The image of the nagging woman being ducked as a scold is firmly ensconced among popular images of women in the past, but the historical phenomenon of prosecutions for scolding, though it has been briefly touched on in many studies, has been the subject of only two substantial contributions, those of David Underdown and Martin Ingram. Underdown has maintained that from the 1560s there was increasing concern with scolds, which he links with the rise in witchcraft prosecutions and growing anxiety about domineering and unfaithful wives. Accepting the notion of a ‘crisis of order’ in the decades around 1600, he postulates as an aspect of this a ‘crisis in gender relations’ which he attributes to a decline in neighbourliness and social harmony resulting from the spread of capitalism. He bases his argument partly on literary sources, including plays, sermons and popular pamphlets (though conceding that literary evidence is not conclusive and that the misogynistic tradition in literature is a long one) and partly on a somewhat impressionistic survey of court records from around 1560 to around 1640. This period, he claims, witnessed an intense preoccupation with women perceived as threatening the patriarchal order, manifested by greater numbers of prosecutions of scolds and other disorderly women than in the preceding and subsequent periods, and by more severe punishments, notably the cucking-stool. Women accused as scolds, he maintains, were usually poor, widows, newcomers, social outcasts or ‘those lacking the protection of a family’, and were likely to vent their frustration on local notables as the nearest symbols of authority. He suggests that both the prosecution of scolds and their punishment by ducking were more common in towns and wood-pasture villages than in arable areas (such as that around Fordwich in Kent, the borough we will be looking at); however, he admits that rural records have survived less well than urban, and gives no quantified evidence for the alleged lenience of the authorities in arable villages towards ‘disorderly’ women.

In medieval and early modern England, men's and women's rights to land were not equal. Sons were preferred over daughters in the inheritance of land. Marriage removed rights of property ownership from women and placed them in the hands of their husbands. Yet land stood at the heart of the economy and society in rural England in a period when agriculture was the main employer and land the main source of wealth, social status and political power. Ordinary women's inferior rights to land were a key aspect in women's subordination as a whole. The study presented here is a detailed examination of women's acquisition and possession of land in north-east Norfolk in the period 1440–1580, using data from manorial documents and wills. Erickson has noted that ‘it is relatively easy to compile information on how women as a sex were supposed to act in early modern England, and lists of the legal restrictions placed upon them. It is much more difficult to ascertain exactly how women did behave and how they responded to their legal disabilities.’ This study emphasizes actual practice rather than legal theory.

Economic historians and development economists have exploited links between nutrition, health status and physical stature to argue that evidence about height can be used to supplement conventional economic indices of well-being. Evidence on stature may be available for time periods when conventional economic indices are not. It may also exist for sections of populations for which only aggregate income data is available, and so expose variations in living standards within populations: indeed this may be its most important contribution. Moreover height is an aggregate function of many aspects of well-being, including real income, work intensity and the disease environment. Unlike real income data it can reflect net environmental factors such as arduous employment at an early age that is not fully offset by inputs of food and health care.

This article exploits these potentially useful attributes of the anthropometric approach to explore a neglected aspect of inequality in early industrial Britain and to try to capture evidence of the net effect of relative deprivation through cross-sectional analyses of heights. Children in families headed by women comprise the subsample on which we focus. Considerable qualitative and some quantitative evidence exists to suggest that children in such families were relatively deprived. Female-headed households were impoverished by the relatively low earning power of women, which was only partially offset by poor relief. But oppressive poverty was not alone in making these children's lives hard. Evidence suggests that they comprised a disproportionate share of child workers in the mines and manufactories of early industrial Britain. They were put to work early and at jobs which involved long hours and although their efforts augmented family incomes, given the poverty within which such families remained it is unlikely that the children's claim on resources was sufficiently boosted to offset the energy required by their employment.

In late imperial China, as many as 10 per cent of all peasants were unfree. The most common form of unfree labour was state populations organized under the Eight Banners, an elite military organization. This article discusses household succession and household division in three such banner populations organized under the imperial household agency (neiwufu).

The banner household, called hu in Han Chinese or boigon in Manchu Chinese, was defined by common residence and common consumption. Household members lived together, ate together, and farmed together. They did so, however, on state land as hereditary state peasants, albeit elite peasants. Provided with ample land, their principal functions were to provide the state with agricultural goods, as well as with labour and military service.

The Qing state organized the banner household according to two contradictory principles. On the one hand, by encouraging late household division many banner households evolved into large joint households. On the other hand, by enforcing a system of primogenitary household headship and by granting household heads considerable power over the persons and property of all household members, banner households also resembled stem households. This combination of exclusionary headship and inclusionary membership was a source of tension and potential conflict within banner households. The purpose of this article is to compare Daoyi to two other banner populations, Dami and Gaizhou, in order to ascertain if household behaviour in Daoyi was common elsewhere in northeast China. This is of particular interest since our previous reconstruction of social organization in Daoyi, Fate and fortune in rural China: social organization and population behavior in Liaoning, 1774–1873 (1997), revealed a society dominated by multiple-family households sharply stratified by generation, seniority within generation, and gender.

Specifically, we compare headship succession and household formation rules among these three populations between 1789 and 1909. The article is divided into three sections. In Section I, we describe the three populations and the household registration system that provides most of our information on them. In Section II, we analyze household structure and the patterns of household transition. Finally, in Section III, we contrast two different rules of headship succession among these populations and discuss the consequent patterns of household division.

If the household head had important functions in his household and in the community, his disappearance could have major consequences for his family and members of the community. In agricultural communities in early modern Japan, where the village was organized and run by the heads of the households, and where small-scale family/household farming required the integration of family members under the leadership of the household heads, the death of the household head was a major concern for both family members and the community at large. In two Northeastern villages in Japan, for example, it has been shown that the death of the household head actually increased the probability that female members of the household would also die, even after controlling for other household and individual factors. This increased mortality was occasioned by economic stress resulting from the loss of a core labour component of the household, from psychological stress occasioned by the loss of a family member, and finally from the loss of power by the household which operated within the stem family system.

Our focus in this article is on the age at achieving the headship of a household, and to whom the headship of the household might be transferred. Japanese families in pre-industrial times are said to have followed the stem family rule, which was characterized by non-partible inheritance and succession by just one child. In this system, one child continued to live with the parents while his or her siblings all left home at some point. The eldest son was the preferred successor but some regions selected the eldest child, even if that child was a daughter, or the youngest child. Headship in this family system involved a number of specific responsibilities: to represent the family in the village organization, to sign contracts and negotiate agreements, to manage the family's labour force and finances, and to practise the religious rites of the family. The survival of the family line indicated by the continuation of household names and properties (and businesses) depended, therefore, upon obtaining and training capable heirs. Thus focusing on the transfer of headship provides a clue to the kind of strategies which were followed by peasants.

In 1935 John Embree, an American student of Radcliffe-Brown, entered Suye mura, a village in the Kyushu island of Japan. He was to live in that village for a year and a half to conduct a field survey for his Ph.D. dissertation. During his stay there he determined that ‘The primary social unit in buraku [hamlet] life is the household’, and that ‘This household includes the small family, perhaps a retired grandfather or grandmother, and one or two servants to help in the household and farm labor.’ Since by the ‘small family’ he meant a group of ‘master, wife, eldest son (own or adopted), eldest son's wife, any unmarried children of the master, and eldest son's children (own or adopted)’, what he described is a stem family household.

Being a Radcliffe-Brownian anthropologist, Embree was more interested in the functions of various forms of interaction between households than in statistical analysis of the size and composition of the households of the village. His published monograph includes no table showing a classification of the households there, nor does it contain any information from which we can calculate, for example, the mean number of a particular kin group living within the households of Suye. Nonetheless, his account merits attention for two reasons.

The Society's annual conference will take place in York, 2–4 January 1999.

Proposals for papers on the theme of ‘Self and Society’ in any historical period and culture are invited. Proposals should contain a title proposal and an abstract of one or two paragraphs. They should be sent to Mrs Linda Persson, Centre for Social History, Furness College, Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YG, UK; email l.persson@lancaster.ac.uk, so as to arrive if possible by 31 May 1998.

Subjects for consideration include:

self, community, region and nation

social inclusion and exclusion

welfare and welfare systems

individualism, communitarianism, and collectivism

identities

(auto)biography

self-presentation, manners and behaviour

private and public

body and self.

Presentations will normally be of 20 minutes' duration, followed by discussion. Proposals for panels comprising a chair and three papers on a linked subject or period will be particularly welcomed, as will proposals for papers from post- graduate students.