Patriarchy Levels in Historic Europe after Contextual Adjustments

Mikolaj Szoltysek, The Cardinal Wyszynski University of Warsaw
Bartosz Ogórek, Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences

Previous research utilized the Gruber-Szoltysek Patriarchy Index (PI) to examine intensity (values and levels) of gendered and generational power relations within family dynamics across several hundred European regions from 1700 to 1918. It also investigated the relationship between regional patriarchy and socioeconomic, demographic, and environmental characteristics by measuring the association between PI and these variables. However, the assertion that a region or country has low or high PI values might reflect local family organization patterns' propensity or resistance to hierarchical social structures, or it could indicate that specific structural factors predetermine the establishment of such structures. To draw solid conclusions about a region's or country's patriarchy, we must control for these factors on regional patriarchy levels. In this paper we propose an approach to disentangle this issue by looking comparatively at the “country-specific patriarchal endowments” (CSPE) using the 300+ regional populations from IPUMS-I historical data from NAPP and Mosaic projects as a testbed. CSPE are operationalized as the marginal residuals from a linear mixed-effects model (with PI as the dependent variable) that accounts for socioeconomic, demographic, environmental, and cultural variables at either the regional or country level. We infer that the unexplained variation represented by these residuals can be attributed to latent country-specific patriarchal characteristics such as policies, institutions, historical legacies, or cultural scripts which are otherwise difficult to quantify. A comparison of these marginal residuals might offer insights into the underlying patriarchal characteristics that vary across our populations if the conditions controlled for in the model are the same across the dataset.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 179. Kinship, Family, and Ideational Change in Historical Context