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"Ever since the Princeton European Fertility Project on the decline of fertility, the question of how (changes in) cultural beliefs have influenced the historical fertility transition has been in the forefront of historical demographic research. Previous research has however mostly assessed the influence of religious denomination and has not examined the impact of wider beliefs or 'cultural life scripts'. On the basis of a folklore questionnaire, this article examines the occurrence, content, and geographical patterning of popular beliefs about childbearing in relation to fertility patterns in 1.022 rural Dutch communities during the nineteen forties. Beliefs in isolation and churching of women existed in almost half of all communities, particularly among Catholic populations, while fear of enchantment of infants was still alive in about a fifth of all municipalities. To be sure, such popular beliefs were rapidly vanishing and remnants were still found in isolated and strongly religious areas. A multivariate analysis shows that in communities where beliefs in churching and witchcraft still existed, birth rates were significantly higher. The study shows the salience of including popular beliefs in studies of fertility behavior and fertility decline. Moreover, it extends the concept of cultural life scripts beyond that of age norms to include prescriptions on social contexts, conducts, and practices surrounding important life passages." (author's abstract)

This article investigates the antecedents, experience and consequences of service in the lives of rural-born Dutch women within the urbanizing and industrializing context of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. The decision to enter service was often taken by the girl's parents against the background of a distress-ridden household. From the latter part of the nineteenth century, the migration fields of servants widened, with women more often serving in middle-class households in the growing large cities. The consequences of out-migration to these urban and more diverse labour and marriage markets, and for some women also the educational work setting of urban service itself, were that larger proportions of women contracted advantageous marriages and settled outside their rural region of birth.

Die Autorin untersucht, inwieweit Mädchen vom Lande, die als Dienstmädchen in die Stadt abwanderten, mit ihrer Eheschließung einen höheren sozialen Status erreichen konnten. Sie stützt sich auf Daten aus den Jahren 1820 bis 1935, die in der niederländischen Provinz Zeeland ermittelt wurden und vergleicht diese mit entsprechenden Daten der Stadt Middelburg für denselben Zeitraum. Die Auswertung belegt, dass der Dienstmädchenberuf nicht zu Ehen mit Männern höherer sozialer Stellung führte als nach dem gegebenen Sozialstatus des Mädchens zu erwarten war. Hingegen bieten sich anderen in der Stadt lebenden Frauen größere Chancen auf eine Ehe mit höherem Sozialstatus. Die Untersuchung widerlegt damit die Auffassung anderer Wissenschaftler, wonach die Hausangestelltentätigkeit in der Stadt für Mädchen vom Lande als 'Brückenschlag' zu einem höheren Sozialstatus anzusehen sei. (prh)

Research on the effects of sibling position on marriage timing has produced ambivalent findings, suggesting that birth order effects were contingent on social, local, and historical contexts. Based on a large database of marriage certificates from five Dutch provinces between 1840 and 1922, we examine the influence of birth order on marriage timing. Our main conclusion is that sibling position became less important for marriage timing during the nineteenth century. This trend can be considered part of the transition from the West-European marriage pattern to a marriage pattern characterized by more universal marriage in which personal preferences became more significant.

'Why are some families scattered over a larger area than others? In this article we use a dataset with the complete life courses of all children from 210 families, originating from the same village in the commercialized North-Western part of The Netherlands. We experiment with multinomial logistic regression on sibling sets to discover the factors behind geographical sibling dispersal. The most important factors turn out to be the survival of the parents, the civil status of the siblings, and the size and gender composition of the sibling set.' (author's abstract)|

This article investigates developments in and antecedents of socially mixed marriage in the rural Dutch province of Zeeland during the long nineteenth century, taking individual and family histories, community contexts, and temporal influences into account. A government report of the 1850s said of Zeeland that farmers and workers lived "in indifference together". However, our analysis of about 163,000 marriage certificates reveals that 30 to 40 per cent of these rural inhabitants continued to marry outside their original social class. Multivariate logistic regressions show that heterogamous marriages can be explained first and foremost by the life-course experiences of grooms and brides prior to marriage. Previous transitions in their occupational careers (especially to non-rural occupations for grooms, and to service for brides), in their migration trajectories (particularly moves to urban areas), and changes in the sphere of personal relationships (entering widowhood, ageing) are crucial in understanding marriage mobility.

SummaryIn contrast to the extensive knowledge on the association between women's empowerment and the nutritional status of children under the age of five, relatively little is known about the influence of women's empowerment on adolescents' nutritional status. This study aimed to assess the association between women's empowerment and gender inequalities in adolescent nutritional status. Data were from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) covering the period 1997 to 2015, and consisted of 16,683 observations from 13,396 adolescents between the ages of 10 and 19 years born in 6781 families. Three indicators of women's empowerment were used: mother's education, mother's bargaining power and mother's working status. Multivariate linear regression with robust standard errors was used to examine whether and how these indicators of women's empowerment influenced adolescent nutritional status. Interaction terms were added to analyse how the association between women's empowerment and adolescent nutritional status differed by gender. The results showed that mother's education and mother's working status were significantly associated with adolescent nutritional status, particularly with height-for-age. Adolescents of well-educated mothers had a higher height-for-age while those who were raised by mothers with a blue-collar job had a lower height-for-age. Although no gender differences were found for height-for-age, gender differences for BMI-for-age were obvious, with boys having a lower BMI-for-age than girls. Interactions between indicators of mother's empowerment and gender showed that the gender gap in BMI-for-age was smaller for adolescents of more educated mothers. However, further analyses of food consumption patterns showed that boys whose mothers were more educated consumed more fast food and had higher instant noodle consumption than girls, thus suggesting gender bias in new disguise.