Much has been written about boarding and lodging in late-nineteenthcentury North America. Modell and Hareven 1977 provides a benchmark study of boarding in East Coast urban centers in the United States. For Canada, Medjuck 1980; Katz 1975; Katz et al. 1982; Harney 1978; Bradbury 1984, 1993; and Harris 1992, 1994, and 1996 shed light on aspects of boarding in various Canadian urban communities from the 1850s to the 1950s. In general these studies emphasize the importance of family cycles and economic circumstance for an understanding of the boarding process (see also Robinson 1993; Shergold 1982). Some point to the similarity in social and class background of boarders and boardinghouse keepers (Harney 1978;Medjuck 1980; Modell and Hareven 1977; Harris 1992). Literature on boardinghouse keeping has focused generally, however, on the economic rather than the social or cultural importance of boarding. Even when cultural implications are explored, the unit of analysis is that of community or region or, as in the literature on the acculturation of newcomers, on sojourners and immigrants only

This article shows that late-nineteenth-century wealth inequality was associated with rising wealth levels supporting the existence of a Kuznets-type curve, but this curve is not unconditional.The tendency of wealth inequality to vary with age means that wealth inequality was also a function of the changing age composition of the population and may have been the result of portfolio allocation decisions across the life cycle. Canada's population “aged” during the late nineteenth century, with the proportion of population under age 20 dropping from 53% in 1871 to 43% by 1911. The general aging of the population could have increased inequality in both wealth and income. These results follow recent work by Jeffrey Williamson (1998), who argues that Kuznets curves are not unconditional. In other words, as the results of this article confirm, wealth inequality is the outcome of a complex economic process, not a single determinant cause.

This article answers Larry Gerber's (1995) challenge for a renewed appreciation of the social science literature on corporatism and state theory by explaining variations in corporatist institutions through the concept of policy legacies. To understand the variation in corporatist forms of governance, three policy areas are key: the long-standing trade policies of the England and Canada, the forms of government intervention during World War I, and prior political battles within the dairy industries. In their own unique way, these policies shaped the character of the market failure, the political capacities of farm organizations, and the institutional response that incorporated private interest groups within the formulation and implementation of public policy. By viewing the emergence of corporatist institutions in England and Canada as examples of governmental responses to economic crisis, this research on corporatism contributes to the larger theory of the determinants, as well as the effects, of the state in capitalist democracies.

Many scholars have noted the theoretical importance of remarriage in twentieth-century American life (Burch 1995; Cherlin 1998; Furstenberg 1980; Glick 1980; Thornton 1977; Uhlenberg and Chew 1986), yet few historical studies have examined remarriage in the United States empirically. This gap in the literature is noteworthy for two reasons. First, the turn of the twentieth century seems to have marked a crossover in the remarriage transition of the United States, reflecting changes in the pool of persons eligible to remarry. This transition was characterized by decreases in remarriage resulting from declines inmortality and probability of widow(er)hood, followed by increases in remarriage resulting from higher divorce rates. The crossover in the transition was likely to have occurred when the pool of eligibles was at or near its nadir. Second, there is ongoing debate about the implications of remarriage for families and individuals (Booth and Dunn 1994), and about the impacts of remarriage on family functions (Cherlin 1978; Cherlin and Furstenberg 1994). In the light of these considerations, we believe it is important to examine remarriage and its consequences in the United States at the turn of the century so that we may better understand the ways that remarriage influences family life and shapes the life course of persons within families (see London and Elman 2001).

Extramarital pregnancy and illegitimate childbearing have been interpreted by historians as well as sociologists basically in terms of deviant behavior and lack of social control (Tranter 1985; Blaikie 1995). While society has looked at procreation outside marriage as a moral lapse, social science has regarded it in terms of deviancy, as “something which interrupted the proper functioning of social processes, and revealed a failure of social control, the control of individual behavior by family and kin, by political and educational authority” (Laslett 1980a: 1–2).Within this framework, interpretations of the “illegitimacy explosion” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have almost invariably referred toweakening social control as a result of industrialization, urbanization, and migration. In the 1970s, the debate on the rise of illegitimacy was centered on Edward Shorter's contention that women's emancipation produced rising extramarital sexual activity. This article does not reopen that dispute (see Shorter 1971, 1975: 255–68; Tilly et al. 1976; Lee 1977; Fairchilds 1978; Alter 1988). Rather, it starts from the common ground underlying the different interpretations, which associates adolescent extramarital pregnancy with social isolation. Scholars have argued that migration and new living and working conditions often led to separation from the family and local community. This change would have resulted in the collapse of traditional social control, making premarital intercourse more likely.