SOC213: Marriage and Family: Supplemental Readings

The Way We Never Were examines two centuries of American family life and shatters a series of myths and half-truths that burden modern families. Placing current family dilemmas in the context of far-reaching economic, political, and demographic changes, Coontz sheds new light on such contemporary concerns as parenting, privacy, love, the division of labor along gender lines, the black family, feminism, and sexual practice.

Not long after her father died, Afsaneh Najmabadi discovered that her father had a secret second family and that she had a sister she never knew about. In Familial Undercurrents, Najmabadi uncovers her family's complex experiences of polygamous marriage to tell a larger story of the transformations of notions of love, marriage, and family life in mid-twentieth-century Iran. She traces how the idea of "marrying for love" and the desire for companionate, monogamous marriage acquired dominance in Tehran's emerging urban middle class. Considering the role played in that process by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century romance novels, reformist newspapers, plays, and other literature, Najmabadi outlines the rituals and objects---such as wedding outfits, letter writing, and family portraits---that came to characterize the ideal companionate marriage. She reveals how in the course of one generation men's polygamy had evolved from an acceptable open practice to a taboo best kept secret. At the same time, she chronicles the urban transformations of Tehran and how its architecture and neighborhood social networks both influenced and became emblematic of the myriad forms of modern Iranian family life.

Stephanie Coontz, the author of The Way We Never Were, now turns her attention to the mythology that surrounds today’s family--the demonizing of "untraditional” family forms and marriage and parenting issues. She argues that while it’s not crazy to miss the more hopeful economic trends of the 1950s and 1960s, few would want to go back to the gender roles and race relations of those years. Mothers are going to remain in the workforce, family diversity is here to stay, and the nuclear family can no longer handle all the responsibilities of elder care and childrearing.Coontz gives a balanced account of how these changes affect families, both positively and negatively, but she rejects the notion that the new diversity is a sentence of doom. Every family has distinctive resources and special vulnerabilities, and there are ways to help each one build on its strengths and minimize its weaknesses.The book provides a meticulously researched, balanced account showing why a historically informed perspective on family life can be as much help to people in sorting through family issues as going into therapy--and much more help than listening to today’s political debates.

"Jonah Lehrer has a lot to offer the world....The book is interesting on nearly every page....Good writers make writing look easy, but what people like Lehrer do is not easy at all." --David Brooks, The New York Times Book Review Science writer Jonah Lehrer explores the mysterious subject of love. Weaving together scientific studies from clinical psychologists, longitudinal studies of health and happiness, historical accounts and literary depictions, child-rearing manuals, and the language of online dating sites, Jonah Lehrer's A Book About Love plumbs the most mysterious, most formative, most important impulse governing our lives. Love confuses and compels us--and it can destroy and define us. It has inspired our greatest poetry, defined our societies and our beliefs, and governs our biology. From the way infants attach to their parents, to the way we fall in love with another person, to the way some find a love for God or their pets, to the way we remember and mourn love after it ends, this book focuses on research that attempts, even in glancing ways, to deal with the long-term and the everyday. The most dangerous myth of love is that it's easy, that we fall into the feeling and then the feeling takes care of itself. While we can easily measure the dopamine that causes the initial feelings of "falling" in love, the partnerships and devotions that last decades or longer remain a mystery. This book is about that mystery. Love, Lehrer argues, is not built solely on overwhelming passion, but, fascinatingly, on a set of skills to be cultivated over a lifetime.

Since the dawn of humanity we've been mystified by desire, love, and the compulsion to bond with others. How do we fall in love and back out again? Why do people differ and how and who they love? What force keeps people together, and, if it's so powerful, how can anybody ever cheat? Neuroscientists like Young are at last able to peer inside living brains to discover how chemicals acting on circuits drive such seemingly complex behaviours. It turns out that on a molecular level, love is not so mysterious after all.

Using Social Exchange Theory (SET) and an actor-partner interdependence model (APIM), we examine direct and indirect associations among financial distress, work-family spillover, and relationship satisfaction. Data come from wave 3 of the Couple Relationships and Transition Experiences (CREATE) study: a dyadic, nationally-representative sample of U.S. newlyweds (N = 1,044 opposite-sex, dual-earner couples). We found wives' and husbands' financial distress were negatively associated with both their own relationship satisfaction, while only wives' financial distress was associated with their spouse's relationship satisfaction. Wives' and husbands' work-family spillover were both negatively associated with their own relationship satisfaction. Wives' work-family spillover was negatively associated with their husbands' relationship satisfaction, while husbands' work-family spillover was not significantly associated with their wives' relationship satisfaction. Wives' work-family spillover partially mediated the negative associations between their own financial distress and relationship satisfaction as well as their husbands' relationship satisfaction. In addition, husbands' work-family spillover partially mediated the negative association between husbands' financial distress and their own relationship satisfaction, but not the association between husbands' financial distress and wives' relationship satisfaction. This study highlights the importance of considering the work-family interface and using dyadic data to understand the nuanced connection between financial distress and relationship satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the rise of the "tradwife" phenomenon, in which women embrace traditional domestic roles while simultaneously leveraging social media for financial and personal gain. It examines how this trend reflects broader cultural shifts, including growing dissatisfaction with contemporary feminism, the ideological and social polarization between men and women, and the decline of marriage and traditional relationships.