Understanding intra-family inequalities: The Montes de Pas, Spain, 1700-1900

This article deals with the family organization of labor in a peasant community in Northern Spain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It uses this case study to review some of the assumptions with which peasant family history is being written, namely, the idea that from historical evidence of family members "working together," a vision of families as cooperative, i.e., egalitarian units, can be deduced. Contrary to this idea, the article argues that coresidence cannot be taken as an indicator of equal economic status for all family members. The article proposes a method to identify inequalities between family members, based on a comparison between each member's working contribution to the household and access to family resources, including income generated by each member's own work.