Marriage is a site of political conflict. It is a controversial issue in the UK, Australia and the US where there is a clash of values between neoliberal governments and diverse groups either strongly opposing or supporting marriage. In the meantime, fewer couples are marrying, while other family forms are more widely accepted. This book explores this disconnect by examining policy issues such as class divides, ethnicity, religion, same-sex marriage, gender relations and romantic expectations. A top down approach explores different government policy responses to marriage. In all three countries, there are differences and similarities in how governments react to the changes in family formations, but values or 'conceptions of the desirable' play a significant role. Enhancing stability and commitment as well as personal responsibility are important for policymakers who aim to keep 'the family' intact and thereby lower the burden on the public purse. It is difficult for political actors to respond to conflicting and changing values surrounding the diversity in relationships or to translate them into policies. There is a strong case to be made for increased policy attention to adult relationships - and a much weaker case for marriage. Rich evidence is drawn from interviews with key stakeholders as well as politicians' speeches, government departmental reports, stakeholders' documents and responses to government policies, and media articles.

This book explores the journey of young people through a Secure Training Centre and, more generally, the criminal justice system in the UK. It examines the extent to which young people have been failed by the system at every stage of their lives, with incarceration used as a means of removing 'the problem' from society. To explore this process, the authors utilise an integrated theoretical framework to develop a new rehabilitative approach focused on developing positive outcomes for young people. The book deploys a social impact measurement methodology to evaluate the experience and outcomes of youth justice interventions at a Secure Training Centre. Such an approach provides a fresh perspective on the youth justice debate which has traditionally utilised outcome data to measure immediate impact relating to recidivism and is therefore not focused on the young person holistically. Using a social impact framework to evaluate youth justice, underpinned by an integrated theoretical framework, allows for assessment to be made which place the young person at the centre of evaluation.

This is the first book specifically devoted to exploring one of the longest-running controversies in nineteenth-century Britain - the sixty-five-year campaign to legalise marriage between a man and his deceased wife's sister. The issue captured the political, religious and literary imagination of the United Kingdom. It provoked huge parliamentary and religious debate and aroused national, ecclesiastical and sexual passions. The campaign to legalise such unions, and the widespread opposition it provoked, spoke to issues not just of incest, sex and the family, but also to national identity and political and religious governance.

Published in 1998, this work is concerned, in the main, with reproduction - for which marriage is not an essential prerequisite. Nevertheless, much of sexuality and the greater part of parenthood still subsist within the marital relationship. Sex and marriage are interdependent - indeed the definition of the latter depends on the former. After looking at the prerequisites for marriage and for making a marriage void, the author shows that the medico-legal interests of marriage relate to the mental health and the sex of the parties. The author also looks at various aspects of the sexual-familial relationship, including contraception, sterilization, abortion, protection of the foetus, foetal experimentation, the infertile husband, the infertile woman, defective neonates and infants, consent to treatment and research in children, the protection of young children and the killing of children within the family. Cases are used to highlight the legal aspects of these subjects.

Why did the medieval West condemn clerical marriage as an abomination while the Byzantine Church affirmed its sanctifying nature? This book brings together ecclesiastical, legal, social, and cultural history in order to examine how Byzantine and Western medieval ecclesiastics made sense of their different rules of clerical continence. Western ecclesiastics condemned clerical marriage for three key reasons: married clerics could alienate ecclesiastical property for the sake of their families; they could secure careers in the Church for their sons, restricting ecclesiastical positions and lands to specific families; and they could pollute the sacred by officiating after having had sex with their wives. A comparative study shows that these offending risk factors were absent in twelfth-century Byzantium: clerics below the episcopate did not have enough access to ecclesiastical resources to put the Church at financial risk; clerical dynasties were understood within a wider frame of valued friendship networks; and sex within clerical marriage was never called impure in canon law, as there was little drive to use pollution discourses to separate clergy and laity. These facts are symptomatic of a much wider difference between West and East, impinging on ideas about social order, moral authority, and reform.

The collection of chapters in the "Handbook of Population and Family Economics" and their organization reflect the most recent developments in economics pertaining to population issues and the family. The rationale, contents, and organization of the "Handbook" evolve from three premises. First, the family is the main arena in which population outcomes are forged. Second, there are important interactions and significant causal links across all demographic phenomena. Third, the study of the size, composition, and growth of a population can benefit from the application of economic methodology and tools. The diversity and depth of the work reviewed and presented in the "Handbook" conveys both the progress that has been made by economists in understanding the forces shaping population processes, including the behavior of families, and the many questions, empirical and theoretical, that still remain. For more information on the Handbooks in Economics series, please see our home page on http: //www.elsevier.nl/locate/hes

This book explores how young children and new families are located in the consumer world of affluent societies. The author assesses the way in which the value of infants and monetary value in markets are realized together, and examines how the meanings of childhood are enacted in the practices, narratives and materialities of contemporary markets. These meanings formulate what is important in the care of young children, creating moralities that impact not only on new parents, but also circumscribe the possibilities for monetary value creation. Three main understandings of early childhood - those of love, protection and purification - and their interrelationships are covered, and illustrated with examples including food, feeding tools, nappies, travel systems and toys. The book concludes by re-examining the relationship between adulthood and the cultural value of young children, and by discussing the implications of the ways markets address young children, also examines the realities of older children in consumer culture. Childhood and Markets will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, childhood studies, anthropology, cultural studies, media studies, business studies and marketing.

This life-course analysis of family development focuses on the social dynamics among family members. It features parent-child relationships in a larger context, by examining the help exchange between kin and nonkin and the intergenerational transmission of family characteristics.

While the practice of surrogacy has existed for millennia, new fertility technologies have allowed women to act as gestational surrogates, carrying children that are not genetically their own. While some women volunteer to act as gestational surrogates for friends or family members, others get paid for performing this service. The first ethnographic study of gestational surrogacy in the United States, Labor of Love examines the conflicted attitudes that emerge when the ostensibly priceless act of bringing a child into the world becomes a paid occupation. Heather Jacobson interviews not only surrogate mothers, but also their family members, the intended parents who employ surrogates, and the various professionals who work to facilitate the process. Seeking to understand how gestational surrogates perceive their vocation, she discovers that many regard surrogacy as a calling, but are reluctant to describe it as a job. In the process, Jacobson dissects the complex set of social attitudes underlying this resistance toward conceiving of pregnancy as a form of employment. Through her extensive field research, Jacobson gives readers a firsthand look at the many challenges faced by gestational surrogates, who deal with complicated medical procedures, delicate work-family balances, and tricky social dynamics. Yet Labor of Love also demonstrates the extent to which advances in reproductive technology are affecting all Americans, changing how we think about maternity, family, and the labor involved in giving birth.

Erika and Klaus Mann: Living with America provides new insights into the lives of Thomas Mann's two eldest children, by focusing on their years in America. It begins with Erika and Klaus Mann's self-promotional tour of the United States in 1927-1928, and follows up with their return in 1936 as voluntary exiles determined to fight the spread of Nazism in Europe. As children of privilege and considerable personal charm, Erika and Klaus Mann quickly became highly visible representatives of the German exile community. In examining their lives in America, the United States plays a central role. Just as the Manns' views of America evolved between 1936 and 1952, so did American public opinion and government policy. This study examines Erika and Klaus Mann's public and private statements, while also examining statements made about them by American journalists, politicians, book critics, and F.B.I. and immigration officers. It follows the Mann siblings' rise in America as celebrity representatives of an "other," better Germany, and the forces that began to rally against them even before the outbreak of the war. It shows the many concrete actions the Mann siblings took to persuade Americans to view their country as one linked to European interests, and it describes their various war activities, with Erika becoming a U.S. war correspondent and Klaus an American soldier. Finally, it portrays their fears for America as the war drew to a close, America deployed the atom bomb, and the nation quickly transformed itself from Russian ally to Cold War combatant.

Adolescents and emerging adults today spend an estimated seven hours daily attending to media. The media teens attend to commonly present relationships between men and women as a "game" or "competition" in which women seduce through their physical appearance and the masculinity of men is defined through sexual conquest. A growing body of research suggests that viewing this sexualized media may contribute to adolescents' and emerging adults' understanding of and behaviors around romantic and sexual relationships. Using social cognitive theory of gender development, scripting theory, and heterosexual script theory as a framework, Scripting Adolescent Romance presents methods and analyses of data from in-depth interviews with 16 high school and young college students, and focus groups with over 100 individuals in this age group. Findings provide a rarely seen view inside youths' private spaces-their bedrooms and their social media spaces. In often highly-personal conversations, youth provide in-depth information about how they understand and navigate virginity, romantic relationships, sexual situations, and interpersonal violence. Their discussions of "Netflix and chill," Facebook stalking, and the scorecard script illuminate aspects of romance and sex that may be uniquely characteristic of today's young people. This book is a must-read for parents of adolescents, and promises to be an enjoyable, insightful text for classes about media effects, adolescent development, gender roles, and sexual health.

Originally published in 1974, The Social Analysis of Class Structure is an edited collection addressing class formation and class relations in industrial society. The range and variety of the contributions provide a useful guide to the central concerns of British sociology in the 1970s. Encompassing general theorizing and empirical investigation, the book examines the treatment of crucial issues of the day, such as the relationships between race and class formation, and sexual subordination, as well addressing historical questions such as the Victorian labour aristocracy and the incorporation of the working class.

For every female suicide in Ireland, there are five male suicides. This book is based on fieldwork done in and around Cork, Ireland between 2008 and 2012 among some forty young lads, aged 18-34. This anthropological approach aims to help explain why some groups in a specific society or community are more prone to commit suicide than others. In addition to suicide, this book focuses extensively on related issues such as alcohol, drug abuse, and other self-destructive behaviors prominent within Irish lad culture. This includes peer pressures and loyalties, chauvinistic jargon, homophobic bullying, humor, and the culture of mocking so as to grasp the cultural expectations of this particular form of masculinity. The everyday workings of gender segregation and gender-appropriateness is examined in detail by informants while addressing the underlying question whether increased gender equality-which includes men-could lessen young men's vulnerability to self-destructive behaviors and suicide in Ireland.

This book explores multiple facets of femininity for marriage in India. Using language as an entry point, it looks at how and why media representations of gender identities are constructed the way they are. It works with a unique synthesis of second-wave feminist discourse and empirical linguistic research to look at how the social institution of marriage becomes the site of interaction between language, ideology, psyche and culture. This volume also brings together the personal histories and views of women who discuss how media, modernity and social norms shape their ideas about marriage and selfhood. Deconstructing perceptions of femininity in contemporary India, the book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of sociology, gender studies, linguistics, media and cultural studies and psychoanalysis.

While the family remains a core social institution in every society, it is, nonetheless, an institution which continues to evolve. In many societies, divorce, separation, and remarriage have become a normative part of marriage and family life. These changes have, understandably, led to a great diversification of the behaviors, attitudes, and norms concerning marriage and family. In order to better comprehend these issues, this multidisciplinary volume of CPFR addresses topics including: marital instability, cohabitation and remarriage, step-parenting, divorce in later life, impact of divorce and separation on children, employment and the risk of divorce, marital dissolution and health, the role of extended kin in the process of divorce, the quality of relationships with former spouses, race/ethnicity and remarriage, economic factors and divorce/remarriage, and extra-marital affairs, among others.

This book depicts the evolution of Singapore's family and population landscape in the last half a century, the related public policies, and future challenges. Since the country gained independence in 1965, family and population policies have been integral to her nation-building strategies. The chapters discuss the changes in population compositions, family structures, relations, and values among major ethnic groups. They also discuss policies for vulnerable populations such as female-headed households, cross-cultural families, same-sex partnering, the elderly, and low-income families.

Stepfamilies were as common in the European past as they are today. Stepfamilies in Europe, 1400-1800 is the first in-depth study to chart four centuries of continuity and change for these complex families created by the death of a parent and the remarriage of the survivor. With geographic coverage from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia and from the Atlantic coast to Central Europe, this collection of essays from leading scholars compares how religious affiliation, laws and cultural attitudes shaped stepfamily realities. Exploring stepfamilies across society from artisans to princely rulers, this book considers the impact of remarriage on the bonds between parents and their children, stepparents and stepchildren, while offering insights into the relationships between full siblings, half siblings and stepsiblings. The contributors investigate a variety of primary sources from songs to letters and memoirs, printed Protestant funeral works, Catholic dispensation requests, kinship puzzles, legitimation petitions, and documents drawn up by notaries, to understand the experiences and life cycle of a family and its members - whether growing up as a stepchild or forming a stepfamily through marital choice as an adult. Featuring an array of visual evidence, and drawing on topics such as widowhood, remarriage, and the guardianship of children, Stepfamilies in Europe will be essential reading for scholars and students of the history of the family.

Until recently, domestic violence, as it has been referred to, was a problem to be dealt with inside the family. In this ground-breaking work, Hattery's unique approach provides a detailed theoretical discussion of race, class, and gender-effects on intimate partner violence and a thoughtful discussion of the interactions of these factors.

"The study of kinship remains a lively concern among historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. One of the very attractive features of the volume is its crossdisciplinary representation from these fields but also from literature... and] the mix of senior and junior scholars." . Mary Lindemann, University of Miami

"The essays are of uniform excellence and interest, written by established scholars, including very well known scholars; the essays also make a remarkably coherent set... and] are well focused...the research is valuable, offering original perspectives on a number of issues, from kinship reckoning to industrialization, to emotional history. This is a very useful, and widely cited companion to the previous volume on kinship in Europe, a great introduction to the current research." . William Reddy, Duke University

Recently considerable interest has developed about the degree to which anthropological approaches to kinship can be used for the study of the long-term development of European history. From the late middle ages to the dawn of the twentieth century, kinship - rather than declining, as is often assumed - was twice reconfigured in dramatic ways and became increasingly significant as a force in historical change, with remarkable similarities across European society. Applying interdisciplinary approaches from social and cultural history and literature and focusing on sibling relationships, this volume takes up the challenge of examining the systemic and structural development of kinship over the long term by looking at the close inner-familial dynamics of ruling families (the Hohenzollerns), cultural leaders (the Mendelssohns), business and professional classes, and political figures (the Gladstones)in France, Italy, Germany, and England. It offers insight into the current issues in kinship studies and draws from a wide range of personal documents: letters, autobiographies, testaments, memoirs, as well as genealogies and works of art."

Embodied Family Choreography documents the lived and embodied practices employed to establish, maintain, and negotiate intimate social relationships in the family, examining forms of control, care, and creativity. Making use of the extensive video archives of family interaction in the US and Sweden, it presents the first investigation of how touch and interaction between bodies, in conjunction with talk, constitute a primary means of orchestrating activities through directives, thus creating rich relationships through supportive interchanges, and engaging in playful explorations of the world. Through close investigation of the sequential and simultaneous engagement of bodies interacting with other bodies, this book makes visible the important role touch plays in the context of contemporary Western middle class family life and is pioneering in its analysis of how the visual, aural, and haptic senses (usually analysed separately) mutually elaborate one another. As such, Embodied Family Choreography will appeal to scholars of child development, the sociology of the family and ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.

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.

Faith and Public Policy turns the spotlight on the role of faith in the public square and the spiritual consequences of public policymaking. The work brings together fourteen of America's most respected writers on the intersection of faith and public policy to discuss the changing roles of government, church, education, and the family. Chapters investigate such issues as inner city programs, the secularization of faith-based programs, the impact of tax policy on the family, and the status of school vouchers. Contributions by Steve Forbes and William E. Simon illustrate the deep personal faith that informs and fuels the public leadership of America's leading thinkers and political figures. Readers will find Faith and Public Policy a timely and vigorous conversation on the commingling of government and religion in America, a country eager to return to the Founding Generation's idea of a nation in covenant with God.

Living in sin is the first book-length study of cohabitation in nineteenth-century England, based on research into the lives of hundreds of couples. 'Common-law' marriages did not have any legal basis, so the Victorian courts had to wrestle with unions that resembled marriage in every way, yet did not meet its most basic requirements. The majority of those who lived in irregular unions did so because they could not marry legally. Others chose not to marry, from indifference, from class differences, or because they dissented from marriage for philosophical reasons. This book looks at each motivation in turn, highlighting class, gender and generational differences, as well as the reactions of wider kin and community. Frost shows how these couples slowly widened the definition of legal marriage, preparing the way for the more substantial changes of the twentieth century, making this a valuable resource for all those interested in Gender and Social History. -- .

What Now? Nothing your marriage has sustained in the past compares to the pain of discovering that your spouse has been unfaithful. The betrayal, rage, sadness, and jealousy is unlike anything you've experienced before. And yet it is possible to move forward, decide what to do in your marriage, and most important, heal. For more than 10 years, Surviving Infidelity has been offering sage advice and compassionate, nonjudgmental analysis. Based on the private practices of licensed marriage and family therapist Rona B. Subotnik and clinical psychologist Gloria G. Harris, Ph.D., this third edition has been completely updated and gives you strategies to: Understand the different kinds of affairs and why they happen, including Internet and emotional affairs Cope with your emotions, from grief to rage Repair the marriage if you choose to Learn what it takes to be a survivor Surviving Infidelity, 3rd Edition brings you the new hope and the empathy you need in this difficult time.

The slow response of maternal and child health care problems to control strategies in Nigeria suggests that the health sector requires more holistic study. This study focuses on case-specifics of the affected communities and examines the incidence of maternal and child health care from entire cultural domain of the focused communities. The rural communities of Osun state in Nigeria are the object of the study, where the local conception of maternal and child health was examined. Similarly, the local people's perception of maternal and child health was identified and various attitudes and practices affecting health care provisioning in the rural communities of Osun state were similarly analysed. Relying on ethnographic methods of data collection, the text establishes that certain local attitudes are constraints against equitable access to maternal and child health care facilities. It also establishes that there are some other local practices which promote good health of the rural mothers and their children. Specific findings show that illiteracy and low level of economic activities suffered by mothers were the major causes of maternal and child health care problems in rural communities.