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Women around the world are opting out of marriage. Through nuanced
ethnographic accounts of the ways that women are moving the needle
on marital norms and practices, Opting Out reveals the conditions
that make this widespread phenomenon possible in places where
marriage has long been obligatory. Each chapter invites readers
into the lives of particular women and the changing circumstances
in which these lives unfold - sometimes painfully, sometimes
humorously, and always unexpectedly. Taken together, the essays in
this volume prompt the following questions: Why is marriage so
consistently disappointing for women? When the rewards of economic
stability and the social status that marriage confers are troubled,
does marriage offer women anything compelling at all? Across
diverse geographic contexts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America,
this book offers sensitive and powerful portrayals of women as they
escape or reshape marriage into a more rewarding arrangement.
In recent decades, the North American public has pursued an
inspirational vision of successful aging-striving through medical
technique and individual effort to eradicate the declines,
vulnerabilities, and dependencies previously commonly associated
with old age. On the face of it, this bold new vision of
successful, healthy, and active aging is highly appealing. But it
also rests on a deep cultural discomfort with aging and being old.
The contributors to Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession
explore how the successful aging movement is playing out across
five continents. Their chapters investigate a variety of people,
including Catholic nuns in the United States; Hindu ashram
dwellers; older American women seeking plastic surgery; aging
African-American lesbians and gay men in the District of Columbia;
Chicago home health care workers and their aging clients; Mexican
men foregoing Viagra; dementia and Alzheimer sufferers in the
United States and Brazil; and aging policies in Denmark, Poland,
India, China, Japan, and Uganda. This book offers a fresh look at a
major cultural and public health movement of our time, questioning
what has become for many a taken-for-granted goal-aging in a way
that almost denies aging itself.
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more
at www.luminosoa.org. Today, the majority of the world's population
lives in a country with falling marriage rates, a phenomenon with
profound impacts on women, gender, and sexuality. In this
exceptionally crafted ethnography, Sarah Lamb probes the gendered
trend of single women living in India, examining what makes living
outside marriage for women increasingly possible and yet incredibly
challenging. Featuring the stories of never-married women as young
as 35 and as old as 92, the book offers a remarkable portrait of a
way of life experienced by women across class and caste divides,
from urban professionals and rural day laborers, to those who
identify as heterosexual and lesbian, to others who evaded marriage
both by choice and by circumstance. For women in India, complex
social-cultural and political-economic contexts are foundational to
their lives and decisions, and evading marriage is often an
unintended consequence of other pressing life priorities. Arguing
that never-married women are able to illuminate their society's
broader social-cultural values, Lamb offers a new and startling
look at prevailing systems of gender, sexuality, kinship, freedom,
and social belonging in India today.
This rich ethnography explores beliefs and practices surrounding
aging in a rural Bengali village. Sarah Lamb focuses on how
villagers' visions of aging are tied to the making and unmaking of
gendered selves and social relations over a lifetime. Lamb uses a
focus on age as a means not only to open up new ways of thinking
about South Asian social life, but also to contribute to
contemporary theories of gender, the body, and culture, which have
been hampered, the book argues, by a static focus on youth.
Lamb's own experiences in the village are an integral part of her
book and ably convey the cultural particularities of rural Bengali
life and Bengali notions of modernity. In exploring ideals of
family life and the intricate interrelationships between and within
generations, she enables us to understand how people in the village
construct, and deconstruct, their lives. At the same time her study
extends beyond India to contemporary attitudes about aging in the
United States. This accessible and engaging book is about deeply
human issues and will appeal not only to specialists in South Asian
culture, but to anyone interested in families, aging, gender,
religion, and the body.
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