Questions about how children fare in divided families have become as perplexing and urgent as they are common. In this landmark work on custody arrangements, the developmental psychologist Eleanor Maccoby and the legal scholar Robert Mnookin consider these questions and their ramifications for society. The first book to examine the social and legal realities of how divorcing parents make arrangements for their children, Dividing the Child is based on a large, representative study of families from a wide range of socioeconomic levels. Maccoby and Mnookin followed a group of more than one thousand families for three years after the parents filed for divorce. Their findings show how different divorce agreements are reached, from uncontested dealings to formal judicial rulings, and how various custody arrangements fare as time passes and family circumstances change. Numerous examples of joint custody and father custody are considered in this account, along with the mother-custody families more commonly studied; and in most cases the point of view of both parents is presented. Among families in which children spend time in both parental households, the authors identify three different patterns of co-parenting: cooperative, conflicted, and disengaged. They find that although divorcing parents seldom engage in formal legal disputes, they are generally unable to cooperate effectively in raising their children. Full of interesting findings with far-reaching implications, this book will be invaluable to the lawyers, judges, social workers, and parents who, more and more often, must make wise and informed decisions concerning the welfare and care of children of divorce.

Extrait de la couverture : "This publication [...] focuses on gender relations, namely the social, economic, politicla, and legal roles of women and men in society. The appearance of this book coincides with the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, China, during Septembre 1995. Four of the main themes of the conferecne are considered from a gender perspective : women's status and rights, education and training, economic participation, and sexual and reproductive health. Each of these four state-of-the-art reviews is accompanied by an annoteted bibliography, providing the reader with an introduction to key literature concerned with developing countries. As in all parts of the world, these themes are extremely topical. Debates about women's status and rights, for example, are debates about gender and therefore about the fabric of society, in addition to being debates about women."

Female offenders experience very different treatment from male offenders at the hands of the courts and welfare agencies. In Offending Women, former probation officer Anne Worrall draws on detailed empirical research to examine why this is, how the situation is perpetuated, and what the implications are for women. The author looks at the wholly inadequate categorizations applied to women who offend and the inappropriate solutions offered to their ill-defined problems. In acknowledging the State's powerlessness to categorize them, Worrall builds up a fascinating concept of the 'nondescriptiveness' of certain women offenders. By defying description they are largely neglected by (and elude the control of) professional expertise. The author then examines the relevance of the concept to a broader sociology of women's experiences. Offending Women provides an interesting and useful theoretical analysis of the discourse surrounding women's deviancy. Based on interviews with probation officers, magistrates, solicitors, psychiatrists, and female lawbreakers themselves, the book will be essential reading for practitioners in the field as well as academics in criminology and women's studies.

What on earth is postmodernism? This is a guide to the maddeningly enigmatic concept which is supposed to define the human cultural condition at the end of the 20th century.

Presents a history of prostitution from ancient times up to the present day, with emphasis on how different societies in history have viewed and dealt with prostitutes.

This volume challenges many stereotypes about Victorian women and their families and offers insights into middle-class life in Britain from 1840 through the early years of the 20th century. Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair examine women's relationships, their marriages, the ways they earned and spent their money, and their social, spiritual, and civic lives. What emerges from this fascinating research is a revised - and far richer - view of middle class women's experiences in the Victorian era than has been understood before. family as a private enclave in which women's roles related only to service and dependency are narrow and inaccurate. In fact, as arbiters of taste, managers of display, and consumers of culture, women were central to the creation of middle-class identity and culture. Gordon and Nair explore men's and women's personal diaries, correspondence, inventories, wills, census reports, and other documents from Victorian Glasgow, the second most important British city of the period. Their findings illuminate the everyday lives of single and widowed as well as married women, and they reveal for the first time the complexity of roles that Victorian women of the middle classes assumed in domestic, economic, and public spheres.

A groundbreaking examination of the historical myth of motherhood looks at how different cultures have viewed motherhood, showing how our current idea of the "good mother" reflects a reaction to burgeoning women's rights. 25,000 first printing. National ad/promo. Tour.

Why would a country strongly influenced by Buddhism's reverence for life allow legalized, widely used abortion? Equally puzzling to many Westerners is the Japanese practice of mizuko rites, in which the parents of aborted fetuses pray for the well-being of these rejected "lives." In this provocative investigation, William LaFleur examines abortion as a window on the culture and ethics of Japan. At the same time he contributes to the Western debate on abortion, exploring how the Japanese resolve their conflicting emotions privately and avoid the pro-life/pro-choice politics that sharply divide Americans on the issue.

The author of "The Female Eunuch" examines parent-child relationships in the West, Middle East, India, and Africa and explores the possibility that Western culture hates its children and takes little pleasure from family life

In the controversy over female sexuality and behavior she played an especially significant role, because she embodied the potential for either virtuous attention to duty - as wife/mother or spinster/sister - or depraved independence and sexual freedom. Unlike other examinations of Victorian girlhood, this collection is particularly distinguished by its combination of literary and cultural history in its discussion of both British and American texts and practices. Among the topics addressed are the nineteenth-century attempt to link morality and diet; the making of heroines in biographies for girls; Lewis Carroll's and John Millais's iconographies of girlhood in, respectively, their photographs and paintings; genre fiction for and by girls; and the effort to reincorporate teenage unwed mothers into the domestic life of Victorian America

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Some say the fetus is the "tiniest citizen." If so, then the bodies of women themselves have become political arenas--or, recent cases suggest, battlefields; A cocaine--addicted mother is convicted of drug trafficking through the umbilical cord. Women employees at a battery plant must prove infertility to keep their jobs. A terminally ill woman is forced to undergo a cesarean section. No longer concerned with conception or motherhood, the new politics of fetal rights focuses on fertility and pregnancy itself, on a woman's relationship with the fetus. How exactly, Cynthia Daniels asks, does this affect a woman's rights? Are they different from a man's? And how has the state helped determine the difference? The answers, rigorously pursued throughout this book, give us a clear look into the state's paradoxical role in gender politics--as both a challenger of injustice and an agent of social control. In benchmark legal cases concerned with forced medical treatment, fetal protectionism in the workplace, and drug and alcohol use and abuse, Daniels shows us state power at work in the struggle between fetal rights and women's rights. These cases raise critical questions about the impact of gender on women's standing as citizens, and about the relationship between state power and gender inequality. Fully appreciating the difficulties of each case, the author probes the subtleties of various positions and their implications for a deeper understanding of how a woman's reproductive capability affects her relationship to state power. In her analysis, the need to defend women's right to self--sovereignty becomes clear, but so does the need to define further the very concepts of self-sovereignty and privacy. The intensity of the debate over fetal rights suggests the depth of the current gender crisis and the force of the feelings of social dislocation generated by reproductive politics. Breaking through the public mythology that clouds these debates, At Women's Expense makes a hopeful beginning toward liberating woman's body within the body politic.