- The Age of Independence
- Michael J. Rosenfeld
- Rosenfeld offers a new theory to account for the startling changes in American family composition in recent years. His argument revolves around the independent life stage that emerged around 1960, experienced by young adults after leaving their parents' homes and before settling down to start their own families. He shows how this stage has reduced parental control over their children's mate selection and has resulted in a rise in interracial and same-sex unions--unions that were more easily averted by previous generations.
- Hardcover 2007
- Alone Together
- Paul R. Amato
- Alan Booth
- David R. Johnson
- Stacy J. Rogers
- Based on two studies of marital quality in America twenty years apart, Alone Together shows that while the divorce rate has leveled off, spouses are spending less time together. The authors argue that marriage is an adaptable institution, and in accommodating the changes that have occurred in society, it has become a less cohesive, yet less confining arrangement.
- Hardcover 2007
- Barren in the Promised Land
- Elaine T. May
- Chronicling astonishing shifts in public attitudes toward reproduction, May reveals the intersection between public life and the most private part of our lives--sexuality, procreation, and family.
- Paperback 1997
- Celebrating the Family
- Elizabeth H. Pleck
- Elizabeth Pleck examines two centuries of changing family traditions and finds a complicated process of change in the way Americans celebrate holidays, as well as the life cycle rituals of birth, coming of age, marriage, and death. This multicultural, comparative history of American family celebration, rich in detail and spiced with telling anecdotes and illustrations and a keen sense of irony, offers insight into the significance of ethnicity and consumer culture in shaping what people regard as the most memorable moments of family life.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback
- Competing Devotions
- Mary Blair-Loy
- Competing Devotions focuses on the broad social and cultural forces that create women's identities and shape their understanding of what makes life worth living. Mary Blair-Loy examines the career paths of women financial executives who have tried various approaches to balancing career and family. These mavericks, she suggests, who face great resistance but are aided by new ideological and material resources that come with historical change, may eventually redefine both the nuclear family and the capitalist firm in ways that reduce work-family conflict.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005
- Every Child a Wanted Child
- Doone Williams
- Greer Williams
- Emily P. Flint, Editor
- Hardcover 1978
- Fierce Communion
- Helena Wall
- Helena Wall shows what life was like in colonial America, a culture where individuals and family were subordinated to the demands of the community. Using local town, church, and especially court records from every colony, she examines the division of authority between family and community throughout colonial America.
- Hardcover 1990 / Paperback 1995
- From Contract to Covenant
- Margaret F. Brinig
- This book is the first systematic account of the law and economics of the American family. It explores the implications of economics for family law--divorce, adoption, breach of promise, surrogacy, prenuptial agreements, custody arrangements--and its limitations. It introduces the idea of covenant to consider the role of love, trust, and fidelity, concepts about which economic analysis and contract law have little to offer, but to which feminist thought has a great deal to add.
- Hardcover 2000
- Growing Up With a Single Parent
- Sarah McLanahan
- Gary Sandefur
- More than half of all children in the current generation will live in a single-parent family--and these children will not fare as well as their peers who live with both parents. This is the clear and urgent message of this powerful book. Based on four national surveys and drawing on more than a decade of research, Growing Up with a Single Parent elucidates the connection between family structure and a child's prospects for success.
- Hardcover 1994 / Paperback
- The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler
- Irene Quenzler Brown
- Richard D. Brown
- In 1806 an anxious crowd of thousands descended upon Lenox, Massachusetts, for the public hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, condemned for the rape of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Betsy. Using the trial report to reconstruct the tragic crime and drawing on Wheeler's jailhouse autobiography to unravel his troubled family history, Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard D. Brown illuminate a rarely seen slice of early America.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005
- Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence
- Anthony Molho
- Hardcover
- Medieval Households
- David Herlihy
- Hardcover 1985 / Paperback
- Public Vows
- Nancy F. Cott
- We commonly think of marriage as a private matter between two people, a personal expression of love and commitment. In this pioneering history, Nancy F. Cott demonstrates that marriage is and always has been a public institution.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2002
- Race Mixing
- Renee C. Romano
- Marriage between blacks and whites is a longstanding and deeply ingrained taboo in American culture. On the eve of World War II, mixed-race marriage was illegal in most states. Yet, sixty years later, black-white marriage is no longer illegal or a divisive political issue, and the number of such couples and their mixed-race children has risen dramatically. Renee Romano explains how and why such marriages have gained acceptance, and what this tells us about race relations in contemporary America. The history of interracial marriage helps us understand the extent to which America has overcome its racist past, and how much further we must go to achieve meaningful racial equality.
- Hardcover 2003
- Strangers and Kin
- Barbara Melosh
- Strangers and Kin is the history of adoption. An adoptive mother herself, Barbara Melosh tells the story of how married couples without children sought to care for and nurture other people's children as their own. Taking this history into the early twenty-first century, Melosh offers unflinching insight to the contemporary debates that swirl around adoption: the challenges to adoption secrecy; the ethics and geopolitics of international adoption; and the conflicts over transracial adoption.
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2006
- Valuing Children
- Nancy Folbre
- While parents spend significant time as well as money on children, most estimates of the "cost" of children ignore the value of this time. Folbre provides a startlingly high but entirely credible estimate of the value of parental time per child by asking what it would cost to purchase a comparable substitute for it.
- Hardcover 2008
- When Fathers Ruled
- Steven Ozment
- Here is a lively study of marriage and the family during the Reformation, primarily in Gemany and Switzerland, that dispels the commonly held notion of fathers as tyrannical and families as loveless.
- Hardcover 1983 / Paperback
- Women's Work and Family Values, 1920-1940
- Winifred D. Wandersee
- Hardcover 1981