|
|
Quantifying Patriarchy: Two Joint Family Systems Compared
| Patriarchy has been used to a high degree to describe societies especially in the east and southeast of Europe (talking about a European perspective). Patriarchy consisted of elements like patrilineal descent, patrilocal or patrivirilocal residence after marriage, power relations which favor the domination of men over women and of the older generation over the younger generation, a customary law that sanction these patterns, the absence of an interfering state, and a traditional society opposing changes and economic development. These elements have been used to explain the residence patterns in the east and southeast of Europe as compared to Western Europe, but they have not been used in a quantitative way. In this paper we try to quantify patriarchy by using a list of different variables: gender of household heads, the kin composition of the households, sex ratio, age heaping, missing information about women, age at marriage, order of registration, household complexity, literacy, and sons-in-law. These variables will be compared to each other and to household complexity to see, whether they correlate or not.
We use two data sets for this analysis: the CEURFAMFORM database with data from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 18th century and the Albanian census of 1918. Both datasets show a high proportion of living in joint family arrangements with a remarkable regional variation. The analysis will be done on the village level, which creates a high number of cases for the analysis and the possibility of locating areas of different degrees of patriarchy.
|
|
