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Divided Households

Extended Kin in Working-Class Chicago, 1924

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Kathryn M. Neckerman
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The structure of the extended family is often described as a strategy for coping with poverty, unemployment, or migration (Agresti 1979). Whether extended kin relations are thought to be short-term and calculative (Anderson 1971) or bound by ties of reciprocity (Hareven 1982), the extended household itself is assumed to be adaptive to the material conditions under which working-class families live. This characterization is supported by studies of the present-day poor (Angel and Tienda 1982; Stack 1974; Stern 1993). Although Ruggles (1987) questions the importance of economic motives for nineteenth-century extended families, he suggests that by the early twentieth century there is evidence that extended households were increasingly strategic.

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Social Science History , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , Fall 1995, pp. 371 - 398
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Copyright © Social Science History Association 1995 

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