Abstract
A historical survey of the inheritance practices of farming families in North America and elsewhere indicates that resource allocations among children differed through time and space with regard to sex bias and equality. Tensions between provisioning all children and maintaining a productive economic entity (the farm) were resolved in various ways, depending on population pressures, the family’s relative resource level, and the number and sex of children.
Against a backdrop of generalized son preference, parents responded to ecological circumstances by investing in offspring differentially within and between the sexes. Vesting the preponderance of family resources in one heir increased the likelihood of at least one line surviving across several generations, whereas varying degrees of parental investment in emigrating sons or out-marrying daughters might yield boom or bust harvests of grandchildren according to circumstances in more remote locales. Primogeniture (eldest son as primary heir) allowed early identification of heirs and appropriate socialization, as well as more time for parents to contribute to the heir’s reproductive success. Son bias and unigeniture decreased as numbers of children per family declined, as land became less critical to economic success, and as legal changes improved the resource-holding potential of females. We suggest that changing ecological conditions affected parental decisions regarding resource allocation among children at least as much as did changing ideologies of parent-child relations.
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Our initial research on this topic was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation Gender Roles Program. An early version of the paper was presented at the Santa Fe Institute at a conference on Biology and Economics, 14–26 April 1992, organized by Martin Shubik.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Debra S. Judge have been using archival data to study allocation of resources at death by residents of Sacramento and Yolo counties in California from 1890 through 1984 and of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Hrdy is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and the author ofThe Langurs of Abu: Female and Male Strategies of Reproduction andThe Woman That Never Evolved. Judge is a graduate student at UC Davis and has published articles on primate, avian, and human behavioral ecology. They share interests in evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, and the biology and culture of gender relations.
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Hrdy, S.B., Judge, D.S. Darwin and the puzzle of primogeniture. Human Nature 4, 1–45 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02734088
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02734088