My research concerns a district called the Noorderkwartier in the northern area of the province of Holland in the western part of the country, and I have collected data relating to more than 4,000 households between the years 1622 and 1795. Fortunately the eighteenth-century Dutch demographer Nicolas Struyck collected evidence on the size of household in about forty villages in the same part of Holland about the year 1740. His original materials have been lost, but summary totals of inhabitants and households in every village are to be found in his books. What is more, Struyck gives the number of servants (and in some cases lodgers) for most of his villages and even goes so far as to give the sex ratio and the number of children below a certain age. From Struyck's work I have extracted information relating to 8,500 households to add to that for the 4,000 mentioned above.

However, I should like first to discuss the theories developed by Dutch social scientists in the field of the sociology of the family. Historical work gains significance in the light of these sociological theories, and it is appropriate that they be considered before the results of the research referred to above are set out. After the Second World War, interest in the family grew at a much faster rate amongst the Dutch sociologists than amongst the historians. The particular object of attention has been the position of the family in the rapidly changing society of the Netherlands.