The editors of this book aim to open up new perspectives on the history of welfare by defining it more broadly than as a system where the state and voluntary sector provided for the poor. They argue that for many social groups family and kin played an important role in the provision of welfare, even when there was property. Indeed, the ten articles in the book (in addition to the editors' Introduction) focus on the arrangements made for people with property, and on the influence that gender, the market, the state, and voluntary institutions had on those provisions.

The Introduction gives an overview of the traditional approach to the history of welfare and goes on to lay out alternative ways of analyzing who needed welfare and when, who provided it, and what influenced those variables. Because the focus of the book is on welfare provided by families, households, and kin, the editors also examine the relationship between risk and strategy in the context of welfare, and how strategies were shaped by the life course (marriage, retirement, guardianship, divorce, inheritance).

The articles that follow cover a number of different historical periods—from the seventeenth to the twentieth century—and geographical areas, including France, Switzerland, Holland, Bohemia, Germany, Sweden, and the United States. What is striking in them is the enormous variety of strategies employed by people in these areas to ensure the long-term survival of the family, and how this involved different approaches and attitudes for men and women. That those differences are hardly a thing of the past is demonstrated in the article on the United States by Marsha Shapiro Rose that compares inheritance among the Rockefellers and Binghams in the twentieth century. Although the female heirs in both families received a share of the inheritance, they were excluded from managing or administrating it, even when it came to the family philanthropies. The family patriarchs did not see the women as capable of administration, and, of course, the women were never encouraged to acquire the necessary skills. Therefore, male hegemony perpetuated itself. Moreover, the women received a smaller share than their brothers and were more likely to inherit the home and family jewels rather than the family business.

Such gender inequalities could also be found in France during the ancien régime. As one would expect, according to Gérard Béaur, in areas of impartible inheritance sons were usually (but not always) given priority. Interestingly, though, in areas with partible inheritance, women were not necessarily much better off or treated more equally, as men tended to inherit the land whereas women received money. Sometimes this transmission of land took place upon death, and sometimes land was transferred inter vivos so that it would fall outside the inheritance. Many variations existed, but the upshot was that the inheritance strategies followed in impartible regions, and their outcomes, were not much different from those in partible ones, and did not necessarily result in excessive subdivision of land. Moreover, the author claims that a case can be made that some of the partible regions ended up being economically more efficient than the impartible ones because capitalist agriculture actually benefited from the subdivision and recombination of land. Because people did not inherit an adequate amount of land they viewed it as capital to help set up a household.

Rose Duroux discusses an interesting case study in France in which women did inherit the land. The inheritance system in the High Auvergne revolved around male migration to Spain, where men could earn enough money to ensure the continuation of the family enterprise when they returned and married. With men absent, women inherited the house and property, putting them in a good position to secure an advantageous marriage, often to a returning migrant. Such a marriage also could provide the cash needed for noninheriting siblings, who could then collect a dowry and marry. In this area of France, female inheritance linked with male migration operated together to secure economic stability and to prevent partition.

A theme that recurs in the articles on Germany and Sweden is the impact of the market economy and the commercialization of property on the definition of gender roles and on the financial welfare of women. Robert Beachy shows that, starting in the late seventeenth century, women in Saxony, acting as merchants, were held responsible for the debts they incurred: they could not hide behind a guardianship law that held them not legally competent to sign documents. This resulted from a change in interpretation of the law, recognizing the many women involved in family firms. The protective aspects of the law continued for women not involved in business, and their property could not be touched by the creditors of their husbands. However, as corporate capitalism grew in the nineteenth century, guardianship was used by insolvent merchants to hide their assets, and the law became a target for critics and reformers. It was abolished, and as a result married women's property now fell under the administration of the husband, and could be seized by his creditors. Not necessarily progress for women!

Similar pressures of economic change and growing individualism affected guardianship laws in Sweden and led to their abolition in the early twentieth century, when the Marriage Act of 1921 established formal equal rights. As Kirsti Niskanen points out, however, the formal equality enshrined in the law did not automatically lead to real equality. In the case of divorce, a woman's equal right to property had to be balanced with societal expectations of her role in the family, resulting in unequal, and traditional, property settlements: house to the woman, business to the man.

Finally, the Dutch case is instructive in that the very commercially oriented community in Amsterdam turned its back on complete individual responsibility and instead chose to protect the future of family and property by building and supporting communal orphanages.

Whether these articles will change historians' approach to the study of welfare only time will tell, but in the meantime they challenge traditional interpretations and give interesting analyses of the subtleties and choices involved in strategizing family survival. The book should be of interest to both specialists and students.