Suchergebnisse

People have always lived in families, but what that means has varied dramatically across time and cultures. The family is not a ""natural"" phenomenon but an institution with a dynamic history stretching 10,000 years into the past. Mary Jo Maynes and Ann Waltner tell the story of this fundamental unit from the beginnings of domestication and human settlement. They consider the codification of rules governing marriage in societies around the ancient world, the changing conceptions of family wrought by the heightened pace of colonialism and globalization in the modern world, and how state polici

Taking the Hard Road is an engaging history of growing up in working-class families in France and Germany during the Industrial Revolution. Based on a reading of ninety autobiographical accounts of childhood and adolescence, the book explores the far-reaching historical transformations associated with the emergence of modern industrial capitalism. According to Mary Jo Maynes, the aspects of private life revealed in these accounts played an important role in historical development by actively shaping the authors' social, political, and class identities. The stories told in these memoirs revolve around details of everyday life: schooling, parent-child relations, adolescent sexuality, early experiences in the workforce, and religious observances. Maynes uses demographics, family history, and literary analysis to place these details within the context of historical change. She also draws comparisons between French and German texts, men's and women's accounts, and narratives of social mobility and political militancy

Mary Jo Maynes's work asks us to reconceptualize and broaden our notion of children's agency. Maynes sees this problem as analogous to that of learning to recognize the agency of women which is disguised by the everydayness of their activities and by prevailing views that historical change is a result of the public actions of powerful individuals. She concludes, "The effort to assess the place of girls in history brings us to question the very notion of historical agency itself." She goes on to show how life stories, particularly retrospective accounts of childhood, can offer new insights into both the agency of the young and the historical significance of childhood.-M.S.

Approaches to the history of class relations in Germany as elsewhere have changed dramatically over the past two decades or so. Historical class analysis, which once pointed to the clear significance of class as a social marker, a cultural and political identity, in short, as a force of history, has became dulled in the wake of the collapse of socialism, the decline of organized labor, and the intellectual challenges associated with postmodernism, feminism, and race theory. As one student remarked in a recent seminar on the history and historiography of class relations in Europe, class has become the unexamined third pillar of the race, class, gender triad. Historians do not deny the significance of class relations; it has just that figuring out how to theorize and document the history of class is much more complicated than it used to be.

Current debates about globalization often treat it as a
late-twentieth-century phenomenon. But many of the characteristics of
the contemporary global economy are continuations of older trends:
accelerating substitution of globally marketed products for local
products, the rapid growth of the labor force producing goods and services
for the international market, and the complex mediation of local and
regional economic conditions within global power relations. One of the
most significant aspects of globalization from a feminist point of view
is its disruption of local gender divisions of labor and its impact
on women's wage labor. The history of Europe's spinning industry as
it moved from cottage to factory between 1750 and 1900 puts a new spin
(so to speak) on accounts of globalization and gender. Europe's early
industrial capitalist development brought regions of Europe into and out
of production for globalizing markets through selective investment and
disinvestments. Then, as now, women's work, and in particular the work of
young women, played a key role in the region's "economic development."

During the course of the nineteenth century, the parameters defining 'youth', marking its beginning and its end, were becoming more precise and more institutionally defined for both girls and boys in Europe. More than any other phenomenon or institution, elementary schooling (and leaving school) contributed to a certain 'normalization' of the life cycle for young people. By the end of the nineteenth century, most girls as well as boys attended school at least intermittently until at least age 12 or 13; at school-leaving a new phase of life began. Throughout much of Europe a select minority of middle-class and upper-class young women joined their brothers at universities, as higher education became first a possibility and then a routine for them in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century.