Someday All This Will Be Yours : : A History of Inheritance and Old Age / / Hendrik Hartog.

We all hope that we will be cared for as we age. But the details of that care, for caretaker and recipient alike, raise some of life's most vexing questions. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, as an explosive economy and shifting social opportunities drew the young away from...

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Superior document:Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter E-BOOK GESAMTPAKET / COMPLETE PACKAGE 2012
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Place / Publishing House:Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2012]
©2011
Year of Publication:2012
Language:English
Online Access:
Physical Description:1 online resource (368 p.)
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Other title:Frontmatter --
Contents --
Introduction: Over the Hill --
Part One: Planning for Old Age --
Chapter One. Of Helplessness and Power --
Chapter Two. The Work of Promises --
Chapter Three. Keeping Them Close --
Chapter Four. Things Fall Apart --
Part Two: Death and Lawyers --
Chapter Five. A Life Transformed --
Chapter Six. Compensations for Care --
Chapter Seven. Paid Work --
Epilogue --
Notes --
Acknowledgments --
Index
Summary:We all hope that we will be cared for as we age. But the details of that care, for caretaker and recipient alike, raise some of life's most vexing questions. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, as an explosive economy and shifting social opportunities drew the young away from home, the elderly used promises of inheritance to keep children at their side. Hendrik Hartog tells the riveting, heartbreaking stories of how families fought over the work of care and its compensation.Someday All This Will Be Yours narrates the legal and emotional strategies mobilized by older people, and explores the ambivalences of family members as they struggled with expectations of love and duty. Court cases offer an extraordinary glimpse of the mundane, painful, and intimate predicaments of family life. They reveal what it meant to be old without the pensions, Social Security, and nursing homes that now do much of the work of serving the elderly. From demented grandparents to fickle fathers, from litigious sons to grateful daughters, Hartog guides us into a world of disputed promises and broken hearts, and helps us feel the terrible tangle of love and commitments and money.From one of the bedrocks of the human condition-the tension between the infirmities of the elderly and the longings of the young-emerges a pioneering work of exploration into the darker recesses of family life. Ultimately, Hartog forces us to reflect on what we owe and are owed as members of a family.
Format:Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
ISBN:9780674062634
9783110288995
9783110293807
9783110293791
9783110756067
9783110442205
DOI:10.4159/harvard.9780674062634
Access:restricted access
Hierarchical level:Monograph
Statement of Responsibility: Hendrik Hartog.