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Someday All This Will Be Yours
Hendrik Hartog
A History of Inheritance and Old Age
Harvard University Press
January 2012
On Sale: January 15, 2012
364 pages
ISBN: 0674046889
EAN: 9780674046887
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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