When gay couples become parents, they face a host of questions and issues that their straight counterparts may never have to consider. How important is it for each partner to have a biological tie to their child? How will they become parents: will they pursue surrogacy, or will they adopt? Will both partners legally be able to adopt their child? Will they have to hide their relationship to speed up the adoption process? Will one partner be the primary breadwinner? And how will their lives change, now that the presence of a child has made their relationship visible to the rest of the world? In Gay Dads: Transitions to Adoptive Fatherhood, Abbie E. Goldberg examines the ways in which gay fathers approach and negotiate parenthood when they adopt. Drawing on empirical data from her in-depth interviews with 70 gay men, Goldberg analyzes how gay dads interact with competing ideals of fatherhood and masculinity, alternately pioneering and accommodating heteronormative "parenthood culture." The first study of gay men's transitions to fatherhood, this work will appeal to a wide range of readers, from those in the social sciences to social work to legal studies, as well as to gay-adoptive parent families themselves.

This comprehensive reference views China's welfare system through a cultural-historical lens to integrate its complex story into the global study of welfare. Focusing on the mainland's vast, mainly rural population and its long and complicated history, it analyzes rural welfare from the imperial dynasties, to the socialist planned economy under Mao Zedong, to its recent history in the current market economy. Findings from government and academics explore salient topics such as urban/rural inequity, the situation of migrant workers, change of social security system, the community development of the countryside, and the relationships of rural welfare policy with social structure, cultural background, economic development and political institution. This broad and deep knowledge gives readers the tools necessary for understanding the relationship of China's unique and nuanced past to its prominent status in the evolving global economy. Among the book's topics: < Welfare studies in the West and China Welfare practice in the period of 1840-1949 Creation of the Socialist Welfare System: socialist reformation and construction The Social Security system in rural China, 1979-1998 Re-collectivized process in welfare and economy Welfare's political contexts: rural grass-roots democracy With its accessible, up-to-date coverage and holistic approach to its subject, Rural Welfare in China will find a diverse interested audience, including sociologists, political economists, and social policymakers.

This book explores research on processes that influence family-school partnerships in support of student learning and education. It highlights research related to culture, contexts, and development as families and schools work together to promote smooth transitions and academic achievement. The volume discusses research related to family and community engagement with schools, and describes the various mechanisms by which partnerships may support students' long-term developmental outcomes and success beyond school. Each chapter sets forth a forward-thinking research agenda aimed at further understanding and implementing the processes by which family-school partnerships promote children's healthy adjustment. In addition to examining critical and emerging issues, this unique book also provides robust strategies, data, and rationales across the following areas: Cultural processes and the connections among home, school, and community. Family-school relationships during adolescence. Achievement mediators of family engagement in children's education. Continuities and consistencies across home and school systems. Uncovering processes and pathways in family-school research. Strengthening networks and attachments to promote child development. Processes and Pathways of Family-School Partnerships Across Development is a must-have resource for researchers, scientist-practitioners, and graduate students in child and school psychology, educational policy and politics, family studies, developmental psychology, sociology of education, and other interrelated disciplines.

Relying on women's own words in letters and journals, Rosenzweig refutes the prescriptive literature of the times with its dire predictions of inevitable rifts between Victorian mothers and their daughters, the new women of the twentieth century. Instead Rosenzweig shows us mothers who rejoiced in their daughters' educational successes and, while they did not always comprehend the nature of the changes taking place, were only too happy to see their daughters escape some of their own restrictions and grief.

Extremely useful to scholars and teachers of women's history and family history, "The Anchor of My Life" should also be fascinating to the general public for the accurate window that it provides on these complicated family relationship in our history.
--Laurie Crumpacker, Department of History, Simmons College

"Drawing on a broad array of historical sources, "The Anchor of My Life"challenges the common assumption that mother-daughter relationships invariably are characterized by tensions and conflicts. This lively and moving book deserves a wide audience."
--Emily K. Abel, author of "Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women's Lives"

The relationship between mothers and daughters has been the subject of much research and study, in such fields as psychoanalysis, sociology, and women's studies. But rarely has the history and evolution of this relationship been examined.

In "The Anchor of My Life," Linda W. Rosenzweig draws on a wide range of primary sources--letters, diaries, autobiographies, prescriptive advice or self-help literature, and fiction--to reveal the historical nuances of this pivotal relationship. Rosenzweig's distinctive approach focuses on the interaction between mothers and daughters of the American middle class at the turn of the century, revealing that mothers and daughters managed to sustain close, nurturing relationships in an era marked by a major female generation gap in terms of aspirations and opportunities. Illustrated with photographs and portraits of the time, "The Anchor of My Life" provocatively challenges the facile, late twentieth-century assumption that the mother-daughter relationship is necessarily defined by hostility, guilt, and antagonism.

First published in 1901, this title lends insight into the position of English women in the workforce at the turn of the twentieth century. The conditions of women changed rapidly throughout the 1800s, leading to more varied choices in terms of career and lifestyle. However, this title also reveals the limited status of women even one hundred years ago, as Lyttleton urges that women must decide between a family life and a career. Women and Their Work will be of interest to students of Sociology, Women's History, and Gender Studies.

Originally published in 1914, this text describes L.T. Headland and his wife's experience in China in the early twentieth century. With a focus on home life this study explores issues such as children, marriage and education as well as food, religion and concubinage as well as presenting anecdotes and personal stories from the families Headland interacted with. This title will be of interest to students of Asian Studies and Anthropology.

In this innovative study of the South Carolina Low Country, author Stephanie McCurry explores the place of the yeomanry in plantation society--the complex web of domestic and public relations within which they were enmeshed, and the contradictory politics of slave society by which that class of small farmers extracted the privileges of masterhood from the region's powerful planters. Insisting on the centrality of women as historical actors and gender as a category of analysis, this work shows how the fateful political choices made by the low-country yeomanry were rooted in the politics of the household, particularly in the customary relations of power male heads of independent households assumed over their dependents, whether slaves or free women and children. Such masterly prerogatives, practiced in the domestic sphere and redeemed in the public, explain the yeomanry's deep commitment to slavery and, ultimately, their ardent embrace of secession.
By placing the yeomanry in the center of the drama, McCurry offers a significant reinterpretation of this volatile society on the road to Civil War. Through careful and creative use of a wide variety of archival sources, she brings vividly to life the small worlds of yeoman households, and the larger world of the South Carolina Low Country, the plantation South, and nineteenth-century America.

Italian Family Matters examines the debates and political priorities that led to significant changes in the law and its relation to women and the family in postwar Italy. Informed by the feminist debates on these issues, it shows that both the need for and the limits to the demand for equality before the law can be used to show what a different ordering of the relations between the sexes could mean.

The genealogical model has a long-standing history in Western thought. The contributors to this volume consider the ways in which assumptions about the genealogical model-in particular, ideas concerning sequence, essence, and transmission-structure other modes of practice and knowledge-making in domains well beyond what is normally labeled "kinship." The detailed ethnographic work and analysis included in this text explores how these assumptions have been built into our understandings of race, personhood, ethnicity, property relations, and the relationship between human beings and non-human species. The authors explore the influences of the genealogical model of kinship in wider social theory and examine anthropology's ability to provide a unique framework capable of bridging the "social" and "natural" sciences. In doing so, this volume brings fresh new perspectives to bear on contemporary theories concerning biotechnology and its effect upon social life.

The first line of responsibility for children lies with their parents, but what if the parents fail to look after their children? Who else is involved, and what should they do? Children in the International Political Economy examines the moral responsibilities of different individuals and agencies towards children and argues that some responsibilities should be codified as concrete legal duties. If all else fails, children must look to the international community for help. Thus international agencies should recognize specific obligations to look after the well-being of children around the world.

Researchers recognize that theoretical frameworks and models of child development and family dynamics have historically overlooked the ways in which developmental processes are shaped by socio-cultural contexts. Ecological and acculturation frameworks are especially central to understanding the experiences of immigrant populations, and current research has yielded new conceptual and methodological tools for documenting the cultural and developmental processes of children and their families. Within this broad arena, a question of central importance is on how gender roles in immigrant families play out in the lives of children and families. Gender Roles in Immigrant Families places gender at the forefront of the research by investigating how it interplays with parental roles, parent-child relationships, and child outcomes.

This collection brings together an interdisciplinary pool of scholars to explore the relationship between children and borders with richly-documented ethnographic studies from around the world. The book provides a penetrating account of how borders affect children's lives and how children play a constitutive role in the social life of borders.

This authoritative book examines current trends in divorce throughout the world, analyzing hitherto inaccessible information on Asian and Arab countries and Eastern Europe, as well as data from Latin America, Western Europe, and the Anglo countries. William J. Goode asserts that these trends over the past four decades challenge previous theories, including his own, first offered in his classic World Revolution and Family Patterns. Among the topics Goode discusses are how divorce rates in different countries are affected by industrialization, dictatorship, civic standards for nations, and easier divorce laws; the relations between divorce and such factors as age and class; the meaning of the worldwide rise in cohabitation; and why people are becoming less likely to remarry. In all these divorce systems he points to the problems caused by divorce: how to get child support from ex-husbands, the increase in mother-headed families (even in Arab countries), and the scanty help (if any) governments give to such families. He argues that modern countries with high rates must learn an important lesson from what he calls traditional "stable high-divorce-rate" systems--that divorce is part of the system, and that we must create and support social norms (not only laws) that reduce its harsh effects.

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Read the Preface.

"A wide-ranging and beautifully dialectical analysis of the modern discourses on love and intimacy. David Shumway overturns some of the usual assumptions about romantic love and, in the process makes original, often surprising observations about literature, movies, pop music, self-help books, and a variety of other texts. Modern Love is a pleasure to read, and it contributes significantly to our understanding of modernity."
--James Naremore, Indiana University

"Fascinating and timely."
--"Intams Review"

"An extremely valuable contribution to the history of that supposedly timeless ideal, the intimate relationship."
--Elizabeth Freeman, author of "The Wedding Complex"

"A cultural study of love and marriage in fiction and film rather than a history of recent marriage, "Modern Love" illuminates the complexities of an important recent development in American marital ideals."
--"The Journal of American History"

"My ideas of romance came from the movies," said Woody Allen, and it is to the movies--as well as to novels, advice columns, and self-help books--that David Shumway turns for his history of modern love.

Modern Love argues that a crisis in the meaning and experience of marriage emerged when it lost its institutional function of controlling the distribution of property, and instead came to be seen as a locus for feelings of desire, togetherness, and loss. Over the course of the twentieth century, partly in response to this crisis, a new language of love--"intimacy"--emerged, not so much replacing but rather coexisting with the earlier language of "romance."

Reading a wide range of texts, from earlytwentieth-century advice columns and their late twentieth-century antecedent, the relationship self-help book, to Hollywood screwball comedies, and from the "relationship films" of Woody Allen and his successors to contemporary realist novels about marriages, Shumway argues that the kinds of stories the culture has told itself have changed. Part layperson's history of marriage and romance, part meditation on intimacy itself, Modern Love will be both amusing and interesting to almost anyone who thinks about relationships (and who doesn't?).

This volume presents global and comparative perspectives on the perpetual pendular movement of family law between status and contract. It contributes to the topical academic debate on 'family law exceptionalism' by exploring the blurred lines between public law, private law and family law, and sheds light on the many shades of grey that exist. The contributions focus on both substantive and procedural family law on parents and children and on life partners, with particular attention for contractual arrangements of family formations and of conflict resolution. The hypothesis underlying all contributions was the trend towards contractualisation of family law. A convergent research outcome resulting from the comparison of national reports was the ambivalent position of family law in legal systems worldwide. That comparison shows that, whereas family law is clearly moving towards contract with regard to old family formations, the contrary is true for new family formations. The movement towards contract is rarely considered to be contractualisation pur sang, with civil effect. The movement towards status, finally, does not necessarily witness 'family law exceptionalism' vis-a-vis private law, in view of the increasing State interventionism in private law relations in general. In sum, as the volume shows, the high permeability of the demarcations between the State, the family and the market impedes a categorial approach. This volume is based on the general and selected national reports on the topic "Contractualisation of Family Law" that were presented at the XIXth International Congress of Comparative Law in Vienna in July 2014.

This work assembles a group of international scholars to address issues on marriage and the state, motivations to marry, partner selections, marriage ceremonies, religion, kinship ties and marriage, sexual interaction and marriage, and divorce.

Reproductive disruptions, such as infertility, pregnancy loss, adoption, and childhood disability, are among the most distressing experiences in people s lives. Based on research by leading medical anthropologists from around the world, this book examines such issues as local practices detrimental to safe pregnancy and birth; conflicting reproductive goals between women and men; miscommunications between pregnant women and their genetic counselors; cultural anxieties over gamete donation and adoption; the contested meanings of abortion; cultural critiques of hormone replacement therapy; and the globalization of new pharmaceutical and assisted reproductive technologies. This breadth - with its explicit move from the local to the global, from the realm of everyday reproductive practice to international programs and policies - illuminates most effectively the workings of power, the tensions between women s and men s reproductive agency, and various cultural and structural inequalities in reproductive health. Marcia C. Inhorn is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies. A specialist on infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in the Muslim Middle East, she is the author or editor of four books on the subject. Her publications include Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994, winner of Eileen Basker Prize for outstanding research in gender and health), Infertility and Patriarchy: The Cultural Politics of Gender and Family Life in Egypt (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996) and Local Babies, Global Science: Gender, Religion, and In Vitro Fertilization in Egypt (Routledge Press, 2003)."

Although interest in mother/daughter relationships has led to a plethora of books on the subject, these books all consider situations found in the mainstream white population. In this book, relationships between mothers and daughters from 13 ethnic groups, including Asian, Black, Latino, and Native American, are explored. The voices of 17 highly successful mothers, in different stages of their life, and their 19 daughters are heard. The reader will learn of their values, intergenerational relationships, and the mother's influence as a role model. The research that confirms and validates these women's life stories is discussed. The book provides valuable insight into the issues facing minority women in the United States.

Although the women in these case studies come from diverse multi-ethnic backgrounds, they have all faced traditional and ethnic barriers and been able to achieve success, becoming role models for their daughters. The book is both a significant contribution to women's and ethnic studies, social sciences and education.

Drawing on children's narratives about their everyday life this book explores how children understand the process of socialization as an embodied, biographical experience at home, at school and in the neighbourhood. Through close analysis of what children have to say, the book shows how children actively learn from and contribute to the mundane practices and interactions of everyday social life. Through these experiences they get to know about social norms, rules and values and also develop their sense of self and identity. Working from this child-centred perspective and drawing on recent theoretical ideas about personal life and the individual, the book demonstrates the valuable contribution that childhood studies can make to long-standing sociological debates about processes of social reproduction and social change.

In The Renaissance Man and His Children, author Louis Haas delves into account books, letters, and literature of the Renaissance to examine elite Florentine male attitudes and behaviors regarding birth and infancy from 1300 to 1600.

This volume will focus on innovative research that examines how the nature of paid work intersects with family and personal life today. Although some workers have more stability than others, rising income inequality, the continued rise of nonstandard work, further erosion of unions, technological advancements that encourage permeable boundaries between work and home, and the pressures of a global 24/7 economy generate an aura of insecurity for all. Some workers are working long hours but have some control over when, where and how they work; many others are poorly compensated and struggle with underemployment, have little say over their schedules, lack adequate benefits, and must cobble together several jobs and/or rely heavily on kinship networks to make ends meet. These changes suggest the need for nuanced analyses that are sensitive to class variation in work conditions and to diverse family formations. Research that addresses how current work conditions are experienced in different life course stages and in different policy contexts is also needed to fully understand the work-family interface.

Single Parents offers an overview of this growing phenomenon, the problems faced by single-parent families, and their impact on society. Topics include men and women as single parents, single-mother families and poverty, the legal system and single parents, gay and lesbian parents, moral issues, and the effects of growing up in a single-parent family. The experiences of single parents in other countries are also discussed. This volume lists numerous resources, among them federal government programs; state statutes concerning child custody and adoption; private and public organizations; a guide to literature, films and videos; and information on the Internet. Lists numerous resources such as federal government programs, private and public organizations, films and videos, and information on the Internet

"Notions of Family: Intersectional Perspectives" presents new and original research on gender and the institution of family featuring both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The objective of this volume is to present a framework for understanding the ways in which the salient identities of gender, class position, race, sexuality, and other demographic characteristics function simultaneously to produce the outcomes we observe in the lives of individuals as integral forces in the maintenance of family. While there is a large body of literature in each of these demographic areas of analysis and theory, only within the past decade have academics attempted to model and analyze the "simultaneity" of their functioning as one concerted force in our everyday lived experience. Moreover, there has been little directed focus on any particular institutional force in current textual discussions of intersectionality. We seek to begin the process of addressing this void in the academic literature with this edited volume on the family as a societal institution.

Covers the major languages, language families, and writing systems attested in the Ancient Near East Filled with enlightening chapters by noted experts in the field, this book introduces Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) languages and language families used during the time period of roughly 3200 BCE to the second century CE in the areas of Egypt, the Levant, eastern Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Iran. In addition to providing grammatical sketches of the respective languages, the book focuses on socio-linguistic questions such as language contact, diglossia, the development of literary standard languages, and the development of diplomatic languages or "linguae francae." It also addresses the interaction of Ancient Near Eastern languages with each other and their roles within the political and cultural systems of ANE societies. Presented in five parts, The Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages provides readers with in-depth chapter coverage of the writing systems of ANE, starting with their decipherment. It looks at the emergence of cuneiform writing; the development of Egyptian writing in the fourth and early third millennium BCI; and the emergence of alphabetic scripts. The book also covers many of the individual languages themselves, including Sumerian, Egyptian, Akkadian, Hittite, Pre- and Post-Exilic Hebrew, Phoenician, Ancient South Arabian, and more. Provides an overview of all major language families and writing systems used in the Ancient Near East during the time period from the beginning of writing (approximately 3200 BCE) to the second century CE (end of cuneiform writing) Addresses how the individual languages interacted with each other and how they functioned in the societies that used them Written by leading experts on the languages and topics The Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages is an ideal book for undergraduate students and scholars interested in Ancient Near Eastern cultures and languages or certain aspects of these languages.