Guest Editor Comments

Abstract

One of the assumptions in family studies is that marriage behavior and household composition are conservative institutions strongly connected to social and economic characteristics of the society. Historically, household was the basic cell of production and consumption while in contemporary society still remains the basic unit for consumption. Family and household structures therefore do not change unless some important economic, social or political problems affect the society as a whole so any significant variation of their characteristics (age at marriage, percentage of single women, number and type of people living in the same household) are interpreted as signs of important social changes taking place in the society (Lesthaeghe 1983). While family is assumed to be a system (Cox and Paley, 1997) with well-defined and relatively stable characteristics, there are few theoretical attempts to define its parameters outside of the structuralist approaches to kinship (LeviStrauss, 1969 [1949]), which are focused on the connections between people belonging to the kin rather than factors modeling the structure of household.Almost fifty years ago, John Hajnal, an English/Hungarian statistician, made such an attempt by introducing the notion of an "European" pattern of marriage/household, characterized by high age at marriage, high proportion of people who never marry, women and men working as servants before marriage and establishing their own households upon marriage. Hajnal describes this pattern of marriage as "unique" and "almost unique" in the world and, although (for brevity) he calls it "European," he defines it as being applicable only to the Northwestern Europe, west of an imaginary line connecting "Leningrad" (Saint Petersburg) to Trieste. Eastern European countries, mostly falling east of the Hajnal's line, as well as some Southern European countries, were characterized as having a non-European household formation system:Although Hajnal did not intend to give a definitive perspective on the causes that led to such a particular system of household organization, he saw the pattern of marriage as being based on and influenced by the economic organization of life: ...a marriage almost by definition requires the establishment of an economic basis for the life of the couple and their children. The arrangements current in a society for achieving this must fit in with the marriage pattern: they will shape it and will be in turn influenced by it. (Hajnal, 1965: 132)Interestingly enough, Hajnal's line followed the same borders as the Iron Curtain, then dividing Europe into capitalist and socialist societies. As Churchill put it in a speech he gave at Westminster College, Missouri, in 1946, an iron curtain has descended after the World War II "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic." While the iron curtain was the result of the Yalta negotiations and the countries mixed together on one or the other sides of the curtain were highly dissimilar from an economic and social point of view, Hajnal's line implied that the Eastern nations were homogeneous from at least one point of view: historical marriage patterns. It gave a good, historical reason to look to Eastern European countries as being closely related to Russia/USSR rather than seeing them as part of Europe. The link between the Iron Curtain and family patterns is not explicitly discussed in Hajnal's work, but later on other authors (Todd (1985)) picked up and expanded the idea by arguing that the historical family structures are strongly related to the ideologies adopted by various European countries.Although the notion of a "Western European" as opposed to "the rest of the world" type of family is currently related to Hajnal's work, his research relied on and was influenced by the studies coming from the Cambridge Group for the Population History. Within a larger context of ideas, the 1950s-1960s were the times when Rostov's theory of modernization was quite popular in the academic world. …