Traditional textiles are more than decorative or utilitarian objects; they are enduring repositories of family memory, cultural identity, kinship, and intergenerational continuity. Yet, scholarship has largely emphasized artistic, anthropological, and heritage perspectives, overlooking textiles as family heritage within broader studies of family history and material culture. This review synthesizes interdisciplinary research on how inherited garments and ceremonial fabrics preserve collective memory, strengthen family identity, and transmit cultural values. It examines family heritage, material culture, women's preservation roles, marriage traditions, kinship, and intergenerational continuity, while identifying research gaps and opportunities in cross-cultural comparison, digital preservation, and integrated family-history frameworks .
This article examines how Happy Home magazine (1936–1949) contributed to the construction of modern motherhood in Republican Shanghai through the dissemination of scientific childcare knowledge. Drawing on ninety-four issues of the magazine and employing historical analysis, it argues that Happy Home redefined mothers as knowledgeable caregivers and educators responsible for children's physical, intellectual, and moral development. The magazine also promoted cooperative marriage, maternity protection, and nursery services, linking maternal responsibilities with broader family and social support. This study highlights the role of family magazines in shaping modern motherhood in Republican China.
The article analyzes the legal, religious, and moral construction of fatherhood in nineteenth-century Spain, with particular attention to the liberal bourgeoisie. Drawing on legislation, Catholic doctrine, and conduct manuals, it explores how the father was defined as the patriarchal head of household, guardian of family order, breadwinner, and moral educator. These discourses legitimized paternal authority through patria potestas and reinforced a hierarchical, patriarchal family structure. Although they incorporated ideals of domestic affection and sensitivity associated with bourgeois culture, they maintained deep gender inequalities. In this way, fatherhood was consolidated as a central pillar of nineteenth-century social order within Spanish society.
This article explores the intellectual and political legacy of Lila Hojčová (1912–1989), a Slovak lawyer, sociologist, communist, and advocate for women's rights embedded within state-socialist institutions in Czechoslovakia. By addressing issues that challenged the socialist pledge of gender equality in her work, including alcoholism, domestic violence, and family breakdown within Slovak society, Hojčová's legal and sociological expertise functioned as feminist agency within ideological and bureaucratic structures. Drawing on Hojčová's work, this article argues that feminist activism operated as a relational force within the restrictions imposed by the complex, contradictory practices of governance, expertise, and welfare under socialism.
Technological change has long been a central driver of transformations in work, social structure, and economic organization. While extensive scholarship has examined the effects of industrialization, mechanization, and, more recently, digitalization on labour markets, less attention has been paid to how such changes reshape family-level career trajectories across generations. Drawing on insights from family history, economic sociology, and labour economics, this paper develops an interdisciplinary review of the ways in which technological change reconfigures intergenerational occupational mobility and skill transmission within families. Situating contemporary developments in artificial intelligence (AI) within a broader historical continuum, the paper traces shifts from pre-industrial systems of occupational inheritance to modern patterns characterized by education-mediated mobility and increasingly fragmented career paths. Through a systematic synthesis of existing literature, the study highlights the evolving role of families as mediating institutions that both reproduce and transform economic opportunity over time. The paper contributes to family history research by integrating technological change into analyses of kinship, mobility, and inequality, and proposes a multi-level conceptual framework linking macro-level technological shifts to micro-level family outcomes. Implications for understanding the future of family adaptation in the age of AI are discussed.
This paper reviews the impact of individual identification through family composition on societal and governance outcomes. Drawing on comprehensive literature and integrating insights from family systems theory, social identity theory, and social systems theory, the research provides a comparative analysis of prominent and historically important Family Composition Registration Systems (FCRSs) across eight countries. The study highlights the features of Pakistan's National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA)'s pioneering FCRS, including facilitating inheritance and succession, supporting social welfare programs, aiding disaster management, and strengthening law enforcement. Adopting a multilevel approach, the research situates FCRSs within broader societal frameworks, emphasizing both benefits and challenges. This paper contributes analytically to academic discourse, family history research, and policy discussions, offering recommendations to enhance citizen registration within family units. The findings have implications for social welfare, child protection, human rights, and crisis management, while informing the development of more inclusive FCRS and effective identity management systems worldwide.
This study examined long-term shifts in household structures across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal using DHS data over three decades. Household size has declined across all countries, with rapid nuclearization in India and Nepal and persistent joint families in Pakistan. Nuclear families have stagnated in Pakistan and Bangladesh, whereas single-person and childless nuclear households have increased due to adult child migration. The share of households reporting adult children living outside the parental home has risen, suggesting that family ties are being rearranged rather than weakened. Together, these findings challenge the notion of a universal transition toward nuclear families and instead point to the coexistence of nuclearization and enduring intergenerational connections across contemporary South Asia.
The Han bamboo and wooden slips of Northwest China were excavated in the twentieth century. They contain more than 20,000 personal names and serve as important materials to study the naming culture of the Han Dynasty (202 B.C. to 220 A.D.). This paper accounts for, organizes, and classifies these personal names without omissions. According to their detailed analysis, it was common for people in the Han Dynasty to have surnames in which single-character ones are the majority and the two-character ones the minority. In addition, these surnames had two characteristics: First, the amalgamation of clan names and matrilineal names into one surname and, second, the phenomenon of the wife taking her husband's surname after marriage. Based on these findings, this study plays a key role in learning about ancient surnames and their naming system, and gives insights into the origins of surnames in modern times.
In pre-industrial rural Nordic society, the care for animals and the working of animal products were part of the female domain. The purpose of this article is to analyse the inventories of eighteenth-century Helsinki to determine the presence of evidence for economic activity usually identified with rural pursuits, within the urban household. By demonstrating the existence of such activity, the aim is to challenge the idea of a pre-industrial male breadwinner family and provide further support for the demands to re-evaluate the existing paradigm within studies of the household economy.
In late Ottoman Istanbul, parricide both transgressed household authority and exposed its limits. Drawing on newspapers, archival documents, and medico-legal sources, this article examines how violence against parents was interpreted between the 1880s and the early twentieth century. Contemporary accounts rarely treated parricide as an isolated crime. Instead, they explained it through abuse, abandonment, economic conflict, and domestic instability. Parricide is analyzed as a recurring interpretive problem through which contemporaries understood the failure of the conditions that sustained household order.
This article undertakes a demographic analysis of the landed elite of Warwickshire from the late Middle Ages to the early eighteenth century. It analyzes nuptiality and endogamy in marriages of peers and upper gentry (knights, baronets, and esquires). Major findings include: the marriage pattern before the eighteenth century was one in which women “married down;” significant changes occurred around 1550 and after 1650; generalizations about the demography of peers cannot necessarily be extrapolated to the upper gentry; and the marriage patterns of English Catholics after 1550 differed from those of English Protestants and resembled those of continental Catholic elites.
