Intergenerational Household Structure and Economic Change At the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Most older persons at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States lived with a child. Family theories stress kin affiliation or jointfamily survival strategies as motives for coresidence. This article uses exchange theory to examine whether hierarchical and noncollectivist "elder strategies" shaped coresidence. Analysis of the 1910 Public Use Sample and linked macrolevel census data finds that the coresidence of elderly males with adult children was afunction of local economic opportunities, old-age dependency, economic resources (including Civil War pensions), and remarriage alternatives. Specifically, local economic opportunities led to more coresidence, but remarriage, older men's robustness, and greater material resources led to less coresidence with a child. Older men, as those in previous cohorts, held onto the resources they possessed—including headship— for their own use and perhaps to maintain leverage over kin.