Ch .20 p973-1017

• Marriage and the Family
• Late Marriage and Nuclear Families
• The nuclear family was the most common in preindustrial Europe.
• Common people married late (mostly in their late twenties) in this period.
• The custom of late marriage combined with the nuclear-family household distinguished European society from other areas in the world.
• Most people waited to marry until they could support themselves economically.
• The state attempted to control the sexual behavior of unmarried adults.
• Work Away from Home
• Girls and boys both learned independence by working away from home as servants, apprentices, and laborers.
• Service in another family’s home was the most common job for single girls.
• Servant girls worked hard, had little independence, and were in constant danger of sexual exploitation.
• Boys were subject to verbal and physical abuse, but were less vulnerable to sexual harassment and assault than girls.
• Prostitutes faced harsh laws in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
• Premarital Sex and Community Controls
• The evidence suggests a low rate of illegitimate births.
• In rural villages there were tight community controls over premarital sex and adultery.
• Once married, couples generally had several children.
• Contraception was used mainly by certain sectors of the urban population.
• New Patterns of Marriage and Illegitimacy
• Cottage industry enabled young men and women to become independent earlier.
• Young villagers who moved to the city entered into new sexual relationships free of community control.

• Rates of illegitimacy rose sharply between 1750 and 1850.
• Children and Education
• Child Care and Nursing
• Women of the lower classes generally breast-fed their children for a longer period of time than is customary today.
• The well-off generally hired poor wet nurses 
• 
  
• to breast-feed their children.
• Reliance on wet-nurses contributed to high levels of infant mortality.
• In the second half of the eighteenth century, critics mounted harsh attacks against wet-nursing.
• Foundlings and Infanticide
• Rates of infant mortality were high. 
• Many children were abandoned soon after birth and foundling homes existed to care for some of these children. 
• Infant mortality rates in foundling homes were extremely high.
• There is some evidence that infanticide remained common.
• Attitudes Toward Children
• There is conflicting evidence about relationships between parents and young children in the eighteenth century.
• Discipline methods for children were often severe.
• The Enlightenment sparked a new discourse about childhood and childrearing.
• Schools and Popular Literature
• Protestants and Catholics encouraged common people to read the Bible.
• Some European governments encouraged primary school education for children of the common people (Prussia, other Protestant principalities in Germany, Scotland, England, the Austrian Empire).
• Basic literacy rose rapidly between 1600 and 1800.
• The growth in literacy promoted a growth in reading.
• Ordinary people were not completely cut off from the ideas of the Enlightenment.
• Food, Medicine, and New Consumption Habits
• Diets and Nutrition
• The poor ate whole grain bread, beans, peas, and vegetables.
• The common people of Europe loved meat and eggs, but did not eat them very often.
• Townspeople had a more diverse diet than that of peasants.
• The rich gorged on meat, sweets, and liquor.
• Diets varied regionally.
• Patterns of food consumption changed markedly over the course of the eighteenth century.
• New foods introduced from the Americas (corn, squash, tomatoes, potatoes) improved calorie per acre production and nutrition.
• The most remarkable dietary change was in the consumption of sugar and tea.
• Toward a Consumer Society
• Consumer goods increased in quantity and variety over the course of the eighteenth century.
• The increasing importance of fashion was particularly noticeable in clothing.
• Housing reflected the new consumer spirit.
• The developing consumer society was concentrated in large cities in Northwestern Europe and North America.
• Medical Practitioners
• Medical practitioners in the 1700s included faith healers, pharmacists, physicians, surgeons, and midwives.
• Over time women were increasingly excluded from medical practice outside midwifery.
• Few treatments by any of these practitioners were effective.
• Surgeons made considerable progress in the eighteenth century.
• The conquest of smallpox was the century’s greatest medical triumph.
• Experimentation with inoculation against smallpox led eventually to vaccination with cowpox, which was effective in preventing the disease (Edward Jenner, 1798).
• Religion and Popular Culture
• The Institutional Church
• The local parish church remained the basic religious unit all across Europe.
• Local churches played key roles in community life.
• Protestants quickly created bureaucratized churches controlled by the secular powers.
• Catholic rulers increasingly took control of the Catholic Church in their domains (as in Spain).
• The growth of state power and the weakness of the papacy are exemplified by the experience of the Jesuits in the eighteenth century.
• Protestant Revival
• Pietism sought to revive the emotional fervor of early Protestantism.
• Influenced by Pietism, John Wesley (1703-1791) spread Methodism among the English populace.
• Catholic Piety
• Catholic authorities tended to compromise with the local elements and festivity of popular Catholicism.
• Jansenism was Catholicism’s version of the Protestant Pietist movement.
• Jansenism was an urban phenomenon.
• Inspired by the Counter-Reformation, Catholic clergy sought increasingly to “purify” popular religious practices.
• The severity of the attack on popular Catholicism varied widely by country and region. 
• Leisure and Recreation
• Carnival illustrates the combination of religious celebration and popular recreation.
• Towns and cities offered a wide range of amusements.
• Blood sports were popular with the masses.
• Within Europe there was a growing division between “high culture” and popular culture, with elite reformers tending to see the latter as sin, superstition, disorder, and vulgarity.