The Wealth of Patriarchs

Deerfield, Massachusetts, 1760-1840

Bibliographic Data

ID3419982
AuthorsN Folbre (0000-0001-6868-9834, corresponding author), Nancy R Folbre
Year1985
Volume16
Issue2
Pages199
Publication date1985-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-1953 • E-ISSN: 1530-9169
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/204174
OpenAlexW1976428025
LanguageEN
Citations received14

The Wealth of Patriarchs: Deerfield, Massachusetts, I760-I840 In I809, when Simeon Peck, Jr. requested public aid for his father from the town of Deerfield, the town's officials informed him that they would not aid parents who had children able to labor. Forty years earlier such a request would have been unlikely, for most eighteenth-century New Englanders assumed that it was their own responsibility to support their parents in old age. Forty years later such a request might well have been satisfied, because the absence of children able to labor was no longer a necessary prerequisite for public relief. Changes in economic relations between the generations were a central aspect of the transition from an economy based largely on patriarchal households to an economy in which wage labor played an important role.1 Much of the historical literature on the New England family explores authority relations within the patriarchal household. But this literature, with its largely descriptive emphasis and typically non-economic slant, has had little impact on conventional explanations of New England's economic and demographic transitions, which often treat the family as an undifferentiated unit acted on by external forces, such as population pressure.2

Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Medicine · Gerontology

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