The household and the making of history

Hartman, Mary S.

"This book argues that a unique late-marriage pattern, discovered in the 1960s but originating in the Middle Ages, explains the continuing puzzle of why western Europe was the site of changes that, from about 1500, gave birth to the modern world. Contrary to views that credit political and economic upheavals from the late eighteenth century for ushering in the contemporary global era, it contends that the roots of these and other modern developments themselves are located in an event taking place more than a millennium earlier, when the peasants in northwestern Europe began to marry their daughters almost as late as their sons. The appearance of this late-marriage system, with its unstable nuclear household form, is also shown to have exposed for the first time the common ingredients whose presence has perpetuated apparently universal beliefs in the importance of gender difference and of a sexual hierarchy favoring men."--Jacket.