The significance of looking back: fertility before the "fertility decline"

In this paper, I argue that living with no or few children and low fertility was widespread in pre-industrial societies. After a critical discussion of demographic transition theory and the concept of 'natural fertility', I investigate fertility in early modern Europe. In doing so, I follow the suggestion of 'cultural demography' and combine quantitative and qualitative research. I show a great extent and many variations of deliberate birth control before the 'fertility decline' took place. This finding should help to see the actual level of fertility as less exceptional and dramatic than it is often claimed. Adapted from the source document

Lohnarbeit und Lebenszyklus im Kaiserreich [1988]

The starting point of this chapter is an observation made by German sociologists during the early twentieth century concerning the occupational fate of elderly workers in large-scale industry. A series of studies on single enterprises led to the conclusion that at around the age of 40, workers in these industries experienced a "critical turning point" that led to a serious deterioration of their working conditions and living standards and, most frequently, to their expulsion from industry altogether. Sociologists have ar-gued that this "second phase" of an industrial worker's life course remained "in the dark." The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the experiences of these elder workers by going beyond single enterprises and industries and analysing contemporary comprehensive statistics. The German Empire's occupational statistics from 1882, 1895, and 1907 offer excellent data; parts of these surveys have been made machine-readable, which al-lows scholars to follow age cohorts over the entire period between 1882 and 1907. My analysis of this data reveals the strong impact of life-course related transitions from agriculture to industry (during the early years of one's working life) and back (in middle and old age), and from wage labour in crafts and trades to economic independence. I argue that in Germany during the era of "high industrialisation" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wage labour was still not yet an overall life-long attribute of the working life but was for the majority of workers a phase in the working life course or a preliminary step towards independence as peasant or craftsman, be it as small employer or through self-employment

"Traditionelle" Handwerker und ihre Zünfte als starke Akteure in der neuzeitlichen Expansion von Warenmärkten und Arbeitsmärkten: Forschungsansätze und Resultate [1998]

The original text of this reprint begins with a comprehensive discussion of the surprisingly intense scholarly discussions and political debates about the history and "essence" of artisans and guilds that took place across Europe from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. At the core of these discussions was the construction of a dichotomy: Be it for adulatory or critical reasons, artisans and guilds were portrayed as representatives of tradition, equality, corporative ideals, a community spirit, and solidarity, and, thus, as the antithesis of modernity, innovation, competition, liberalism, social inequality, individualism, and other dimensions of the modern economy and society. This dichotomic matrix was shared by conservatives and liberals alike, e.g., by Marx, Engels, and later Marxists, and by nineteenth- and twentieth-century economists and historians across the political spectrum. This first part of the original chapter has been omitted for spatial reasons. The very aim of the two parts of the chapter reprinted here is to question the dichotomic matrix; to engage with it in light of the results of recent research; and to integrate artisans and guilds into the history of the evolution of early modern market economies and, thus, into the history of capitalism. This is accomplished, first, by reviewing a wide range of recent scholarly literature from various parts of Europe that contradicts previous narratives and, second, by presenting exemplary research results from Austrian sources. Both approaches demonstrate the following: that guilds were less a medieval than an early modern institution; that they were characterised by strong internal hierarchies between very poor and very rich members; that artisans were engaged in competition within and between guilds as well as between rural and urban producers (even when they belonged to the same provincial guild); that there were not only antagonistic but also symbiotic relations between guild masters, freelancers, and completely illegal artisans; and that the borders between production and merchandising were very weak

Frauenarbeit und Arbeiterfamilie in Wien: Vom Vormärz bis 1934 [1981]

This chapter reconstructs the extent and the structure of women's gainful employment in Vienna from the early nineteenth century to the 1930s. The very focus, however, is on the tension between work performed for wages and housework and how it was negotiated in working-class families. The basic assumption is that during the hundred years under investigation, the relationship between women’s housework and wage labour changed according to the different phases of the industrialisation process: centralised manufacture and domestic industry particularly in textile production; a specific form of the Industrial Revolution defined by the expansion of artisanal small-scale production; the breakthrough of capitalist labour relations in the era of "high industrialisation"; and, finally, advanced industrial capitalism from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1930s. Each of these phases was characterised by distinct labour markets for women, specific family patterns and housing conditions, and by specific ideas about gender roles and family life. An investigation into these various factors makes use of a range of different sources including population and occupational statistics, contemporary social surveys, and autobiographical writings. The combination of these sources reveals several ambivalent trends. Specifically, the last period of industrialisation is characterised by women's increasing participation in modern factory work; the increased withdrawal of married women from gainful employment together with a growing appreciation for housewives in working-class families; a stricter assignation of household chores to women; but also a strong inclination towards vocational training and career in the future plans of girls

Arbeitsdiskurse im deutschen Sprachraum des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts [2016]

Discourses on work and labour have been taking place in Europe since Antiquity. In some historical periods, however, such topics were much more intensively discussed than in others. The starting point of this chapter is the assumption that in European history, the period around 1500 was one such high point. Perceptions of the value of work became an issue of public interest, and the meaning of work was increasingly narrowed to gainful employment. Labour discourses found expression in a wide range of sources related to the everyday life of the lower and middling classes such as journeymen’s petitions, guild statutes, charity regulations, and urban poor laws, but they also appeared in popular poetry and in a wide range of visual representations of work and workers in the public space, for instance, on the walls of churches. I argue that the social background of intensified discourses included a spate of dynamic socio-economic changes in the sixteenth century, including the transformation of feudal agriculture and the emergence of a largely independent peasantry, increasing social inequality in the rural world, the growth of cities, the spread of mining centres, among other things. In periods of change such as this, discourses on work and labour allowed new social groups to form an identity and define their position in society. It was particularly social groups on the lower rungs of society that developed a work ethic from below and used their inclination to manual labour and their disgust over idleness as a political argument in conflicts with the upper classes and state authorities