Family and the female life course - George Alter
The women of Verviers, Belgium, 1849-1880
KORTE INHOUD
The tension between women's workplace opportunity and family obligation is not exclusively a phenomenon of the 1980s, as George Alter makes abundantly clear in this study. His close investigation of women's lives in a nineteenth-century European industrial city advances our knowledge in several areas of social history, historical demography, and life course studies. It is the first monograph to apply event history analysis to the study of family history. In doing so, it moves beyond the static categories of traditional household studies to a dynamic view of the influence of the family on the life course decisions of individuals. In contrast to most previous historical studies of the family, this work focuses on the dynamic aspects of life course transitions (employment, marriage, household formation, childbearing) rather than the structure of households. In doing so, attention is shifted from the household as a decision-making unit to the role of family obligations and resources in the decisions of individual...
