This text explores a paradox of kinship - namely that in any given culture kinship is understood as "natural" or "scientific", but comparing cultures or even different epochs within the same culture reveals how kinship is an ongoing project of human construction. The book consists of a general introduction to the topic and twenty essays examining different aspects of kinship: how family relations and descent are understood, how property is passed down from one generation to the next, how gender differences matter in kinship rules and practices, and how kinship positions held by men and women affect their power in other realms. Areas covered by the book include: China, Italy, India, England, Austria, Jamaica.

This volume, the first of its kind in English, brings together scholars from different disciplines who address the history of women in Austria, as well as their place in contemporary Austrian society, from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, thus shedding new light on contemporary Austria and in the context of its rich and complicated history.

This textbook showcases innovative approaches to the interdisciplinary field of childhood and youth studies, examining how young people in a wide range of contemporary and historical contexts around the globe live their young lives as subjects, objects, and agents. The diverse contributions examine how children and youth are simultaneously constructed: as individual subjects through social processes and culturally-specific discourses; as objects of policy intervention and other adult power plays; and also as active agents who act on their world and make meaning even amidst conditions of social, political, and economic marginalization. In addition, the book is centrally engaged with questions about how researchers take into consideration children's and young people's own conceptions of themselves and how we conceptualize child and youth potentials for agency at different ages and stages of growing up. Each chapter discusses substantive research but also engages in self-reflection about methodology, positionality, and/or disciplinarity, thus making the volume especially useful for teaching. This book will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including childhood studies, youth studies, girls' studies, development studies, research methods, sociology, anthropology, education, history, geography, public policy, cultural studies, gender and women's studies and global studies.

This volume, the first of its kind in English, brings together scholars from different disciplines who address the history of women in Austria, as well as their place in contemporary Austrian society, from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, thus shedding new light on contemporary Austria and in the context of its rich and complicated history.

"Taking the Hard Road" is an engaging history of growing up in working-class families in France and Germany during the Industrial Revolution. Based on a reading of ninety autobiographical accounts of childhood and adolescence, the book explores the far-reaching historical transformations associated with the emergence of modern industrial capitalism. According to Mary Jo Maynes, the aspects of private life revealed in these accounts played an important role in historical development by actively shaping the authors' social, political, and class identities. The stories told in these memoirs revolve around details of everyday life: schooling, parent-child relations, adolescent sexuality, early experiences in the workforce, and religious observances. Maynes uses demographics, family history, and literary analysis to place these details within the context of historical change. She also draws comparisons between French and German texts, men's and women's accounts, and narratives of social mobility and political militancy.

Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills offers a comparative history of European girlhood from 1750 to 1960, with a focus on Britain, France, and Germany. It covers diverse issues in the lives of girls, from sexuality and leisure to social roles in the family and the economy. A corrective to historians traditionally male orientation toward youth, the volume brings girls to the center of European history, emphasizing their importance in European economics and culture. It also identifies cultural and temporal differences within the European experience, particularly with regard to the spaces girls occupied. While the contributors appreciate the importance of systemic and institutional factors in shaping young girls lives, they are also sensitive to the ways in which girls have been able to resist dominance and create their own destinies.

The contributors are Kathleen Alaimo, Christina Benninghaus, Pamela Cox, Clare Crowston, Anna Davin, Andreas Gestrich, Celine Grasser, Irene Hardach-Pinke, Elizabeth Bright Jones, Clair Langhamer, Mary Jo Maynes, Carol E. Morgan, Tammy M. Proctor, Rebecca Rogers, Karin Schmidlechner, Deborah Simonton, Birgitte Soland, and Mary Lynn Stewart."

This book addresses the question of what world history looks like when the family is at the center of the story. People have always lived in families, but what that means has varied dramatically over time and across cultures. The family is not a "natural" phenomenon-it has a history. And family life is not limited to the realm of the private or the strictly personal; the family is a force of history. Gender and generational differences affect how individual family members relate to each other and how the family operates in changing historical times. For example, youth rebellion against repressive elders fed into choices about conversion to Christianity in colonial Kenya in the early twentieth century and also into the May Fourth rebellion against traditional rule in China in 1919.These are the sorts of examples that drive the narrative of The Family: A World History. Maynes and Waltner begin their story more than 10,000 years ago with various projects of domestication around the globe - different ways of inventing human settlement and explaining and attempting to control the natural world. The authors then examine how family systems and family practices help to account for the historical fate of different world regions in the era of growing world trade, colonization, and religious warfare and conversions between 1450 and 1750. They make connections between economic, political, and cultural modernity and the transformation of family and gender relationships between 1750 and 1920. Finally, they demonstrate that the struggle over family relations was central to fascist and colonial regimes, Cold War era ideological and economic confrontations, and post-World-War II antagonisms between 'developed' and 'underdeveloped' nations, and, more recently, between the global North and the global South. The narrative concludes with such contemporary realities as transcontinental family life, state programs of genocide, and innovative reproductive technologies. Taking a long and broad view of the family as a force of history brings to light processes of human development and patterns of social life that are missed by narrower investigations. This book on the family is thus also engaged in a larger conversation about what it means to be human, and how a very expansive temporal and geographic frame of history brings new insights into the human past and present. Maynes and Waltner draw on a wide range of historical sources including legal codes, census records, memoirs, art, and oral history.

In Telling Stories, Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett argue that personal narratives autobiographies, oral histories, life history interviews, and memoirs are an important research tool for understanding the relationship between people and their societies. Gathering examples from throughout the world and from premodern as well as contemporary cultures, they draw from labor history and class analysis, feminist sociology, race relations, and anthropology to demonstrate the value of personal narratives for scholars and students alike.

Telling Stories explores why and how personal narratives should be used as evidence, and the methods and pitfalls of their use. The authors stress the importance of recognizing that stories that people tell about their lives are never simply individual. Rather, they are told in historically specific times and settings and call on rules, models, and social experiences that govern how story elements link together in the process of self-narration. Stories show how individuals' motivations, emotions, and imaginations have been shaped by their cumulative life experiences. In turn, Telling Stories demonstrates how the knowledge produced by personal narrative analysis is not simply contained in the stories told; the understanding that takes place between narrator and analyst and between analyst and audience enriches the results immeasurably."

In Telling Stories, Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett argue that personal narratives autobiographies, oral histories, life history interviews, and memoirs are an important research tool for understanding the relationship between people and their societies. Gathering examples from throughout the world and from premodern as well as contemporary cultures, they draw from labor history and class analysis, feminist sociology, race relations, and anthropology to demonstrate the value of personal narratives for scholars and students alike.

Telling Stories explores why and how personal narratives should be used as evidence, and the methods and pitfalls of their use. The authors stress the importance of recognizing that stories that people tell about their lives are never simply individual. Rather, they are told in historically specific times and settings and call on rules, models, and social experiences that govern how story elements link together in the process of self-narration. Stories show how individuals' motivations, emotions, and imaginations have been shaped by their cumulative life experiences. In turn, Telling Stories demonstrates how the knowledge produced by personal narrative analysis is not simply contained in the stories told; the understanding that takes place between narrator and analyst and between analyst and audience enriches the results immeasurably."

This volume of recent "Signs "articles offers a number of significant contributions to feminist debates on history and theory. It illustrates the uses of theories in recent feminist historical research and the often contentious arguments that surround them. The readings are organized into three sections. The first draws on the tradition of political economy, and discusses the importance of class relations for understanding historical events and social relationships and the expansion of concepts of political economy to include race. The second section, on "The Body," demonstrates how feminist scholars have increasingly worked to re-place the body, to move it from its traditionally less valued position in the hierarchal Enlightenment mind/body split to an approach that emphasizes the body as both material and discursive, both "real" and "representational." The final section, "Discourse," focuses on an examination of the productive power of language in both reflecting and shaping experience and in the contestation of social relations of power.

This volume of recent "Signs "articles offers a number of significant contributions to feminist debates on history and theory. It illustrates the uses of theories in recent feminist historical research and the often contentious arguments that surround them. The readings are organized into three sections. The first draws on the tradition of political economy, and discusses the importance of class relations for understanding historical events and social relationships and the expansion of concepts of political economy to include race. The second section, on "The Body," demonstrates how feminist scholars have increasingly worked to re-place the body, to move it from its traditionally less valued position in the hierarchal Enlightenment mind/body split to an approach that emphasizes the body as both material and discursive, both "real" and "representational." The final section, "Discourse," focuses on an examination of the productive power of language in both reflecting and shaping experience and in the contestation of social relations of power.