Race, Care Work, and the Private Law of Inheritance

2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (02) ◽  
pp. 511-518
Author(s):  
Dorothy E. Roberts

In Someday All This Will Be Yours, Hendrik Hartog (2012) examines how private inheritance law structured the strategies people used at the turn of the twentieth century to induce relatives to care for them as they aged. Reading it as a book about social inequality and the family reveals how wealth, gender, and race not only worked to deny claims of marginalized caregivers but also to hide the way these social hierarchies affect family life. Although race does not figure in Hartog's analysis, highlighting its latent presence illustrates the often unspoken yet fundamental role race plays in legal regulation of families.

2020 ◽  
Vol 147 (4) ◽  
pp. 823-837
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Sierakowska

Evolution or revolution? Transformations of family in the Polish lands in the first half of the twentieth century: Selected aspects The text focuses on select issues related to the transformation of the family in the first half of the twentieth century, such as: changes regarding marital choices and relationships between spouses, changes in the scope of parental roles and the processes of individualization and individual autonomy in the family. It tries to answer the questions about the dynamics of these processes in different social milieus and to indicate factors that accelerated and delayed them. The analysis of the sources and literature concerning family lives does not allow for an unambiguous assessment of the rapidity and range of changes taking place in families. Nevertheless, it exposes the diversity of models existing in family life and shows that it depends on such elements as social environment, gender, idiosyncratic features of the individual, to the same extent as it does on the rate of change.


Author(s):  
Joanna L. Grossman ◽  
Lawrence M. Friedman

This book is a comprehensive social history of twentieth-century family law in the United States. The book shows how vast, oceanic changes in society have reshaped and reconstituted the American family. Women and children have gained rights and powers, and novel forms of family life have emerged. The family has more or less dissolved into a collection of independent individuals with their own wants, desires, and goals. Modern family law, as always, reflects the brute social and cultural facts of family life. The story of family law in the twentieth century is complex. This was the century that said goodbye to common-law marriage and breach-of-promise lawsuits. This was the century, too, of the sexual revolution and women's liberation, of gay rights and cohabitation. Marriage lost its powerful monopoly over legitimate sexual behavior. Couples who lived together without marriage now had certain rights. Gay marriage became legal in a handful of jurisdictions. By the end of the century, no state still prohibited same-sex behavior. Children in many states could legally have two mothers or two fathers. No-fault divorce became cheap and easy. And illegitimacy lost most of its social and legal stigma. These changes were not smooth or linear—all met with resistance and provoked a certain amount of backlash. Families took many forms, some of them new and different, and though buffeted by the winds of change, the family persisted as a central institution in society. This book tells the story of that institution, exploring the ways in which law tried to penetrate and control this most mysterious realm of personal life.


Author(s):  
Catherine E. Rymph

This chapter surveys the origins of foster care in earlier methods for supporting dependent children dating back to the colonial period, including indenture, orphanages, “placing out” (also known as orphan trains), boarding out, and adoption. It attends to the racial and religious aspects of these systems and to the relationship between private and public systems of child welfare. The chapter also discusses the importance of the professionalization of the child welfare field in the early twentieth century, particularly the creation of the US Children’s Bureau and the Child Welfare League of America.


2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura A. Scudellari ◽  
Bethany A. Pecora-Sanefski ◽  
Andrew Muschel ◽  
Jane R. Piesman ◽  
Thomas P. Demaria

Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

This chapter analyses the earliest of the New Zealand coming-of-age feature films, an adaptation of Ian Cross’s novel The God Boy, to demonstrate how it addresses the destructive impact on a child of the puritanical value-system that had dominated Pākehā (white) society through much of the twentieth century, being particularly strong during the interwar years, and the decade immediately following World War II. The discussion explores how dysfunction within the family and repressive religious beliefs eventuate in pressures that cause Jimmy, the protagonist, to act out transgressively, and then to turn inwards to seek refuge in the form of self-containment that makes him a prototype of the Man Alone figure that is ubiquitous in New Zealand fiction.


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