During recent years considerable progress has been made in the study of household structure in the U.S.S.R., especially in Estonia. Several studies have been published on the structure of Estonian households, and more are to appear in the near future.

Estonian households are on the whole more complex than those in western Europe. Households with farmhands, whether male or female, are very common, and some even contain the families of such farm servants. On the south Estonian mainland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, complicated houseful systems existed, with two or more farmers' households on one farm (poolemaamehed in Estonian, Hälftner in German, but here we call them ‘co-farmers’). In these circumstances Peter Laslett's standard classificatory table on the typology of households cannot be applied without some slight changes. However, a full picture of Estonian households in those days can be given if we allocate the categories and classes of this table to smaller groups: households without farmhands; households where the farmhands are unmarried or without their families; and households containing farmhands together with their families. For south Estonia four categories have to be distinguished: one household to a farm; one farmer's household together with one or more cotters' households to a farm; the households of co-farmers on a single farm; and the households of co-farmers together with cotter(s)' households on a single farm (see table 6.5 below).