Embattled Paradise PDF Download

Author: Arlene S. Skolnick
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Skolnick offers a lucid and compassionate appraisal of the crisis of the American family, arguing that while the great economic and cultural transformations of the past generation are irreversible, they need not irreparably undermine our most precious family values.

Author: Rosalind C. Barnett
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674805958
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
A four-year study of 300 middle-class and working-class couples, this text draws on cross-disciplinary research and debunks the myth of the overwrought working mother with her insensitive husband and neglected children.

Author: Scott Coltrane
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199938105
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The typical American family has changed dramatically since the days of "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Father Knows Best." Double-income families are now the rule, and fathers are much more involved in raising the children and cleaning house. Reactions to these changes have been diverse, ranging from grave misgivings to a sense of liberation and new possibility. Groups as diverse as Promise Keepers, the Million Man March, and Robert Bly's mythopoetic men's movement tell us that fathers are important. From the fundamentalist right to the feminist left, opinions about the changing nature of the family--and the consequent rethinking of gender roles--have been vehement, if not always very well-founded. In Family Man, sociologist Scott Coltrane brings a wealth of compelling evidence to this debate over the American family. Drawing on his own extensive research and many fascinating interviews, Coltrane explodes many of the common myths about shared parenting, provides first-hand accounts of men's and women's feelings in two-job families, and reveals some innovative solutions that couples have developed to balance job and family commitments. Readers will find an insightful discussion of precisely how and why family life has changed, what forms it may take in the future, and what new kinds of fathers may be on the horizon. The author firmly places these questions within a broad contextual framework. He provides, for instance, an illuminating history of the family that shows that, far from being a fixed structure, the family has always adapted to changing economic, social, and ideological pressures. And by examining how families operate in a variety of non-industrial societies, he demonstrates that our own notions of gender-specific work and parenting roles are culturally rather than biologically determined, and thus inherently flexible. And indeed these roles are changing. While contemporary American women still perform the bulk of domestic tasks, Family Man gives us decisive evidence that men are becoming increasingly involved in both housework and childrearing. Coltrane argues convincingly that this trend will continue. Given the current economic situation--with two-job households now the norm--and the gradual ideological shift away from restrictive gender roles, more and more couples will find it both necessary and desirable to share the workload. More important, Coltrane suggests that as fathers participate more fully in raising their children and performing traditionally female household tasks, men will themselves be transformed by the experience in profoundly positive ways and American society as a whole will move closer to true gender equity. Family Man succeeds brilliantly in bringing clarity, perspective, and above all hope to a discussion that is too often shrill, chaotic, and beset with the rhetoric of nostalgia. It shows us not only exactly where the family is today, but where it has been and what it may become.

Author: Jean Halley
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252091450
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
A history of the shifting and conflicting ideas about when, where, and how we should touch our children Discussing issues of parent-child contact ranging from breastfeeding to sexual abuse, Jean O'Malley Halley traces the evolution of mainstream ideas about touching between adults and children over the course of the twentieth century in the United States. Debates over when a child should be weaned and whether to allow a child to sleep in the parent's bed reveal deep differences in conceptions of appropriate adult-child contact. Boundaries of Touch shows how arguments about adult-child touch have been politicized, simplified, and bifurcated into "naturalist" and "behaviorist" viewpoints, thereby sharpening certain binary constructions such as mind/body and male/female. Halley discusses the gendering of ideas about touch that were advanced by influential social scientists and parenting experts including Benjamin Spock, Alfred C. Kinsey, and Luther Emmett Holt. She also explores how touch ideology fared within and against the post-World War II feminist movements, especially with respect to issues of breastfeeding and sleeping with a child versus using a crib. In addition to contemporary periodicals and self-help books on child rearing, Halley uses information gathered from interviews she conducted with mothers ranging in age from twenty-eight to seventy-three. Throughout, she reveals how the parent-child relationship, far from being a private or benign subject, continues as a highly contested, politicized affair of keen public interest.

Author: Jennifer Scanlon
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814781322
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
An interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collection of readings and archival materials examining the gendered relationship between the home and consumer culture, identity through purchasing, the supply side of consumer culture and the ways in which consumers embrace, resist and manipulate the messages and activities of consumer culture. Topics include: shoplifting, racism in advertising, the Zoot suit, Esquire magazine, Dockers, lesbianism, narcissism.

Author: David G. Myers
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300091205
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
In this compelling book, a well-known social psychologist asks why, in an era of great material wealth, America suffers from such a disturbing array of social problems that reflect a deep spiritual poverty. Illustrations.

Author: Karen M. Dunak
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479858358
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
In As Long as We Both Shall Love, Karen M. Dunak provides a nuanced history of the American wedding and its celebrants. Blending an analysis of film, fiction, advertising, and prescriptive literature with personal views from letters, diaries, essays, and oral histories, Dunak demonstrates the ways in which the modern wedding epitomizes a diverse and consumerist culture and aims to reveal an ongoing debate about the power of peer culture, media, and the marketplace in America.

Author: Ignacio Bunster-Ossa
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351177516
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
In 1969 Ian McHarg laid out a new approach to land-use planning. His seminal work, Design by Nature, blazed the trail for sustainable urban development. The road was paved with good intentions. But where exactly did it lead? And where do we go from here? Reconsidering Ian McHarg offers a fresh assessment of McHarg’s lessons and legacy. It applauds his call for environmental stewardship while acknowledging its unintended results. For McHarg’s idyllic developments at the edge of nature turned greenfield sites into suburban communities. They added to sprawl and made America more dependent on cars. And they may even have delayed the kind of urban redevelopment needed to make today’s cities more sustainable.

Author: Richard J Gelles
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315417049
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
Richard Gelles explains why government programs designed to cure social ills don’t work in sector after sector and why they should be replaced with a universal entitlement at lower cost.

Author: Gerald Handel
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9780202369907
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 710

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Book Description
This long-awaited fourth edition has the same goal as the preceding editions: to understand families in terms of the kinds of interaction through which family life is constructed. The changes in the family as an institution have influenced these processes, just as they have influenced the ways we understand and write about them. But even in these "postmodern" circumstances, an underlying premise of the volume is that two partners establish a family because they have selected each other as distinctively meaningful to one another. They will affirm, modify, elaborate, or retreat from various aspects of the relationship through interaction over time and in changing circumstances. This volume contains the best available interdisciplinary work on the social psychology of the family. More than half of the selections are new to this edition, which incorporates a variety of theoretical and research perspectives that provide the reader with a range of authoritative and up-to-date sources on the family and interpersonal relations. The newer forms of family organization that have emerged in the more recent literature - specifically, single-parent families, stepfamilies, and families of gay and lesbian domestic partners - are included. Authors have been drawn from a variety of disciplines, including sociology, communication, family studies, human development, psychology, anthropology, and social work.