Abstract
modernization and enduring language barriers influenced
one of the most intimate acts of social interaction: marriage.
In the period during which Belgium underwent social and economic
modernization – often thought to have diminished barriers
between social groups, increasing the likelihood of social heterogamy
– linguistic barriers remained strong. The intriguing question
is, what happens if socio-economic modernization coincides with
persistent linguistic cleavages. We will study this by looking at
marriage formation in communities in the province of (contemporary)
Flemish Brabant and the Brussels Capital Region. We ask:
How large were the temporal and municipal variations in homogamy by social status in the period 1821–1913? And can modernization and the existence of linguistic divisions explain these variations? We use two types of data: couple data from civil registration records in Flemish Brabant 1821–1913 (N = 333,729), and, for some analyses, context data on the municipality at the time of marriage to a shorter period, 1859–1910, and thus a lower number of marriages (N = 270,151). We find that during modernization a shift took place from homogamy on fathers’ status to homogamy on groom’s status, and we find partial support for the effect of language barriers.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 94-122 |
| Number of pages | 29 |
| Journal | The History of the Family |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 3 Nov 2018 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2019 |
Funding
This work was supported by the H2020 European Research Council [Advanced Grant, no: 230279, 2009–14 “Towards Open Societies”]. CONTACT Marco H.D. Van Leeuwen [email protected] The Flemish marriage certificates were collected by 150 volunteers from the General State Archives in Leuven, under the leadership of Patrick Trio. The community indicators were collected as part of the European Research Council, Advanced Grant, no: 230,279, 2009–14 ‘Towards Open Societies? Trends, Variations and Driving Forces of Intergenerational Social Mobility in Europe over the Past Three Centuries’. As indicated in the text most of the community variables used in this paper come from the datatabase `Historische Databank van Lokale Statistieken – LOKSTAT’, University of Gent, Dept. of History, and we are grateful for its curators, profs. E. Vanhaute and S. Vrielinck, for allowing us to make use of them, see for this database http://www.hisstat.be. We also like to thank the audiences of the European Social Science History Conference in Vienna, April 23–26, 2014 and in Valencia, March 30–2 April 2016 for their comments. We are grateful for the helpful comments by the anonymous referees of this journal, as well as to Chris Gordon for polishing the text.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| H2020 European Research Council | |
| Seventh Framework Programme | 230279 |
| European Research Council |