Homeliness, ready meals and care : practical, economic and emotional benefits and meanings of family households for middle-class bachelors in early-twentieth-century Helsinki

The article looks at the family relationships of unmarried men at a time when the family became more strictly defined as just a nuclear family. The article focuses especially on middle-class and urban bachelors who lived together with their various family members. The aim is to challenge the image of bachelors and their masculinity produced by representations and discourses of the time by looking at residence practices and bachelors’ writings about family and home. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bachelors were often portrayed in newspapers as lonely and homeless. Increasingly, bachelors were excluded from the family and were even presented as posing a threat to the well-being of families. However, Leonore Davidoff (2012), for example, has highlighted how families are constructed from many other relationships in addition to the nuclear family. Census data on Helsinki show how, in both 1900 and 1930, a significant proportion of unmarried middle-class men lived with family members in various arrangements. Regardless of twentieth-century discourses and (among other things) social-policy measures, the family was an important part of the lives of many adult unmarried men, and these men were for their part an essential element in the lives of many families. In addition to census data, correspondence, diaries, oral history data, probate records and newspaper material have been used as sources. The article focuses on the significance of family households for bachelors over the age of 18 and how bachelors living with family members benefitted from these arrangements economically, domestically and in terms of their physical and mental well-being. Living with family members could, among other things, enable more comfortable living conditions and bring continuity, support and security to the bachelor’s life. The article also looks at how bachelors’ family relationships changed according to age and circumstances.The article is a revised version of a chapter [2] of the author’s EUI PhD thesis, 201