Marital violence in a martial town: husbands and wives in early modern Portsmouth, 1653-1781

Sessions papers from early modern Portsmouth survive from 1653 on and are nearly continuous for eighty-five years, that is, from 1696 to 1781. They include 356 cases of wife beating in addition to 7,658 other assaults; as such, the town's records allow for a comparison of the violent behavior of individual wife beaters both inside and outside of their marriages. These comparisons suggest that assaults on wives were more severe than assaults on strangers and acquaintances: not only were many wives assaulted on several occasions before lodging a complaint, the attacks themselves often resulted in greater injury, reflecting (1) a greater tendency to use potentially lethal weapons and (2) a differential in strength between most husbands and wives. The motives of individual wife beaters are less clear; what can be said with certainty is that wife beatings, like assaults in general, tended to rise whenever soldiers were demobilized and men were either unemployed or underemployed.     

Absent husbands, single wives: success, domesticity, and seminuclear families in the nineteenth-century Great Lakes world

The industrial and transportation revolutions of nineteenth-century America separated work from home (at least for the growing middle class) and intensified the development of masculine and feminine spheres devoted to success and domesticity, respectively. This development tended to reduce the husband's traditional patriarchal roles to that of provider only, while leaving the wife and mother with enhanced authority over household management and child rearing, a development with consequences for feminism. This article examines two extreme cases of separation of work from home: absent husbands, respected professional men, who left their wives alone for months or years and, while they provided financial support, surrendered all household authority to "single" wives.     

Dressing for leadership in China: wives and husbands in an age of revolutions (1911-1976)

The intertwining histories of Chinese dress and politics are registered by the way successive leaders and their spouses chose to present themselves. This essay examines the sartorial practices of three specific marriage partnerships to arrive at a nuanced understanding of the counterbalance of female and male roles played out in the public gaze through the great turns of twentieth-century Chinese history. While the protagonists themselves had little to say publicly about their appearance, there are compelling visual images, as well as telling contemporary comments, which are interrogated for their representation of a revolutionary Chinese modernity.     

"A star that gathers lustre from the gloom of night": wives, marriage, and gender in early-nineteenth-century American temperance reform

This article argues that wives occupied a more central place than mothers in the early nineteenth-century American temperance movement, and that temperance literature portrayed them in two ways. First, temperance writers depicted the drunkard's wife as a pitiable example of the dire effects of male drinking on women and families. Second, they cast wives as potent moral influences on their husbands, capable of preventing the sober from faltering and reclaiming the drunkard. These portrayals coexisted with overtly misogynist views of women within the temperance movement that accused women of making men drunkards through perverted influence and blamed drunkard's wives for their own predicament. The temperance movement's depiction of wives' gender both reflected and contributed to the large ambivalence toward women in American society.     

Mortality and sanitary conditions in the "best governed city in the world"--Birmingham, 1870-1910.

The growth of population in nineteenth-century Britain has often been attributed to the decline in mortality during that period. Here the relationship between improvements in sanitary conditions and the fall in disease mortality is considered for one particular city in the period 1870–1910. Medical Officer of Health reports are used to show the spatiotemporal patterns of both a selection of fatal diseases and sanitary conditions in Birmingham in the 1880s. This evidence suggests that administrative developments in hospital provision, for instance, need to be combined with public health improvements in any explanation of mortality decline. Further, that poverty, as reflected by back to back housing, is more closely associated with high mortality than variables measuring sanitary conditions.     

The role of the Toronto Girls' Home, 1863-1910

It has been suggested that the role of Ontario children's homes, who had for half a century been helping disadvantaged children, changed significantly and immediately under the 'Children's Protection Act of 1893'. However, the records of the girls admitted to Toronto Girls' Home from 1863 to 1910 suggest that this was not the case, for this home at least. For most of their history, their core clientele was the children of poor respectable parents dealing with a crisis or who could not both work and care for their children. Thus, although prior to 1893 they did also care for a significant number of neglected children, and after 1893 fewer such children were admitted, the Home continued for more than 20 years to help families as they always had, providing a form of family support for which the child protection system was not designed.     

Leadership and Coordination in Legislatures: The "President" of the First American Congress: 1774-1789

We analyze the viability of the office of President of Congress as a source of leadership in the Continental and Confederation Congresses.1 Our primary interest is in institutionally grounded, as opposed to and separate from charismatic or personal, bases for leadership. We show that virtually every institutional support for leadership power recognized to be at work in the modern Congress was absent in the Continental Congresses. We trace the origins of these limitations on leadership power and potential to a series of decisions taken during 1774 and 1775 and substantially maintained and even elaborated over the fifteen-year history of the Congress. The result was that even though the institution was awash in "leaders," men like Virginia's Peyton Randolph, Massachusetts' John Hancock, and New York's John Jay, stable and effective "leadership" from the office of President of Congress proved to be impossible.     

The Reduction of Fire Damage in Southern England, 1650-1850

Abstract

The incidence of fire damage in southern England fell off steeply about 1780. This is traced to a spreading movement to build or rebuild in brick-and-tile instead of ‘mud’, timber and thatch, reinforced by improvements in fire-fighting. It resulted in the predominantly Georgian central buildings of southern market towns.