The Place of a Cousin in As You Like It

Abstract

6 Miranda Chaytor's research on households that included (among other things) multigenerational cohabitation, foster parenting, and adoption shows that early modern households could be productively understood as the "point where kin groups joined by marriage shared and redistributed their resources." See "Household and Kinship: Ryton in the Late 16th and Early 17th Centuries," History Workshop Journal 10 (1980): 25-60, esp. 39. One of Chaytor's arguments is that people once deemed "rejects" and "wastage" should be understood as integral parts of households. Bray argues that some historians' insistence on the historical dominance of the restricted patriarchal nuclear family was intended to serve as a limit case on the claims of the social welfare state within their own moment: normative nuclear families had always, and would always, best take care of the needs of society; see Friend, 307-14. Amy Froide's research on the prevalence of single-woman-headed households-the same women once deemed "rejects" or "wastage"-as well as on the revelatory fact that a "woman was likely to be unmarried for twothirds of her life span" drew new attention to the work of feminist historians on the effects of