Uses and Meanings of Peculium in Care Placements for Minors. Province of Buenos Aires, Early 20th Century

Abstract

This article seeks to provide a complex overview of the work of children, focusing on care placements in family homes and businesses. Drawing on the tools provided by the social history of work, it proposes an approach to the way in which money and other forms of payment went through these relationships, and to the meanings given to them by those who were part of that link. These forms of work and the various ways of remunerating them persisted in parallel with the advance of a certain commodification of the world of formal domestic work freely contracted in the market and even with attempts to regulate the work of minors.