Dissolution du mariage et continuation de la lignée familiale dans la société rurale de l'époque Tokugawa

This article investigates the relationship between marriage dissolution and family continuation in Tokugawa Japan. We rely on population registers (shūmon aratame-chō) to analyze the case of Nishijō village, in central Japan. First, we construct remarriage tables on the basis of 286 observations. Then, we select 26 individuals aged below 40 at the death of their husband and follow their lives for 10 years in order to identify the factors determining the remarriage of widows. The results obtained using this data set indicate that the probability of remarriage was influenced by the age of the eldest child (the older the child was, less often would the mother remarry), the future heir, rather than the number of children or the age of the widow at the death of her husband. It appears that these widows placed a high priority in maintaining the family line of their late husband and that they adopted strategies aimed at preserving the stem family

Art · Humanities · Population · Remarriage · Sociology · Demography · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Japanese History and Culture