| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Carole Shammas. A History of Household Government in America. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 2002. Pp. xv, 232. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.50.

Carole Shammas likes to think big, and in her most recent book she thinks in more wide-ranging and innovative ways than ever. A past scholar of long-term economic, social, and legal change in England and the United States, she now uses her considerable knowledge to illuminate the history of public policy with regard to the care and control of legal dependents. In this book, Shammas argues forcefully that modern sensibilities about who should comprise a household and what their power relationships should be found expression in the United States during a forty-year period in the middle of the nineteenth century, roughly 1840–1880. It was during these years that male household heads lost their right to control the property and labor of wives, children, servants, and slaves. During these same decades, institutions for care of the poor, orphans, and the mentally ill arose in response to concerns about the ability of household heads to govern them properly at home—only to become suspect in turn when the Catholic Church proved more adept at institutional care than its mainstream Protestant competitors. The result was a return to household care for many of those in need and the rise of the modem welfare system.

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