Households and Families

Abstract

No special theories about the East European and Balkan family exist that try to explain the specific character of East European families in history (see Burguière, Klapisch-Zuber, Segalen and Zonabend, 1996). Empirical studies have mainly led to classifications or classificatory systems. The most famous and influential is that following Hajnal’s (1965) distinction of two different European Marriage Patterns. The idea was that there was a split in family behaviour between the West and the East. Hajnal later (1983) discussed the impact of his distinction of family formation behaviour on family structure. Peter Laslett (1983) made an attempt to systematize the results from different regional case studies in one typology of European family and household patterns. He distinguished four patterns: first a ‘Northern and Western’ and a ‘Southern and Eastern’, and then subclassified them into ‘West’, ‘West/Central and Middle’, ‘Mediterranean’, and ‘East’. Typical examples were England for ‘West’, Germany for ‘West/Central and Middle’, Italy for ‘Mediterranean’, and Russia for ‘East’.