Marriage and Family : Perspectives and Complexities

Family life has been radically transformed over the past three decades.Half of all households are unmarried, while only a quarter of all married householdshave kids. A third of the nation's births are to unwed mothers, and a third ofAmerica's married men earn less than their wives. With half of all womencohabitating before they turn thirty and gay and lesbian couples settling down withincreasing visibility, there couldn't be a better time for a book that tracks newconceptions of marriage and family as they are being formed.Theeditors of this volume explore the motivation to marry and the role of matrimony ina diverse group of men and women. They compare empirical data from several emergingfamily types (single, co-parent, gay and lesbian, among others) to studies oftraditional nuclear families, and they consider the effect of public policy andrecent economic developments on the practice of marriage and the stabilization-ordestabilization-of family. By approaching this topic from a variety ofperspectives-historical, cross-cultural, gendered, demographic, socio-biological,and social-psychological-the editors highlight the complexity of the modern Americanfamily and the growing indeterminacy of its boundaries. Refusing to adhere to onlyone position, the editors provide an unbiased account of contemporary marriage andthe makeup of the family.