This book provides an ethnography of love-marriages in the late 1990s in Delhi, identifying the ways in which marriage is ever more a pitch of intense political contestation. It bears upon anthropological understandings of marriageability, urban morality, gender, kinship and the study of the individual and the couple in contemporary India.

Children's and young people's right to participate has been increasingly acknowledged and taken up internationally, as expressed in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Yet much of this has focused on collecting children's voices, rather than achieving change, and has met its limits. This book provides an analysis of children's participation in formal, collective and action research processes in six different international settings. It offers a deeper understanding of what helps and facilitates children's and young people's participation through research, evaluation and decision-making to go beyond voice and effect change. This analysis is set in the context of historical and current discourses of participation, the sociology of childhood, contemporary anthropology, children's geography and international development. Themes addressed include time and processes in children's participation, shifting and multiple identities of children, political and cultural contexts, places and spaces children inhabit, skills and capacities of adults, accountability and power. The analysis promotes an approach to children's participation as relational and collaborative, and will contribute to answering some of the questions facing practitioners and researchers embarking on participatory enquiry with children and young people. This is an invaluable book for practitioners and for scholars, postgraduates in anthropology, sociology, human geography, childhood studies, development studies, social policy, social work, community work, education, youth work and those with an interest in citizenship, children's rights and human rights. Researchers and practitioners in UN, government and non-government services will also find it applicable to engaging with children and young people.

Women and families within the criminal justice system (CJS) are increasingly the focus of research and this book considers the timely issues of intersectionality, violence and gender. With insights from frontline practice and from the lived experiences of women, the collection examines prison experiences in a post-COVID-19 world, domestic violence and the successes and failures of family support. A companion to the first edited collection, Critical Reflections on Women, Family, Crime and Justice, the book sheds new light on the challenges and experiences of women and families who encounter the CJS. Accessible to both academics and practitioners and with real-world policy recommendations, this collection demonstrates how positive change can be achieved.

This book takes a global perspective to address the concept of belonging in youth studies, interrogating its emergence as a reoccurring theme in the literature and elucidating its benefits and shortcomings. While belonging offers new alignments across previously divergent approaches to youth studies, its pervasiveness in the field has led to criticism that it means both everything and nothing and thus requires deeper analysis to be of enduring value. The authors do this work to provide an accessible, scholarly account of how youth studies uses belonging by focusing on transitions, participation, citizenship and mobility to address its theoretical and historical underpinnings and its prevalence in youth policy and research.

Siblings and all the lateral relationships that follow from them are clearly important and their interaction is widely observed, particularly in creative literature. Yet in the social, psychological and political sciences, there is no theoretical paradigm through which we might understand them. In the Western world our thought is completely dominated by a vertical model, by patterns of descent or ascent: mother or father to child, or child to parent. Yet our ideals are 'liberty, equality and fraternity' or the 'sisterhood' of feminism; our ethnic wars are the violence of 'fratricide'.

When we grow up, siblings feature prominently in sex, violence and the construction of gender differences but they are absent from our theories. This book examines the reasons for this omission and begins the search for a new paradigm based on siblings and lateral relationships.

This book will be essential reading for those studying sociology, psychoanalysis and gender studies. It will also appeal to a wide general readership.

When Tammy Wynette sang ""D-I-V-O-R-C-E,"" she famously said she ""spelled out the hurtin' words"" to spare her child the pain of family breakup. In this innovative work, Ted Ownby considers how a wide range of writers, thinkers, activists, and others defined family problems in the twentieth-century American South. Ownby shows that it was common for both African Americans and whites to discuss family life in terms of crisis, but they reached very different conclusions about causes and solutions. In the civil rights period, many embraced an ideal of Christian brotherhood as a way of transcending divisions. Opponents of civil rights denounced ""brotherhoodism"" as a movement that undercut parental and religious authority. Others, especially in the African American community, rejected the idea of family crisis altogether, working to redefine family adaptability as a source of strength. Rather than attempting to define the experience of an archetypal ""southern family,"" Ownby looks broadly at contexts such as political and religious debates about divorce and family values, southern rock music, autobiographies, and more to reveal how people in the South used the concept of the family as a proxy for imagining a better future or happier past.

Drawing on interviews and focus groups with young mothers and fathers, their parents and other relatives, this book provides a rich exploration of the experience of being a teenage parent now, and for earlier generations, closely examining teenage pregnancy and parenting in families where two or more generations have been teenage mothers. Brown also explores the cultural and social contexts of teenage parenting by including the views of people who have many years' experience of working with young parents in health, social and welfare settings. The book challenges policy contexts which focus on negative aspects of teenage parenting, and shows that for many young people, parenting can be a positive experience. It will appeal to academics, policymakers and professionals with an interest in teenage pregnancy and parenting.

The Handbook of Feminist Family Studies demonstrates how feminist contributions to family science advance our understanding of relationships among individuals, families, and communities. Bringing together some of the most well-respected scholars in the field, the editors showcase feminist family scholarship, creating a scholarly forum for interpretation and dissemination of feminist work. The Handbook s contributors eloquently share their passion for scholarship and practice and offer new insights about the places we call home and family. The contributions as a whole provide overviews of the most important theories, methodologies, and practices, along with concrete examples of how scholars and practitioners actually engage in doing feminist family studies.

Key Features:

Examines the influence of feminism on the family studies field, including the many ways feminism brings about a re-visioning of families that incorporates multiple voices and perspectivesCenters the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, age, nation, ability, and religion as a pivotal framework for examining interlocking structures of inequality and privilege, both inside families and in the relationship between families and institutions, communities, and ideologiesProvides concrete examples of how scholars and practitioners explore such facets of feminist family studies as intimate partnerships, kinship, aging, sexualities, intimate violence, community structures, and experiences of immigrationExplores how the infusion of feminism into family studies has created a crisis over deeply held assumptions about family life and calls for even greater fusion between feminist theory and family studies toward the creation of solutions to pressing social issues

The Handbook of Feminist Family Studies is an excellent resource for scholars, practitioners, and students across the fields of family studies, sociology, human development, psychology, social work, women s studies, close relationships, communication, family nursing, and health, as a welcome addition to any academic library. It is also appropriate for use in graduate courses on theory and methodology.

A portion of the royalties from this book have been contributed to the Jessie Bernard Endowment (sponsored by the Feminism and Family Studies Section of the National Council on Family Relations) in support of feminist scholarship."

This is the first book to bring together international scholars from around the world and from a wide variety of disciplines, to discover what is known about grandfathers and analyse the impact of close involvement with their grandchildren. Within the context of increased divorce rates, single parent families and healthier, more active elders, grandfathers have come out of the shadows and re-invented themselves in a new caring, nurturing role. These original studies demonstrate that grandfather involvement is independently and positively associated with higher levels of child well-being in the UK and South Africa, as well as in Arab and Israeli teenagers, and pre-school children in England. The chapters conclude that societies could benefit from encouraging more grandfathers to become actively involved in their grandchildren's lives and argues the case for grandparent visitation rights in those countries that currently do not have them.

Late modern social theory suggests that women are now liberated from traditional family ties yet remain compelled by parenting. In the light of recent social changes, what has changed and what has remained the same for women as mothers? This study presents a timely account of the dynamic relationship between the past, the present, and the future in the making of modern motherhood. The book includes interviews and case studies with women from a wide range of backgrounds and generations within the same families. It looks at the impact of social structures on motherhood as an identity, including class, ethnicity, and social mobility. The Making of Modern Motherhood includes an additional online resource with 'bonus' image material, review questions, and analysis.

Over the past several decades, researchers as well as social policymakers and educators have acknowledged the importance that fathers play in their children's lives. A good deal of research on fathering has been conducted among Euro-American families in North America. However, our understanding of fathering across various ethnic groups remains limited. Throughout Canada and the United States, the immigrant population has been growing rapidly. Currently, no book has delineated the field of immigrant fathering from a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary perspective which includes theory, research, and social policy. Researchers are widely recognizing that the theoretical frameworks and models of parenting, and more specifically, fathering, that were based on Euro-American families may not be relevant to other ethnic groups. As researchers refine theoretical and methodological approaches to understand fathering within sociocultural contexts, they become more cognizant of the varying meanings of parenting between and within ethnic groups. On New Shores extends the understanding of fathering in ethnic minority families and specifically focuses on immigrant fathers_an area which has remained fairly unchartered. The book provides readers with a richer and more comprehensive approach to how researchers, practitioners, and social policymakers can examine fathering among ethnic minority families.

This book explores two contemporary combative views regarding the search for just families. These views arise from the conundrum of the family being seen as a supportive, nurturing "haven" versus a grievously unjust, harmful institution that violates the rights and freedoms of any individual family member. Triggered by anti-family movements, which have been inspired by the ideas of some theorists and writers, the book addresses the question: Is family destined to wither away? It challenges the radical idea that the solution to the problem of unjust families is their complete replacement by purportedly just anti-familial alternatives. Chhanda Gupta advances a distinct reformist and reconciliatory view that the expulsion of either side of the family-anti-family binary is not the answer. She seeks to syncretize the seemingly irreconcilable ideas propagated through that philosophical binary. Furthermore, she urges that the search for just families must find its answer in clarifying how the term "just" applies to the characters, behaviors, and attitudes of people who comprise actual families. The search is not for a perfectly just society or polity, or even for a perfectly just family. Instead it is a search for ways to redress the remediable injustices that occur in families, in order to benefit and uplift individuals and families and the societies in which they live.

This book is about family life in areas of concentrated poverty and social problems - areas where it is difficult to bring up children and where surrounding conditions make family life more fraught and more difficult. The book is based on a long-run UK study of neighborhood conditions as they affect parents raising their children. The book draws on the lives of 200 families that the authors interviewed annually over a 10 year period. It examines the future prospects of families living in low income urban areas that suffer multiple problems of deprivation. It provides a unique insight into: what families need, what works and doesn't work, what helps or hinders, what is left to do, and which new approaches may be helpful. (Series: CASE Studies on Poverty, Place and Policy)

Working mothers today confront not only conflicting demands on their time and energy but also conflicting ideas about how they are to behave: they must be nurturing and unselfish while engaged in child rearing but competitive and ambitious at work. As more and more women enter the workplace, it would seem reasonable for society to make mothering a simpler and more efficient task. Instead, Sharon Hays points out in this original and provocative book, an ideology of "intensive mothering" has developed that only exacerbates the tensions working mothers face. Drawing on ideas about mothering since the Middle Ages, on contemporary child-rearing manuals, and on in-depth interviews with mothers from a range of social classes, Hays traces the evolution of the ideology of intensive mothering - an ideology that holds the individual mother primarily responsible for child rearing and dictates that the process is to be child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive. Hays argues that these ideas about appropriate mothering stem from a fundamental ambivalence about a system based solely on the competitive pursuit of individual interests. In attempting to deal with our deep uneasiness about self-interest, we have imposed unrealistic and unremunerated obligations and commitments on mothering, making it into an opposing force, a primary field on which this cultural ambivalence is played out.

Winner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award from the American Psychological Association's 44th Division (the Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Issues) An in-depth, transnational primer on the current state of same-sex marriage post legalization The summer of 2008 was the summer of love and commitment for gays and lesbians in the United States. Thousands of same-sex couples stood in line for wedding licenses all over California in the first few days after same-sex marriage was legalized. On the other side of the country, Massachusetts, the very first state to give gay couples marriage rights, took the last step to full equality by allowing same-sex couples from other states to marry there as well. These happy times for same-sex couples were the hallmark of true equality for some, yet others questioned whether the very bedrock of society was crumbling. What would this new step portend? In order to find out the impact of same-sex marriage, M. V. Lee Badgett traveled to a land where it has been legal for same-sex couples to marry since 2001: the Netherlands. Badgett interviews gay couples to find out how this step has affected their lives. We learn about the often surprising changes to their relationships, the reactions of their families, and work colleagues. Moreover, Badgett is interested in the ways that the institution itself has been altered for the larger society. How has the concept of marriage changed? When Gay People Get Married gives readers a primer on the current state of the same-sex marriage debate, and a new way of framing the issue that provides valuable new insights into the political, social, and personal stakes involved. The experiences of other countries and these pioneering American states serve as a crystal ball as we grapple with this polarizing issue in the American context. The evidence shows both that marriage changes gay people more than gay people change marriage, and that it is the most liberal countries and states making the first move to recognize gay couples. In the end, Badgett compellingly shows that allowing gay couples to marry does not destroy the institution of marriage and that many gay couples do benefit, in expected as well as surprising ways, from the legal, social, and political rights that the institution offers.

This book is about family life in areas of concentrated poverty and social problems - areas where it is difficult to bring up children and where surrounding conditions make family life more fraught and more difficult. The book is based on a long-run UK study of neighborhood conditions as they affect parents raising their children. The book draws on the lives of 200 families that the authors interviewed annually over a 10 year period. It examines the future prospects of families living in low income urban areas that suffer multiple problems of deprivation. It provides a unique insight into: what families need, what works and doesn't work, what helps or hinders, what is left to do, and which new approaches may be helpful. (Series: CASE Studies on Poverty, Place and Policy)

This highly anticipated third edition of the Handbook of Parenting brings together an array of field-leading experts who have worked in different ways toward understanding the many diverse aspects of parenting. Contributors to the Handbook look to the most recent research and thinking to shed light on topics every parent, professional, and policymaker wonders about. Parenting is a perennially "hot" topic. After all, everyone who has ever lived has been parented, and the vast majority of people become parents themselves. No wonder bookstores house shelves of "how-to" parenting books and magazine racks in pharmacies and airports overflow with periodicals that feature parenting advice. However, almost none of these is evidence-based. The Handbook of Parenting is. Period. Each chapter has been written to be read and absorbed in a single sitting, and includes historical considerations of the topic, a discussion of central issues and theory, a review of classical and modern research, and forecasts of future directions of theory and research. Together, the five volumes in the Handbook cover Children and Parenting, the Biology and Ecology of Parenting, Being and Becoming a Parent, Social Conditions and Applied Parenting, and the Practice of Parenting. Volume 1, Children and Parenting, considers parenthood as a functional status in the life cycle: Parents protect, nurture, and teach their progeny, even if human development is more dynamic than can be determined by parental caregiving alone. Volume 1 of the Handbook of Parenting begins with chapters concerned with how children influence parenting. Notable are their more obvious characteristics, like child age or developmental stage; but subtler ones, like child gender, physical state, temperament, mental ability, and other individual-differences factors, are also instrumental. The chapters in Part I, on Parenting across the Lifespan, discuss the unique rewards and special demands of parenting children of different ages and stages - infants, toddlers, youngsters in middle childhood, and adolescents-as well as the modern notion of parent-child relationships in emerging adulthood, adulthood, and old age. The chapters in Part II, on Parenting Children of Varying Status, discuss common issues associated with parenting children of different genders and temperaments as well as unique situations of parenting adopted and foster children and children with a variety of special needs, such as those with extreme talent, born preterm, who are socially withdrawn or aggressive, or who fall on the autistic spectrum, manifest intellectual disabilities, or suffer a chronic health condition.

The Social Dynamics of Family Violence explores family violence throughout the life course, from child abuse and neglect to intimate partner violence and elder abuse. Paying special attention to the social character and institutional causes of family violence, Hattery and Smith ask students to consider how social inequality, especially gender inequality, contributes to tensions and explosive tendencies in family settings. Students learn about individual preventative measures and are also invited to question the justice of our current social structure, with implications for social policy and reorganization. Hattery and Smith also examine violence against women globally and relate this to violence in the United States. Unique coverage of same-sex and multicultural couples, as well as of theory and methods, make this text an essential element of any course considering the sociology of family violence.

It was among the most notorious criminal cases of its day. On August 11, 1921, in Birmingham, Alabama, a Methodist minister named Edwin Stephenson shot and killed a Catholic priest, James Coyle, in broad daylight and in front of numerous witnesses. The killer's motive? The priest had married Stephenson's eighteen-year-old daughter Ruth to Pedro Gussman, a Puerto Rican migrant and practicing Catholic.
Sharon Davies's Rising Road resurrects the murder of Father Coyle and the trial of his killer. As Davies reveals with novelistic richness, Stephenson's crime laid bare the most potent bigotries of the age: a hatred not only of blacks, but of Catholics and "foreigners" as well. In one of the case's most unexpected turns, the minister hired future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to lead his defense. Though regarded later in life as a civil rights champion, in 1921 Black was just months away from donning the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, the secret order that financed Stephenson's defense. Entering a plea of temporary insanity, Black defended the minister on claims that the Catholics had robbed Ruth away from her true Protestant faith, and that her Puerto Rican husband was actually black.
Placing the story in social and historical context, Davies brings this heinous crime and its aftermath back to life, in a brilliant and engrossing examination of the wages of prejudice and a trial that shook the nation at the height of Jim Crow.
"Davies takes us deep into the dark heart of the Jim Crow South, where she uncovers a searing story of love, faith, bigotry and violence. Rising Road is a history so powerful, so compelling it stays with you long after you've finished its final page."
--Kevin Boyle, author of the National Book Award-winning Arc of Justice
"This gripping history...has all the makings of a Hollywood movie. Drama aside, Rising Road also happens to be a fine work of history."
--History News Network

This volume challenges the dominant discourse that perceives Asian women as either "mail-order" brides or overseas workers. Providing the first sustained critique of the artificial analytical division between brides and workers, the book demonstrates women's transition from brides to workers and from workers to brides. Focusing on how women workers use marriage as a strategy to gain citizenship and how migrants for marriage become workers, the authors present these modern Asian women in their multidimensional roles as wives, workers, mothers, and citizens. The case studies explore a wide gamut of experiences, including Filipino caregivers in Canada, Thai sex workers in Germany, Filipino brides in Australia, Singaporean expatriates in Shanghai, Taiwanese families split between Taiwan and California, Asian migrants for marriage in Japan, and Filipino domestic helpers in Spain and Italy. All of these show the multiplicity of roles women maintain and emphasize the point that marriage, work, and migration are inextricably linked. Contributions by: Maria W. L. Chee, Michelle Lee, Deirdre McKay, Pat Mix, Tomoko Nakamatsu, Rogelia Pe-Pua, Nicola Piper, Mina Roces, Katie Willis, and Brenda Yeoh.

American families are far more diverse and complex today than they were 50 years ago. As ideas about marriage, divorce, and remarriage have changed, so too have our understandings about cohabitation, childbearing, parenting, and the transition to adulthood. Americans of all socioeconomic backgrounds have witnessed changes in the nature of family life, but as this book reveals, these changes play out in very different ways for the wealthy or well off than they do for the poor.
"Social Class and Changing Families in an Unequal America" offers an up-to-the-moment assessment of the condition of the family in an era of growing inequality. Highlighting unique aspects of family behavior, it reveals the degree to which families' varying experiences are shaped by social class. This book offers a much needed assessment of contemporary family life amid the turbulent economic changes in the United States.

American families are far more diverse and complex today than they were 50 years ago. As ideas about marriage, divorce, and remarriage have changed, so too have our understandings about cohabitation, childbearing, parenting, and the transition to adulthood. Americans of all socioeconomic backgrounds have witnessed changes in the nature of family life, but as this book reveals, these changes play out in very different ways for the wealthy or well off than they do for the poor.
"Social Class and Changing Families in an Unequal America" offers an up-to-the-moment assessment of the condition of the family in an era of growing inequality. Highlighting unique aspects of family behavior, it reveals the degree to which families' varying experiences are shaped by social class. This book offers a much needed assessment of contemporary family life amid the turbulent economic changes in the United States.

Why do so many Americans-working harder and longer and with less security than ever before-question the price of success demanded by today's hot-wired economy? Can you work and still have a life? Paula Rayman says, is yes. In this timely book, she offers a powerful blueprint for transforming the world of work, family, and community that is the downside of our relentlessly competitive culture. In this much-needed wake-up call to corporate America, Rayman shows why companies must go beyond the bottom line to survive and thrive. Drawing on her experience as a leading advocate for a more responsive workplace, she demonstrates how companies can organize for profit, productivity, and the desire of workers for a more rewarding quality of life. In a win-win agenda for changing outmoded organizations, she demonstrates convincingly that all successful transformations create workplaces that respect the need for dignity: security, self-respect, and the time and freedom to care for family and community.

This volume captures the domestication of mobile communication technologies by families in Asia, and its implications for family interactions and relationships. It showcases research on families across a spectrum of socio-economic profiles, from both rural and urban areas, offering insights on children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly. While mobile communication diffuses through Asia at a blistering pace, families in the region are also experiencing significant changes in light of unprecedented economic growth, globalisation, urbanisation and demographic shifts. Asia is therefore at the crossroads of technological transformation and social change. This book analyses the interactions of these two contemporaneous trends from the perspective of the family, covering a range of family types including nuclear, multi-generational, transnational, and multi-local, spanning the continuum from the media-rich to the media have-less.

The majority of people will now spend about one-third of their lives as grandparents, yet developmental psychologists have largely ignored the nature of the grandparental role, and the influence which grandparents can have on grandchildren. Originally published in 1991, this book redresses the balance and uses life-span evolutionary and psychodynamic theoretical frameworks to provide a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of grandparenthood from cross-cultural perspectives. Much recent work in developmental psychology has disregarded the extended family in favour of the two-generational nuclear family of parents and children. But grandparents do have a significant role in family relationships and children's development. This volume contains detailed discussion of intergenerational transmission of parenting skills, cooperation and conflict in three-generational families and the ways in which grandparents and grandchildren perceive one another. The importance of considering social and cultural contexts of development applies to grandparents just as much as to other areas of human development. Kinds of family structure, social policies regarding employment, health and housing, attitudes to marriage and even particular historical events all have an impact on the position and role of grandparents and on stereotypes of old age. These factors vary considerably from country to country. Our understanding of grandparenthood can only be enriched by learning about the variety of ways in which it is expressed in different cultural settings. Most previous research has been confined to the USA. This book is truly international containing contributions from Britain, Canada, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, West Germany and the USA. International comparisons enable us to see which elements are essential to grandparenthood and which are culture dependant. In most Western countries the population is ageing and this sort of study is becoming vitally important. The Psychology of Grandparenthood is required reading for anybody who is professionally involved with the elderly and for psychologists interested in development, the life-span and family systems.