The Lithuanian family in its European context, 1800-1914 : marriage, divorce and flexible communities

ENIndustrialisation and urbanisation alone were not capable of changing traditional household and marriage patterns in historic Europe. Thus the East and West typologisation, known as the symbolic Hajnal line, should not be understood as a paradigmatic demographic concept. It is more like a tool for an analysis of the variety of family systems. Chapter 1 presents a comparative overview of family systems, including household structures, marriage and inheritance models, divorce and separation, child-rearing, and nationalistic family ideologies in Europe. The chapter uncovers flexible family strategies practiced in most European peasant communities in order to preserve certain marriage forms and household structures.Household structures, patterns of marriage and inheritance systems varied greatly throughout historic Europe. They depended on traditions, laws and the prevailing needs of family and household. In central Russia, marriage and inheritance were not related to property division. At the same time, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Lithuanian villages, marriage and the establishment of a new household was a synchronous act. Different land management in the central and western provinces of the Imperial Russia was one of the factors that determined different household structures and sizes in the tsarist empire. In the nineteenth century Lithuania, only family life was accepted. Bigamy, levirate and sororate marriages were exercised in order to respond to the external obstacles that had an impact on the family life and household structure. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Lithuanian-speaking intelligentsia aspired towards a modern society based on Lithuanian national identity. Although the Lithuanian intelligentsia also desired to promote a nationally “pure” family, they did not treat it as an exclusively reproductive institution. Lithuanian nationalists believed that the idea of a strong national family would succeed only if a wife and a husband treated each other as equal partners and comrades in arms.In a majority of European countries in the nineteenth century divorce regimes grew more liberal. In the context of this change Lithuania was one of the last European countries to introduce official divorce. According to Catholic canon law, annulment of a legally binding marriage was impossible and only the death of one of the spouses could end the sacrament of matrimony. In the nineteenth century in Lithuania the only form of legal divorce was the acknowledgement that a marriage had been illegal from its inception. According to the canon law, a married life could also be suspended if the ecclesiastical court handed down a decision that the couple separate “from bed and board”. Canon law regulated Catholic divorce in Lithuania until 1940, whereupon a civil registry of marriage was introduced. In 1863–1904, a total of 89 Catholics from the Kaunas province appealed to the Consistory regarding marriage annulments. Seventy-seven court rulings were negative. In the nineteenth century, there were several ways of breaking off an unsuccessful marriage without the knowledge of the ecclesiastical court: fleeing, creating an illegitimate family, converting from Catholicism to another religion or murdering one’s spouse. Cohabitation in nineteenth-century Lithuania was often bigamous, as one or both of the cohabitants women would already be married. [Publisher annotation]

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