The Household and the Making of History

Many years ago when I first imagined this book, it presented itself as a perfectly straightforward undertaking. A modern European historian trained in political history but attracted to the new social history and the even newer women's history, I was intrigued by the then novel work of Peter Laslett and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. I was fascinated as well by John Hajnal's remarkable discovery of a unique pattern of late marriage – for women, in particular – that is believed to have emerged as early as the medieval era in northwestern Europe. I devised a project in the late 1970s that would show how the subfields of women's history and family history, and the recent demographic findings about this strange marriage and household formation pattern, were bound to transform the ways we understand the Western past.

After taking what I believed was a temporary administrative post in the early 1980s, I continued to find as much time as I could to explore the effects, as well as the still-mysterious origins, of the distinctive late-marriage arrangements in northwestern Europe. At that point, I was convinced that the project was such an obvious one that it was likely to be pursued by many scholars. I was wrong about that, as things turned out. I was wrong, too, about the administrative post being temporary. Worse still, I was wrong about the project itself being straightforward. I explain why in the book.