The Transmission of Well-Being: Gendered Marriage Strategies and Inheritance Systems in Europe

What does well-being mean when we talk about men and women in the past? Their sheer chances of survival, their protection from want, their social status, their individual agency and their self-esteem were all strongly mediated by the family, the predominant social institution. Family laws and customs of family formation created differences between insiders and outsiders in terms of well-being. Within families, there were strong differences in autonomy, status and freedom between the genders and generations. The book offers a fascinating exploration of gender differences in well-being in many regions of historic Europe, with some comparative perspectives. It explores how historic family systems differed with respect to choosing a marriage partner, transmitting property, living and care conditions of widows and widowers and the position of children born out of wedlock.

The Editors: Margarida Durães is Professor of Contemporary History at University of Minho (Portugal) where she teaches History of Family and History of Migrations. She developed comparative international projects in cooperation with Brasil, Spain and France.
Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, a social historian and historical demographer, is Maître de Conférences at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Centre de Recherches Historiques/CNRS, Paris (France), where she teaches History of the Family.
Llorenç Ferrer i Alòs is Professor Catedrático at the Department of Contemporary History at Barcelona University (Spain) where he teaches economic and social history. His interests are family history, agrarian history, historical demography and industrialization.
Jan Kok publishes on family history, historical demography and Information and Communications Technology/ICT-related research practices in the Humanities. He is senior researcher at the Virtual Knowledge Studio and the International Institute of Social History (The Netherlands) and visiting professor at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium).