Recently, Kok () added yet another building block to these theoretical considerations by looking at family systems through the prism of illegitimacy patterns.
Members of the Eurasia Project on Population and Family History recently went even further by stipulating that one of the most important characteristics which distinguishes various family systems is the sequence of individual life-course transitions (Dribe, Manfredini, & Oris, ). Focusing on the co-residence of the elderly not only minimizes the effects of variation in demographic conditions on indicators of family structure (Ruggles,, , ) it can also shed light on contrasting systems of social security and family welfare provision (Cain, Laslett, Smith, Szołtysek, ). The discussion was given a new impetus in the studies of Ruggles, who argued that family structure and living arrangements could be most profitably analyzed from the perspective of the elderly. Both Das Gupta () and Todd () stressed the importance of post-marital residence, but while the former asserted that the crux of family system analysis should be the contours of parental authority, the latter emphasized the effects of inheritance patterns. By contrast, Wall () suggested that the key features to be accounted for are the size and composition of the kin group within the household. In their wide-ranging attempts at explaining intra-European familial differentials, Laslett and others, following the Cambridge Group tradition (most notably Hajnal), tended to focus on the triad household structure – age at marriage – and service, and on the marriage–household formation nexus (Hajnal, Laslett, ). Over the course of 50 years of continuous investigation, various scholars have proposed a number of different approaches for pinning down various dimensions of family systems.
The search for a ‘master variable’ capable of capturing the variation in family systems across past societies of Europe has been the central preoccupation of historical family demography. From ‘family systems’ to an Index of Patriarchy The unprecedented patterning of the many elements of power relations and agency contained in the index generates new ways of accounting for both the geographies and the histories of family organization across the European landmass.ġ. The index allows the authors to identify regions with different degrees of patriarchy within a single country, across the regions of a single country, or across and within many broader zones of historical Europe. In order to explore the comparative advantages of the index, the authors use information from census and census-like microdata for 91 regions of historical Europe covering more than 700,000 individuals living in 143,000 domestic groups, from the Atlantic to the Urals. The index combines all these items, with each being given equal weight in the calculation of the final score, which represents the varying degrees of sex- and age-related social inequality (‘patriarchal bias’) in different societal and familial settings. This indexed composite measure, which the authors call the Index of Patriarchy, incorporates a range of variables related to familial behaviour, including nuptiality and age at marriage, living arrangements, post-marital residence, power relations within domestic groups, the position of the aged, and the sex of the offspring. It is a first exercise in the design and application of a new ‘master variable’ for cross-cultural studies of family organization and relations. This article stands at the confluence of three streams of historical social science analysis: the sociological study of power relations within the family, the regional demography of historical Europe, and the study of spatial patterning of historical family forms in Europe.