Pflege, Betreuung und soziale Fürsorge im ausgehenden 18. und im 19. Jahrhundert: Institutionen, familiale und verwandtschaftliche Netze
Social Welfare and Care within the Domestic, Familial and Kinship Context at the End of the Eighteenth and in the Nineteenth Centuries

Summary/Abstract: The majority of studies on the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries German-speaking areas focus primarily on public institutions in urban areas as well as on poverty and pauperism. Contexts of informal and familial care have not been investigated to a comparable extent. However, the care of children, of the elderly and the sick has been primarily the responsibility of family members, mainly of women. The article first gives an overview of various forms of professional, informal and contractually regulated care. It then focuses on crisis situations and demand for care within families using the unique evidence provided by dispensation applications. They provide new insights into issues of family care work, social norms and expectations. At the same time, this kind of source material reveals the importance of female relatives, especially of the deceased wife’s sisters, but also of cousins and nieces as caregivers. They were seen as opposed to the negatively depicted figure of the “stranger” as maid servant or stepmother.

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