Marriage Sociology

For a woman traveling without her husband in the late nineteenth century, there was only one reason to take the train all the way to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, one sure to garner disapproval from fellow passengers. On the American frontier, the new state offered a tempting freedom often difficult to obtain elsewhere: divorce. In The Divorce Colony, writer and historian April White unveils the incredible social, political, and personal dramas that unfolded in Sioux Falls and reverberated around the country through the stories of four very different women.

Among consenting adults, family should be a matter of choice and the configuration thereof should be the choice of the family members. There are between 50,000 and 100,000 families in the U.S. living in polygamy today. Recently, these numbers began to climb rapidly as certain Christian, Islamic, and secular groups seek ways to live according to their convictions, in spite of federal and state laws. The growth is accelerating at a surprising rate. Yet, there are few resources and little information to help those seeking happiness in this way of life. This book is a primer for those wishing to seek fulfillment outside the confines of monogamy. As people search for and find their own happiness, the population practicing polygamy will soon grow large enough to have a voice loud enough to change the laws of the land from within. Polygamy may be the next movement in the search for individual freedom and happiness.

In We Live for the We, first-time mother Dani McClain sets out to understand how to raise her daughter in what she, as a black woman, knows to be an unjust—even hostile—society. Black women are more likely to die during pregnancy or birth than any other race; black mothers must stand before television cameras telling the world that their slain children were human beings. What, then, is the best way to keep fear at bay and raise a child so she lives with dignity and joy?

Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but they grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. By the time they were young teenagers, Zakia, strikingly beautiful and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and tender, had fallen in love. Defying their families, sectarian differences, cultural conventions, and Afghan civil and Islamic law, they ran away together only to live under constant threat from Zakia's large and vengeful family, who have vowed to kill her to restore the family's honor.

The best educated and most prosperous have the most stable families, while working class families have seen the greatest increase in relationship instability. Why? The book provides the answer: greater economic inequality has profoundly changed marriage markets, the way men and women match up when they search for a life partner. It has produced a larger group of high-income men than women; written off the men at the bottom; and left a larger group of women with a smaller group of comparable men...

Where the Wild Things Were centers on the exploding, contentious national conversation about the nature of childhood and parenting in the postwar US emblematized by Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care. Renowned scholar Henry Jenkins demonstrates that the language that shaped a growing field of advice literature for parents also informed the period's fictions—in film, television, and elsewhere—produced for and consumed by children.

After her traditional engagement to her high school sweetheart falls apart, Liza Monroy faced the prospect of another devastating loss: the deportation of her best friend Emir. Desperate to stay in America, Emir tried every legal recourse to obtain a green card knowing that his return to the Middle East where gay men are often beaten and sometimes killed was too dangerous. So Liza proposes to Emir in efforts to keep him safe and by her side. After a fast wedding in Las Vegas, the couple faces new adventures and obstacles in both L.A. and New York City as they dodge the INS.

Looking for stories that spark joy, evoke fond memories, and foster meaningful conversations? 100 Short Stories for Seniors and Adults brings laughter and warmth to seniors, adults, and their families. These carefully crafted tales are designed to uplift, entertain, and create lasting connections.

Families today are squeezed on every side - from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours. Many realize that attaining the standard of living their parents managed has become impossible. Alissa Quart, executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children.

For more than a century before gay marriage became a hot-button political issue, same-sex unions flourished in America. Pairs of men and pairs of women joined together in committed unions, standing by each other "for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health" for periods of 30 or 40 - sometimes as many as 50 - years. In short, they loved and supported each other every bit as much as any husband and wife. In Outlaw Marriages, cultural historian Rodger Streitmatter reveals how some of these unions didn’t merely improve the quality of life for the two people involved but also enriched the American culture.

Married Americans enjoy over 1,000 benefits and entitlements that are withheld from our nonmarital counterparts. Health insurance, immigration rights, tax privileges (such as the estate tax), and hiring policies favor the married. Despite this blatant and widespread prejudice, nonmarital Americans—nonmarital people—have not galvanized as a group to demand equality and inclusion. Why? Moving Past Marriage argues that it is because of our troubled relationship to history.

Look around you and think for a minute: Is America too crowded? For years, we have been warned about the looming danger of overpopulation: people jostling for space on a planet that's busting at the seams and running out of oil and food and land and everything else. It's all bunk. The population bomb never exploded. Instead, statistics from around the world make clear that since the 1970s, we've been facing exactly the opposite problem: people are having too few babies.

Couple Therapy: The Basics provides a comprehensive introduction to couple therapy. Taking both a general overview and a psychoanalytic focus, it addresses the basic questions that both couples and those interested in becoming couple therapists can expect to ask.

Plötzlich entflammt ein hitziger Streit zwischen Opa und Enkel, Vater und Tochter, Alt und Jung. Es geht ums Gendern, um Faulheit und Handys, um die vermeintlich guten alten Zeiten und die Lasten, die jede Generation zu tragen hat. Wie Risse ziehen sich die Konfliktlinien durch die Familien und die ganze Gesellschaft. Der renommierte Generationenforscher und Spiegel-Bestseller-Autor Rüdiger Maas beleuchtet die Ursachen und Hintergründe dieser augenscheinlichen Kluft.

In una società in cui si sono dissolte le strutture tradizionali della parentela e della famiglia, uomini e donne si trovano costretti a darsi individualmente le regole della loro vita: ciascuno è il giudice delle proprie trasgressioni, il prete che assolve i propri peccati e il terapeuta che indaga e cura le ferite del proprio passato. La lotta per conciliare famiglia e carriera, amore e matrimonio, e per una "nuova" genitorialità ha oggi sostituito la lotta "di classe".

Долгие годы после окончания войны большинство немцев, разлученных ею с близкими, мечтали о воссоединении семей и нормальной жизни. Но частная жизнь за дверями домов не стала тем островком спокойствия, которого так жаждали эти люди. Происшед шее оставило глубокий след на повседневной жизни семей. Отцы и мужья после войны и плена стали другими. Их дети росли и воспитывались в атмосфере молчания, намеков и строгости. В конце концов конфликт поколений обернулся уличными беспорядками. Флориан Хубер описывает послевоенную семейную драму с точки зрения и от имени этих людей.

Eigentlich hatte Didier Eribon sich vorgenommen, ab jetzt regelmäßig nach Fismes zu fahren. Doch seine Mutter stirbt wenige Wochen nach ihrem Umzug in ein Pflegeheim in dem kleinen Ort in der Champagne. Wie in Rückkehr nach Reims wird dieser Einschnitt zum Ausgangspunkt für eine Reise in die Vergangenheit. Eribon rekonstruiert die von Knappheit und Zwängen bestimmte Biografie einer Frau, die an einen brutalen Ehemann gekettet blieb und sich sogar in ihren Träumen bescheiden musste. "Meine Mutter", hält er fest, "war ihr ganzes Leben lang unglücklich."

Americans hold marriage in such high esteem that we push people toward it, reward them for taking part in it, and fetishize its benefits to the point that we routinely ignore or excuse bad behavior and societal ills in the name of protecting and promoting it. Through revealing storytelling, Zug builds a compelling case that when marriage is touted as “the solution” to such problems, it absolves the government, and society, of the responsibility for directly addressing them.

All families have secrets but the facts requiring secrecy change with time. Nowadays a lesbian partnership, a "bastard" son, or a criminal grandfather might be of little or no consequence but could have unraveled a family at an earlier moment in history. Margaret K. Nelson is interested in how families keep secrets from each other and from outsiders when to do otherwise would risk eliciting not only embarrassment or discomfort, but profound shame and, in some cases, danger.

In this memoir of identity and discovery, Vanessa A. Bee explores the way we define "home" and "belonging"—from her birth in Yaounde, Cameroon, to her adoption, to experiencing housing insecurity in Europe and her eventual immigration to the US. After her parents' divorce, Vanessa traveled with her mother to Lyon and later to London, eventually settling in Reno, Nevada, as a teenager, right around the financial crisis and the collapse of the housing market. At 20, still a practicing evangelical Christian and newly married, Vanessa applied to and was accepted by Harvard Law School.