Hendrik Hartog

Based on a study of 19th and early 20th-century New Jersey cases, Hartog examines the complicated interplay of love, duty, gendered expectations, promises, work, and inheritance as society changed while human needs remained relatively similar. In order to avoid the King Lear problem, older people tried to keep young people near them and taking care of them, often by making promises of what those young people would get after the older people died. Sometimes those promises weren’t carried out; sometimes they were, and other excluded family members sought to invalidate them as the products of undue influence. Courts struggled with these messy situations, using concepts of testators’ freedom to devise property regardless of whether the allocation was fair; ideas of contract and exceptions to the requirement that land be transferred only in writing when a young person had sufficiently disrupted his (almost, but not always, his) life in order to do an older person’s wishes; expectations about what it meant to be in a family (especially for women, this meant that care given wasn’t supposed to be remunerated, so they were often disappointed if the will didn’t bear out past promises of reward); and, over time, changing understandings of what kind of care was natural within a family, as nursing in particular moved towards the market. The stories are complicated, and Hartog shows that they always were, even as Social Security and other changes have altered the way that older people secure care and provide for their children (now increasingly by investing in their education rather than leaving them property at death).… (more)