RURAL RETIREMENT ARRANGEMENTS IN SEVENTEENTH- TO NINETEENTH-CENTURY

Abstract: The peasant retirement arrangement known in Austria as Ausgedinge, is established by the transfer of a farm holding to an heir in exchange for the lifelong provision of shelter, food and other services to the retirees. Since the retirement of the old peasant is closely linked to the marriage of the successor, this arrangement leads to a specific stem-family household in which the head-of-household position rests with the younger generation. The article compares the frequency of retirement arrangements across a wide range of Austrian villages and small towns, controlling for age distribution as well as the various structural and cultural characteristics of these units. The data used are census-type parish registers (soul books) from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. Households with retirement arrangements are found to be rare; only a small pro-portion of the elderly were formally retired. The increase of retirement ar-rangements during the nineteenth century cannot be attributed to changes in age distribution but rather, to increasing wealth in specific agricultural areas. Moreover, the data suggest that in case of the death of a spouse, retirement was increasingly preferred over remarriage. Long before it became one of the most prominent topics for historians of the family, the stem family as the allegedly &dquo;dominant&dquo; household organization of *The research for this paper was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship (81.702.0.79) of the Swiss National Science Foundation. The data used were collected and coded at the Institute of Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna as part of a project on the history of the European Family sup-ported by a grant of the Fonds zur Foerderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung in Oesterreich. I am indebted to Michael Mitterauer, Paul David