Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children: Negotiating the Family in Late Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. By Sherri Broder (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. vii plus 259 pp.)

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 794-796
Author(s):  
E. Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Family ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Neglected Children

Working Class Debt in the Late Nineteenth Century United States

1993 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elyce Rotella ◽  
George Alter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Distress ◽  
Economic Strategies ◽  
The Family ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Life Cycle Patterns ◽  
Near Future

Children's wages played a central role in family economic strategies in the late nineteenth century. The family budgets collected by the U.S. Commissioner of Labor in 1889-1890 show that life-cycle patterns of savings and debt varied by industry depending upon incomes from children. The consumption patterns of families whose expenditures exceeded their incomes do not show signs of economic distress, and most families whose annual budget was in deficit could expect larger contributions from children in the near future. These patterns suggest that families used borrowing and saving to smooth consumption over the life-cycle as the earning capacity of the family changed.

State, Market, and Popular Sovereignty in Agrarian North America

2020 ◽  
pp. 177-199
Author(s):  
Christopher Clark
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Productive Capacity ◽  
The Family ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
American Political Economy

This essay focuses on agriculture and particularly the “freehold ideal” of independent farmers in the nineteenth-century United States. An odd contradiction of American territorial settlement was the farmers’ simultaneous drive to exploit resources for the market and the aim of many of those actively engaged in settlement to shield themselves from the market’s dangers by acquiring land on the frontier. Clark shows how the ideal of freehold farming, which was so central to the American political economy, was actually threatened not so much from the dangers of the market overwhelming the small farm as from the family farm running out of labor to uphold its own productive capacity. Labor, not land, was the problem confronting the freehold vision, as he argues in a provocative re-reading of late nineteenth-century small farmers’ calls for state intervention.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document