The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800During the period 1500 - 1800 there were massive changes in world social and cultural systems, and the family unit as we recognize it today came into being. The emphasis on the individual, the right to personal freeedoms and the desire for privacy developed during this period and were symptomatic of world-wide shifts in attitude that also affected religion and politics. This is a study of the evolution of the family, from the (to us) impersonal, economically bonded and precarious extended family group of the sixteenth century to the smaller, affectively bonded nuclear unit that had appeared by the end of the eighteenth century, and shows how this process radically influenced child-rearing, education, contraception, sexual behaviour and marriage. This work challenges many of the conventional views hitherto held about English society at that period. |
Contents
List of Graphs | 10 |
Chapter 1 | 16 |
The Demographic Facts | 37 |
Copyright | |
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adults affection attitudes became behaviour birth Boswell Boswell's bourgeoisie boys Calvinist child choice Church classes coitus interruptus contraception court daughter death decline domestic Dr Johnson early eighteenth century Early Modern early seventeenth centuries economic eighteenth century elite emotional England English evidence family type father female Francis Place girl gonorrhoea happiness honour husband illegitimacy individual infant James Boswell labour Lady late eighteenth century late seventeenth century late sixteenth later living London Lord male marital marriage married Mary Mary Astell masturbation middle mistress moral mother nuclear family obedience parents passion patriarchal Pepys period physical pleasure political poor practice pre-nuptial pregnant primogeniture Puritan reason religious result riage rise romantic love seems servants seventeenth century sixteenth and early sixteenth century social society squirarchy tion took upper upper-class venereal disease wealthy wet-nurses wife wives woman women young