwestern Europe with regards to household organization. Richard Wall was among the first to tackle the problem of inter-regional differences in familial organization within areas traditionally subsumed under the label of simple (and neolocal) household systems.78 Referring to the substantial range of variation between individual settlements in England, he warned that it would be incorrect “to see English households as variations on one basic type.”79 Meanwhile, the considerable degree of variation in household structures Wall found within the confines of Northern and Central Europe led him to point out rather boldly that “so great is the degree of variation that it must be doubtful whether Hajnal’s generalization captures much of the reality of family and household patterns of Northwest European societies in the past.”80

Following this thread, in this paper, we have attempted to demonstrate that, even though eastern Poland–Lithuania and Albania both followed joint-household formation rules (i.e., the pattern antithetical to the neolocal one according to Hajnal) and can both be seen as examples of societies with long traditions of the ownership of joint property rights, the family systems in the two settings were not entirely the same. Throughout this exercise, Wall’s argument that family and household systems should not be defined solely on the basis of variations in the proportions of extended and multiple-family households81 has proven particularly valuable, and we have taken a large number of factors into consideration to demonstrate the validity of our approach.

The paper demonstrates several differences between the two Eastern European regions, however, the most convincing findings are related to the distinctly different role of females in households of Poland–Lithuania and Albania. It is in this regard that the patterns detected in the regions of eastern Poland–Lithuania deviate most significantly from many of the tendencies found in Albania. The distinctiveness of female position in the two societies, in turn, suggests that their patriarchal underpinnings may not have been the same. This disparity stemmed from the interplay of various socioeconomic, institutional, and ecological factors that are too complex to be fully discussed here.82 Here, it must suffice to say that manorialism, demesne lordship83 and the associated interventions by landlords in the lives of peasants created a political-economic framework within which historical tendencies to form corporate family groups in eastern Poland–Lithuania were to some extent constrained and the power of lineage groups was partly mitigated.84 In Albania, on the other hand, rather extreme environmental conditions in alpine or highland areas far from communication and trade routes appear to have facilitated the continuity of patriarchal cultures barely subject to state surveillance or socio-cultural currents of the Early Modern and Modern Eras.85

The different interactions among the microprocesses of elderly household membership recruitment discussed in this paper—all within a broad geographical area traditionally associated with family complexity—not only raise the question of how, ultimately, the area as a whole should be characterized, i.e. as pertaining to the operation of different household systems, or, alternatively, variations of one basic system. They also point to the more substantial question of the extent to which the term “joint family” should be used to describe a distinct family system. Further research along the lines proposed here, but extended over other areas of traditional Europe, could help us resolve this problem.86 In fact, the most recent studies suggest that the residential patterns of the elderly are but one element of a much wider “package” of dissimilarities between Polish–Lithuanian joint families and their counterparts in the Black Earth region in nineteenth-century Russia and Albania.87 One solution to the problem could be to abandon the idea that one country or region belongs to one rigid “pattern” and another country to another “pattern,” and instead to use a set of different variables to compare countries, regions, or subpopulations within them. Such a set of variables can be used to analyse similarities and differences between two or more populations and see which ones are closer to or more distant from each other; thus, to approach the Eastern European joint families as various “scalar types.”

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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Levente Pakot

Family Composition, Birth Order and Timing of First Marriages in Rural Transylvania. A Case Study of Szentegyházasfalu (Vlăhiţa) and Kápolnásfalu (Căpâlniţa), 1838–1940

In this article I explore the roles of family composition in the timing of first marriages in two mountain villages in the eastern part of Transylvania (in present-day Romania) between 1838 and 1940. Using micro-level data based on family reconstitutions, I found evidence suggesting the dominant role of family composition in the decision to marry in the case of both males and females. Although strong age norms existed with regards to marriage in the settlements in question, the results of multivariate analysis show that ordinal position of birth, number of siblings, parental presence, and the historical period during which a marriage was concluded, all played decisive roles in determining the age at the time of marriage of males and females. The effect of ordinal position of birth differed by gender: first-born males tended to marry at an older age than their brothers, as opposed to first-born females, who normally married at a younger age than their younger sisters. The death of one or both parents was an inducement among males and females to marry. This response to a family crisis reflects the acceleration of the inheritance process and an effort to maintain the viability of a rural household.

Keywords: marriage timing, sibling configuration, birth rank, Transylvania

In most cases, marriage is not considered an isolated event. Rather it is a complex family event that is related to the needs of parents and siblings.1 If marriage is analyzed within the context of family dynamics, one of the questions that may arise is how the presence of parents and siblings affects the marriage prospects of unmarried sons and daughters. Little research has been done on this question in the case of Transylvania in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this article I explore the roles of family composition and birth order on the timing of first marriages in two mountain villages in the eastern part of Transylvania (present-day Romania) in the period between 1838 and 1940.

Background

Historical research on marriage patterns has long been dominated by John Hajnal’s hypothesis.2 It is important to emphasize that, according to Hajnal, the Western European historical model, which is characterized by late ages at the time of marriage, is unique since marriage was accompanied by the establishment of independent households. This is the underlying cause of the dominance of simple family households. The material goods required in order to set up a new household were acquired partly by inheritance and partly by savings gathered during the period prior to marriage. Therefore, the average age at the time of marriage was often rather high and a small portion of the young never married at all. According to Hajnal’s model, in other parts of the world where complex family households dominate, the marriage of children requires fewer resources from the parents, as the children normally stay in the parental household. Thus the average age at the time of marriage is lower than the average age in Western Europe, and the proportion of individuals who married is higher.

The Western European marriage model inspired a series of studies on inheritance systems and family reproduction.3 The studies focused on two closely interrelated questions: on the one hand, the differential reproduction of families living in the settlement and, on the other, differences among siblings within the family regarding access to local marriage and migration. Recent studies based on individual level and longitudinal data are part of this inquiry. The underlying question is to what extent do the individual characteristics and the composition of the family, the household and the community in historical-social context affect the possibility of marriage or migration.

In the nineteenth century, the demand for a female workforce in the booming textile industry in small towns in Eastern Belgium led to the migration of young women from nearby villages, thereby creating a very unbalanced marriage market.4 Under these circumstances, the children of farmers had much better marriage prospects than the other groups and were less likely to emigrate. Paternal presence decreased the risk of marriage and migration. The death of a father and/or mother was an inducement for their children to marry and to proceed with the process of inheritance. The risk of marriage and migration was lower among members of groups with many siblings with one exception: older girls living in the same household with their younger sisters, who were prone to emigrate. Based on the results, differential access to marriage and migration were of importance among families and not within the family, and birth order meant neither an advantage nor a disadvantage.5 A comparative analysis of Pays de Herve in Belgium and Zélande in the Netherlands suggests the adverse marriage perspectives of groups with a high number of siblings.6 In these regions, the presence of older sisters reduced the likelihood of younger sisters to marry. However, the marriage of older sisters facilitated the marriage of their younger siblings.7 Inheritance and marriage were tightly correlated in the villages of Alsace in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where sons without siblings were more likely to marry and on average at a younger age than those who had siblings.8 In parallel to an increase in the number of siblings of the same gender, marriage prospects worsened and the possibility of migration came up, mainly for children in higher ordinal position of birth.

Systematic gender differences in accordance with birth order were observed among Norwegian–Americans living in Wisconsin where the marriage prospects of children of higher ordinal position of birth with limited access to household resources were worse than the marriage prospects of the elder siblings.9 Members of groups with a low number of siblings had better chances of marrying. There was a positive correlation between the death of the father and the marriage of daughters, whereas the marriage prospects of sons were lessened by migration at a younger age.10 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, first-born children married at a younger age than their younger siblings in Québec.11 Due to the abundance of land and the possibility of establishing one’s own farm, they did not have to wait until they came into their share of an inheritance, and the high fertility of parents ensured the utilization of the younger siblings as a contribution to the workforce on the family farm.

In 1973, when Daniel Scott Smith analyzed the marriages in Hingham, Massachusetts, he drew attention to the fact that the marriage of daughters in accordance with their birth order reflected the influence of parents on their children.12 In pre-industrial patriarchal society, parents were responsible for their daughters’ virginity, as the reputation of the young woman was closely intertwined or even identical with the reputation of her family.13 Therefore, a divergence between birth order and the order in which siblings were married could imply greater freedom in decision-making. Smith’s paper reflected on the fact that, regarding females, the custom of concluding a marriage in accordance with the birth order began to vanish at the turn of the nineteenth century. In the same work, Smith also indicated that in the American colonies fathers sought to delay the marriages of their sons because they needed their sons’ help for a longer period of time and the portion of the inheritance required for the establishment of a new household was issued later.

Most recent studies on Western European and Asian historical populations emphasize the oversimplification and untenable nature of Hajnal’s hypothesis.14 In Asian societies, which were dominated by complex households, providing a dowry for a child who was going to leave the household placed a great burden on parents. Moreover, a child’s savings from the pre-marital period played a less significant role than was supposed by the model. The characteristics of the family, namely, its socioeconomic position and the presence of parents and siblings, also play an important role in marriage in both Europe and Asia.15

Similar efforts can be observed in the Hungarian scholarship on the social history of towns. Differences in age at the time of marriage were detected for the first time by Vera Bácskai.16 She examined the average age at the time of marriage of males and females by applying groups of place-of-origin and occupation data gathered from marriage certificates in Pest from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, organized according to five different periods of time. Results suggest that men and women from Pest had more marriage options and different marriage customs according to occupational group. The impact of occupation, social status and religion on individual life cycle and age at the time of marriage has also been emphasized by Tamás Faragó.17 Among the Hungarian studies, Gyula Benda’s work on marriages in the town of Keszthely is of high significance. It examines marriage at the levels of population, family and the individual.18 By processing individual data of parochial registries in Keszthely and comparing this data with data from other sources, he made it possible to articulate further hypotheses regarding the impact of demographical events (e.g, the death of parents) and family context (the presence of siblings).

Ethnographic and historical studies on marriages in Transylvania, more precisely in the Székely Land, emphasize the influence of parents on the marriages of their children.19 In general, the youngest boy could stay in the parental home, and he had to look after the aging parents in exchange for their property.20 Earlier, parents provided older sons with the chance to establish a separate household.21 According to the study on inheritance customs,22 at the end of the nineteenth century sons inherited a significant share of real estate, whereas daughters were given movable belongings and assets and some real estate. Parents aimed to provide the youngest son with the biggest portion of the wealth, and they paid the other children two-thirds or three-quarters of the market value.23

Hypotheses

In the subsequent sections, I examine the impact of the presence of parents and the sibling configuration on the timing of the first marriages for young females and males. Since the sources are chiefly limited to members of the younger generation who did not migrate, the question here differs slightly from the question posed in mainstream studies. Instead of access to marriage, I focus on the timing of the first marriage. More precisely, I examine how the composition of the family of a young person who was concluding marriage, by which I mean parental presence and sibship configuration, affect such timing.24 I offer hypotheses regarding this subject in the following section.

The first factor I consider is parental presence. The death of either or both parents could accelerate the inheritance process and break up financial resources, thereby indirectly facilitating the marriage of children. The death of a father, for instance, could increase the speed of the distribution of family assets among children and smoothen the progress of their conclusion of a marriage. It is supposed that such a change (the death of a father) is accompanied by the disappearance of tight control, so the child may enjoy a greater degree of liberty in the choice of a partner. Based on the fact that a significant share of the real property was inherited by sons, it is reasonable to assume that the death of either or both parents facilitated the marriage of sons. In order to maintain the economic viability of a household, one alternative was for the surviving parent to marry again or for one of the children to marry, or for the family to dissolve and establish new households. It was in the interests of parents to find a spouse for their children, as the families of children normally supported the parents when they grew old. Moreover, whereas the older generation was able to exploit its status and social network to seek spouses for their adult children, the young who had lost their parents may face disadvantages. Based on the data gathered in Keszthely, Gyula Benda articulated a similar opinion. He argued that children orphaned at a young age had worse marriage prospects, whereas coming close to the acquisition of an inheritance significantly improved marriage prospects.25 At the same time, however, living parents were interested in postponing the marriage of adult sons in order to profit from their labor on the family farm as long as possible. All in all, I assume that the loss of one or both parents at an early age resulted in a higher than average age at the time of marriage. However, in the case of people who were adults when one or both of their parents died, the death of a parent (or the parents) accelerated the conclusion of a marriage. Moreover, as the sons inherited the real property, it is reasonable to suppose that the impact of the death of a parent on marriage is more noticeable among sons.

Sibling configuration may radically influence age at the time of marriage. The size of the group of siblings, the order in which they were born and the composition of the group according to gender played a decisive role. Due to the limited resources of the family and parallel to the increasing number of children, one observes resource dilution. Resources of the family of origin could be modified by the life cycle of the family, and this could affect the children who were born at different times in dissimilar ways.26 Limited resources could greatly impact first-born children, as upon reaching marriage age they had to compete with younger siblings. The position of later-born children who were reaching the normative age of marriage could be better if their older sibling(s) had already married. One of the resources that affected the timing of marriage was the space available for the young adult.27 In households with big families, children often shared a room. The desire to establish their own household may have been a strong incentive to marry for children who had reached marriageable age. According to this reasoning, the establishment of a new family was appealing for first-born children, so they tended to conclude marriages at younger ages than later-born children. The impact of the number of siblings and birth order within the framework of parental resources could be perceived in various ways. In the case of first-born young males, marriage was normally accompanied by the establishment of an independent farm that was indisputably headed by males. In less ideal cases, marriage led to a shared household and shared farming with the possibility of establishing a separate farm later. The majority of females, however, moved to a different household upon marriage. The establishment of an independent household by a first-born son often depleted resources that had to be replaced, and the process of replacing these resources took time. Parents aimed to utilize the labor of the first-born son on the family farm. Based on the reasoning outlined above, it is reasonable to hypothesize that older sons married later than their younger brothers, who had to vie with fewer competitors for the available resources. One could expect quite the opposite in the case of daughters. Since the marriage of a daughter required less financial contribution from their parents, and since resources were limited to space, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the scarcity of resources was a source of pressure for the oldest girl in the sibling group to marry as soon as possible. Put simply, they married at a younger age than their later-born sisters.

The impact of sibling characteristics on the timing of a first marriage can also be approached from the field of social relations. According to this, the presence of siblings of opposite gender in childhood facilitates the establishment of relationships with the other gender. I therefore assume that the presence of siblings of the opposite gender smoothens the progress of transition to the first marriage at a younger age.

Figure 1. The Area Under Study

The Communities Under Study

Szentegyházasfalva (Vlăhiţa) and Kápolnásfalva (Căpâlniţa) are neighboring settlements. They are located along the southern skirts of the Harghita Mountains, in the eastern part of Inner Transylvania, a region in present-day Romania, at about 860 meters above sea level (see Figure 2). The villages lie on the frontier, far from the economic centers of Transylvania. Their total population reached 4,000 in the 1900s. The majority of their inhabitants belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. Due to their geographical proximity (2 kilometers) and the joint privileges received from the Princes of Transylvania, the history of the two villages was closely interlinked: they formed one parish until 1838 and one administrative unit until 1876.28

The discovery of iron ore sites close to the villages and the opening of mines were important events in the nineteenth century in each of the two settlements. An industrial plant, Szentkeresztbánya, was founded a few kilometers away from the villages in the 1850s. It provided an opportunity for the locals to secure some extra income. Due to contemporary financial and infrastructural conditions, mining remained a small-scale enterprise.

The majority of villagers were smallholders, and they earned their livelihoods through lumbering and woodwork in the communally owned woods, as well as through extensive animal husbandry. Timbering and woodwork were carried out within a cottage-industrial framework that required the close cooperation of related families. The number of water-driven sawmills operated by siblings or close relatives reached 100 according to the cadaster of 1909.29 The economic development of Inner Transylvania raised the demand for woodenware. Timber used in construction and agriculture was transported in carriages by male family members in the direction of the agriculturally more developed and more urbanized Southern Transylvanian regions.

The population of the settlements was characterized not only by geographic and economic conditions, but also by particular patterns of demographic behavior. In addition to the dynamic increase of the population and its relative youth (as an average), the common demographic characteristics of the two villages included relatively high fertility, low emigration and relatively high infant and child mortality. Between 1786 and 1869, the population doubled. After 1869, epidemics (cholera in 1873) and increased infant and child mortality in the 1870s and 1880s slowed down this increase, but this was followed by a significant increase around the turn of the century. An important characteristic of demographic behavior was universal and early marriage. Average age at first marriage was 20–21 years for females and 25–27 years for males. The proportion of unmarried people among the old was very low. Strict religious and community regulations forbade divorce.

Data and Methods

We reconstructed the demographic behavior of the settlements under examination on the basis of parish registry data. An electronic database was compiled from parish registries from the period between 1776 and 1941. Based on the principles of the family reconstitution method established by Louis Henry and Michel Fleury30 and making use of available computerized database management facilities, we were able to reconstitute the most important demographic events of families and individuals by applying time-consuming record linking.

The sample population was comprised of people who concluded their first marriages locally in the period between 1838 and 1940 (N=4,116). To define the sibling characteristics, we applied only the data on siblings who concluded marriages locally, that is to say, we disregarded the deceased and migrated members of a sibling group. The exclusion of the first group is explained by the fact that death could be a competing risk with marriage. Regarding the second group, the exact date of migration remained unknown. Consequently, the time at risk of first marriage cannot be detected. In order to arrive at the most accurate identification of surviving parents, the sample was reduced to young individuals whose parents’ date of death is known. The sample, elaborated in this way, was narrowed down by excluding the group of single children (N=346). All in all, the sample used for this study contains first marriages concluded between 1838 and 1940 of 1,580 unmarried females and 1,424 unmarried males.

For the analysis of the timing of first marriages, the beginning of marriage risk was defined at age 15. Individuals in the sample were followed from age 15 until the date of their first marriage. Sibling characteristics were explained by time-constant covariates. Married siblings who shared the same father and mother were grouped and are described according to the following variables: number of siblings of the individual in question, place in the birth order and number of brothers and sisters. A dummy variable was applied to indicate that the individual is the only son or daughter in the sibling group.

In order to test the hypotheses regarding the presence of parents, a series of time varying covariates were introduced that represent the paternal presence from age 15 until the transition to the first marriage. For the hypothesis on the death of a father and/or mother (a factor that, it was conjectured, would be an indirect inducement to marry and to accelerate the inheritance process), the not too remote period of losing parents is also emphasized. I divide the sample into nine categories on the basis of the parent or parents with whom they lived and also on the basis of whether or not either their mother or father had died in the preceding three years. First we identify persons living with both parents. Next we identify persons who had lost a parent more than three years earlier, and lastly we consider those who had lost a parent in the previous three years according to whether this was the first or second parental death.31 Inheriting and marriage subsequent to the decease of one of the parents could be accelerated by the remarriage of the surviving parent. Dummy and time-constant covariates are applied if the surviving parent remarried. To evaluate the impact of the historical period, marriages were analyzed in five separate sections, as follows: 1838–1869; 1870–1889; 1890–1913; 1914–1918 and 1919–1940. To reveal differences by location, data were grouped by parish of residence.

Table 1 gives an overview of the characteristics of the sample.

Table 1. Characteristics of the analytical sample

I examine the timing of first marriages in two separate parts. In the first one, I use descriptive statistics in order to present average age at the time of marriage of males and females, the differences by birth order, and the number of brothers and sisters. In the second part of the analysis, by applying event history analysis, I examine the impact of parental presence, sibling configuration, historical period and the parish of residence on the timing of the first marriages for males and females.32 Since I am interested in the effects of family composition and sibling configuration on the timing of marriages, I utilize a series of Cox proportional hazard models.33 By applying Cox models, my aim is to reveal the extent to which the covariates under discussion facilitated or impeded the transition to first marriage.

Results
Descriptive results

Average age at the time of marriage for women in the sample is 21.9 years. In the case of men it is 26.1 years. Figure 2 shows the percent of unmarried males and females between 15 and 39, more precisely, it shows how this ratio decreases with age. Since these are cumulative values, the curve is monotonically decreasing. These curves provide information about the change of risk of concluding marriage and the percent of individuals at risk. Curves steeply decrease in periods when the risk of concluding marriage is high. The curve slowly decreases or is horizontal in phases when the risk is low. Significant differences are observed in the timing of first marriages by gender. Women tended to marry at an earlier age than men. Median age at the time of marriage is 21.5 years for females and 25.6 years for males. According to survival curves, the impact of the normative age of marriage is noteworthy for both sexes. However, the curve is more long-drawn in the case of women. Based on this, particular differentiating factors may have played a more significant role among females.

Figure 3. Average age at first marriage for males and females in the two parishes, 1838–1940.

Source: Family reconstitutions based on the data of parish registries from the period 1776–1941.

Figure 3 shows the mean age at the time of marriage for males and females. The extent of fluctuation of age at marriage is different by sex. In the case of men, average age at the time of marriage is between 25 and 26.5, except for two periods: the second half of the 1850s and World War I. In the case of women, age at the time of marriage varies more significantly, but the postponing of marriage during the wars is also observed. After the war, the age at marriage remains higher for a while and then gradually starts to decrease. The reason for the higher age at the time of marriage during the late 1920s and early 1930s, which can be a sign of the introduction of a new pattern, remains unknown. Around the middle of this period, the age difference between males and females increased, whereas around the end of the period it started to diminish.

Males	Females

Figure 4. Average age at first marriage for men and women by birth rank

Source: Family reconstitutions based on the data of parish registries from the period 1776–1941.

Regarding the investigation of the effects of sibling characteristics, age differences by sex still played an important role in determining the average age at the time of marriage. Figure 4 and 5 shows the average age at the time of marriage for males and females by birth order and the presence of siblings of the same sex. One observes contrasting impacts concerning males and females. The average age at transition into the first marriage of men decreases by birth order. The highest age at the time of first marriage is found among the older sons (26.6 years), whereas this value is one year less (25.7 years) among the younger siblings.

It is likely that parents aimed to delay the marriage of oldest sons and take advantage of their contributions as part of the labor force on the family farm as long as possible, at least until their siblings reached working age. In the case of females one observes a tendency in the opposite direction: ordinal position in birth increases the age at the time of marriage. While the average age at the time of the conclusion of the marriage of first-born daughters was 21.9 years, it was 22.5 years in the case of the children who were born later. Parents probably pressured oldest daughters to marry, and limited parental resources also were an inducement for them to marry as soon as possible.

Males	Females

Figure 5. Average age at first marriage for men and women by number of brothers and sisters

Source: Family reconstitutions based on the data of parish registries from the period 1776–1941.

Multivariate analysis

In the next section, by applying multivariable event history models elaborated for each sex, I examine the impact of parental presence and sibling configuration on the age at the time of first marriages for males and females. Table 2 presents results from Cox event history models for men’s entry into a first marriage. Five different models were applied to examine the effects of sibling configuration. The entries in Table 2 are estimates of the relative risk of marriage associated with one unit change in an explanatory variable. A relative risk of 2.0 implies that a one unit increase in that variable doubled the likelihood of marriage. A relative risk of 0.5 implies that the risk of marriage decreased by 50 percent compared to the reference category. In this case, where all the individuals in the sample experienced the transition to marriage, the increase of the risk means a lower age at the time of marriage, while a decrease of risk means a higher age at the time of marriage compared to the reference category. For example, the estimate of 1.14 in the model for male marriage during the period 1870–1889 means that men were 14 percent more likely to marry. In other words, they married at a lower age during that period than in the reference period, 1838–1869. Sibling characteristics. According to the results of models 1 and 2, the marriage risk of males increases parallel to birth order. In other words, the youngest males of sibling groups tended to marry at a younger age. The number of siblings, however, did not significantly affect age at marriage. This corroborates the hypothesis according to which the difficulties of finding the material goods required for marriage delayed the act. Based on the outcomes of model 3, men with a larger proportion of female siblings had a greater risk of entering first marriages at any given pace. That is to say, such men transitioned to first marriage at a faster pace. This result seems to support the hypothesis according to which sisters had positive effects on the marriage timing of their brothers and may have played an intermediary role in the first marriage of a brother. The presence and growing number of brothers had no significant impact on the average age at the time of marriage among males. In model 4, the introduction of an “only son” variable makes no major changes. Age at marriage of only sons did not significantly differ from age at marriage of men who had at least one brother. However, the number of sisters remains an accelerating factor of transition to marriage.

Table 2. Estimated relative risks of first marriage, males, ages 15–39, Szentegyházasfalu and Kápolnásfalu, 1838–1940. Source: Family reconstitutions based on the data of parish registries from the period 1776–1941.

Note: gray background if p<0,1.

Parental presence and mortality. Parental presence was of key importance regarding the first marriage of males. The death of a father and/or mother in the preceding three years accelerated the process of inheriting and, possibly as a consequence of this, the conclusion of the first marriage. The recent death of both parents almost doubled the risk of first marriage (p<0,00) compared to people both of whose parents were still alive. The lack of the presence of both parents for a longer period, three years after the last death, was also an inducement to marry. The death of only one parent in the preceding three years could also have been an accelerating factor for marriage. The death of a father who was survived by the mother increased the risk of marriage of sons by 30 percent, while the death of a mother who was survived by a father increased the risk of marriage of sons by 80 percent compared to the reference category of young males where both parents were still alive. This difference can be explained by the fact that the economic survival of the household relied on the complementarity of traditional gender roles. The death of a mother created a need for the labor of an adult female, whereas no such need arose when a father died, particularly if an unmarried adult son lived with the family. The remarriage of the surviving parent was also an inducement for a son to marry. Sons of remarried mothers and fathers transitioned into their first marriages at a younger age than those whose parents married only once in their life. The impact of remarried mothers on the transition into first marriage is greater and statistically significant. It is important to note that these are time-constant variables. They therefore do not reveal the presence of a stepfather or stepmother, but rather only show whether the surviving parent remarried or not. On the basis of this, we may conclude that the potential or actual presence of a stepfather, probably in connection with inheritance, also prompted sons to marry.

Historical period. Between 1870 and 1889, the age at the time of marriage slightly decreased compared to the period between 1838 and 1869, and it remained the same until World War I. Average age at marriage rose between the two World Wars, as is well represented by the lower risk of first marriage of this period (p<0,02).

Parish of residence. After the consideration of family and community factors, there was no significant difference in the timing of transition into first marriages for males living in the two parishes.

Table 3. Estimated relative risks of first marriage, females ages 15 to 39, Szentegyházasfalu and Kápolnásfalu, 1838–1940. Source: Family reconstitutions based on the data of parish registries from the period 1776–1941.

Note: gray background if p<0,1.

Table 3 presents similar models of women’s transition to first marriage.

Sibling characteristics. According to model 1, an increasing number of siblings raised the risk of marriage, which means it reduced the age at the time of marriage. When applying a birth-order variable, this effect is more accentuated. Namely, the gradual dilution of family resources motivated daughters to transition into their first marriages as soon as possible. Marriage risks of girls of higher ordinal position of birth were lower than the marriage risks of their older siblings. Due to the marriage of older siblings, the pressure was lower on them and they transitioned into their first marriages at a later age. According to model 3, an increasing number of brothers resulted in a later average age at the time of marriage. However, these results are not statistically significant. On the contrary, the age at marriage decreases with the growing number of sisters. The effect of this variable is more conceivable when the effect of an only sister in the sibling group is filtered (model 4). All in all, females tended to marry in accordance with their ordinal position of birth.

Parental presence and mortality. The impact of paternal presence on the age at the time of marriage of females was less than the impact on the age at the time of marriage of sons, including both direction and extent. It is clear that the recent death of one or both parents was an inducement to marry. In the three years following the death of a mother, the marriage risk of females almost doubled in comparison with females both of whose parents were alive. The distant death of both parents, however, delayed the marriage of women. Lacking the supporting presence of parents, these females had a worse position on the marriage market than those whose parents were still alive. The presence of the mother is of high significance, since the distant death of a mother still delayed marriage of a female even if the father was still alive. It is also valid vice versa: presence of the mother had beneficial effects that counterbalanced the effects of the distant death of the father. However, these results are not statistically significant. Subsequent to the death of her mother and in the presence of her father, it is very probable that a young girl took up the female’s roles in the family, and this directly delayed her marriage. In accordance with this, daughters of remarrying parents married at a younger age than those whose parents married only once. The chance of a female marrying increased with the remarriage of the father by 24 percent to 27 percent and with the remarriage of the mother by 11 percent to 15 percent, compared to the reference category of females where the surviving parent did not remarry et all. Due in part to having received an inheritance after the death of a parent and in part to the potential conflict with the step-parent, young females tended to marry as soon as possible.

Historical period. During the period before World War I, the age at the time of first marriages decreased. Throughout the years of the war and the subsequent period, this trend turned around and women began to marry at older and older ages. In the interwar period the postponement of marriage was characteristic.

Parish of residence. The comparison of the two settlements reveals that, after other factors have been excluded, females born in Szentegyházasfalu married at a younger age than those born in Kápolnásfalu.

Conclusion and Discussion

In this study the effect of parental presence and sibling configuration on the timing of first marriages was investigated using data found in parish registries in two Transylvanian mountain villages in the period between 1838 and 1940. The first marriage of young adults was not treated as an isolated phenomenon. Rather, it was placed in the complex relationship of familial and individual considerations. In the course of this analysis, I intended to reflect on the importance of family dynamics. The most fundamental question of my inquiry was how the ordinal position of birth and the presence of siblings and parents influence the average age at the time of marriage. Based on the inheritance norms regarding young adults, I conjecture that the effect of sibling group configuration might be different by gender in the context of available parental resources.

In compliance with the outcomes of the research, the average age at the time of marriage in a given group of siblings was greatly affected by obligations towards siblings and parents. Although strong age norms existed regarding marriage in the settlements in question, ordinal position of birth, number of siblings, parental presence and the period in history during which a marriage was concluded all played decisive roles in determining the age at the time of marriage of males and females. The effect of ordinal position differed by gender: first-born males tended to marry at an older age than their brothers, as opposed to first-born females, who normally married at a younger age than their sisters. This is explained by the fact that the norms governing the process of inheritance took two factors into account first and foremost, namely, gender and ordinal position of birth. Because the male line inherited real estate, upon reaching the normative age of marriage, males of higher ordinal position of birth competed less for goods required for marriage with their siblings. Since normally the youngest male member of a sibling group remained in the family home as to provide support for parents in old age (even after having married), the parents wanted them to marry as soon as possible. With the aid of their older siblings, more precisely, their sisters, resources based on social relations were more accessible. In the case of daughters (who inherited less than their brothers), parental resources often meant the available living space, and the eldest daughters had the worst position in this context. Desire to establish their own home inspired these females to marry as soon as possible.

Death of one or both parents was an inducement among males and females to marry. This response to a family crisis reflects the acceleration of the inheritance process and an effort to maintain the viability of a household.

According to my interpretation, the timing of marriage for young adults in the period in question was characterized by strong social control and parental influence. The power of parents over their children’s marriage was more palpable in the case of young women. The first marriage of young adults certainly was an important source of tensions between generations. Further studies are needed to investigate the nature of the relationships between generations in greater detail.

The major limitation of this study is that I examined only the experiences of young adults living in these two Transylvanian mountain villages, and these populations were rather homogeneous in terms of religion and socioeconomic composition. Subsequent studies should include more settlements with populations that show a higher degree of variance with regards to religion and socioeconomic background. Furthermore, the period after the Second World War should be included in the analysis.

Archival Sources

Arhivele Naţionale ale României Direcţia Judeţeană Harghita, Miercurea Ciuc [National Archives of Romania, Branch of Harghita, Miercurea Ciuc], Fond 47: Colecţia registrelor de stare civilă, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 728, 729, 730, 731.

Szentegyházasfalusi Római Katolikus Plébánia Levéltára [Roman Catholic Parish Archive, Vlăhiţa]

Roman Catholic Parish Registries 1776–1941, vol. II–X.

Kápolnásfalusi Római Katolikus Egyházközség Levéltára [Roman Catholic Parish Archive, Căpâlniţa]

Roman Catholic Parish Registries 1776–1941, vol. I–V.

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Stanislav Holubec

Between Scarcity and Modernity: Working Class Families in Prague in the Interwar Period

This study investigates the life experiences of working class families in Prague in the interwar period with particular emphasis on processes of family formation and sustainment. With regards to the notion of “family formation,” I examined in particular the search for partners, patterns of cohabitation, and sociological aspects of partner’s choice. I analyzed the life course of workers´ families with a focus on child births, questions pertaining to health, and divorces and other non-traditional forms of family. Working class families are interpreted as having undergone and reacted to different aspects of modern social change. These include demographic transition (declining infant mortality, declining fertility), the adoption of modern values (individualization, rise of divorce rates, secularization, female emancipation, multiple identities), the effects of World War I (material scarcity, high mortality), local circumstances (housing shortages), and persistent traditional patterns and values in the mentality among the working class (gender inequality and family hierarchies).

Keywords: Prague, interwar period, working class families, life experiences, life course

In the following article I investigate the life experiences of working class families in Prague1 in the interwar period with particular emphasis on processes of family formation and transformation. In the first part I will outline briefly the socioeconomic development of Prague between 1870 and 1940, concentrating on the surroundings in which workers lived, the factors that, in my view, exerted a substantial influence on their family lives, and complex questions regarding identity. In the second part I will present the life experiences of working class families in Prague with emphasis on the processes involved in the formation of a family, including dating, cohabitation and marriage, in their sociological context. The family lives of workers, which includes child births, questions pertaining to health, mortality and the disintegration of families, will be analyzed in the last part. As there has been little research on these topics in the Czech context, I occasionally draw on comparisons with the situation in Germany.

The practice of writing about the everyday lives of workers and their families has a long history. It was strongly ideological under state socialism. The historiography concentrated on the political and social “struggles,” particularly in communities of heavy industry and mining workers, and simultaneously ignored the workers in other branches of the economy, such as agriculture. The official historiography tended to combine very pessimistic descriptions of the prevailing conditions based primarily on statistical data with idealized descriptions of workers as politically highly conscious and supportive of the Communist Party.2 The predominance of class and class struggle in peoples´ identities and life courses was taken for granted. In the studies on working class family histories, the statistical or folklorist perspective prevailed.3 Since 1990, Czech historiography has almost completely abandoned “workers” as a category of study, and only a small group of historians of the older generation has attempted to promote the social history of the lower classes, with emphasis on the nineteenth century.4 The interests of mainstream historiography shifted to the social history of the everyday lives of “elites” or members of the middle classes, sometimes presented as “typical citizens,” or to gender history and the history of ethnic relations. Attention was also paid to the history of the most marginalized social groups (prostitutes, Roma). The political history of the interwar period shifted from class struggle to the clash between democracy and totalitarianism. The history of industrial work remained as insignificant as it had been before 1989. The German scholar Peter Heumos was one of the few exceptions.5 Only in recent years have we begun to experience a return to the history of workers. The pioneering work by Martin Jemelka on everyday life in the miners´ colony in Ostrava until 1950,6 followed by the monograph on the interactions between the middle classes and workers in Moravia at the turn of the century by Lukáš Fasora,7 my monograph on everydayness and the social status of the Prague workers in the interwar period,8 and most recently the monograph on the everyday life of Czech workers during World War I by Rudolf Kučera.9 The problems faced by Czech workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also started to interest young non-Czech historians.10

Prague and Members of the Working Class During Industrialization

In the late nineteenth century, Prague, the historical capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, was the third largest city in the Habsburg monarchy and one of its most important industrial centers.11 At the time, it had experienced the greatest period of industrial and demographic growth in its history. The population growth in the period between 1870 and 1914 was 25 percent every ten years. Because of the influx of migrants from the Czech-speaking countryside, like other cities of Central and Eastern Europe, Prague started to lose its multicultural character.12 Symbolically, in 1868 the Czech administration enforced the replacement of German street names with bilingual versions and in 1894 exclusively with Czech names.13 Prague was still described as provincial in comparison with the imperial charm of Vienna or Budapest. It had neither the power nor financial resources to develop edifices comparable with those of Budapest. The Prague National theatre (1883), National Museum (1891), and Municipal House (1912) hardly rivalled the Hungarian parliament, the Budapest subway (the first in continental Europe), or St. Stephen´s basilica.

After 1918, as the capital of the new Czechoslovak Republic, Prague became the seat of the central authorities. The influx of migrants to the city continued, although it was slowing. Due to an administrative reform, in 1922 Prague expanded its territory eight fold and its population grew to 676,000 inhabitants, and in the late 1930s it reached 900,000. The historical center was unified with industrial suburbs, residential districts, and in some cases even with villages that had not yet been integrated into the infrastructures of the city. The creation of greater Prague weakened the power of the National Democratic Party (Československá národní demokracie), which was comprised of liberal nationalist forces that had dominated Prague in previous decades. After the administrative reform, the proportion of workers and members of the lower middle classes in the city increased significantly, and power shifted to the hands of centrist Socialists (Československá strana socialistická) and Social Democrats (Československá sociálně demokratická strana dělnická). Prague was not spared post-war political radicalization, and the Communist Party become an important representative of the professionally less qualified and poorest strata of Prague inhabitants. The creation of Greater Prague also further contributed to its ethnic homogenization. Jews and Germans, who lived primarily in the city center, now comprised less than 8 percent of the population, and as a political force they held onto influence only on the level of the central districts. Even increased migration to Prague from Slovakia, Polish Galicia and revolutionary Russia after 1918 did not modify the prevailing ethnically Czech character of the city.14

In spite of the rapid industrialization that had begun in the 1860s, as the country´s capital Prague maintained a strong proportion of middle and upper classes and was never perceived as an unambiguously industrial center, in comparison to Brno (Brünn in German) or the centers in northern Bohemia and Moravia. Its character as a regional capital and its proximity to northern and central Bohemian industrial centers and coal districts promoted industrialization, but the simultaneous growth of administration and the service sphere kept the social structure more balanced, so even after unification with the industrial suburbs, the number of workers and their families did not surpass 40 percent of the population according to statistics. The center of Prague never lost its high social status during the process of industrialization, and it remained home primarily to members of the middle classes,15 who also established the residential districts around it, such as Vinohrady, Bubeneč and Střešovice.16 Proletariats arriving to the city had to look for places to live comparatively far from the city center, close to the factories in the northeast or southwest of the city. As of the early twentieth century, the industry of Prague was oriented primarily around the production of machines, electric equipment and carriages. Textile production and glass production were less important. Industry in Prague was strongly diversified, with predominantly small places of production in comparison with the urban centers established during the period of rapid industrialization from 1870 to 1914. Only eleven plants in the city had more than 500 workers in early 1920s, and two of them were publically owned (the railway heating plant and a tram depot).17 The relative diversity of industry in Prague also meant a diversity of workers and less influence of trade unions.18

In combination with the general housing shortage, the migration of large segments of the agrarian population to Prague created serious social conflicts in the early 1920s. The presence of new workforces allowed owners to cut wages. The lack of appropriate housing led to crowding in apartments and the spread of slums. However, economic growth, which as of 1923 was increasingly rapid, helped to ameliorate the situation.19

The interwar urban slums, which were referred to as “poverty colonies” (nouzové kolonie), are an interesting phenomenon widely discussed in the literature. They came into existence shortly after 1918, as the plots of wasteland at the outskirts of Prague began to be rented to the migrants to the capital for the construction of provisory wooden cabins (old carriages were also used). Their inhabitants were sometimes people from the eastern parts of the republic or refugees from Galicia or revolutionary Russia.20 The colonies, with their picturesque appearance, soon attracted the attention of journalists and writers, and numerous reports on the conditions in them were written. Also the Prague municipal governments began to perceive the colonies as a problem primarily because of hygiene and crime. The illegally built cabins were sometimes destroyed in the presence of the police, creating conflicts between the inhabitants of the slums and the organs of public administration. The political left used the defense of slum dwellers as part of its own political agenda. Later, even the municipal administration of Prague attempted to start its own project of provisional housing for the families in need. Although the colonies are the subject of many documents in the archives and the secondary literature,21 their inhabitants in fact comprised only a small portion of the population of Prague, about 2 or 3 percent.

Even for workers’ families not living in the colonies, the housing situation was not easy. The average workers’ household in Prague was truly overcrowded. The families lived either in one-room apartments or (for the more fortunate) an apartment with a separate kitchen. Two-room apartments with separate kitchens were affordable only for the small numbers of workers who had the best jobs, such as typographers.22 The workers’ families sometimes even offered other people a place to stay, mainly grandparents.23 Occasionally other relatives lived together with the partner’s family, either new arrivals from the countryside or boyfriends or girlfriends who lived together with the family before they could establish their own households. Under these circumstances, not everyone had his or her own bed.24 Most children shared their beds with siblings, and older siblings sometimes slept on the floor.25 The only modern technologies Prague workers enjoyed at the time was the water pipe line to the houses (but only rarely to the apartments) and sometimes electrical lighting, which gradually became more common after the war (in 1931 about half of the workers´ households already had it).26 Other modern technologies already common in the middle class apartments, such as water lines, gas stoves, central heating, separate toilets and bathrooms, and refrigerators were rare in workers’ households until the 1950s.27

The high level of spatial stratification in Prague contributed to the fact that working class families lived primarily in the local neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.28 While workers made up only 10 percent of the inhabitants of the city center according to the censuses in 1921 and 1931, they often comprised more than 50 percent of the population in the peripheral parts of Prague. Although public transportation and bicycles were affordable to all social groups, the lower strata did not frequently go to the city center to indulge in amusements or cultural events, or even to shop, but preferred rather the local facilities. Much of social life also took place in the yards of the houses. The apartments had shared laundry rooms where the women met, and the modest size of the apartments pushed their inhabitants outside, where they spent time interacting with other neighbors (woman doing the laundry, men doing a little craftsman’s work, and children playing).

Those who lived without much contact with their families were mainly the newcomers to Prague from the countryside. In some cases these people commuted on Sunday to visit their relatives, or their work in Prague was of a seasonal nature (construction workers), so they spent the winters at home. If their families lived at greater distances, they would visit them even less frequently. If the grandparents and other relatives lived in the countryside, contact was kept with them only sporadically. Short workers´ vacations, which lasted only about one week (in contrast with the longer vacations enjoyed by state employees or managers), and high transportation costs did not allow workers to take regular visits to relatives. People compensated for the lack of personal contact by writing letters, a practice that was already significant at the time.29 In contrast, families with grandparents living in Prague kept regular contact with them. The grandparents helped with the children and household, while the parents, who had paying jobs, supported them financially, as the elderly often had no pensions.

Due to the character of Prague industry and the character of modern society (which was slowly approaching the phase of mass consumption), the identities of Prague workers were more diverse than the pre-1989 historiography used to claim. It is likely that the inhabitants of Prague recorded in the statistics as “workers” (dělníci) often did not like to use this term to describe themselves. It had a negative connotation for them, and they preferred to call themselves “craftsmen” (řemeslník). They called themselves workers only if they had a job that required no training. The register books that were kept by every district of the city contain interesting information in this respect. Couples who were getting married were obliged to state their professions, along with other data. One could consider, for example, the register book from the district of Karlín from 1923–24. In this district, according to the statistical survey the percentage of workers was about 38 in 1921, roughly the Prague average.30 The wedding book contains 456 marriages, a total of 912 people, which can be considered representative. Surprisingly, in this sample only 13 percent of the people describe themselves as “workers” (dělník, dělnice), and there is no significant difference between males and females. Sometimes male respondents added an adjective, such as “factory,” “shoe,” “brick,” or “mill.” The other employees with manual jobs described themselves as “craftsmen“ or mentioned their trade, e.g. “locksmith,” “plumber,” or “joiner.” This group, which can be referred to as manual trained professions, comprised about 40 percent of the sample among males. Among females the proportion was much lower (only about 10 percent). In the register book no one described his or her job as “day laborer” (nádeník), the term used in the statistics for the untrained workers who worked without contracts at jobs that had the least prestige.

The reluctance of young workers to identify with this term is also visible in the personal ads, which as a practice was quite widespread at the time. We can cite here several ads that were published in the Prague women’s magazine Hvězda in 1930 showing the contrasting worlds of the middle and upper classes and the world of the workers. The first placed clear emphasis on the importance of property, while the second stressed personal characteristics: “A factory owner would like to marry an intelligent woman of gentle character possessing adequate capital. Replies with photographs are welcome and will be given back discretely.” “25-year-old farmer, in possession of 300,000 crowns, with the duty to care for his old parents, would like to marry a woman with a farm of at least 70 acres or a pub with its own farm. Widows are not excluded.” “40-year-old owner of factory, villa and car, intelligent and not unattractive would like to meet an intelligent lady, widow, possessing capital in the amount of 600,000, I offer a marriage and dowry, mortgage ensured.” Sometimes the personal ads were difficult to distinguish from the job ads: “I am looking for a female sales assistant for my shop, who will contribute by deposit 5,000 to 10,000 crowns. Latter marriage to me not excluded.”31

If one looks at ads taken out by people who had less assets, as is the case in the register books, the authors did not like to describe themselves as workers. In the case of males looking for females, they preferred to refer to themselves as “craftsmen” (řemeslník) or “employed.” Sometimes they did not mention their profession at all and stated only their age, along with descriptions of their character and physical appearance. Their ads were also shorter, because the cost of an ad depended on its length: “a blonde with a tall figure would like to meet a nice boy, preferably a craftsmen.” “28-year-old craftsman would like to meet a nice girl.” “25-year-old employed girl would like to meet a railway man, or someone with a similar profession who does not need money, but rather a good housewife.” Obviously the workers could neither offer nor expect money or assets and concentrated instead on character, sentiments or physical appearance.32

Although unattractive in everyday life, the term worker as a collective political identity still had its appeal. Social democratic forces used it in the name of their party and in the names of the affiliated organizations (Workers’ Academy, Workers’ Sport Association),33 while the Communists preferred the more radical term “proletariat.” Those who were reluctant to label themselves “workers” obviously had no difficulties voting for “workers’ parties,” which regularly got one-third of Prague’s votes in the interwar elections. The parties were conscious of this contradiction and strove to educate their members to become more “class conscious.” The party publications appealed to young members not to be ashamed of the word “worker” when they had to state their profession.34

Young Workers Dating and Marrying

Young people from working class families usually had jobs before they were married. For working class boys and girls it was natural to take a job after leaving school or completing an apprenticeship, while for members of the middle class about half of the girls did not have any job before marriage. They either pursued studies or helped at home. The girls from working class families of Prague did not have much chance of getting a job as a house servant, since middle and upper class families tended to prefer girls from the countryside (who were in abundant supply) over girls with a working class background (who were perceived as unclean, frivolous or otherwise having bad habits).35 Workers’ wives did not stay at home after their weddings either, but rather had jobs until they bore children. In contrast, in many cases middle class girls who worked as clerks did not wait until they were pregnant to quit their jobs, but rather quit immediately after having gotten married “to take care of their husbands.”

As it was unusual to send children to a nursery, women had to stay at home with them until they reached school age. This time span was as long as seven to ten years, if one takes into consideration the average number of children and the differences in their ages. As the children began to attend school, only a minority of working class women sought out regular paid work in the factories, as the factories offered jobs primarily to childless women. Instead, mothers in working class households took part-time jobs, mainly as helpers and cleaners in middle class households or as wash-women (a task that was time-consuming; one had to set aside one day a week to clean the clothes for a single family).

Concerning the places where one could find a future partner, the dancing room was a well-known option, but there were other places as well, such as outdoor swimming pools, the workplace, sport organizations (for instance the numerous but middle class and nationalist leaning Sokol [Falcon], which resembled the German Turnvereine, or the less numerous Dělnické tělocvičné jednoty [Workers’ Sport Association], which was close to the Social Democratic Party). Sometimes shared quarters also offered people a chance to get acquainted. An activity that was specific to Czech culture and that allowed young people a chance to meet one another was weekend camping, referred to in Czech as “tramping” (“tramping” usually took place from Saturday afternoon to Sunday, as Saturday morning was still a workday). Tramping is considered the first Czech youth subculture,36 taking form in Prague in the early 1920s, imitating in its dress code and leisure-time activities the life of the American mountain man known from Westerns and adventure novels by Karl May and Jack London. In comparison to the scout movement, it was anti-authoritarian, not divided by gender, and its social base was more working class than middle class. While scouts were mainly for pre-adolescent and early-adolescent kids, “tramping” was popular among late teenagers and young adults. At the time, the only similar subculture seems to have been found in Germany, the so called “wilder Wandervogel” (Wild wandering birds), which was an anti-authoritarian split from the German Wanderfogel movement.37 Czech tramping profited from the hilly landscape covered by forests in the south of Prague, which was easy to reach by local trains. Tramps would stay overnight in tents or improvised wooden cabins, wearing cowboy-like clothing and playing guitars by camp fires and singing their “tramp songs.” Naturally this all created an ideal atmosphere for young people to fall in love. The authorities were alerted by the shocked moralists of older generations (who complained that tramping was a site of “free love,”), and in 1931 the regional government issued a regulation prohibiting unmarried people from spending the night together in a tent or a cabin, bathing together without proper dress, or singing “obscene songs”.38 This was soon followed by police raids against tramps. In response, the movement organized protests, including demonstrations and a press campaign, and the regulation was repealed four years later.

As the working class youth started to date, it was not uncommon for them to have sex.39 Again, the world outside offered more suitable sites for trysts than the overcrowded apartments. The prevalence of premarital sex among members of the working class contrasted sharply with the prevailing expectations of the middle classes, according to which a bride had to be a virgin,40 which was still common at the beginning of the interwar period. Middle class boys had their first sexual experiences as visitors to the brothels, although this habit among middle class students and soldiers, though strong before the war, started to decline after 1918, not least due to the spread of venereal diseases caused by the war.41 It seems that in the 1920s middle class girls also become more liberal in terms of sexuality. In the 1930s all urban youths may well have had similar experiences of premarital sex.

Cohabitation was also quite common among young workers, while it was taboo for the Prague middle classes. This pattern of cohabitation existed at the time primarily among the poorer segments of the working class in Prague, while the “workers’ aristocracy,” like the middle class, rejected cohabitation as unacceptable. From our sample of the 456 couples who married in 1923–1924 in the Žižkov district (who could be identified as workers, at least as far as their professions were concerned), about 15 percent lived at the same address on the day of the wedding.42 Among the 101 couples at least one member of which characterized himself or herself explicitly as a “worker” the proportion of cohabition was about one-third. Cohabitation sometimes preceded dating in cases in which young people met each other as inhabitants of the same apartment. Cohabitation among workers was sometimes criticized by the middle class journals and authorities. One of the complaints of the Prague municipality regarding the urban slums was that many of the inhabitants lived together without having gotten married.43 The young workers active in the Communist Party were similarly scandalized by allegations made in the right-wing press that they lived in a “concubinate.”44 It is worth stressing that unmarried cohabitation often was not a consequence of love but rather of necessity. According to the most common model, due to the lack of apartments one of the partners moved into the home where his or her partner lived with the parents.45

Conservative middle class authors tended to offer shocking descriptions of the sex lives of young members of the working class in the late nineteenth century, characterizing workers as promiscuous, rash, and prone to incest. This discourse was still used in the 1920s and 1930s, mainly with regards to the sexuality of “socially difficult” families, but not anymore with regards to workers, who were perceived in the mainstream discourse almost as “normal citizens.” On the other hand, leftist authors tended to present the sex lives of young workers as “clean” and “honest,” in contrast with the “cynical” sexuality of the sons of the bourgeoisie.46 The two main political forces representing the workers—the Communists and Social Democrats—had different views on the sex lives of young people. The Communists, who were influenced by the radicalism of the Russian revolution, seemed to be more liberal, while the Social Democrats remained quite conservative. For example, in 1922 the Social Democratic brochure recommended that people begin to have sexual relations only after having gotten married and secured employment.47 The question of contraception was not mentioned at all.

Contraceptives that were commonly used by members of the middle classes already in the early 1920s came into use more slowly among the working class. They seem to have entered widespread use first among youngsters. An article entitled “How to avoid unwanted conception,” printed in the women’s communist magazine Rozsévačka (female sower), popularized contraceptives among workers in 1930 as something entirely new. Condoms were recommended as the safest method of contraception. Contraceptives were propagated in Prague with the argument according to which they were already in widespread use in the Soviet Union and they would allow women to be more active in the revolutionary struggle.48 Interestingly, the article was not approved by the police censorship, and only its title and the last sentence were published. The editorial board, however, did not give up, and they let it be read as a speech in parliament by a Communist MP, which meant it could be published again uncensored.49

If contraception failed, abortion was fairly widespread. Although it was prohibited by the law inherited from Austria (approved in the Czech lands in 1852),50 abortion was quite common in the interwar period in Prague, and practitioners ranged from luxurious clinics where it was performed officially as a treatment of the appendix or an inflammation of the peritoneum to backstreet abortionists. The Social Democrats and Communists protested against the law primarily by noting its “class” character. According to them, it brought harm primarily to poor women, because they could not afford good treatment and they were forced to ask for help from amateur backstreet abortionists.51 Also biological arguments were used. For instance the claim was made that too many births would weaken a woman. The Communists argued that women should not produce “slaves for the bourgeoisie” or “soldiers for imperialist wars,” and they referred, in support of their argument, to the legality of abortion in the Soviet Union, at least they did until 1933, when abortion was prohibited there.52 Interestingly, the individual right of a woman to choose (which today is perhaps the most important argument in favor of the legality of abortion) was not cited as an argument.53 The left-leaning MPs even repeatedly initiated the abolishment of abortion laws, but they were unsuccessful in their efforts. The state authorities, however, were quite tolerant in putting the law into practice. They did not actively search for cases of abortions, and they pursued charges only if they had been informed by a doctor, which was usually only the case if an amateur abortionist had endangered a woman´s health and she found herself compelled to ask for professional medical treatment. According to the health statistics, of the estimated 100,000 thousand annual abortions, only about 600 were prosecuted in Czechoslovakia.54 The common penalties ranged from a couple of weeks to six months in prison, though mothers of children generally were given milder sentences.

Many young male and female workers became parents as unmarried couples.55 The extramarital births (referred to as “illegitimate” in the public discourse at the time) were more frequent in Prague than in the rest of the country (about 13 percent of births between 1921 and 1931 in Czechoslovakia were “illegitimate,”56 whereas the figure in Prague was 22 percent). Extramarital birth rates were higher in the capitals all over Europe, because many unmarried pregnant girls from rural areas left for the city to give birth in order to avoid social stigmatization in their communities. The illegitimacy rate was somewhat higher in Prague among the working class than it was among the middle classes. It can be estimated at one-fifth of the total number of births.57 However, most children were “legitimized” by later weddings, which were very informal in these cases. Only very rarely did children grow up living together with both the unmarried parents.

Members of the working class in Prague married at a relatively young age and at a relatively high rate in comparison with members of the middle classes or the Czech Germans and Jews. They also married earlier than the rural population. A typical age at marriage of a working class girl was around 23. Members of the middle class in Prague married on average four years later. The age gap between the workers´ brides and grooms was about two years, lower than among the middle classes, where it was about seven years. This was the result of the middle class custom according to which a man first had to obtain a position and accumulate wealth before entering a marriage. A working class girl who was not married at age 25 was considered an old maid, while the public was much more tolerant of men who remained unmarried. The number of women who never married was much higher than the number of men, in part because of the tremendous casualties suffered by men in World War I. In the cohort born between 1890 and 1900, one in ten males died in the war and one in ten was permanently disabled.58 About one-fifth of the females born between 1880 and 1900 therefore remained unmarried and childless, the highest proportion since the introduction of statistical records until today.

People tend to marry people of similar social, demographic and economic backgrounds (this is known as endogamy). On the other hand, marriage is also considered a channel of upward social mobility, which leads to a certain exogamy. There are numerous discussions regarding the factors that lead to shifts in patterns of exogamy and endogamy, how to categorize different societies, and the thesis according to which there was a shift from endogamy to exogamy during the transition from pre-modern to modern society.59 Although comparisons are always difficult, the inhabitants of Prague in the period under discussion seem to have been more exogamous than the rural population. Of course, a working class girl could not hope to find her millionaire (a common plotline in penny novels and movies at the time), but there was a chance of marrying a bit higher on the social ladder. Men who worked in public service were regarded as a “good catch” for working class girls. They included policemen, subordinate officers, tram conductors, railway men, or qualified workers in the private sector (typographers or electrical workers). A working class man could hope to marry his foreman’s daughter or possibly a widow with some wealth but few other endearments.

Although class barriers were strong in Prague at that time, some marriages were sealed between two people of differing social status. The prevailing marriage pattern of socially unequal partners followed the pattern typical in other modern societies, meaning that a marriage between a bride of lower status and a groom of higher status was more acceptable than vice versa. A young woman with a working class background had somewhat higher chances of marrying someone from the middle classes than a young male worker. In 1925, 9.1 percent of the marriages were partnerships between a female worker and a male clerk, while only 1.8 percent of the marriages involved a male worker and female clerk.60 The barriers between the social classes, however, seem to have been more permeable than the barriers between the Czechs and Germans or Jews, as ethnic identity was considered more important than class identity, and members of different social classes were more likely to meet one another than people belonging to different national backgrounds were, due to a rather clear geographic line dividing ethnic Czechs and Germans.61 Interethnic marriage was almost nonexistent among workers in Prague, as Germans or Jews were not numerous in the city. Although the Prague workers and their families belonged to different Christian denominations (about half of them were baptized as Catholics, a third were atheists,62 and one-sixth was protestant), it was not considered a problem to marry a member of a different church, as the working class in the capital city was already highly secularized.

The political orientation of grooms was sometimes a big problem for the families of brides. There was a significant rift between the Communists and the rest of the community.63 Some girls were explicitly warned not to marry a Communist, and in some cases this led to a break with other family members.64 There was some rational basis for this attitude, since a Communist Party activist sometimes had to face the loss of work, and in military production there was an explicit prohibition against giving members of the Communist Party a job. In contrast, if one had a membership card for the Socialist Party (bearing since 1926 the name National Socialist Party), which dominated Prague, this could prove helpful in the search for a job in publically owned enterprises.

Working class girls were also warned not to marry an alcoholic or a man who liked to play the cards, a habit considered (along with alcohol consumption) the worst social evil.65 For example, one female who wrote a letter to the journal Hvězda on her personal troubles, expressed her appreciation of her husband, since he neither drank nor played cards.66 Consorting with prostitutes, which was particularly common among students and soldiers, was not a big issue among workers.67 All in all, in contrast with the middle classes, working class parents did not have much influence on their children’s choice of partners. The last obstacle to marriage was age. One was only allowed to marry without parental permission at the age of 21. Couples between the ages of 17 and 21 were only allowed to marry if they had the permission of their fathers or legal guardians.68

Family in the Life Course

The period under discussion was marked by the end of a demographic transition in the Czech lands. In 1880, the average woman gave birth to 4.7 children. This figure declined in 1900 to 4.1, in 1920 to 2.8 and in 1938 to 1.9. The working class people of Prague were average in this respect. The birth rate was lower than in the countryside, but higher than among the middle classes. The prevailing model among workers was a family with two or three children.69 The one-child model was not preferred due to child mortality, which was still high.70 The social surveys on the working class people of Prague revealed more nuanced views. According to a survey conducted by Marie Nečasová in the late 1920s, the average clerks’ family had two children, the average workers’ family71 had 2.8, and the average day laborers’ family had 3.8.72 Other authors have consistently confirmed that a lower social position means more children. This was also the case according to a criminological survey on prostitutes with many brothers and sisters,73 as well as a pedagogical survey on schools, according to which “neglected [pupils] who were in danger of being ruined” usually came from the largest families.74 We do not have any data on the basis of which we could compare birth rates among atheist, protestant and Catholic workers, but denominational belonging does not seem to have played a significant role, as social workers did not pay any attention to it. Although the statistics indicate a decline in fertility, even in the 1930s working class women in Prague complained that they gave birth to more children than they actually would like to have had.75

Another aspect of the demographic transition was the decline in infant mortality, which fell from 15 to 9 percent in the Czech lands in the period between 1920 and 1940.76 However, this figure indicates that even towards the end of the interwar period the death of an infant was not uncommon. Although the statistics do not offer any breakdown of infant mortality rates according to social class, the data from different districts of the city clearly show social stratification. Prosek, the district of Prague with the highest proportion of workers and the highest concentration of slums, also had the highest infant mortality rate, 23 percent in 1935, while the suburbs with the highest percentage of “independents and landlords” had rates of only about 10 percent.77 Higher infant mortality was also recorded among children born out of wedlock, whose chances of reaching adulthood were two times lower than those of children of married parents.

Even the children of working class parents who survived infancy often were in poor health according to doctors, primarily as a result of malnutrition. About half of the children at the schools in the working class districts were characterized as unhealthy. The most frequent findings were rickets, anemia, “backward body development,” “weakness,” “nerve instability” and “hypertrophied chest glands.”78

Fathers were often absent from working class families. Female mortality rates were lower, and many men had died in the war. The death of a woman in childbirth, which had been frighteningly common only a few decades earlier, became less frequent, occurring in no more than 5 out of 1,000 of births. The most common cause of death in working class families was tuberculosis, which reached its peak during the war, but steadily declined afterward. In 1914, 26 of 100 deaths in the Czech lands were caused by tuberculosis. By 1937 this proportion had declined to 9 of 100.79 Tuberculosis was truly a “malady of the proletariat,” affecting primarily young adults. According to the statistical bureau of Prague, it was the cause of one in four deaths among male workers, but only one in ten deaths among people employed in liberal professions.80 Even successful medical treatment meant a long period of time and a considerable financial burden for the family.

Two other reasons for the absence of fathers were single motherhood and divorce.81 The Austrian legislature only allowed divorces in the sense of separation (Scheidung/rozvod), but without the right to remarry. Divorce (Trennung/rozluka), meaning that the parties to the process would have the right to remarry, was rarely allowed. The Czechoslovak Republic liberalized the laws regarding divorce after 1918, making divorce (rozluka) much easier and taking the procedure out of the hands of church. Consequently, the divorce rates began to rise: In 1921 they rocketed to 4.7 percent, possibly in part because the option had only recently become available and many people who had already separated from their spouses chose to finalize their separations with divorce. Although the rise in the divorce rate slowed down soon, as of the latter half of the 1920s it began to grow again, reaching 7.9 divorces annually for every 100 marriages in 1935–1937.82 Among the working class people of Prague, divorce was by no means unheard of. However, the statistical evidence shows that divorce was less widespread among working class families than it was among the middle classes, who might have had better proficiency in the use of the law. Members of the middle classes were also better able to afford divorce, since the breakup of a household represented a less threatening economic burden for them than it did for working class families. According to the statistics, divorce was twice as frequent among the middle classes in Prague than among the workers.83

Concerning the reasons for divorce recorded by the court of justice, domestic violence was more common among workers, while adultery was more common among the members of the middle classes.84 This could mean either that adultery was actually more common among the middle classes, who had more opportunity (more leisure time, better apartment conditions), and that domestic violence was more common in the working class families, or that adultery was not as frequently perceived as grounds for divorce among workers.

The outcome of a divorce was the separation of the household and a ruling regarding alimony, which could be a big financial burden to a male worker.85 However, Nečasová noticed in her survey that in the majority of cases divorced working class fathers did not pay anything. According to her, although the court of justice declared it the duty of the father to pay alimony, in many cases the fathers did not meet this obligation and their ex-wives had no legal means of compelling them to do so.86 The impact of the great depression on divorce rates was ambivalent. On the one hand, the rise in unemployment and increasing financial uncertainties frequently led to conflicts within families, while on the other among members of the working class divorce rates declined, presumably because the financial burdens were too great.

Combining divorce and the death of a parent, one can estimate that about one-third of the school-age children of working class parents in Prague came from “incomplete” families. According to research by Stejskal, in three-fourths of the cases the father was absent because he had died. The other one-fourth were cases of unwed mothers or divorced parents.87 The relatively frequent “incompleteness” of the family is confirmed by Apetauer. According to him, about 20 percent of Prague apprentices had lost their fathers, and 10 percent had lost their mothers. In the 1930s, as World War I become a more distant memory, the ratio of deceased fathers and mothers equalized somewhat.

The death of a father created a situation of extreme difficulty for a working class family. One strategy to minimize the disastrous consequences was to move in with grandparents or take in sub-tenants, who sometimes became new partners, as one sees on the basis of the information collected by the authorities about the widows of the 46 men who died during the collapse of construction works of the new shopping mall in the city center in 1928 (street Na Poříčí), the biggest catastrophe of this sort in the interwar period in Prague. Many widows found new partners astonishingly quickly.88 In the case of the death of his wife, a husband usually preferred to turn the children over to the care of relatives or sometimes institutions than to try to combine child care with paid work.

While first marriages were based on personal preferences and sympathies among workers, a marriage after the death of partner or after a divorce was generally a way out of a difficult situation, and the expectations placed on a potential partner were much lower. In particular, children from the previous marriage were instructed by their mothers to behave respectfully in the presence of their stepfathers. Records from the 1920s indicate that mothers even pressured their children to kiss their stepfather’s hand, a practice that was no longer common at the time, or to greet him with the words “praise the lord Jesus Christ” (pochválen buď pán Ježíš Kristus).89 This greeting was already out of fashion before the First World War, and after 1918 it was abolished from the schools and other public spaces, but still was perceived by some people as more polite than the civil “Good day” (dobrý den).

Conclusion

The family-lives of the Prague workers can be interpreted in light of the different transformations at the time. These include a demographic transition (declining infant mortality rates, declining fertility, rise of divorce rates), the adoption of modern values (individualization, secularization, female emancipation, emotionalization), combined with the effects of World War I (material scarcity, high mortality), local circumstances (housing shortages), and persistent traditional patterns and values (gender inequality and family hierarchies). The crucial aspect of the everyday lives of workers’ families seems to have been material scarcity, which was particularly significant at times of economic depressions (in other words roughly half of the period under discussion), resulting often in the malnutrition of children. The welfare system still existed only in rudimentary forms, so changes in the nuclear family, such as the death of a spouse or serious illness, could have disastrous effects on the family. Although the emotional bonds were important aspects of a marriage, in order to minimize the consequences of such catastrophes emotions sometimes had to be put aside, and remarrying was not always a sentimental so much as a rational choice.90

Living standards did not improve much during the period under discussion, and real average wages grew above the pre-1914 levels only for a short period of time, in the second half of the 1920s. World War I and the subsequent economic depression had disastrous effects on every segment of society, but particularly on the urban workers. The spread of “incomplete” families and the “marriage squeeze” for females were two of its consequences. On the other hand, the foundation of the Republic brought an improvement in the living conditions of workers due to the passage of new socially conscious legislation, including the reduction of work hours and the introduction of vacations, pensions and unemployment benefits, not to mention the emancipation of women during the war.

1918 also marked a shift in the values of the generation of young workers, who seemed to bear more affinities with their middle class counterparts than their parents had. In leisure-time activities, the formation of subcultures, dating practices, pre-marital sex, and the free choice of partners, the young workers even seem to have adopted these practices more rapidly than the middle class youth. The youths were also reluctant to accept the exclusive identity as “workers,” as the register books and personal ads illustrate. Also marriages between members of different social classes probably became more common than they had been in the past. The levels of social inequality and perceptions regarding these differences nonetheless remained strong at the time, separating the social strata in terms of consumption, space or demographic behavior. In this respect Prague did not differ from other cities of Central Europe. Due to our limited knowledge of the social history of Polish and Hungarian working class families, comparisons can only be drawn with well-researched life histories of German and Austrian working class families. In this context, Prague was not unusual, differing primarily only in housing welfare policy, which was more developed in the case of Germany or Austria.

Archival Sources

Národní Archív České Republiky (NA ČR) [National Archive of the Czech Republic]. Ústřední výbor Komunistické strany Československa 1921–1938 [Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia 1921–1938].

Národní Archív České Republiky (NA ČR) [National Archive of the Czech Republic]. Československá sociálně demokratická strana dělnická [Czechoslovak Social Democratic Workers’ Praty].

Národní Archív České Republiky (NA ČR) [National Archive of the Czech Republic]. Společnost pro potírání chorob pohlavních [The Society for the Fight on the Venereal Diseases].

Archív Hlavního Města Prahy (AHMP) [Archive of Capital of Prague]. Kancelář primátora [The Office of Mayor].

Archív Hlavního Města Prahy (AHMP) [Archive of Capital of Prague]. Rada hlavního města Prahy [Council of the Capital].

Archív Hlavního Města Prahy (AHMP) [Archive of Capital of Prague]. Sbírka matrik [Collection of Register Books].

Archív Národního Technického Muzea (ANTM) [Archive of National Museum of Science] Sbírka vzpomínek a rukopisů [The Collection of Memoires and Manuscripts].

Všeodborový Archív (VA) [All Unions’Archive]. Odborové sdružení Československé [The Union’s Association of Czechoslovakia].

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Jemelka, Martin. Na kolonii: život v hornické kolonii dolu Šalomoun v Moravské Ostravě do začátku socialistické urbanizace [In the Colony: The Life in the Miner’s Colony Šalomoun in Moravská Ostrava before the Start of Socialist Urbanization]. Ostrava: VŠB–Technická univerzita Ostrava, 2007.

Kleindienst, Jonas. Die Wilden Cliquen Berlins: “Wild und frei” trotz Krieg und Krise. Geschichte einer Jugendkultur [The wild cliques of Berlin: “Wild and Free” Despite War and Crisis. Story of a Youth Culture]. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2011.

Kohn, Melvin. Class and Conformity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

Komarovsky, Mirra. Blue-collar marriage. New York: Random House, 1964.

Korčák, Jaromír. Vylidňování jižních Čech: studie demografická [The Depopulation of South Bohemia: A Study in Demography]. Prague: Spolek péče o blaho venkova, 1929.

Kosáková, Jana. “Příspěvek ke studiu způsobu života dělníků v Praze v Malém Břevnově” [Contribution to the Study of Worker’s Life Style in Prague District Malý Břevnov]. Master thesis, Charles University Prague, 1975.

Kučera, Rudolf. Život na příděl: válečná každodennost a politiky dělnické třídy v českých zemích 1914–1918 [The Life on the Ration: The War Everydayness and Politics of Working Class in the Czech Lands 1914–1918]. Prague: NLN, Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2013.

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Mónika Mátay

The Adventures of Dispute: a Marriage Crisis

Various developments in the study of history over the past few decades have borrowed theoretical assumptions and methodological innovations from cultural anthropology. Similarly, some of the leading scholars in the field of legal history have done the same.

In this article I investigate the avenues of dispute within a Calvinist burgher family from Debrecen, the biggest Hungarian city at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I try to reconstruct the individual strategies they adopted in order to achieve their goals and the means and tactics they used against each other in business, defamation conflicts or a divorce case. I approach the legal construction as a creative moment, a formative period in which the combination of central legislation and local statutes offered a space for individual strategies and legal maneuvering. In the analysis, I scrutinize both the disputing habits and the internal motivations of a quarreling couple, the Ladányis, to take their private matters and conflicts to the court, as well as the mutual influences of social actors and increasingly modern social institutions, more precisely, the city court and the legal profession.

Keywords: Calvinism, family, gender, marital dispute, divorce

In the 1970s, a harsh debate erupted among anthropologists over legal theory and practice in which the rule-centered or functionalist paradigm and the processual paradigm were juxtaposed.1 Representatives of the first model concentrated on formal written law and legal institutions as the only legitimate objects of legal analyses, and they thought that only laws and norms “from above” could define the boundaries between deviant and acceptable social behavior. Supporters of the second paradigm emphasized individual decisions and the legal competence of social actors, and they refused to view conflicts as “pathological phenomena.” For them, conflict is a natural ingredient of everyday life and it is unavoidable when the individual attempts to realize his or her goals. These anthropologists accept that “order” in a society provides the basis for stability, but they believe that order is not a well-defined structure, but rather a shifting and dynamic environment shaped by the members of the community.

In the end, the scholarly debate led to more ambitious considerations than the mere challenge to traditional views grounded in the coercive power of law and legal institutions. According to Sally Falk Moore, Simon Roberts, John L. Comaroff, Laura Nader and other anthropologists, the processual paradigm as a primary approach to legal life has the potential to pose more radical questions than the subordination of the formal, institutional perspective to individuals’ manipulative strategies and legal competence. In general they argue that the analyses of legal norms should rely on social behavior, because this is the formative context in which social norms and rules are determined. In other words, social behavior is more dependent on social relations than on the regulative authority of any political or social institutions. The shift of focal points led these anthropologists into a new arena in which they paid more attention to concrete conflicts among individuals or social groups as well as to the possible resolutions of these conflicts. That means that social practices are not subordinated to rules, but that they have equally important power in shaping social conditions.

According to the functionalist model, law determined the lives of ordinary people, and historians who applied it ignored the possibility that there might exist a less hierarchical structure and failed to articulate a more mutual correlation between regulations and actors. In the new framework, however, the reductionist interpretation of the law is replaced by a more flexible and complex paradigm in which social historians focus on individuals’ legal competence and manipulative capacities. Undoubtedly, the liberation of ordinary historical actors from the constraints of political, economic and social structures is not an entirely novel approach to history. Microhistorians, among others, Carlo Ginzburg, Nathalie Zemon Davis and Judith Brown, contributed to this “deliberating” process to a large degree. Ginzburg illustrated the contours of self-fashioning, the freedom of individual actions and decision-making strategies in the example of the miller, Menocchio, who even confronted the much-feared Inquisition and sacrificed his life to have a chance to discuss his strange ideas with competent people.2 Davis excellently crafted the personality of Martin Guerre and his rival, the impostor Arnaud du Tihl alias Pansette, who tried to make his fortune by slipping into another person’s skin.3 Brown, in a genuinely new fashion, showed the possibilities a unique female character had to gain public attention in Renaissance Italy.4 After reading these historical analyses, no one would think that these actors of the past were helpless puppets whose actions were dictated entirely by contemporary social and economic conditions. Just the opposite was the case; they seemed to be remarkably creative and active in shaping their own lives. The new paradigm in the study of legal practice made it possible to apply the findings of social and microhistory in a new field, legal history, which has been neglected by most social historians, including the representatives of the Annales School.

One of the most successful attempts to apply the findings of legal anthropology in social history is Thomas Kuehn’s collection of essays that claims to explicate a “legal anthropology” of Renaissance Italy.5 Although the ambitious endeavor remained incomplete in the sense that instead of Renaissance Italy the author focused only on one Italian city (Florence), this does not reduce the value of the work. Kuehn argues that laws and statutes attempted to diminish the freedom of action of the individual within a coherent and logical structuralist framework. Legal practice in real everyday life, however, was very different and contained many irrational, chaotic and contradictory elements. Kuehn paid particular attention to individual choices and decisions even if they did not seem cogent.

Using published and unpublished notarial records and private sources (such as letters and diaries), Kuehn demonstrates that the citizens of Florence were not only familiar with the ever-changing legal statutes, but also knew that the law had an immense influence on people’s everyday lives. For Kuehn, quattrocento Florentine law was incoherent and fluid; therefore, it left space for individual creativity and for the application of alternative methods of dispute in addition to formal litigation. “My desire has been to understand how, or how much, the very sophisticated and complex apparatus of law could serve the interests of litigants and to see how law functioned in a context with other mechanisms of disputing and settling disputes, ranging from fairly formal arbitration to violence.”6 The inherently ambiguous laws created a broad horizon for social actors, individuals and kinsmen, in which they could find ways of accomplishing their goals and interests in competition with other members of the community.

Kuehn’s vision of the relationship between law and society as a formative process, combined with his aim of integrating alternative legal habits into his investigation, provides his readers with a new understanding the legal authority of certain social groups, especially women. He admits that women’s legal activity was circumscribed by the immanently oppressive, patriarchal order of the period. At the same time, he also explains the manifest contradiction between formal legal regulations and everyday legal practice, and the interpretation and application of law in matters such as female inheritance or, more generally speaking, women’s legal authority.

Simona Cerutti, in her work on the summary court of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Torino, examines the day-to-day operation of this peculiar form of jurisprudence.7 She demonstrates that legal practice could serve as a major source of law, because the summary court excluded all forms of professional juridical intervention, including legal experts and written law, and was grounded purely in non-professional individuals’ sentences. Cerutti’s focus on this ancient institution made it possible to pay closer attention to the practical consequences of the ideological assumptions that were articulated by the followers of the processual legal paradigm. In Domestic Dangers, Laura Gowing attempts to reconstruct the litigation and, most importantly, the complex motives outside the court that inspired seventeenth-century Londoners to seek justice and initiate civic legal cases.8 Like Kuehn, Gowing warns against overemphasis on the patriarchal order of early modern society and illustrates in various ways how legal instruments could become powerful weapons even in the hands of women.

Legal anthropology provided several theoretical and methodological findings for historians that I consider in my work. The present inquiry, restricted to an examination of the squabbles of a Debrecenian couple in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is an attempt to uncover the importance of lawsuits by integrating into its methodology historiographical developments. As opposed to “rules-oriented” legal historians, who were reluctant to apply the law in actual cases and focused either on structural institutional changes or legal theory, my goal is to provide a more nuanced understanding of the couple’s litigation. Of course, I acknowledge that legal norms and rules are “ranges of discourse” which set constraints on disputants as they argued over marriages, wealth and honor.9 However, I try to avoid imposing on my understanding of litigation a sharp distinction between “theory” and “practice.” I approach the legal construction as a creative moment, a formative period, in which the combination of central legislation and local statutes opened up space for individual strategies and legal maneuvering. In the analysis, I scrutinize both the disputing habits and the internal motivations of the quarreling couple, the Ladányis, to take their private matters and conflicts to the court, and the mutual influences of social actors and modernizing social institutions, more precisely, the city court and the legal profession.

The Husband, the Wife and the Marriage

János Ladányi and Erzsébet Diószegi got married on April 27, 1774.10 Both of them were born in Debrecen, the biggest Hungarian city at the time. Debrecen is a former trading center located in the Hungarian plain, about 150 miles to the east of the present-day capital, Budapest. The city lay far from rivers, quarries, forests, and mountains that could have supplied it with raw materials for development and provided natural defensive borders. There was hardly reason to build a city on this empty plain, with the exception of the endless supply of space for expansion. Throughout the early modern era, and even today, visitors have always been struck by the stark contrast between the city’s large size and density and its rural characteristics. In 1715, it was the largest city in the country, and in 1787, when Joseph II ordered a census of the total population of Hungary, Debrecen, with its 29,000 inhabitants, was still ahead Pressburg (27,000; Pozsony in Hungarian, today Bratislava in Slovakia) and Buda (25,000).

Both János and Erzsébet were scions of noble families.11 Within the urban community nobles formed a somewhat closed and particular social group. Fleeing the plunders of Turkish soldiers, they began to move to Debrecen in the 1500s. During the following centuries the Debrecenian nobility permanently grew in size. Most of them never owned estates, but were so-called armalis nobles; in other words, they were ennobled without land, which in practice meant that they enjoyed tax exemption but had to work for a living.12 Most noblemen were farmers and artisans, others were Debrecenian merchants and intellectuals. Some of the nobles of Debrecen had estates outside the city, but regardless of that, none of them were allowed to invoke their noble privileges within the city; like the burghers, they were required to pay ranks and taxes. Although they preferred to marry among themselves, according to profession and residence, they integrated themselves well into the city. According to contemporary national and county records, 132 noble families lived in Debrecen in 1715, and during the reign of Joseph II (in the late 1700s) this number rose to 207. Despite the slow growth of the Debrecenian nobility, their proportion within the total urban population remained around one or two percent.13

The groom’s father, János Ladányi, was a native of Debrecen. Little is known about his background except that he was a hard-working citizen who contributed considerably to the family’s assets. His grandmother, Anna Rácz, made a last will and testament in which she praised her son, János the elder:

…he suffered with me much cold and warm, he rushed and troubled himself with my matters and helped me a great deal […] for these reasons all the money I lent to him once or twice [100 Forints] and the vineyard which I bought together with him I leave to János, and my other children should not demand any part of that wealth.14

The elder János Ladányi was probably an artisan, but the available sources do not indicate his craft. Due to the fact that he did not make a last will and testament and did not leave his son valuable properties, I assume he was not particularly wealthy. Affluent members of the urban community usually left behind a written will and made scrupulous decisions about their properties. Mihály Jándi, a tanner and member of a prestigious noble family, was undoubtedly rich, and his last will and testament documents his wealth. He was well-off, and this obliged him to make a number of final decisions. He had a house, several mills, a vineyard, a large piece of land, animals and movable assets.15

Many Debrecenian noblemen spent most of their income on their children. They spent their earnings on their sons’ education and their daughters’ dowries. The elder Ladányi provided his son with reasonable schooling. After completing his compulsory years of apprenticeship, at the very young age of 18, he joined the highly esteemed guild of tanners in Debrecen.16

There is more information about the bride’s background. She was a child of the illustrious Diószegi family.17 Her great-great-grandfather was István Diószegi, who had been a prominent professor of the city’s College for more than three decades. Among her ancestors, Sámuel, the famed chief justice of Debrecen, was a particularly prominent personality. He also headed the highly esteemed postmaster’s office and led the city during wartime at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He was well connected with contemporary European political elites and his exploits were legendary among the citizens of Debrecen. According to a popular anecdote he hosted the Swedish king, Charles XII, for an evening of entertainment.18 István Szücs, the nineteenth-century chronicler of Debrecen, noted that the king spent an amusing evening and a peaceful night in Diószegi’s house, where he met members of the Magistrate, Protestant pastors, and professors from the College.19

Erzsébet’s father was Pál Diószegi, a teacher at one of the ten girls’ schools in the city.20 Noblemen who did not possess extensive estates had to learn a trade or enter the world of industry or the intellectual professions.21 Debrecenian elementary school teachers established the Teachers’ Association in 1708, which increased their prestige, but this still did not mean financial recognition. Teachers in Debrecen lived under miserable conditions. They received their salaries directly from the parents, which resulted in endless complaints on behalf of the teachers: “[…] they brought their children from one school to the other and so they avoided paying tuition-fees. They did not pay, so we could not even afford our basic everyday necessities.”22

Although Pál Diószegi registered his daughter at one of the girls’ schools in the city, Erzsébet apparently possessed no more than a very basic education—typical of elementary schools of that time.23 She learned to read and write and she probably acquired primary mathematical skills and a fundamental understanding of the Bible. Decades later, a letter she wrote as an adult indicates that she could write, but she made many grammatical and spelling mistakes. Like many girls at the time, she most probably learned the necessary skills of a housewife, and later she became an assiduous housekeeper.

Erzsébet had two brothers, Mihály and Sámuel. Mihály married into the nationally recognized Fazekas family. His brother-in-law was a writer and the author of one of the most popular satires of the early nineteenth century, Ludas Matyi, which is still required reading for Hungarian school children. Erzsébet’s other brother, the twelve-year younger Sámuel, taught at the city’s College. Later he moved to a neighboring town, Hajdúböszörmény, where he worked as a schoolmaster. He then moved on to a bigger city in the Hungarian Plain, Kecskemét. He attended the University of Gottingen, where he studied geometry, physics and medicine. He completed his university degree in the 1790s and became a Protestant pastor in his native Debrecen. Sámuel co-authored the first Hungarian botanical treatise and was member of the enlightened intellectual workshop, the Debrecen Assembly. His sermons, entitled Moralistic Teachings in Preaching, were published in Debrecen in 1808.24

We do not know whose idea the marriage was, nor can we know how and when they met first. Both the Ladányi and the Diószegi families resided in the heart of Debrecen, and most likely the couple had already known each other as children. There are no references to mutual attraction or love in the archival documents, but neither physical attraction nor emotional commitment was considered a prerequisite for marriage in the waning years of the eighteenth century. The surviving archival sources on divorce cases suggest that marriages were usually arranged by the parents or relatives and sometimes the couple hardly saw each other before the wedding.

Marriage was considered the first real step into adulthood. In order to be accepted as a “mature man,” János had to get married. He was already 26 and had been guild master for eight years at the time of his wedding. Most likely he was following public expectations when he decided to marry Erzsébet. The bride was almost the same age, 25, anything but too young to marry by the standards of the time. Examining registers of marriage from this period, the data suggest that most women married about five years earlier, around the age of 20.25 For a woman, marriage was almost compulsory: in the traditional Protestant views of Debrecenians, it was shameful, dangerous and immoral for a woman to live alone.26

In Debrecen, parents or relatives arranged marriages. They introduced the couple and controlled the necessary fiscal negotiations. Documents of divorce cases suggest that economic motivation provided a weak bond to sustain a bad marriage, and mere financial ties were not enough to prevent separation or divorce. Many plaintiffs in divorce cases complained that they disliked their spouses from the first time they met and reluctantly yielded to parental pressure, resulting in a forced wedding. They used this circumstance to convince the court that the marriage had not been the result of a voluntary decision. Erzsébet Böszörményi, the wife of János Szilágyi, a cobbler, argued during her divorce trial that “boundless parental power forced her to marry János Szilágyi,” but after nine doleful years of her marriage she preferred to try the life of the lonesome female than suffer the hardships of living together with her husband.27

Presumably, in this case money did not serve as a primary motivation for the marriage.28 Neither of the two families was particularly wealthy. Despite the lack of economic motivation, the parents thought this an acceptable match because of the noble origins of both families. Nobles in the market towns of the Hungarian Great Plain lived in closed communities and preferred to marry among themselves. In most cases, noble families refused to allow their children to marry to non-noble citizens.29

The couple had been living in lodgings for more than twenty years and could afford a house only as late as 1798, when they received Erzsébet’s inheritance.30 It is true that in Debrecen many young people, even scions of wealthy citizens, often began their adult lives in a sublease. That did not necessarily mean that they were poor. But the fact that the Ladányis were unable to buy a house for more than two decades indicates that they were not financially prosperous. Ultimately, they could only afford the house when they received Erzsébet’s inheritance.

Once they were able to buy their own home, they purchased it along with a very small piece of land. In nineteenth-century Debrecen houses were surrounded by land. Actually, the value of the property was dependent on the size of the adjacent estate, not the building itself. The Ladányis bought their house with a plot that was a bit smaller than the average size on their street.31

A document about the renovation of the house in 1823 offers a rough sketch of the ground plan. It was a typical Debrecen home, neither rich nor poor. There were two rooms in the house. The main room, which was bigger and more comfortable, was the multipurpose tisztaszoba (clean room). The window in this room afforded a glimpse of the street. The members of the household rarely used this room; it was a combined living and dining room, and visitors were entertained here. The only bedroom of the house, reserved for the spouses and their daughter, was in the back of the building. The family spent most of their time in the kitchen, located between tisztaszoba and the bedroom, which also served as the main entryway from the yard.

Unfortunately, the sources do not indicate why the couple was in such dire financial straits. Whatever the case, they were unable to accumulate much wealth despite the fact that Ladányi was a recognized master craftsman. After entering the guild in 1766, he made something of a name for himself as a talented artisan by producing high quality leatherwork.32 The Magistrate rewarded him for being more productive than his fellow-artisans in the guild by bestowing monetary recognition on him. His products earned a special prize from Joseph II, the emperor in 1785, furthering bolstering his reputation.33 When making his testament, he displayed with pride to the witnesses and the notary “that golden medal […] which weighs about 10 ounces and which [he] received from late glorious Joseph II for exemplary knowledge of his trade.”

Erzsébet contributed substantially to his work as an artisan: “in the practice of the craft she took an active part.”34 In the everyday life of an artisan family, women always played an important role. In addition to performing the traditional tasks of women, which included cooking and looking after the servants and the apprentices, they were also expected to work the land, trim and hoe the vines, and feed domestic animals. As legal documents suggest, Debrecenians harshly criticized “lazy and neglectful” housewives. Mária Zefer, a cobbler’s wife, “worked in the craft like a man, as much as she could.”35 Besides assisting their husbands in the workshop, artisans’ wives also sold the products at local or even distant fairs. If the husband joined the army, left his family, or squandered the family’s earnings, women often took over the craft as if they were masters. We also know of a few examples when women, although they lived together with their husbands, were independent artisans. Although her husband was a well-off quilt-maker, János Kapros’ wife brought in a huge amount of money by herself according to her husband: “she has always lived on independent earnings.”36

Erzsébet’s contribution to the family’s income was essential because Ladányi did not hire apprentices. Certainly he could have had assistants, and he was competent enough to supervise the workshop with multiple apprentices. Sámuel Teleki, a royal representative in Debrecen and a well-known, enlightened figure of contemporary public life, noted in his report on the work of tanners in the city that masters should send their apprentices to the house, where they could profit from Ladányi’s knowledge of the craft. Still, in the documents of the guild no assistants were ever registered with the tanner. Erzsébet later testified during the trial that young men were afraid of her husband’s “cruelty and rigor.” There were many rumors in the city regarding his unruly behavior. How could she live together with a man who alienated potential apprentices and seemed so uninterested in furthering their economic means?

Dilemmas of a Bad Marriage

The marriage was anything but a good emotional match, at least by the second decade. Erzsébet wrote a statement around 1806 or 1807 that was fashioned in the style of a last will and testament and bears further witness to the hardships of their relationship. We do not know to whom she addressed her writing. Most likely, she just wanted to document the miserable conditions under which she lived. Although this unique reflection on her circumstances is informal, she prepared it as part of the legal maneuverings that she used against her husband, or rather as part of a strategy to ensure that she would be able to defend herself from him when necessary. She complains that, with her husband, “[she] suffered much, and in particular in the course of the past four years I underwent enormous torments.”37 She does not go into the details, but the bitter tone of her letter attests to endless miseries. Most likely, Ladányi brutally struck and possibly tortured his wife. At the end of her one-page long note, Erzsébet crafts a statement in a convention meant to leave a record of her misery. She complains about her husband’s control over the family house and his intent to distribute her wealth. Ladányi refused to give her either the wealth she had inherited from her parents or the goods they had accumulated together. She declares that she wishes to leave all her belongings to her daughter and grandchildren. The letter suggests that she had decided to leave her husband: “that from now on I not suffer further disasters.”38 Such an act would make her a social outcast.

Erzsébet’s letter shows that her relationship with her husband was irrevocably ruined, and yet they did not separate. We learn from Ladányi’s last will and testament that the couple split-up several times. He laments that his wife “was unfaithful to him, she left him many times, on at least 13 occasions.”39 Finally, in 1818, at the age of 69, she fled from the house, three years before he made his will and testament. Why did she wait so long? Why did she return to her “devilish husband” over and over? And most importantly, why did she fail to initiate divorce proceedings against Ladányi?

Were there any economic considerations behind her reluctance to leave? In Debrecen, an independent life for a woman was hard, but possible. Compared to their counterparts in small villages, where women could only find work jointly with their husbands or male relatives, Debrecenian women had opportunities to work outside the family circle. At times, widows could make respectable incomes, and when they made their wills, they proudly emphasized how much they had amassed after their husbands’ deaths. Mária Ferge, the widow of a carpenter, acquired money through net making.40 Women also worked as servants, midwives, bartenders and innkeepers. They spun thread for weavers and made loaves of bread or cakes to sell. One young girl made her living by painting furniture. Between 1820 and 1830, more than 400 spinners were registered as artisans working outside of guilds, and most of them were women. In all likelihood, Erzsébet could have managed to live independently from her husband. She probably had skills in some traditionally female work. Still, she decided to stay. Why? If divorce was legally possible and socially acceptable, why did Erzsébet Diószegi not decide to write a petition and start divorce proceedings against her husband? One possibility was that, while divorce was considered acceptable, it clearly was not looked on favorably at the time, and this may have influenced Erzsébet.

In 1791, Leopold II, the Habsburg Emperor, passed a law that permitted Protestants to be granted a divorce in a secular court for the first time. The law was liberal by the standards of the time, since it allowed divorce on a broad range of grounds and divorce was made available both for men and women. Still, Leopold II’s enlightened policies did not lead to a divorce revolution in Debrecen. Between 1793, when the first petition for divorce was submitted to the court, and the middle of the nineteenth century 201 couples in Debrecen decided to get divorced. 41

Leopold II’s legislation was similar to statutes in Germany, where people could also get divorced regardless of their social status or gender.42 A divorce law was introduced in France during the revolution in 1792 that prompted thousands of French couples to turn to the courts.43 In England, the situation was not that liberal. For the overwhelming majority, legal divorce was not available. A Divorce Reform Act was introduced in 1857.44

To initiate a divorce case in Debrecen, first the couple had to go to their pastor and request a certificate asserting that reconciliation was impossible. Then the main plaintiff called on a barrister and initiated the divorce proceedings in the local court. In this sense, the ecclesiastical authorities played an important role in the legal procedure, but the decision was made by a secular assembly.

Remarks that were made in the course of trials and the arguments that were made by the magistrates when the issued their decisions suggest that the courts were adamantly opposed to divorce. They were well aware that citizens of Debrecen paid close attention to the outcomes of divorce trials: “Many eyes watch at this scandalous trial in the local Public and eagerly await its outcome […].”45 Clearly, the judges attempted to discourage divorce among Debrecenians, and whenever possible they rejected petitions for divorce.

A high number of divorce petitions were withdrawn, which suggests that the vast majority of ordinary people were somewhat hesitant about divorce. As is often the case in the study of history, sources yield little insight into the opinions individuals had regarding the dissolution of a marriage. Still, on the basis of the plentiful archival documents, we can attempt to reconstruct views about divorce expressed by the couples involved and by the witnesses, who most often were parents, relatives, servants, tenants or neighbors. Like the judges of the city, most of the petitioners said they were reluctant to divorce and contended that the drastic step had been forced upon them by external circumstances. They complained about their spouses’ misconduct, which included multiple attempts to poison and physical and psychological torture, alcoholism, adultery, and absence. Despite the hostility of the legal elite and the reluctance of the general public to accept divorce, the number of court cases that ended in divorce and the attitudes of defendants suggest that someone living in an impossible marriage could find a sympathetic ear and persuade the courts and society in general to accept divorce as one possible solution to a marital breakdown.

In addition to the doubts she may have had regarding the attitudes towards divorce, Erzsébet may well have had several other considerations on her mind. For a while, she might have hoped that Ladányi’s coarseness would pass. Perhaps she thought of her family, especially her brother, Samuel, the respected scholar, and did not want to involve them in a scandalous family battle. She had a daughter, Julianna, whom she certainly did not want to leave under the care of a brutal father. Gathering her belongings, leaving the house, and starting a new life under someone else’s roof was anything but appealing in the eyes of a lonely mother with a child. The probability that a divorce decree would give her back her ancestral property was very low. Not that the court was reluctant to respect women’s property rights, but Erzsébet’s inheritance had been spent when the couple had purchased their house. Even if the divorce sentence was favorable to her, due to her husband’s extremely aggressive behavior, she would never see a penny of her money. Finally, she had invested not only her money but also her energy into the shop and the household. She may have been unwilling to leave everything behind. Last but not least, though she might not have put it in these words, she certainly was concerned about her reputation as a woman. She was no longer young and did not have significant economic resources, so her chances of marrying again were very small. For whatever reason(s), she learned to accept life with her husband for almost fifty years. What can we know about the person with whom she decided to live for so long? Did he have any redeeming qualities that persuaded her stay, or did she remain with him simply because of the factors enumerated above?

János was vindictive, bitter, and peevish. As a young man, he worked as a tanner. In the census of 1792, twenty years into their marriage, when all the members of the tanner guild of Debrecen were registered (including the widows), he was listed as “inactive”: “They are masters, but they do not work in the trade themselves, neither do they have assistants who would work for them, and they do not bring profit to the guild.”46 Why did Ladányi decide to stop practicing his trade? We know about special cases when an artistan went into bankruptcy or was too incompetent or helpless to work alone. Many artisans of Debrecen were engaged in agriculture in the city’s extended adjacent lands.47 They purchased farms outside the borders of the city and worked in the fields, in addition to working as members of the guild. Sometimes the wife took over the trade while the husband devoted his energies to cattle breeding and other peasant work. None of this was true of Ladányi. Unquestionably, he was a very talented tanner, and neither in wealth registers nor in the legal documents is there evidence indicating that he pursued work in agriculture.48

It is impossible to know why he stopped working as a tanner, but in all probability he thought that he would raise more money and better succeed in life as a casual businessman than as a hard-working artisan. We know for certain that he abandoned his craft sometime in the 1790s, and, as the surviving legal documents of his multiple conflicts with fellow citizens suggest, most likely his earnings came from fishy business dealings.

A Quarrelsome Nobleman

Ladányi started his first legal case against a certain András Nagy, a local salesman, in 1815.49 They were involved in a honey hoarding business together, but, as Ladányi argued in court, Nagy had cheated him and refused to give him his share.50 Nagy, on the other hand, firmly stated that he had never asked Ladányi to take part in the transaction because Ladányi had no talent and he was also far too vehement and “impetuous.” Still, he required the money for the transaction. Nagy called the tanner a person “who was well-known for his unruly behavior” and “made a judge of himself and took revenge without any consideration of the consequences.” The court rejected Ladányi’s request on the basis of the lack of a written contract. Further evidence about his court cases suggests that he was engaged in several business dealings in which he became entangled in interpersonal conflicts and gained quite a few enemies in Debrecen.

The tanner was unbearably aggressive, a real scandal-maker. In 1816, one of the city representatives began a defamation case against him because he had publicly called him a bastard. Ladányi was sentenced to pay a considerable fine, and the judges, who usually were impartial, used extremely derogatory language when talking about him. They described him as “hideous-tongued, blatant, and disobedient.”51 Undoubtedly, the city authorities were tired of the intractable old man’s disruptive behavior. The Magistrate was especially sensitive to a haughty demeanor and the flaunting of noble origins.52 Clearly Erzsébet lived with an irresponsible husband who abused her and all those around him. Enough was enough. In 1821, after 47 years of marriage, she called on a well-known attorney, Gábor Keresztessy, and asked him to draft a petition for divorce.

The brief for Erzsébet was a masterpiece, both in its style and its content. The petition effectively captured the attention of the judges and no less effectively infuriated Ladányi (these two goals went hand in hand for a well-written legal petition at the time). Many of the most successful petitions were first-person narratives created on the popular notion that putting one’s life on display in all its details was automatic proof of virtue and honesty. One was not compelled to address the court, but this could be a very convincing tactic. So, Keresztessy composed a first-person account that studiously imitated the tone of a humiliated, tortured and guileless elderly woman: “A single day has not passed without me suffering from his [Ladányi] violent nature, either because I am chased or because I am tortured. At times, he forced me to take my clothes off and then he laid me down naked on the floor and, standing next to me, beat my naked body with a wooden stick until he finally got tired. I remained half-dead on the floor, he kicked me several times... A year before last Christmas he hurt me so badly with a ripping iron that I lost one of my eyes; other parts of my body have also been injured. Considering that it is impossible to share a house with such an inhuman husband, who has threatened to kill me one day, a year ago I had to flee, and I moved in under someone else’s roof to escape his fury.”53

The opening gambit of the petition was unquestionably dramatic and artistic, at least according to standards at the time. Lawyers attempted to sway the magistrates by appealing to their sense of compassion, indignation, and horror. They therefore composed sensationalistic narratives of the tragic turns of a simple life. These narratives demanded a unique vocabulary consisting of extravagantly excessive terms. Contemporary lawyers almost routinely adorned their briefs with hyperbolic language, and they presented the two parties to the case as moral polar opposites: complete innocence on the one hand, the embodiment of evil on the other.

Keresztessy’s rhetorical efforts harmozined with the everyday realities of early nineteenth-century Debrecen. The most common manifestation of family breakdown, at least according to the evidence presented to the court, was domestic violence. Offended wives and eyewitnesses gave testimony indicating cases of brutal physical torture. Usually violence was directed at women and can simply be described as wife beating. Although men did not have a monopoly on rage, examples of women using violence, even to defend themselves, were rare. While it is impossible to provide a catalogue of the various forms of violence used by men against their wives, the offenses included frequent punches and kicks, beatings with sticks, stones, and whips, and the use of knives or whatever else happened to come to hand, not to mention starvation, imprisonment, the binding of various body parts, and murder. This list, though surely not complete, gives an impression of the many ways in which husbands vented their fury. Legal testimony made frequent mention of women’s cries of pain and calls for help, which indicates that physical violence against wives was a common pattern of masculine behavior. Was this really true, or were the varieties of brutality fictive contrivances, little more than a rhetorical strategy used by shrewd attorneys who were seeking favorable rulings for their female clients? The truth is perhaps somewhere between the two extremes. Women may have exaggerated their complaints in their statements to the judges, but at the same time, divorce and criminal documents attest to widespread male violence against women and indicate that the charges that were levelled against husbands and fathers for unusual brutality could not possibly all have been inventions, and indeed may well have been mostly true.

Contemporaries considered wife beating a proper and accepted form of discipline and punishment for a woman’s misbehavior. Relatives and neighbors did not interfere in this kind of domestic strife unless the wife’s life was in danger. Erzsébet Somogyi complained that her husband struck her so brutally, and “without any true reason,” that she needed medical treatment for weeks.54

Keresztessy’s brief, although somewhat manipulative, was not exaggerated at all. The certificate of pastoral reconciliation, which had to be attached to the petition, confirmed the allegations of brutality. Ladányi acknowledged his wife’s accusations: “He confessed to me the cruel acts he had visited on his wife several times. He also declared that he did the right things to his wife when he beat her, so I do believe that there is no hope for improvement.”55

Erzsébet also accused her husband of adultery, saying that “my murderous husband met with bad women and squandered our money …”56 If the plaintiff had a good lawyer and was able to provide satisfactory evidence, these allegations were enough to persuade the court in Debrecen to grant a divorce. In the Ladányis’ case divorce was never granted. A few months after the beginning of the case, Ladányi made a last will and testament, and shortly after that he died.

Last Farewell as Punishment

The tanner’s last will and testament caused as much distress after his death as his presence had during his life. He decided to punish his unruly family members and left the house, which he had purchased together with his wife, to the city. “Forgetting about his fatherly duties,” Ladányi also excluded his daughter, Julianna, and his grandchildren from the inheritance.57 His daughter’s behavior had been a great disappointment to him, because, despite his wishes, she had left a suitable and auspicious marriage that he had arranged for her, and after her divorce she had married a second time, taking a lowly pastor as her husband, although her father harshly opposed the union.

Ladányi sent a letter to the council written in a humble tone in which he said that he wanted to make a last will and testament. He named the people he wished to be present for the act. Usually, the chief justice designated five or seven members of the council and neighbors or friends of the person making the will to execute the process. As always, the tanner’s case was exceptional. He had so many enemies in the city that he was cautious about including his friends as members of the testament committee. He knew very well that his wishes ran contrary to the law. In all probability, he must have realized that the members of his family were likely to challenge the testament after his death.

The process of drawing up his will was a magnum opus, a melodramatic performance. Ladányi moved those who were present to pity, but at the same time, he remained dignified. He made it clear that he was well aware of his extraordinary skills. He was sitting on his bed when the officials entered the room. He then stood up clumsily and crawled to his trunk. He opened it and produced the major piece of evidence of his family’s cruelty: “a torn and blood-spoiled shirt,” which he had been wearing when his granddaughter’s husband, Bálint Szetsey, had attacked him. In tears, he described to the officials his family’s rogueries and his loneliness, calling his wife and his daughter “disloyal, unjust, and his murderers.” Then he got to the point. He declared that he “had always lived in this city in peace and quietly.” He also reminded the committee the Magistrate had once rewarded him for his extraordinary talent. To ensure that he would be remembered as an upright citizen, he had chosen to leave his house, which was so dear to his heart, to the city. He gave the medal that he had received from the emperor to the Reformed Church under one specific condition: “the pastors should make a small golden plate of the medal with his name engraved on it....”

As of the first half of the nineteenth century, personal memory became a much more prominent concern among Debrecenians. Testators had a strategy for the afterlife: they made decisions regarding how to be sure their names would be remembered. Some of them established special scholarships in the city’s College, others made pious gifts to the Calvinist church. In Ladányi’s case, his self-fashioning included stressing his noble origins, to which the family documents attested. Finally, although “they do not deserve it,” he was “generous” with his family and forgave them for their hostile behavior. He gave the chattels to his wife and daughter, but “the people who took care of him should get a reasonable portion of that wealth.”58

A City against a Widow

A few days after making his last will and testament, Ladányi died.59 His testament was read aloud in the presence of his widow’s new attorney, Sándor Sinay, who “challenged the document as a whole and in all of its details.” Sinay argued that the house that Ladányi had left in his will to Debrecen was a common property with his wife, and when the couple had purchased it, they had used Erzsébet’s inheritance. The widow initiated a case to revoke the testament, while the representative of the city ordered it finalized.

A few months earlier Ladányi had tried a very unusual trick to cheat his heirs. He tried to exchange the house for one outside of the city. Alarmed by her husband’s plans, Erzsébet had immediately turned to the court and asked the judges to prevent the transaction.”60

It is hard to imagine that Ladányi, who was current in legal matters and knew how quickly gossip spread in the city, seriously believed that he would be able to pull off this transaction behind Erzsébet’s back.61 Most probably, he hoped that his wife, who was weak and was struggling with financial troubles, would be unable to exercise her legal rights. Even with a lawyer’s help, if the real estate were no longer in the city, it would have been much more difficult for her to stake her claim to it. The transaction was registered in the city’s real estate records, but since the court ruled in her favor, she could take some satisfaction in the fact that she had hindered her husband’s attempt to defraud her at the last moment.

Still, the old woman was in a weak position, because her husband’s last will and testament caused her a great deal of trouble. She had to fight against the city, against commissioners with whom, while her husband had been alive, she “had apparently experienced […] good will.” In the legal petition, her attorney, Sinay, marhsalled the whole arsenal of eloquent romantic rhetoric.62 He reminded the judges that they had previously expressed their compassion for the weak and defenseless woman when she had suffered from her husband’s “brutal cruelty.” He described Erzsébet’s torments in detail, the horrors of her decades-long marriage. He asked the judges not to withhold their compassion now in a time of need that matched her misery during the divorce case. He also reminded the jury that Ladányi had deliberately caused confusion with his last will and testament, which had created the conflict of interest between the city and Erzsébet. Based on the man’s history and the evidence against him, Sinay claimed that the will should simply be nullified and that the court should allow the homeless widow to move back into her house. Two days later, Erzsébet received permission to move back home.63 She had every reason to hope that neither she nor her family would ever be disturbed again by any questions concerning its ownership.

This, however, was not the case. Although the court was well aware of Ladányi’s malicious intentions, the widow’s interests conflicted with the interests of the city. In the end, Erzsébet was allowed to remain in the house for the rest of her life, but the city retained half of its ownership. This essentially meant that after her death the house had to be sold at public auction and the heirs were only entitled to half of the total price. Erzsébet had no other choice than to accept the ruling. Legal restrictions made it impossible to open the same case again, but even had they not, she herself had neither the money nor the energy to renew struggle against the city. She was old and weak and could hardly survive on the money she received from her tenants. She died in 1825 at the age of 75, in a “miserable state,”64 according to the register of deaths.

The Stalwart

After her father’s death, Julianna, who had also been widowed, decided to leave her own household and move in with her mother.65 Her children had already grown up, so this seemed like a rational choice, since it would have been financially wasteful to maintain two separate households for two single women.66 After her mother’s death, for five peaceful years nothing happened to the house. Finally, in 1830, the Magistrate decided to enforce the ruling. The sale of the house was announced by the beat of a drum, in the typical fashion, and the property was turned over to the buyer who offered the highest price. A local artisan purchased it for a reasonable price that exceeded the opening bid.67

Julianna brought a suit against the city immediately. She claimed that nine years earlier, in 1821, Ladányi had violently taken her money and invested a large amount into a precarious brandy business. Since the city now held her father’s estate, she contended that it was also responsible for his debts to her. She argued that the business in question caused her immense losses, and now she demanded compensation. She also demanded a huge amount as reconstruction expenses. Once she had moved in with her mother, she had initiated major reconstruction of the old building. Moreover, in an attempt to appeal to people’s sense of compassion, she requested funds to cover her mother’s funeral expenses.68

The next step in the legal procedure was to collect information from the witnesses named by Julianna. She listed people who stated that they knew about the brandy conflict and remembered the scandalous event very well. Julianna gathered enough evidence to prove that she finally had had to sell the brandy for only one-third of the original sum her father had stolen from her. Although Ladányi had promised in front of other people to compensate her, he had never lived up to his word.69

She went too far and her apparent greed made the jury irate. For five years after her mother’s death, she lived rent-free in a house that was owned by the city. The lawyer representing the city rejected Julianna’s request and indignantly lectured her on the “impudence” of her suggestions. Legally, the demands were unfounded because she had already received her maternal inheritance, half of the price of the house.

Again years passed. In 1835, as a final step, Julianna played her last card. She alarmed her adult son by explaining that the case did not seem very promising, and she asked him to address a letter to the jury. Her well-educated son used an age-old trick when he tried to play on the jury’s empathy. He described his mother’s lonely life in detail, the torments of an atrocious father, the sacrifices she had made for her mother, and in general he convincingly portrayed Julianna’s life as a permanent struggle for survival. He argued that she needed the money she was seeking from the city badly. Otherwise, the judges risked committing the cruel sin of sentencing a lonesome and deprived woman to starvation.70 The Ladányis’ legal skirmishes came to an end in 1836, more than twenty years after János Ladányi had first sought to exact his form of justice in the city court. In their final ruling, the judges rejected all of Julianna’s requests for money, stressing that the widow had been disrespectful of the jury’s generosity. She should have been satisfied with half of the price of her homestead. Any further demand was unrealistic and surely demonstrated her infinite greed.71 There is no evidence indicating that either Julianna or her children were involved in any further legal fights in Debrecen.

Conclusion

My interest in Ladányi’s case was piqued by a series of legal conflicts and cat-and-mouse games that he played with his family and the city authorities. I had been working with last wills and testaments from Debrecen, collecting statistical data from the documents in order to study the mental changes of the Calvinist burghers. In the meantime, however, I began to understand the limitations of the quantitative approach. János Ladányi appeared in my database as an old, married male who had one daughter, who was a Calvinist by religion, a tanner by profession, and a nobleman, and whose most important decision was to will his house to the Magistrate. Shortly after reading about the circumstances of his decision, I realized that by forcing his life into a column of figures I lost useful information about his motives and I misinterpreted his acts. After all, he was not a generous donator, but a vengeful Debrecenian tanner who wanted to vex his wife and daughter, and he was fairly successful in doing so.

In fact, preparing a last will and testament was not a particularly widespread practice among Debrecenians. Although this was one of the most important privileges of the city, granted to Debrecen as early as the fifteenth century, until the mid-1700s it remained rather sporadic. Even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was not common. No more than 5 percent of the adult population prepared written wills.72 Although it was not obligatory to provide a reason for making a will, most people explicitly named their reasons for doing so. The overwhelming majority of Debrecenian testators were obsessed with potential conflicts among their successors, and included clauses and conditions in their wills to avoid fights over their wealth. Many will-makers stated that they actually decided to leave behind a written testament because they thought that the family members and relatives would not be able to agree about how to divide up their belongings. Most burghers only referred to these possible “battles” in general, but some explained their family circumstances in detail and named the potential enemies. Mihály Csonka, a farmer, declared in his last will and testament that he had had two wives, that he had living children from both, and that he wished “to avoid competition and litigation” among them.73 Csonka tried to explain his circumstances as clearly as possible, and he described in detail what he had accumulated with his first and second wives, how they had raised the children, how much they had spent on them and what they had already received in their adult years. These explanations served as justifications for his decisions. Meticulous testators enlisted not only the members of their nuclear families, but also their cousins, uncles, aunts, brothers-in-law, and sisters-in-law, not to mention other legatees, such as friends, servants, journeymen, neighbors, mentors, doctors and lawyers. The most common reason for making a will was to prevent “disturbances,” and other factors (such as war, epidemics, illness, old age or enlistment) were mentioned much less frequently. What should one think of this rhetoric, that placed such emphasis on order and peace?

It should not be taken for granted. Reading the testaments more closely, one has the impression that conflict-management rhetoric was only a “facade” and actually concealed the real motivation of will-making: in many cases the testament served to reward and to punish surviving family members, relatives and other relations.74 Most testators made decisions that were favorable to one or more heirs, while leaving significantly less to others or even completely excluding them from the inheritance. These acts did not prevent conflicts, they generated them. We can identify various grounds for privileging or punishing heirs that were a mix of emotional causes and rational considerations.

Those children—both sons and daughters—who “showed cold behavior” and neglected their parents were more likely to receive less of the inheritance. Parents often accused their adult children of “never showing up on the doorstep anymore,” although they provided them with financial means for their professions and weddings.75 The archival sources suggest that emotional alienation had the biggest role in the decisions, but other factors could also play an important part. Testators kept personal offences in evidence and often mentioned them in wills, which were tools with which they could inflict punishment for what they saw as improper behavior. István Dobszai complained that his elder sons did not respect him and that once one of them had even struck his beard.76 As a consequence, the aggressive child was excluded from the inheritance. In addition to physical violence, other forms of abuse were mentioned in the complaints, including verbal abuse and theft. István Horváth had two adult daughters. The younger, Erzsébet, “once called him a bad father and old man in front of the maid.”77 Her punishment was severe: she did not get a penny of her father’s possessions. An old widow, Anna Oláh, left her soldier son nothing because “when he enlisted in the army, he stole 70 Forints from her.”78

Parents rewarded children who had learned trades, built careers, and accumulated wealth. They scathingly commented on half-wit, alcoholic, vagrant, and prodigal offspring, who received less than their siblings because of their misbehavior. In most cases, testators did not consider the causes of successes and failures, but simply punished “losers” by leaving them trifling amounts or excluding them entirely from the family wealth.79 Deviant children were regarded as unworthy of “parental benevolence,” both because they were unable to attain much in life and because they were a source of shame for their families. Idiots got less or nothing, and they were often left in the care of their healthy family members. Sons were punished for frequenting pubs and daughters for immoral sexual behavior. János Csarnai, a potter, endlessly grumbled about his children. His sons were journeymen, but he could not expect much of them (so he lamented), because they spent more time in inns than in the workshop. His daughter, Erzsébet, stole from him several times and, even worse, wasted her life in taverns, engaging in “sinful conversation with strangers, causing her father much bitterness and pain.”80

Of all the possible sins a child could commit against his or her parents, entering a match that did not have the approval of the parents was the worst. Péter Mélius, the city’s most influential pastor in the sixteenth century, defined marriage as the following: “Marriage is a contract that is dependent on the free and legal consent of the uniting parties and their parents.”81 By the nineteenth century, parents had somewhat less influence on their children’s decisions to marry, their approval remained an important consideration. An advantageous match could secure the family more wealth and stability, and children who resisted their parents’ instructions could suffer exclusion. John Gillis has argued that early modern parents regarded the marriage of one of their children as a capital investment; 82 in nineteenth-century Debrecen this perception was still dominant. Although in the early 1800s Sámuel Diószegi, the protestant pastor and professor of the city’s College, preached that parental coercion was the worst possible foundation of a marriage, in everyday practice fathers and mothers continued to meddle in their children’s affairs, and they used the testaments as a means of enforcing their will.83 János Kováts’s widow openly blackmailed her son: “if he does not marry that girl from Somogy with whom he had a secret relationship against his mother’s and relatives’ will, he will receive 40 Forints as a reward; if, however, he marries her, he gets nothing for his wedding.”84

Testators also mentioned their spouses in their wills. Although wives and husbands received less attention than sons and daughters, the distribution of an inheritance could serve as the pronouncement of final judgment on the spouses’ behavior. Debrecenians made a very clear distinction between good and bad marriages; from the testaments we can more or less reconstruct the criteria of both. In a good marriage the spouses lived together peacefully and diligently accumulated wealth. In this case, the surviving mate could at least expect access to common properties for a lifetime; if there were no children, he or she could count on full property rights. When the union was less successful, the will was often written in a bitter tone and dwelt on the everyday details of the bad marriage, resembling more at times a petition for divorce than a last will and testament. An artisan, György Horváth, took five wives in the course of his long life. When making his last will and testament he had an opportunity to compare them to one another. While his second mate was “hard-working and modest,” his last spouse was a rover who neglected him in his final days: “she does nothing but take her baby in her arms, and she stays out of the house with him all day.”85 She was excluded from any inheritance by her husband for her misbehavior. Many people punished their spouses in their testaments. The causes varied, but drinking, laziness, prodigality and infidelity were the most common.

One might be tempted to ask at this point whether Ladányi’s will was, after all, really so extraordinary. The fact that so many people used their last will and testament to exact vengeance or bestow rewards suggests that his ploy was not exceptional. He adered to an old and widespread tradition by punishing the members of his family, especially his daughter, Julianna, who married against his will, and his wife Erzsébet, who may well have been acting on her daughter’s advice when she initiated divorce proceedings against him. The testament is a formal legal action, but also a social practice which serves to address private conflicts.

The tanner consciously induced and cannily seized on the conflict of interest between the city and his family, maximizing the avenues of revenge. His story also allows us to pose questions about the authority and role of a last will and testament, and it offers insights into a historical phenomenon usually overlooked by social historians who tend to end their analysis where, one might suggest, they should begin. They interpret testaments as documents that settle earthly matters, taking for granted the idea that the words of the testament, cloaked in legal authority, are a terminal point, and not the beginning of new conflicts between the surviving heirs.86 Their focus on the last will and testament as a reflection of social reality blinds these historians to the underlying tensions, motivations, and goals of the testator and ultimately to the aftermath of human conflict. Closer study of inheritance legal cases offers new perspectives on people’s everyday lives and daily squabbles. These questions remind us that the dead have an afterlife in human affairs and that death does not remove people from the stage of history. We can explore a lively human space filled with tensions and hostility on behalf of the successors.

The analysis of the tanner’s will and the subsequent legal battles is an account of an exceptional person’s life and his influence on those who were unfortunate enough to be members of his family. The story extends beyond the borders of Ladányi’s personal narrative and opens avenues of further investigation into the social structures, legal practices, marriage and divorce, cultural values, conflict and solidarity among the burghers of Debrecen. This case study allows us to pose questions about how Debrecenian burghers tried to fashion their lives in unexpected and extraordinary ways and how they used legal means to do this.

Archival Sources

Tiszántúli Református Egyházkerületi és Kollégiumi Levéltár [Archives of Tiszántúl Reformed Church District and College]:

Tt.REL. I. 99. a. Keresztelési és házassági anyakönyvek 1703–1948. [Registers of Baptism and Marriage 1703–1948].

Hajdú-Bihar Megyei Levéltár [Archives of Hajdú-Bihar County]:

IV.A. 1011.b. Register of Civic Legal Actions.

IV.A. 1011.v. Czegléd utcai vagyonösszeírások 1811–1838 [Wealth Register of Czegléd Street 1811–1838].

IV.A. 1011.y. Örökbevallási jegyzőkönyvek 1636–1848 [Records of Civic Properties 1636–1848].

IV.A. 1011.z. Végrendeletek 1518–1848 [Testaments 1518–1848].

IV.A.1018. Debrecen szabad királyi város törvényszéki iratai 1604–1848 [Court Records of the Free Royal City of Debrecen 1604–1848].

IV.A.1018.b. Polgári és büntető törvénykezési jegyzőkönyvek 1726–1848 [Registers of Civic and Criminal Court Records 1726–1848].

IV.A.1018.c. Polgári peres iratok, 1760–1850 [Civic Court Records, 1760–1850].

IX. 35. Debreceni tímár céh iratai 1599–1825 [Records of the Tanner Guild of Debrecen 1599–1825].

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár [National Archives of Hungary]

C-53. Departamento publicum-politicom. Relationes by count Sámuel Teleki.

Bibliography

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Sándor Nagy

One Empire, Two States, Many Laws Matrimonial Law and Divorce in the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy1

Following the Compromise of 1867 between the Habsburg House and the parties pressing for Hungarian independence, the territory of Austria and the territory of Hungary constituted separate jurisdictions, thus it is not surprising that matrimonial law developed differently in the newly sovereign Kingdom of Hungary. In Austria the 1811 civil code specifically circumscribed the right of Catholics, who constituted the overwhelming majority of the population and were only able to “separate from bed and board,” and non-Catholics to dissolve the bonds of marriage. In contrast, in Hungary as of the middle of the nineteenth century Catholics were also able to dissolve the bonds of marriage. In this article I examine the evolution of matrimonial law as well as the influence of the economic and social transformations of the nineteenth century on divorce rates and the spread of divorce. The introduction of the matrimonial law of 1895 and the easing of divorce proceedings in 1907 were direct causes of the steep rise in the already higher rates of divorce in Hungary around the turn of the century. While the higher divorce rates in the larger cities were influenced by industrialization and urbanization, in rural areas, where the rise in divorce rates was not negligible, other factors must be sought. After the adoption of the Hungarian matrimonial law, the number of divorces among Catholics grew and the number of divorce proceedings initiated by members of the lower classes, in particular peasants and agricultural workers, also rose. In general, the data indicate cultural divergences in the practice of divorce and reveal the significance of the differences between the lifestyle customs and legal traditions of different denominations on the one hand and on the other the importance of efforts on the part of the state to reconcile these differences and foster social integration.

Keywords: matrimonial law, divorce rates, denominational difference, urbanization, social integration, nationalism, Austro–Hungarian Monarchy

The rise in divorce rates in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is one of the most interesting questions in the history of the family as an institution. How is it possible that while divorce was practiced almost exclusively among Protestants and only in unusual cases up until the nineteenth century, over the course of the next 200 years divorce gained legal acceptance in almost all of the states of the Western world and indeed by the end of the twentieth century had become almost familiar (as it were)? While contemporaries frequently blamed the moral decline of the family for the rise in divorce rates, sociologists and, in their wake, historians have emphasized the importance of economic and social factors. According to the theory of modernization, which gained ground in the decades immediately following World War II, the social structures that existed prior to the nineteenth century, which were necessarily founded on stable family households, were transformed by industrialization. Family bonds weakened and the nuclear family, consisting only of parents and children, became a more characteristic phenomenon. Parallel to this alleged shift, individual preferences began to play a role in the selection of a partner that would have been inconceivable earlier, and people’s expectations regarding marriage also grew, making marriages less stable and in the end leading to the gradual and accelerating rise in the number and proportion of divorces.2

150 years of research that have been pursued in the social sciences and the work that has been done by historians over the course of the past few decades notwithstanding, we still have only a vague sense of the reasons that have led to the current state of affairs regarding matrimonial law and the institution of marriage.3 Modernization theory has proven useful in understanding social processes, but at the same time it has made us aware of apparently unresolvable contradictions as well. Among these, the most important is perhaps the fact that modernization by no means caused a consistent rise in divorce rates outside the Western world,4 which throws into question the causal relationship between economic transformations and changes in the nature of family relationships or rises in divorce rates. In a historical context something that did not as yet seem problematic with reference to the time of the origin of the modernization theory, namely whether the history of divorce can be blurred with that of the dissolution of marriages, and what divorce rates themselves actually signify, has also been questioned. To cite a classic example, the difference in divorce rates in England and France at the turn of the century was striking. Divorce was far more common in France than in England. Gail Savage poses the question, “How is it that at the turn of the century a comparatively rural Catholic nation should have so many more divorces than a Protestant nation that was the most urbanized and industrialized in the world?”5 Her answer, that the legal system can effectively hamper or facilitate the spread of divorce, may be part of the explanation, but the problem makes clear the need for further study of the social uses of alternative solutions, both legal and otherwise.6

If we must be willing for the moment to do without a comprehensive theory that explains the general if varied rise in divorce rates, we nonetheless stand to glean some insights into the phenomenon from a comparative study of states and legal systems in which one discerns not only contradictory tendencies, but also similarities that may shed light on underlying causes for these divergences. An examination of trends in the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy (a state that was the creation of the Compromise of 1867 between the Habsburg House and Hungary) may prove particularly illuminating. A comparison of matrimonial law in Hungary and Austria is revealing not simply because the two states shared a close history and were indeed successors to the same political body (thus one confronts fewer methodological problems), but also because matrimonial laws in the territory of the Monarchy (which was a distinctive political formation in which two states shared power) were both a sign and symptom of the cultural and religious diversity of the population and the attempts of the state to bridge these differences. Thus, while the rise in the number and proportion of divorces corresponded to the general upward trend, the cultural and political-legal factors that either furthered or hindered this rise (and that in the case of other nation-states are perhaps more difficult to discern) are more easily distinguished.

Roads to(ward) Divorce

Austria and Hungary,7 the two constituent yet legally separated states of the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy, were both heirs to the reforms in matrimonial law of Emperor Joseph II, the Marriage Patent of 1783 (according to which marriage was a civil contract, not a religious institution). In the periods of increased centralization (1780–1790, 1850–1860), the differences between the two systems of matrimonial law disappeared, or rather diminished significantly, but in time they became determining. In the Austrian territories the civil code that was introduced in 1811 (the Allgemeines Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch) gave considerable momentum to the efforts to secularize matrimonial law. In the lands of the Hungarian Crown, however, the system of denominational laws was restored following the death of Joseph II, albeit with significant modifications, and state matrimonial law was introduced only a century later with a law that was passed in 1894.8 Originally both systems permitted divorce only in the case of people who were not Catholics. Catholics, who constituted the overwhelming majority of the population, were only allowed to separate, not legally divorce. This similarity in the substantive law changed, however, following the Compromise of 1867, when Hungary introduced laws permitting converted Catholics to divorce. In the Austrian provinces (what is referred to as Cisleithania) the tendency was in the opposite direction. Through the Catholic impediment to marriage the rights of the Protestant spouses of converted Catholics and in general of divorced Protestants were curtailed (they were not allowed to remarry or could only marry a non-Catholic).9 These diverging tendencies were topped by the matrimonial law that was introduced in Hungary in 1895. With the exception of Croatia, it made divorce legal for any Hungarian citizen, regardless of his or her denomination.

A comparison of the divorce rates in Austria and Hungary at the turn of the century clearly illustrates the significance of the differences in the two systems of matrimonial law (Figure 1).10

Figure 1. Crude divorce rates (divorces per 10,000)

As the chart illustrates, divorce rates in Hungary were almost always higher than in Austria. A significant rise in both took place around 1900, but while this rise was considerably less abrupt in Austria thanks to the stability of the legal framework there, in Hungary the legal changes resulted in a far more dramatic growth in the divorce rates. In the wake of the easing of restrictions on divorce in 1895 and the elimination of automatic appeal in divorce cases in 1907, divorce rates in Hungary were proportionally among the highest in Europe in the years leading up to World War I.11

As in the case of France and England, this comparison again throws into question one of the basic assumptions of the modernization theory. How is it that in Hungary, which was considerably less industrialized and held on to denominational matrimonial law for a much longer period of time, divorce rates were higher than in Austria, which was more economically developed and had secularized matrimonial laws as part of its civil code? The answer, of course, is obvious: divorce, which in 1868 was made possible in Hungary for converted Catholics and as of 1895 for every Hungarian citizen, was much more appealing than the institution of separation which was only available for the majority of the population in Austria. While the rise in divorce rates (both in absolute terms and proportionally) in Austria clearly indicates a growing social demand, the question remains: how is it that steps were taken towards the liberalization of the institution of divorce in Hungary a half-century before the secularization of matrimonial law, at a time when denominational laws were still in effect, while in Austria this did not take place until the Austrian state actually ceased to exist (the dissolution of the bonds of marriage was permitted in general only following the annexation of the country by Nazi Germany in 1938).

The divergent tendencies of the evolution of matrimonial law in Hungary and Austria were undoubtedly due in part to the different confessional structures of the two populations and the greater importance in Hungary of non-Catholic denominations for which divorce was permissible. At the turn of the century, the population in Austria was 80 percent Roman Catholic and 12 percent Greek Catholic. Only roughly 5 percent was Jewish, 2 percent was Protestant, and 2 percent Orthodox. In Hungary the majority was also Catholic, but Roman Catholics comprised only 49 percent of the population, while 11 percent was Greek Catholic, 5 percent was Jewish, 13 percent was Orthodox, 7 percent was Lutheran, and 14 percent was Calvinist.12 The importance of these differences, however, should not be overstated, since in Hungary as in Austria matrimonial law was dominated by canon law until the middle of the nineteenth century, supported on the institutional level by the courts of the Catholic Church, which was regarded as the avita religio and enjoyed a special relationship with the Habsburg House. It is worth noting, for example, that until the introduction of reforms by Joseph II, the sphere of authority of the Catholic ecclesiastical courts extended in principle to the affairs of non-Catholic couples as well.

The distinctive confessional structure of the population in Hungary really became important towards the end of the eighteenth century. Following the death of Joseph II, the National Assembly that was held in 1790 rehabilitated in defense of the old constitution, which had been ignored by the late emperor, the rights of the “accepted” religions (receptae religiones), which alongside the Catholic Church also included by then the Orthodox Church, the Lutheran Church, and the Calvinist Church. This included jurisdiction in matrimonial affairs, which in Austria remained within the sphere of the state.13 The only reason that the establishment of the planned Protestant courts in Hungary was never implemented and matrimonial cases among Protestants remained within the sphere of authority of the county and urban courts (which were still under the influence of the Estates and made rulings based on the Marriage Patent of Joseph II) was that the Hungarian law was shelved in Vienna.14 The noble reform movement that began to emerge in the National Assemblies held in the 1830s, which pressed, in the name of liberal and national ideals, for a transformation of the legal system and greater independence for Hungary, saw not the defense of ecclesiastical rights, but rather national integration and the creation of civil society as its primary goal. Prominent figures of the movement took a stand in support of the freedom of religion and equality among the various denominations. In practice, this meant curbing the written and unwritten prerogatives of the Catholic Church, a supra-national institution that enjoyed a kind of alliance with the dynasty. Regarding the question of matrimonial law, it meant restrictions on canon law and the assertion of the newly introduced liberal legal measures.

Fundamentally, the fact that with respect to the legal acceptance of divorce there was a “breakthrough” in the Hungarian half of the empire in the middle of the nineteenth century in that every Hungarian citizen, including converted Catholics, could seek a divorce, was a consequence of this political situation. The key element of this was the liberalization of religious conversion, which was established in a law passed in 1844.15 While the goal of the law was not to facilitate divorce, but rather only to make the free practice of religion a legal reality, the measure nonetheless had this as one of its consequences. In the case of a husband or wife who had converted to a Protestant denomination, when arriving at a ruling in a case of divorce the county and city courts took into consideration the person’s denomination at the time of the submission of the request for a divorce, not his or her denomination at the time of the marriage, and therefore were able to grant a divorce in spite of the Catholic belief in the inviolability of marriage.16 This was all brought to an end by the defeat of the 1848 Revolution, since in 1853 the Austrian civil code was temporarily introduced in Hungary, but after the reassertion of the Hungarian legal system in 1861 and then the passage of new laws in 1868, the courts not only revived these practices but even built on them. Since the Hungarian laws of 1868 specified that “the acts committed by a convert following his conversion should be judged by the teachings of the Church to which he has converted, and the principles of the Church he has left impose no obligations on him,” the Hungarian courts would even grant a divorce in cases in which only one of the spouses had converted, while the other had remained part of the Catholic Church.17

Thus when the Hungarian state resolved, at the end of the nineteenth century, to make questions of matrimonial law entirely the prerogative of the state, it was absolutely clear that divorce would become a matter of civil law, and that the Catholic dogmas would constitute no obstacles to it. The domination of the Austrian civil code, in contrast, ensured a durable legal framework which, with a brief interruption of an ultramontan course taken by the neo-absolutist regime in 1856 to 1868, when the matrimonial affairs of the Empire’s Catholic subjects were relegated to the competence of the ecclesiastical courts, lasted for more than a century. Furthermore it preserved the various systems of different church dogma, which it had adapted and incorporated into the civil code. Thus while Jews and non-Catholic Christians were able to divorce (if according to different rules), the 111th paragraph of the Austrian civil code contained the following stipulation: “The valid bond of marriage between two people of the Catholic faith can only be broken by the death of one of the two. This bond is indissoluble even if at the time of the marriage only one of the two was Catholic.”18 The liberal political initiatives of the 1860s and the social movements that began to gather steam at the turn of the century (and had the reform of matrimonial law as one of their goals) were unable to alter these basic principles, even if, as of the middle of the nineteenth century, it became ever more common for people to circumvent the law (and even if by the first years of the twentieth century this was not unheard of among people belonging even to the highest circles).19

The Frequency of Divorce: Traditions and Modernity

A hasty overview of the evolution of matrimonial law clearly reveals that over the course of the nineteenth century denominational belonging was of tremendous significance for married couples in the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy. The right to marry or divorce depended on the denominations of the spouses, whether the case was held in a Church forum or a secular forum. There were no exceptions to this until the practice changed entirely with the enactment of the new matrimonial law in Hungary on October 1, 1895. This law introduced marriage and divorce as civil institutions and brought matrimonial cases under the purview of the state. Social scientists have not yet examined the ways in which contradictory secularization (in the case of Austria) or belated secularization (in the case of Hungary) influenced the matrimonial or legal behavior of people of different denominations in practice, and the extent to which these processes of secularization contributed to or slowed the rises in divorce rates in different parts of the empire, parallel to the economic and social transformations of the nineteenth century.

If one compares the published statistics on marriage with the denominational composition of the population, in both Austria and Hungary people who belonged to non-Catholic denominations (which had permitted divorce for centuries) were the most active. In the Austrian lands, even if we draw no distinction between divorce and separation, people belonging to the religious minorities (Protestants, Orthodox, Jews), which represented only 8 percent of the population, accounted for 15–18 percent of the divorces. The percentage of Roman Catholics who had “separated from bed and board” corresponded to their percentage of the overall population (80 percent), while the percentage among Greek Catholics fell short of their proportion to the entire population. While one can no longer speak of legal distinctions between the denominations in Hungary following the enactment of the matrimonial law in 1895, in the period between 1898 and 1913 non-Catholics still accounted for 64 percent of the divorces, while they represented only 40 percent of the total population. One discerns the influence of religious proscriptions against divorce in the fact that Roman Catholics accounted for only 32 percent of the total number of divorces and Greek Catholics only 4 percent. In the period under examination the denominational composition of the demographic trend (in other words the rise in divorce rates) was influenced (somewhat surprisingly) only by the growing weight of the Orthodox population living in the peripheral areas of the Monarchy. In Austria their contribution grew from a mere 1 percent at the end of the nineteenth century to 4 percent by 191020 and in Hungary from 4 percent in 1900 to 21 percent in 1913.

The attitudes of the various denominations regarding divorce, however, were by no means uniform. The denominational composition of the population and the divergent political and legal traditions and denominational “popular customs,” all of which varied from region to region, resulted in significant differences in the practical attitudes towards matrimonial law, even among groups of people belonging to the same Church. Thus the regional differences in divorce rates (Figure 2) were not simply products of divergent denominational structures. Transylvania, a province in the southeastern corner of the Monarchy that had the highest divorce rates, is a revealing example. The Hungarian statistics do not provide a breakdown of the divorce rates on the basis of denomination, but we can nonetheless state with confidence that the high rate of divorce was due to the remarkably high proportion of people belonging to non-Catholic denominations (58 percent). This does not explain the high divorce rate entirely, however, since the non-Catholic population of the neighboring region bordering the River Tisza was just as high (57 percent), but the divorce rate was considerably lower.21 The phenomenon was basically due to the special position of Transylvania and the wide-ranging political and legal autonomy that the non-Catholic Churches enjoyed there. In the Transylvanian Principality, which became independent from Habsburg-ruled Royal Hungary at the time of the Ottoman conquest, the ideas of the Reformation found fertile ground, bringing with them an early version of the notion of religious tolerance. Thus the Counter-Reformation that swept through the Hungarian Kingdom in the seventeenth century did not gain much ground in Transylvania, which remained something of a bastion of Protestantism, even after the province became part of the Habsburg Empire at end of the century. The Catholic rulers essentially respected the distinctive political setup in Transylvania, one essential part of which was the maintenance of the rights of the “accepted” denominations (Lutheran, Calvinist, Unitarian, Roman Catholic, and as of 1848 Orthodox). As of the sixteenth century the rights of the Churches included purview of issues pertaining to marriages,22 and this was suspended only briefly (for a few years) in the wake of the reforms of Joseph II.23

Figure 2. Crude divorce rates (divorces per 10,000 inhabitans) in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1910 (1900)

The separate right and practice of divorce in Transylvania brought with it the early spread of the recourse to this institution. It is telling, for instance, that in the middle of the nineteenth century in the Calvinist diocese of Udvarhely there were annually 7-12 divorces for every 10,000 Calvinists, which was double the average in Hungary in the 1910s (see Figure 1) and also considerably higher than the Transylvanian average (see Figure 2).24 The divorce rate among Lutheran Saxons and Unitarians (the smallest Protestant denomination in Transylvania) was similarly high. In the period between 1871 and 1893 the Lutheran Matrimonial High Court in the city of Nagyszeben (Hermannstadt in German, today Sibiu in Romania) granted between 100 and 150 divorces every year,25 which came to an average of 5 to 8 divorces for every 10,000 Transylvanian Lutherans. The records of sittings of the Unitarian Ecclesiastical High Court of the city of Kolozsvár (Klausenburg in German, today Cluj in Romania) in the period between 1869 and 1895 contain similar data. The average of 40 to 70 divorces per year indicates a divorce rate between 8 and 13 divorces for every 10,000 Unitarian people.26 While the Orthodox Church was not included among the “accepted” religions until 1848, the continuously working ecclesiastical courts in Transylvania probably also granted more divorces than those in Hungary. In the decanal district of Torda (today Turda in Romania) at least 10 divorce cases were initiated on average every year in the period between 1880 and 1899, which may have raised the divorce rate among the local Orthodox community to 8 for every 10,000 Orthodox people in the district.

The divorce rates among members of different denominations and the divorce rates in general in the second half of the nineteenth century were influenced not only by denominational structures and legal traditions, but also by accelerating economic and social transformations, which can be discerned most clearly in divergent divorce rates in the expanding cities on the one hand, and among the rural population on the other. The two metropolises of the Monarchy, Vienna and Budapest, offer striking and paradigmatic examples of this. Vienna’s place in the popular divorce movement at the beginning of the twentieth century was on the verge of being extreme: 37 percent of the divorces and separations granted in the Austrian half of the empire were issued by the Wiener Landesgericht. The divorce rate hovered around 4.5 percent, in contrast with 0.5 percent in rural areas. The divorce rate among Catholics living in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century was eight times as high as the divorce rate among Catholics living in rural areas (3.9 percent in comparison with 0.5 percent), among Jews living in Vienna it was seven times as high (7 percent in Vienna in comparison with 1.1 percent in the rest of Austria), and among Protestants six times as high (5.9 percent in Vienna in comparison with 1 percent in the rest of Austria). Similarly, in Hungary the divorce rate of 5.8 divorces for every 10,000 people in Budapest was much higher than the divorce rate of 2.1 percent in the rest of the country. Regarding denominational breakdown between the capital city and the rest of the country, the largest difference again is found among Catholics. While the divorce rate among Catholics in Budapest was four times as high as the divorce rate among Catholics in the rest of Hungary (5 percent in comparison with 1.2 percent), among Jews it was two-and-half times as much (7.5 percent in comparison with 3 percent), among Lutherans twice as much (6.2 percent in comparison with 3.3 percent), and among Calvinists one-and-a-half times as much (6.4 percent in comparison with 4.7 percent). The actual differences in divorce rates between urban centers and “rural” areas in both halves of the empire must have been even larger than these statistics suggest (both in general and broken down according to denomination), since the term “rural” in this context actually includes many cities in Austria and Hungary.

Nonetheless, with regards to the question of urban lifestyle and urbanization, the differences between the two countries are at least as telling as the similarities. As the example of Vienna suggests, in Austria the cities played a considerably larger role in the divorce movement than in Hungary. While in Austria cities with populations of at least 50,000 (which served as judicial seats) accounted for approximately 50 percent of the divorces, in Hungary this percentage was only 15.27 It is also worth noting that in Hungary in the first decade of the twentieth century, parallel with the rapid rise of divorce rates, the role of the larger cities in this trend did not grow, but rather declined (from 19 percent in 1900 to 15 percent in 1910). In other words, the rise in the divorce rates was rather fuelled by the “rural” population. In Transylvania, among Unitarians and Lutherans who were seeking a divorce in the second half of the nineteenth century, urban residence and lifestyle certainly did not play an important role (in the case of Lutherans this is particularly surprising given the large proportion of Lutherans who lived in cities).28 For instance, the decisive majority of the Unitarians who were seeking a divorce (a group about which we know more) lived in villages and were probably simple peasants.

Divorces among Jews offer a distinctive but nonetheless revealing example of the interrelationship between “modernization” and denominational belonging with respect to marital relations. The statistics on divorce indicate that attitudes towards and trends regarding divorce among Jews (who had practiced separation for millennia) in the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy and especially Austria were similar to attitudes and trends among Catholics. Marriages among Jews in rural areas rarely ended in divorce, in contrast with marriages among Jews in urban centers. The Jews in Vienna, who constituted 13 percent of the Jews in the Austrian provinces, accounted for 50 percent of the divorces among Jews, while this same figure for Jews in Galicia (where 62 percent of the Jews of Austria lived) hovered around 25 percent. In this case, however, one must be careful with the official data. As the Austrian statistician Karl Hugelmann has cautioned with regards to the figures from 1882 and 1883 (i.e. before the regular disclosure of divorce statistics), “We must compare the Jewry of Vienna and Galicia in order to discover the reason for the differing results, and then we begin to suspect that the difference is merely a matter of appearances. As in the case of many marriages among Jews in Galicia, many divorces never came to the knowledge of the state authorities.”29 Thus the statistics only include divorces that were recognized according to the civil code.

One finds an explanation for this phenomenon in the discrepancies between state and denominational law regarding divorce and the civil and ritual practice of divorce. Before the introduction of the Marriage Patent of 1783 in Austria and the Austrian civil code in 1853 in Hungary, issues pertaining to marriage among Jews were decided by the rabbinical courts (the bet-din), which was autonomous from the state. In accordance with the age-old ritual, divorce was completed when the husband handed the bill of divorce (get) to his wife and his wife accepted it. Over the course of the nineteenth century the expansion of state oversight to include these affairs in general collided with the “quiet” resistance of the Jewish communities. At the same time, some rabbis and some spouses (in particular wives) used the compulsion to adapt as a means of increasing their own influence or bringing about a turn in their seemingly hopeless situation for the better.30 It was primarily Jews who lived in the western provinces of the Habsburg Empire and Jews who lived in cities and had essentially integrated into Christian society who turned to the state to resolve marital issues. In contrast, the vast majority of the Jews of Galicia were able to continue to ignore the state laws regarding marriage and address the questions that arose in accordance with their religious law (halakha). Clearly the growing middle-class Jewry represented an ever larger proportion of the couples seeking divorces, though the available sources yield no reliable estimates of these proportions. It is quite possible that if we could compile statistics regarding the purely ritual divorces (i.e. not acknowledged by the state), then the ratio of divorce rates in Vienna to divorce rates in rural areas would be flipped. Given the dearth of data regarding these ritual divorces, we can mention as a kind of analogy the case of Russia. The frequency of divorce among the Jewry living in the western provinces in the first half of the nineteenth century was strikingly high, and while in time it declined considerably, it remained high at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1901, for instance, there were 12 divorces in Vilno (today Vilnius in Lithuania) for every 10,000 Jewish inhabitants of the city, in other words the divorce rate was roughly comparable with the divorce rate among the Lutherans and Calvinists of Transylvania.31 It is perfectly conceivable that the divorce rates among the Jewish communities of Galicia and even among the Orthodox Jews of the Hungarian counties neighboring Galicia were just as high.

In 1878 the Hungarian government was compelled to pass a separate decree “on the subject of hindering divorces of Israelite couples that were carried out in a careless manner by some rabbis.”32 One decade later Magyar-Zsidó Szemle (Hungarian-Jewish Review) carried a report indicating that of the marriages conducted by rabbis among the Jews of Sáros county, only one-third were recorded in the registry of marriages kept by the representatives of the religious community.33 The periodical, which was neologue in its spirit, may well have exaggerated these “irregularities” and the scale of the alleged flouting of the laws of the state, but the Jewish communities of Máramaros, another county in northeastern Hungary (today Maramureş in Romania) also become notorious for the striking number (and proportion) of illegitimate children and cohabitating but officially unmarried couples, which was due in part to the failure to register marriages with the local organs of the state.34 Considering the fragmentary data, it is quite clear that the statistics do not reflect a significant proportion of the divorces among Jews, as they were not granted by the state courts (much as the marriages themselves had not always been recorded in the official registries). Thus the regional divergences in divorce rates among the Jewry were not so much a product of different attitudes towards marriage or divorce. Rather they reflect varying degrees among the Jewish communities of integration into the larger civil society.

The Role of Law

The peculiarities of marital law and divorce rates that were rooted in differences between denominations, regions, settlement types and legal systems, while accounting for the varying pace of the spread of divorce in the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the empire, shed only limited light on the reasons behind this growth, and fail completely to explain the dynamics of the process. The immediate cause of the steep rise in the divorce rates in Hungary was legal in nature: it was prompted by the adoption of the matrimonial law of 1895 and the curtailment of the process of divorce in 1907. Thus it is clear that, as a next step, one must examine more closely how the legal reforms influenced in practice the spread of divorce and what was happening at the same time in Austria, where the practice of law and the civil code on which it was based ensured a continuously stable legal background.

By way of introduction it is worth noting that the Hungarian matrimonial law of 1894 was not simply a “divorce law,” but rather ushered in a complete change of systems in the sphere of matrimonial law in Hungary. It codified matrimonial law by creating a coherent system that took the place of norms that had been shaped somewhat freely by the courts within a framework created by royal decrees and laws. In doing so, it secularized and civilized matrimonial law, creating a civil law in lieu of norms that varied from region to region and denomination to denomination. The civil law regulated the means of contracting and dissolving marriages in a way that applied to all Hungarian citizens uniformly and exclusively. At the same time, given the complexity of the legal changes it is not easy to venture an answer to the question of what role was played by the matrimonial law in the breaking loose of divorce rates. It is true that the elimination of denominational distinctions led to an abandonment of many formal procedures (priestly mediation, dual litigation in the case of mixed marriages) and informal ones (such as religious conversions before the submission of a petition for divorce) that were a hindrance to divorce (first and foremost for Catholics), but the law also contained many measures that tightened restrictions. It created serious obstacles to hasty divorces, eliminating for instance the practice of divorce by mutual consent. It also introduced the principle of culpability, defined precisely the acceptable grounds for divorce, made the right of action obsolete, and limited the period of time for the initiation and completion of the proceedings for a divorce.

The effects of the matrimonial law on the legal practice at the time developed in a contradictory manner. In the wake of the enactment of the law, the decisions of the courts became unpredictable. In divorce proceedings that had begun earlier and had not been concluded by October 1, 1895 (and were based on grounds for divorce that were no longer compatible with the new regulations), new petitions had to be submitted and in many cases the high courts directed the lower courts to arrive at new rulings. The proportion of rejected petitions also grew, the proceedings lasted years, and the costs of a divorce case grew considerably.35 In the first two years the divorce rate fell to a historical low (see Figure 1), while at the same time the number of petitions for divorce submitted on the basis of the new matrimonial law rose abruptly. As a consequence of the initiation of an enormous number of proceedings by the end of the century there was a huge backlog of divorce cases, as indicated by the court statistics (which were kept as of 1899; see Figure 3).36 Even five years after the enactment of the new matrimonial law only 30 percent of the new or unresolved divorce cases in Hungary were settled in some manner, either with the acceptance or the rejection of a petition for divorce or with a legally binding annulment (or in some cases with withdrawal of the petition). This did not change much until 1907, the continuous rise in the number of divorces that were granted notwithstanding.

Figure 3. Circulation of matrimonial cases in the royal courts in Hungary (1899–1913)

One can get a sense of what this backlog of cases actually meant in practice by comparing the duration of divorce proceedings at the turn of the century in different parts of the Monarchy. Given the sources, this is possible first and foremost in the case of the two capital cities. While only 24 percent of the divorce proceedings that were initiated before the Royal Court of Law in Budapest in 1900 were completed within a year, 34 percent within two years, and 19 percent within three years (and the remaining 23 percent took even longer),37 on the basis of the marital actions approved by the Wiener Landesgericht in 1901, 98 percent of the cases it handled were brought to completion within a single year and only a small fraction took years to be resolved. In general the Austrian courts handled matrimonial cases rapidly. 97 percent of the divorces, annulments, and invalidations that were issued in Austria in 1901 were issued within a year, and this rate did not drop later. And one should note that the Austrian statistics only measured the duration of cases of separation (processuale Scheidungen) and divorce (Ehetrennungen) that were subject to litigation, and these comprised only one-fourth of the total number of divorces. Separations that took place with the announcement and acceptance of the consent of the two parties (einverständliche Scheidungen) took even less time, officially at most only a few weeks or, in the case of a consensus reached in the course of legal proceedings, a few months.

The state of affairs in Hungary became unmanageable at the turn of the century. In time the courts and the government were compelled to submit to the pressure put on them by people involved in divorce proceedings. In a manner that was in clear contradiction with the spirit of the law, the courts began to give ground to people seeking a divorce. In cases of petitions for divorce that were based on “deliberate and unjustifiable abandonment,” they did not examine the circumstances of the break, but simply took cognizance of the fact of the separation itself. In consequence, it became more common for spouses to bring their cohabitation to end by mutual consent, and they were not compelled to air their “dirty laundry” in the courts. They were thus able to free themselves of each other relatively quickly and painlessly. As Figure 3 indicates, soon most divorces in Hungary were proclaimed following cases of abandonment. The proportion of such cases rose from 44 percent in 1899 to 72 percent by 1913. In 1907 the government also contributed to the reduction in the proportion of cases awaiting adjudication by securing passage, at the suggestion of the Minister of Justice, of a law to reduce the burdens of the Hungarian Royal Court of Law, part of which was a restriction of appeals in divorce cases. The law rescinded the obligatory submission of divorce cases to higher courts and limited the right of appeal of an attorney charged with the task of defending the marriage to a second instance.38 The adoption of the law helped to reduce the pressure on the highest court, but it made the proceedings simpler for husbands and wives who in a concealed manner had mutually agreed to seek a divorce and had no intention of appealing, while in the meantime the minority who prolonged marital conflict in the courts frequently sought legal redress. This clearly also pushed spouses who earlier had hoped to resolve their marital disputes in the courts in the direction of divorce by mutual consent. However, mutual consent was not accepted by the courts as legitimate grounds for divorce. The couples could only achieve their goal by requesting divorce on the grounds of abandonment in order to circumvent this obstacle. In the end, the elimination of obligatory appeals and the consequent rise in the number of divorces granted on grounds of abandonment shortened the procedures in divorce cases, thereby also reducing the costs of a divorce, making people more likely to pursue a divorce, and causing an increase in the proportion of completed divorces (which rose to 54 percent by the outbreak of World War I). In consequence, divorce rates rose steeply.

What considerations prompted legislators to give in to the “pressure” applied by those seeking a divorce? In response to a note of caution made during the discussion of the 1907 bill, that the abolition of the compulsory supervision of divorce cases would make separation much easier, the representative who had submitted the bill noted, “the goal of this law is not to make divorce more cumbersome, or divorce cases more difficult or more costly, but rather to ease the burdens on the Royal Court of Law.”39 This may seem like a cynical reply, but one cannot deny its logic. Easing the burdens on the Royal Court of Law and the civil courts in general, one of the consequences of which was the steep rise in the number of divorces, was intended to facilitate the effective enforcement of state law. The effective enforcement of state law was particularly important in both halves of the Monarchy, since the law was one of the most important tools in the hands of the government with which to integrate the ethnically and denominationally variegated peoples into one at least legally uniform society. In Austria the civil code of 1811 asserted the authority of the state in questions of matrimonial law. In Hungary this process was unquestionably belated, but Hungarian nationalism, which by the end of the nineteenth century had gathered considerable strength, made etatist tendencies more pronounced and placed tools at the disposal of the state in the interests of furthering not only social integration, but also cultural assimilation.40

The big question that remains, however, is what caused the sudden jump in the number of petitions for divorce in Hungary after 1895 and the subsequent continuous rise. For it was this jump that diverted the courts to a road that ran contrary to the intentions of the legislators, and eventually broke the resistance of the legal system. We should not delude ourselves with the hope that we will find an entirely adequate answer to this question on the basis of the contemporary statistics, but an examination of the changes that took place around the turn of the century in the composition of the groups of people seeking a divorce may offer some insights regarding the underlying reasons for this phenomenon. It may not provide us with any understanding of the expectations of the husbands and wives who sought a divorce, nor may it help us grasp their motivations, but it will enable us to learn more about the group of people who hoped to resolve their marital disputes once and for all in the civil courts. The statistics reveal two very important tendencies. One is the denominational shift in the composition of this group, the other is the social shift.

The extension of the right to divorce to include Catholics after 1895 undoubtedly gave momentum to the rise in the number of petitions for divorce and the number of actual divorces. True, we do not really have any statistic with which we can compare the proportion of Catholics among those seeking a divorce (they comprised 35 percent, this proportion rose to 40 percent only towards the end of the period under examination), but the change should be regarded as revolutionary, since for Catholics the dissolution of the bonds of marriage had previously been legally impossible. While we have no figures for the number of separations issued by the ecclesiastical courts, the mere appearance in the civil courts of people who had sought separations from the ecclesiastical courts could not possibly have caused the increase. One finds further confirmation of this in the fact that while legislators supported the assertion of Catholic dogma in civil law by maintaining separation from bed and board as a legally recognized option, until the outbreak of World War I a total of only 23 petitions for separation were approved in the entire country, which indicates that there was hardly any interest in this civil variant of the legal institution. The example of the Hungarian capital clearly indicates that with the enactment of the matrimonial law, the rise in the proportion of Catholics among the people seeking a divorce was not caused simply by the emergence among them of those who would previously have opted for conversion. In the matrimonial disputes over which the Budapest Royal Court of Law presided in the period between 1866 and 1895, the proportion of people who were either Catholic or who had converted to Catholicism in order to facilitate the procedure was 41 percent of the total number of people pursuing litigation. Following the enactment of the law of 1895, with the rise in the number of petitions for divorce this grew to 52 percent.41 (It is hardly likely that the number of conversions that took place in order to enable a couple to divorce in other parts of the country would have come close to the number in Budapest.)

The other important shift, alongside the removal of legal distinctions between denominations with regards to matrimonial law, was the broadening of the social base of the people seeking divorce. If one examines the national statistics regarding divorce, which go back to 1898, the rise in the proportion of industrial workers and agricultural day-laborers at the end of the nineteenth century is striking. The proportion of people subsumed under the statistical category that included industrial workers, day-laborers employed in industry, and factory workers rose from 4 or 5 percent to 11 percent. The proportion of agricultural day-laborers among people seeking a divorce, which before 1904 never went even as high as 10 percent, was consistently above 25 percent in the years leading up to World War I. At the same time, the proportion of people with characteristically middle-class occupations, who earlier had comprised a significant share of the people seeking a divorce, as well as the proportion of land-owning peasants dropped significantly. In the case of Budapest, the written documentation of divorce cases indicates that while the proportion of people from lower social strata among those seeking a divorce had already begun to grow earlier, this proportion grew significantly after 1900.42

In contrast with the shift that took place in the denominational composition of the group of people seeking a divorce, this transformation was by no means unique to Hungary. In Austria there was also a rise in the proportion of manual laborers (the category included factory workers, journeymen, miners, day-laborers and pieceworkers, and people employed in other non-independent occupations) among men seeking a divorce at the turn of the century. While in the period between 1884 and 1886 they comprised 17 percent of the divorcees and 18 percent in 1890–1892, in 1900–1902 and 1906–1908 this figure rose to 27 percent. The strikingly high proportion of agricultural workers among those seeking a divorce, however, was peculiar to Hungary. The proportion of peasants with small-holdings, for instance, dropped to 25 percent in the years just before the outbreak of World War I, but this figure nonetheless surpassed the corresponding figure of 9 percent for the category of “farmers, small-holders” in Austria.43 Thus the “democratization” of divorce in Hungary, which was one of the most important factors in the rise in divorce rates, cannot be as closely linked to enactment of the matrimonial law as the transformation in the denominational composition of the group of people seeking a divorce. Perhaps it was due in part to shifts in mentality, possibly something of a “renaissance” of marriage and the spread of the middle-class cult of the family. Whatever the hypothetical causes, it is quite clear that the formulation and realization of aspirations for social change were facilitated by a legal change that was not directly tied to the regulation of divorce, namely the expansion of litigation by right of poverty in forma pauperis.

While for the moment we are compelled, in the absence of the necessary statistics, to base conclusions about the rise in the use of litigation in forma pauperis on the complaints of the attorneys who were officially ordered to take up the defense of paupers, the tendency connected to the “demand” for social justice and the acknowledged function of the law as a tool of integration is unmistakable.44 Otherwise it would be impossible to explain how spouses who belonged to the lower social strata were appearing in ever larger numbers in the chambers of the royal law courts precisely at a time when people seeking a divorce were faced with obstacles that were entirely new and that naturally added to the costs of the litigation. Because the court files survived in a more complete form in Vienna, which accounted for more than one-third of the total number of divorces (which as noted earlier includes separations and annulments) in Austria, we know that after 1900 many husbands and wives involved in divorce cases requested free legal aid, although the costs they would have had to cover without free legal aid did not even come close to the costs in Hungary.45

Conclusion and Discussion

An examination of the evolution of matrimonial law in the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy, the divorce rates in Austria and Hungary, and judicial practice in both halves of the empire strengthens the doubts that have arisen recently concerning the modernization theory and the spread of divorce, at least with regards to the early stages of this process. The theory presumes and implies the homogeneity of “traditional societies” in that it presupposes the general stability of the family as allegedly necessitated by exterior forces and characterizes the destabilization of the institution of the family, which is the alleged cause of the spread of divorce, as a process that was closely intertwined with economic and social transformations. The use of this model to explain the demographic shifts that took place in the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy with regards to divorce, however, is encumbered by numerous problems. For instance, the different directions in which the legal systems in Austria and Hungary developed with respect to matrimonial law and the differing legal regulations regarding divorce resulted in higher divorce rates and a more abrupt rise in divorce rates in Hungary in spite of the fact that the economic and social transformations in the (western) Cisleithanian provinces were considerably more advanced than in Hungary. As an examination of the regional divorce rates demonstrates, there is no connection between the rise in divorce rates within the individual systems of jurisprudence and economic development, or if there is, it is only discernible in the case of the larger cities. The high rate of divorce in Bukovina (in the case of Austria) and Transylvania or Banat (in the case of Hungary) can hardly be explained by the modernization theory.

The example of Hungary, a country in which the rise in divorce rates at the turn of the century was abrupt, is revealing. Not only do the distinctive trends in divorce rates broken down by region not corroborate the suppositions of modernization theory, the social factors behind the spread of divorce also do not correspond to the expectations one would have. Seemingly paradoxically, in Austria, where divorce rates rose much more slowly, the significance of urbanization was much more pronounced than in the other half of the Monarchy. In Hungary, after 1900 the role of the large cities (which was not decisive in the first place) actually declined with the spread of divorce. Regarding the occupational composition of the group of people seeking a divorce, the sources clearly demonstrate that peasants with small holdings, agricultural workers and servants comprised an increasingly large proportion (in time more than 50 percent) of this demographic shift. While the proportion of peasants with small holdings within the agricultural sector declined, in the years leading up to World War I they still accounted for one-fourth of the divorces in Hungary. (In Austria, the rise in divorce rates in Bukovina was also largely the result of divorce proceedings initiated by peasants with small holdings.)

The example of the Hungarian half of the empire is also notable from the perspective of the regulatory role of the law. Unquestionably the rise in divorce rates reflects a shift in the nature of family ties. However, in my assessment the legal system, legal traditions, and legal changes did more than merely facilitate the early spread of divorce. The divorce rates in Transylvania clearly indicate the importance of changes in the concrete political power relations. They also reflect the significance of the extent to which a particular law had become an integral part of the value system of a given community. (The data on Transylvania belie the misconception according to which the low rate of divorce in so-called “traditional societies” can be attributed to structural causes and objective compulsions.) Political factors, including the conflict between the Habsburg House and the Hungarian Estates and the nation-state political ideals of the liberal opposition, all played a role in the breakthrough with regards to divorce in Hungary in the middle of the nineteenth century. In Austria, where there were no similar tendencies and where the Catholic Church remained very influential, the law moved in another direction, or rather it essentially came to a standstill with the introduction of marriage as a civil union. In contrast, the enactment of the Hungarian matrimonial law offers a revealing example of the interrelationship between social forces and legal shifts. While in the stable legal context of the Austrian provinces the rise in divorce rates was consistently moderate, in Hungary legal reforms at the turn of the century caused divorce rates to rise sharply. Matrimonial law put many obstacles in the path to divorce, but by opening wide the legal gates, it set off a process that provided its own momentum. The flood of petitions for divorce resulted in less stringent judicial practice and compelled the state to ease the legal procedures in divorce cases.

With regards to the regulatory power of the law, it is worth noting the culturally different application of the institution of divorce. Economic causes played only an indirect role in the rise in the number and proportion of divorces. In contrast, one can cite several examples demonstrating that not only was social access to the legal institution different denominationally and socially because of legal or financial reasons, but legal divorce itself was different depending on the religious and/or regional traditions and the value systems of the various social groups, what one might call “informal law.” The serious marital conflicts of Transylvanian Protestant peasants probably ended in the majority of cases with the dissolution of the marriage by the court. This may have been true in the case of marital conflicts among Jews as well, though these issues only rarely went beyond the religious communities, which stuck to their traditions, and for the most part never made it to the civil courts. In general members of wealthy social strata were also compelled to settle their marital conflicts by legal means, though this didn’t always necessarily mean a divorce case. However, for the better part of the nineteenth century this was not true of members of the working class who were born in the large cities or the rural (Catholic) peasantry.

The fact that, as of the end of the nineteenth century, legal solutions to marital conflict and, among them, sooner (Hungary) or later (Austria) the dissolution of the bonds of marriage began to prevail was due first and foremost not to the influence of economic processes, but rather to the complex interplay of power relations, social demands, changes in the law, and shifts in jurisprudence. Thus an ever-larger proportion of failed marriages ended in legal divorce, washing away the aforementioned cultural differences and gradually making strikingly divergent social practices more uniform to some degree. The cultural diversity of the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy on the one hand and the efforts of the state, in particular in Hungary, to promote social and national integration on the other cast the problem in a particularly sharp light and show the responses and reactions with which it met. In this regard, the assertion and strengthening of state purview of Jewish marriages, which took place parallel with the process of emancipation, is paradigmatic. This expansion of state authority resulted in an increase in the number of divorces, but only according to the official statistics. But this constituted not simply an attempt to undermine the competency of the organs of the Jewish religious communities, but rather the displacement by the state courts of their Church rivals, as well as, in the case of Hungary, the assertion of a civil code that was independent of denominational traditions and the expansion of the authority of the state to include the affairs of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant married couples. Parallel with legal regulation and official intervention that was intended to facilitate the “normalization” of family relations, the assurance of the ability of members of lower social strata to pursue legal action was an additional factor, alongside the shifts that took place in role of denominational difference. In this context it is understandable that the government and the courts did not take more aggressive measures to reduce the unquestionably alarming rise in the number of divorces. As a legal institution, divorce paradoxically was a tool of social integration, and the state saw the rise in the number of divorces as at most an unpleasant but necessary concomitant of this process.

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