‘Last Wills and Remembrance’ builds on Chapter 3’s findings by examining the social authority and memorial value afforded to the last will. The dramatic potency of a last will centres on its ability to evoke the presence of an absent testator, imposing the latent will of the dead upon the living through the obligation of remembrance. This chapter focuses on Ben Jonson’s Volpone, and Thomas Middleton’s The Phoenix, and The London Prodigal (of an uncertain author) to show how consistently this memorial duty elicited a struggle between the will of the testator and their beneficiaries, and that such moments often centre on the manipulation of blank, invalid, or fake wills. I argue that the execution of last wills in these plays illuminates the pitfalls associated with the commemoration of human endeavours, the anxieties related to the endurance of familial dynasties, and the sociopolitical disparities caused by patrilineal succession. The last will, once again, acts as a means by which dramatists could scrutinize and deliberate upon the relative authority or vulnerability of the individual faculty of the will.

1. How do you feel about caring for someone with dementia? 2. What are the human rights issues in this story? 3. What role does empathy play when caring for someone with dementia? 4. What are the issues for you when one sibling wants their elderly mother to have homecare and the other to send her to a care home? 5. What issues of service co-ordination arise from the story? 6. What are the safeguarding issues in this story?

This chapter explores logbooks by non-elite seafarers as a hybrid mode that combines the model of the ship’s official log with the practice of the ordinary terrestrial diary – a form that flourished throughout the nineteenth century. Bringing together original archival research into sea journals with critical approaches to the diary stemming from life writing studies, the analysis reframes the logbook beyond its traditional categorisation as a document of work, in order to position it as a more personal text that allowed for the maintenance of bonds of family and kinship across oceans. The chapter proposes that logbooks were linked to the terrestrial world in other ways too, emerging as a popular literary motif from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, through to fictions by Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad in the late Victorian period. Tracing their evidentiary and narrative potential, logbooks – both real and fictive – are positioned as circulating objects that travelled across social, spatial, and generic borders.

This section sets out the key aims, argument, and methodology of the book, concluding with a comprehensive chapter summary.

This chapter offers the first comprehensive account of the tangential maritime figure of the sailor’s daughter. Though neglected in the scholarship, her life was shaped in material and emotional ways by the intermittent presence of a seafaring father and the complex gender dynamics that attended the composition of the maritime family. With reference to a unique and overlooked corpus of memoirs by working-class women raised in seafaring families within the Victorian and Edwardian periods, the chapter returns to myth of the ‘sailor in the family’, presented in Chapter 1, but this time from the sidelong perspective of the daughter. The analysis shows how these memoirs disrupt the paradigmatic model of the dutiful sailor’s daughter in narratives that set out the compromises, strange intimacies, and frustrations of childhoods shaped by the maritime world. While the sailor-fathers described in the memoirs belong to the late nineteenth century, the book concludes by arguing that it is the writerly daughter’s insurgent account that carries new perspectives on maritime relations into the twentieth century.

Was Luigi Cadorna bound to head the Italian army in 1914? For over a century those tracing the Chief of Staff’s rise and fall across the Great War have argued it was highly likely, if not a foregone conclusion. Scion of a dynasty of soldiers serving the Savoys since the eighteenth century, he was in uniform from childhood, and enjoyed an exceptional career. Come the European conflict, Cadorna appeared to have all the qualities of a national condottiero: the brilliant heir to noble warrior stock, to use one of his hagiographers’ formulas. But the most surprising thing about that personal myth is that Cadorna himself firmly believed it. As his confidant and informal biographer at Supreme Command, Colonel Angelo Gatti, would write: ‘he is sure he is the man of God, and the necessary continuer of his father’s work. Raffaele Cadorna took Rome, Luigi Cadorna will take Trento and Trieste.’

For more than a quarter of a century, Sean O’Casey enjoyed living in what he called the ‘delightful county’ of Devon. O’Casey remained newsworthy in Ireland until his death, but he lived in relative anonymity in this English seaside area, and today the county does little to remember the writer. This chapter examines the way that O’Casey interacted with the local area of Devon, and the chapter also illustrates how his writing was shaped by the personal events that happened in this geographical location, such as the death of his son Niall from cancer in 1956, his interaction with Devon neighbours, and the contact he enjoyed with visitors who travelled to meet him, such as the Irish playwright Denis Johnston.

Eileen Carey’s books are rarely read; her acting career was forgotten during her lifetime; and her presence in literary culture has always remained in the shadow of her husband. But she provided important support for Sean O’Casey throughout the second half of his life, and there is also great prescience in her own writing. This chapter presents a new assessment of Eileen Carey’s professional career in the wake of the #MeToo (2006–) and #WakingTheFeminists (2015–16) movements, showing how she experienced and wrote about male abuse in the entertainment industry, and how she inspired her husband to write about some of those themes in his own writing.

Italy and Germany experienced a decrease in religiosity during the twentieth century. How did Catholicism deal with these challenges? The Catholic family vision and the male breadwinner model had been the fundamental backbone of the Christian welfare states. Italian and German Christian Democratic parties implemented similar family policy regimes in the 1950s. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, these male-breadwinner–centered family policies resulted in low shares of working mothers, low fertility rates, and a low woman voting for the Christian Democrats. Only Germany responded to these challenges with reforms. Why did both countries follow so different developments? In Germany Protestants had changed their ideas on early childhood education from conservative to progressive from the 1970s onward. The Catholics had stayed put on a very conservative interpretation. With reunification a new electorate became available for the Christian Democrats. The East-German electorate was secular but from a Protestant cultural heritage. The Christian Democratic party was after reunification no longer constrained on relying on the Catholic core voters but could now compensate them with secularized Protestants electorate in Eastern Germany. This allowed them to reform early childhood education and parental leave. In Italy instead, the absence of Protestantism allowed the Catholic Church to block all family policy reform attempts.

In this chapter, we define a family cult as a cult that either mainly consists of one family or a cult whose doctrine specifically defines or exerts control over the family structures of its members. We examine the unique dynamics of family cults, as well as the characteristics of leaders and followers of family cults by discussing six family cults: The Branch Davidians, The Children of God cult (later known as The Family International), The Manson Family, The Peoples Temple, The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter-Day Saints, and The Church of the Lamb of God. We explore the added degree of difficulty of maintaining loyalty to a cult leader above family, and the dynamics that appear in the resulting complex relationships. Future considerations include the redefining of family structure in the age of the Internet. As people develop connections with others across the world and the concept of family changes with time, it will be interesting to see the evolution of our concept of family cults.

Infants and toddlers are immersed in the social culture of their family, community and society from before they are born. Every family has distinct social practices and ways of interacting which shape very young children’s holistic physiological, cognitive and emotional learning, development and wellbeing. These practices reflect the values, beliefs, norms and expectations of their community and culture. Over time, through repeated social encounters and experiences, the social culture of their family and community is passed on as infants and toddlers become socialised into these specific ways of engaging with others. Social practices and interactions thus form the basis of the relationships that infants and toddlers form with significant others. As a result, the social opportunities that very young children experience and participate in during their everyday existence have far-reaching consequences for their sense of identify and belonging.

German men and their collaborators perpetrated sexual violence during the Holocaust and throughout the war, during pogroms, in ghettos and labor-camps, as well as in concentration and extermination camps. They committed this violence against women, girls, and gender-nonconforming people as well as against minorities, such as Roma. Sexual coercion and abuse also occurred within the societies of those persecuted, for example in ghettos, camps, or partisan groups. In hiding or during liberation, people also experienced sexual violence at the hands of protectors, allies, or liberation soldiers. This chapter focuses on the experiences of women, but importantly also addresses those of male victims. It also addresses how sexual violence was part of Nazis’ and their collaborators’ acts of genocidal violence against Jews.

This chapter analyzes difficult to impossible attempts to flee the Nazi juggernaut, starting with early emigration from Germany, to later escapes from occupied lands. It discusses how class, age, and gender influenced Jewish chances for flight and addresses helping organizations and destinations.

Second-wave feminism arrived late to economics. It initially permitted criticism of how Gary Becker positioned gendered inequalities in families as rational choices, not as injustices. Methodologies were heterogenous. ‘Equity’ approaches, like Barbara Bergmann’s, engaged statistical analysis and extended Becker-style rational choice theory to reposition gendered inequalities as effects of unfair decision constraints. ‘Critical’ approaches, like Nancy Folbre’s, focused on deficits in the valuation of women’s care, quantifying the full economic worth of care-work, with policies for provisioning in response to needs. Quickly, feminist economists recentred poverty, focusing on ‘lone motherhood’ in the US in its connection with race, and on empowering global South development consistent with justice for women and girls in poor families. Methods developed by Esther Duflo and the ‘poor economists’ included institutional descriptions of poverty traps, with randomised controlled trials studying how incentives affect family agency. However, local knowledge could not easily apply to larger regions. As for the US, just as Becker mobilised controversial 1970s sociobiology against women’s liberation to rationalise women’s specialisation in household labour as an effect of biological comparative advantage in bearing children, categories of binary gender and binary biological difference initially prevented feminist economists from studying injustices experienced by queer families.

Why and how economists have historically studied families is not well understood, neither by those in the discipline, nor by scholars studying families in neighbouring fields like sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. This lack derives from a mistaken view that family economics began in the 1960s when price theory was applied to family behaviour. It is also due to the narrowing of economics from the 1940s in the US, when social reform and advocacy work shifted to the discipline’s periphery. Affirming a contemporary need for gender-inclusive language, while using terms that access historical understandings, the book’s first goal is to show that economists developed methodologies for studying families as a function of how they conceptualised family poverty in different periods. Four historical phases are identified, with economists studying nineteenth-century deficits in family labour productivity in Britain and Europe, inadequacies in low-income family consumption in interwar America, underinvestment in human capital by a post-war ‘underclass’, and gendered injustices in resource distribution experienced by lone mothers, by women and girls in poor global South families, and by queer families. The book’s second goal is to show how family economists prioritised some social problems over others, allowing certain injustices to remain uncontested.

From the 1960s onwards, New Household economists like Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker shifted focus onto the poverty-alleviating impacts of family investment in human capital. This move was informed, first, by increased cultural and political awareness of what Becker referred to as an impoverished ‘underclass’ (1964/1993); second, by the social movements, including civil rights challenges to racial discrimination in schools and labour markets; and third, by government debates during the War on Poverty about the causes of Black family instability. Becker explained family instability as a rational response to price changes in the goods – including children – that families wanted. Given a set of preferences for basic commodities, and facing a defined range of choices, families were conceptualised as maximising utility, subject to constraints of income and time. This permitted hypotheses about how wages and human capital investment affected the cost of children, with effects on family formation and dissolution, fertility, and care-provision by women. As for poverty-alleviation, Becker favoured low-interest education loans. He rejected progressive income taxation and family welfare for incentivising underinvestment in education. Compensatory education programmes would fail by being offset. These policy positions were described by Nancy Folbre and Randy Albelda as a War on the Poor.