Four swiss villages, 1860-1930: Putting gender back into historical demography

Gender and History

Volumn 19, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 242-259

  Praz, Anne Françoise ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GENEVA   (Switzerland)

^b UNIVERSITY OF FRIBOURG   (Switzerland)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CATHOLICISM; CONTRACEPTIVE USE; DEMOGRAPHIC HISTORY; DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION; GENDER ISSUE;

CENTRAL EUROPE; EURASIA; EUROPE; SWITZERLAND;

EID: 34547545019     PISSN: 09535233     EISSN: 14680424     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2007.00474.x     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. The connection was notably introduced by Alison Mackinnon, 'Were Women Present at the Demographic Transition? Questions from a Feminist Historian to Historical Demographers', Gender & History 7 (1995), pp. 222-40; Peter McDonald, 'Gender Equity in Theories of Fertility Transition', Population and Development Review 26 (2000), pp. 427-39. For more recent research: Ang'elique Janssens (ed.), Gendering the Fertility Decline (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007). Historical demography was also influenced by demographic research on contemporary societies: Nora Federici, Karen Oppenheim Mason, Sølvi Sogner (eds),Women's Position and Demographic Change (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); St'ephanie Condon, Michel Bozon and Th'er'ese Locoh (eds), D'emographie, sexe et genre: Bilan et perspectives, collection 'Dossiers et recherches' 83 (Paris: INED, 2000); Irene Tazi-Preve, 'Gender Trouble and Fertility Decline. Gender in Demography', paper presented at the Fifth European Feminist Research Conference, 20-24 August 2003, Lund University, Sweden.
2. See, e.g., Ansley J. Coale and Susan Cotts Watkins (eds), The Decline of Fertility in Europe - The Revised Proceedings of a Conference on the Princeton European Fertility Project (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); John R. Gillis, Louise A. Tilly and David Levine, The European Experience of Declining Fertility: A Quiet Revolution 1850-1970 (Cambridge MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Susan Greenhalgh (ed.), Situating Fertility: Anthropology and Demographic Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
3. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1928; repr. London: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 47.
4. For a more documented discussion: Louise A. Tilly, 'Women's History and Family History: Fruitful Collaboration or Missed Connection?', Journal of Family History 12 (1987), pp. 303-15; Megan Doolittle, 'Close Relations? Bringing Together Gender and Family in English History', Gender & History 11 (1999), pp. 542-54 and 'The Family and the Historian', in Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink and Katherine Holden, The Family Story - Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830-1960 (London and New York: Longman, 1999), pp. 16-50.
5. E.g., Gisela Bock, 'Challenging Dichotomies: Perspectives on Women's History', in Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson and Jane Rendall (eds), Writing Women's History (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 1-23; Françoise Thébaud, Ecrire l'histoire des femmes (Fontenay/ St-Cloud, ENS: 1998), pp. 66-92.
6. Maïté Albistur and Daniel Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français (Paris: Des femmes, 1977); Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement (1931; repr. London: Virago, 1977); Susanna Woodtli, Du féminisme à l'égalité politique: Un siècle de luttes en Suisse, 1868-1971 (Lausanne: Payot, 1977).
7. John Gillis, 'Gender and Fertility Decline among the British Middle Classes', in Gillis, Tilly and Levine, European Experience of Declining Fertility, pp. 30-47.
8. Thébaud, Ecrire l'histoire des femmes, p. 79.
9. Allan Sharlin, 'Urban-Rural Differences in Fertility in Europe during the Demographic Transition', in Coale and Cotts Watkins (eds), Decline of Fertility in Europe, pp. 234-60.
10. Mackinnon, 'Were Women Present at the Demographic Transition?'
11. Ellen C. DuBois et al., Feminist Scholarship: Kindling in the Groves of Academe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. 21.
12. Paola Tabet, 'Fertilité naturelle, reproduction forcée' in Paola Tabet, La Construction sociale de l'inégalité des sexes: Des outils et des corps (1985; repr. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998), pp. 80-86.
13. Susan Cotts Watkins, 'If All We Knew About Women Was What We Read in Demography, What Would We Know?', Demography 30 (1993), pp. 551-77.
14. Nancy Folbre, 'Of Patriarchy Born: The Political Economy of Fertility Decisions', Feminist Studies 9 (1983), pp. 261-84.
15. George Alter, Family and the Female Life Course: The Women of Verviers, Belgium 1849-1880 (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1988).
16. Robert A. Pollak, 'A Transaction Cost Approach to Families and Households', Journal of Economic Literature 23 (1985), pp. 581-608.
17. Laurel Cornell et al., 'Family Strategy: A Dialogue', Historical Methods 20 (1987), pp. 113-25.
18. Carmen Sarasúa, 'Understanding Intra-Family Inequalities: The Montes de Pas, Spain, 1700-1900', History of the Family 3 (1998), pp. 173-197.
19. George Alter, 'Theories of Fertility Decline: A Nonspecialist's Guide to the Current Debate', in Gillis, Tilly and Levine (eds), The European Experience of Declining Fertility, pp. 13-27.
20. Ronny Lesthaeghe, 'La deuxième transition démographique dans les pays occidentaux: Une interprétation', in Dominique Tabutin, Thierry Eggericky and Catherine Gourbin (eds), Transitions démographiques et sociétés (Louvain-la-Neuve: Chaire Quételet, 1995), pp. 133-80.
21. Simon Szreter, Robert A. Nye and Frans van Poppel, 'Fertility and Contraception during the Demographic Transition: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches', Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34 (2003), pp. 141-54. This special issue provides interesting case studies illustrating this connection between demography, anthropology and cultural history.
22. Kate Fisher, "SheWas quite Satisfied with the Arrangements IMade": Gender and Birth Control in Britain (1920-1950)', Past and Present 169 (2000), pp. 160-193.
23. Wally Seccombe, 'Men's "Marital Rights" and Women's "Wifely Duties": Changing Conjugal Relations in the Fertility Decline', in Gillis, Tilly and Levine (eds), The European Experience of Declining Fertility, pp. 66-84; Diana Gittins, Fair Sex: Family Size and Structure, 1900-1939 (London: Hutchinson, 1982).
24. John R. Gillis, 'Gender and Fertility Decline among the British Middle Class', in Gillis, Tilly and Levine (eds), The European Experience of Declining Fertility, pp. 31-47.
25. David Kertzer, 'Political-Economic and Cultural Explanations of Demographic Behaviour', in Greenhalgh (ed.), Situating Fertility, pp. 29-52.
26. S. Ryan Johansson, "Implicit Policy" and Fertility during Development', Population and Development Review 17 (1991), pp. 377-414.
27. Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 481-8.
28. e siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995).
29. Anne-Françoise Praz, De l'enfant utile à l'enfant précieux: Filles et garçons dans les cantons de Vaud et Fribourg, 1860-1930 (Lausanne: Antipodes, 2005), pp. 405-12.
30. John Caldwell, 'Mass Education as a Determinant of the Timing of Fertility Decline', Population and Development Review 6 (1980), pp. 225-55.
31. Alison Mackinnon, 'In a Class of Their Own? SwedishWomen School Teachers and the Fertility Transition in the Late Nineteenth Century', Interchange 34 (2003), pp. 281-96; Daniel Scott Smith, '"The Number and Quality of Children": Education and Marital Fertility in Early-Twentieth Century Iowa', Journal of Social History 50 (1996), pp. 367-92; Ann Larson, Growing up in Melbourne: Family Life in the Late Nineteenth Century (Canberra: Australian National University, 1994). See also the contributions of Alison Mackinnon, Angélique Janssens, Ida Blom, Pau Baizan and Enriqueta Camps in Janssens (ed.), Were Women Present at the Demographic Transition?
32. Archives cantonales vaudoises; Département de l'instruction publique et des cultes; Archives de l'Etat de Fribourg; Département de l'instruction publique.
33. For further development and references on the construction of these data files, see Praz, De l'enfant utile à l'enfant précieux, pp. 559-74.
34. For the administrative sources, we explored annual reports of the cantonal governments, messages presenting the school laws, correspondence between cantonal and local administrations; our content analysis systematically compiled the terms and phrases supporting the arguments in favour of the necessity of education and regular school attendance. For the educational periodicals, we selected all articles containing the topic 'gender' in the Bulletin pédagogique, published in Fribourg since 1872, and in two corresponding periodicals for the canton of Vaud, that merged during the period: L'Ecole, published in Lausanne between 1873 and 1901, and L'Educateur, an educational periodical distributed in French-speaking Protestant Switzerland and published from 1866. The content analysis of school manuals concentrated on two reading books, one published in Fribourg, the other inVaud, and used for children of the age eight to twelve from around 1900 until the end of the 1920s: Emile Bonjour and Louis Dupraz, Livre de lecture à l'usage des écoles primaires du canton de Vaud (Lausanne: Hoirs d'Adrien Borgeaud, 1903); Livre de lecture à l'usage des écoles primaires du canton de Fribourg (Fribourg: Fragniére, 1890). For further development of both the discourse analysis and the statistical results, see Anne-Françoise Praz, 'Ideologies, Gender and School Policy:AComparative Study of Two Swiss Regions', Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education 42 (2006), pp. 345-61.
35. 'Y aurait-il différence d'essence et de destinée entre l'intelligence de l'homme et celle de la femme? Toutes les deux ne seraient-elles pas appelées également à prendre pleine possession du royaume de la vérité, à glorifier Dieu par le libre et complet épanouissement de toutes leurs forces vives?', L'Ecole 25 (1883), p. 308.
36. L'Ecole (1 December 1879), p. 363.
37. 'La mère institutrice', in Bonjour and Dupraz, Livre de lecture à l'usage des écoles primaires du canton de Vaud, p. 110.
38. In the Bulletin pédagogique, the learned woman is negatively presented as: 'une nullité', 'un demi-savant', 'un demi-messieur', 'un amas de sciences qui empêche les connaissances utiles et sérieuses', 'une demoiselle à diplômes qui dédaigne le mariage et la famille'.
39. A first data file includes the 2,353 children whose school career has been reconstituted; a dummy variable is set to one if the child has attended a post-primary school. Using a logistic regression, the model measures the impact of five independent variables (sex, religion, father's occupation, birth order, death of one parent before age thirteen) on a child's chance of attending a post-primary school. A second database is constituted by time sequences of children's school career between the age of thirteen (where the respective school systems permitted the first school leaves) and eighteen (as very few children pursued their studies beyond this point). Using a Cox regression, the second model measures the risk of leaving school early according to the same variables.
40. This hypothesis is advanced by Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender, pp. 410-11 and by John Caldwell, 'The Delayed Western Fertility Decline: An Examination of English-Speaking Countries', Population and Development Review 25 (1999), pp. 479-513.
41. For a detailed analysis of these discourses, see Anne-Françoise Praz, 'Gender, Religion and the Pace of Fertility Decline in French-Speaking Switzerland (1860-1930)', in Janssens (ed.), Were Women Present at the Demographic Transition?
42. Catherine Fussinger and Chantal Ostorero, 'La Question sexuelle - Des seuils de tolérance en reélaboration', Equinoxe 20 (October 1998), pp. 101-14.
43. Margarethe Faas-Hardegger (1882-1963), the editor of a trade union journal for women and the first Women Secretary engaged by the Swiss Federation of Trade Unions, suggested information meetings about contraception for working women, but she was met with absolute refusal by the direction of the Federation. See Ina Boesch, Gegenleben: Die Sozialistin Margarethe Hardegger und ihre politischen Bühnen (Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 2004).
44. Anne-Marie Käppeli, Sublime Croisade: Ethique et politique du féminisme protestant, 1875-1928 (Geneva: Zoé, 1990); Ursula Gaillard and Annick Mahaim, Retards de règles: Attitudes devant le contrôle des naissances et l'avortement en Suisse du début du siècle aux années vingt (Lausanne: Ed. d'en bas, 1983).
45. In exploring the influence of the feminist movements on the British fertility decline, Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender, p. 573, makes a similar observation: The more important impact could have been the strongly evangelical strain within feminism, which emphasised the importance of sexual continence for husbands and put into question male sexual expectations in general.