Acquisition and Transmission
Jonathan Sperber · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2005
This chapter examines the place of property in family life and at points in individuals' life-cycles. Studying relations between spouses, between parents and children, and among siblings, it demonstrates the way that both affection and hostility among family members were articulated through the gender-specific use of property. Rather than perceiving self-interested, individual behavior as in opposition to emotion or family solidarity, the chapter argues that in the 19th-century emotion within family life was articulated through property and property relations. A regime of expectations, emerging from the legal strictures of the Napoleonic Code and the regional custom of equal and partible inheritance, widely shared across the boundaries of social class, governed the relationship between the family life-cycle and the acquisition and intergenerational transmission of property through such practices as dowries or the division of a married couple's property on the decease of one of the spouses.