Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Hendrik Hartog , Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age , Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press , 2012. Pp. 368. $29.95 (ISBN 978-0-0674-04688-7 ).
Book Reviews
Coping strategies in old age have not received sustained attention from legal and social historians. Hendrik Hartog slices into the topic by analyzing over 200 New Jersey cases from the 1840s to the 1950s arising from promises such as "Care for me, and you will get my property" (6). Younger people, usually relatives, sometimes housekeepers, moved into an older person's house, expecting to inherit, and then found they were not named in the will. Hartog mines trial transcripts to illuminate the nature of the care work performed, older people's tactics for keeping adult children close, and the labor negotiations at the core of family life. The epilogue offers a thoughtful rumination on the disjunctions and continuities between today's legal and moral landscape of eldercare and the family-based arrangements of the period under study, which Hartog sees as a single "historical era" (14).
The pages of this book are not studded with influential jurists, flashy lawyers, famous plaintiffs, important precedents, or dramatic doctrinal change. The focus is on probate, contract, and equity actions that were understood at the time as "the ordinary work of...