Alice Reid
Today most of the world’s population lives in places where, on average, women have fewer than two children over their lifetime, but this level of childbearing is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Kevin Schürer & Simon Szreter
Today the small nuclear family dominates across much of the world. Following World War II this prevailing family form was associated with modernity – the product of a post-industrial society. But just how modern is the modern nuclear family?
Alice Reid
Sleeping Beauty tile panel, designed by Edward Burne-Jones for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Earthenware. England, 1860s. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Famous examples suggest that people married at very young ages in the European past. Shakespeare’s Juliet was ‘not [yet] fourteen’ and Romeo probably not much older. Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, was either 12 or 14 when she married Edmund Tudor, and gave birth to Henry not much more than a year later. The marriage age for British nobles increased over time, but members of the royal family were still marrying fairly young in the 19th century. Both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were 20 when they married in 1840, and Victoria’s eldest son, the future King Edward VII, and his bride Princess Alexandra of Denmark, were 21 and 18 respectively when they married in 1863. Such examples encourage people to think that young ages at marriage must have been the norm.
Jim Oeppen
Campop’s estimated series of population totals for England from 1541 to 1871 are the longest and most detailed available for any country. The associated age-structures have been used to provide summary measures of fertility and mortality, such as replacement rates and life expectancy. The opportunity they present for extending per capita analysis into the past means that they have become a standard reference for historical demography and economic history, and have been cited in over 1,500 academic publications.
Amy Erickson
Thomas Gainsborough
Mr and Mrs Andrews
about 1750. Courtesy The National Gallery.
The habit of women taking a husband’s surname is seen by some as reflecting ancient patriarchal control of women, and by others as a romantic custom symbolising unity. But there is nothing either ancient or romantic about it: the practice has a very specific history.
The Cambridge Group for the History of Population & Social Structure turns 60 this year! Since its founding in 1964, members of the Group have made a spectacular series of discipline-transforming contributions to social science history. These include: reconstructing the population history of England over the last 500 years; delineating occupational change in the English economy over the same period; and reconfiguring our understanding of historical household structures, welfare systems, transport, and energy use.
Every week from 11 July 2024 to July 2025 we’ll post a new blog exploring one of the 60 things everyone should know about family, marriage, work and death in past centuries.
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The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure