Reconsidering the northwest European family system: living arrangements of the aged in comparative historical perspective

Steven Ruggles, University of Minnesota

During the past four decades, historians and demographers have argued that historic Northwest Europe and North America had a unique family system characterized by neolocal marriage and weak family ties. This analysis uses newly available microdata from 91 historical and contemporary censuses of 29 countries to evaluate whether the residential behavior of the aged in historical Northwest Europe and North America was exceptional. The results show that with simple controls for agricultural employment and demographic structure, comparable measures of the living arrangements of the aged show no systematic differences between nineteenth-century Northwest Europe and North America and developing countries in the twentieth century. These findings suggest that by these measures Northwest European families were typical of populations with similar levels of economic development.