Sibling Relations and Gender in European Societies

This article explores the history of siblings, the place of siblings, siblinghood, and sibling relations in the history of family and society, the intersection between siblings and gender. The themes covered include obligations, inheritance, emotions, concepts of siblinghood, and rivalries. The coverage ranges from ancient societies to the 20th century, although the main focus is on the period from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. Geographically, the focus is mainly on western Europe. These reflect the scoping of the existing literature in the area. The work on siblings has rested on primary sources that have tended to scope the work into three main areas, which, themselves, have predetermined findings and conclusions. Firstly, much of the work has derived from sources concerned with demography. This has allowed wide-ranging surveys of family life but has tended to blur the nuances of family relationships within wider demographic processes. Secondly, historians have focused on inheritance. The problem here is that these sources favor more elite groups with heritable property. Elites have also been favored by the third main area of work, on qualitative evidence of sibling relations in letters and other ego documents, along with court records and literature. The way that the primary sources have determined the focus of work on siblings is, of course, part of a wider dilemma in the history of the family. It does, though, explain why the work clusters around certain groups and themes, which are reflected in this discussion. Overall, the article suggests that despite the lack of consistent focus from historians, a significant body of knowledge around siblings and siblinghood exists.

Sibling relationships are often the most long-lasting within a family. With siblings, people learn to communicate, exchange, and negotiate without peers, often away from direct parental supervision. Even the absence of siblings has a presence in our lives. Sibling relations are of huge significance for understanding a wide range of themes in history. Historians have only recently begun to pay consistent attention to these affiliations. Previously, attention was directed to the individual and the self. Furthermore, there has been great interest in the vertical ties surrounding inheritance and property, and parent–child and marital relations have tended to dominate. The search for the “modern nuclear family” masked the role of siblings in family life. Additionally, Freudian theories of psychoanalysis tended to favor interest in parent–child relations, and personal sources tend to underplay this closest of family affinities. However, the task of exploring historic sibling relations has begun, and gender has become a major theme within this work. Siblingship was a context in which people experienced gender for the first time early in their lives and in which gender roles and identities were played out. Patriarchy could be moderated within the family, and male power could be contained; in the longer term, though, the subordination of women grew out of these early experiences.