Expectations Of Marriage Research Articles

Attitudes of Palestinians Toward Social Work Interventions in Cases of Wife Assault.

The study examined the attitudes of Palestinian adults toward social work interventions in cases of husband-to-wife assault (HWA). A survey, using self-administered questionnaires and interviews, was conducted among a random sample of 624 adults from the Palestinian Authority. Results indicate higher levels of support for interventions aimed at helping the couple solve their problems than for interventions aimed at protecting the safety of battered women. However, this trend becomes reversed in cases of repeated and severe HWA. Greater support for interventions aimed at protecting the safety of battered women was found among women versus men and younger versus older adults, as well as among individuals with lower levels of justifying wife abuse and more egalitarian expectations of marriage.

An Expressive Turn with a Chinese Twist: Young Women’s Other-Sex Relations in Three Generations

This study examines generational change in young women’s other-sex relations, drawing on interviews with 17/18-year-old Beijingers, their mothers and grandmothers. The change constitutes an “expressive turn” with Chinese characteristics. Individual emotional self-fulfillment—irrelevant to the “grandmothers” and important to the “mothers” mainly in relation to marriage—has for the “daughters” become an important part of being young and of marriage expectations. But there is stronger emphasis on pragmatic reasoning about marriage partners. The daughters are both more romantic and more means–ends rational in other-sex relations than their grandmothers and mothers were, showing a sophistication of the heart and mind. This “instrumental twist” in the expressive trend in post-Mao China adds contextual nuance to theorizing about other-sex relations under global modernization.

The Salome Ensemble: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzio Yezierska, Sonya Levin, and Jetta Goudal by Alan Robert Ginsbergt

Reviewed by: The Salome Ensemble: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzio Yezierska, Sonya Levin, and Jetta Goudal by Alan Robert Ginsbergt Lara Vapnek (bio) The Salome Ensemble: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzio Yezierska, Sonya Levin, and Jetta Goudal. By Alan Robert Ginsberg. Syracuse University Press, 2016. xxiv + 363 pp. How does the modern woman measure her worth, by the money she earns, or the man she marries? This dilemma lies at the heart of Salome of the Tenements, a novel (1922) and movie (1925), and it pulses through the biographies of four women who collaborated on this cultural production: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzia Yezierska, Sonya Levien, and Jetta Goudal. Alan Robert Ginsberg's engaging new book The Salome Ensemble analyzes the Salome narrative and explores the possibilities for self-invention available to immigrant Jewish women during the first third of the twentieth century. In the United States, Ginsberg argues, Stokes, Yezierska, Levien, and Goudal "learned that identities are multiple, plural, and elective" (1). All four of these women changed their names, pursued creative careers, and became romantically involved with gentile men. Like the biblical Salome, they made strategic choices [End Page 311] about what to reveal and what to hide as they engaged in a complicated dance with American popular culture. The story begins with Rose Pastor Stokes (1879–1933), who went to work rolling cigars in Cleveland at age eleven. In 1901, a letter to the Yiddishes Tageblatt describing her life as a working girl set her on the path to journalism. On assignment in New York City, she met James Graham Phelps Stokes, a wealthy socialist. Their 1905 wedding became a tabloid sensation. Rose's fame as the "Cinderella of the Sweatshops" obscured her leftist labor activism, as well as her work as a playwright and translator of Yiddish poetry. World War One divided the charmed couple. J.G. Phelps Stokes became a patriot and Rose a communist. Like many radicals, she was charged with espionage for critiquing the war. The couple divorced in 1925. Rose married a younger Jewish communist man before succumbing to breast cancer in 1933. Anzia Yezierska (1885–1970) met Rose Pastor Stokes at the Jewish Alliance in 1902 or 1903 and watched with fascination as Stokes's marriage lifted her into wealth and fame but ultimately chafed against her idealism. According to Ginsberg, Yezierska saw Stokes as "a new kind of Salome, a dangerous, subversive, defiant, and inspiring woman who wielded feminine power to impose her will and achieve her goals" (56). This observation, combined with Yezierska's own quest for acceptance and her affair with the philosopher John Dewey informed Salome of the Tenements. Coming of age on the Lower East Side, Yezierska aspired to artistic and professional achievement typically denied to women. She hated her jobs as a servant, cook, and sewing machine operator, and she saw her mother and sister as enslaved by the expectations of Orthodox Jewish marriage and motherhood. Determined to be a writer, Yezierska "fled the responsibilities of personal relationships while nevertheless pressing others for emotional or professional support" (101). In a similar vein, Sonya Vrunsky, Yezierska's protagonist in Salome of the Tenements declares, "My life is one endless running away from the things that drag me down" (85). Publication eluded Yezierska until age thirty-five, when she got a break from her friend Sonya Levien, a protégé of Stokes who worked as an editor at Metropolitan Magazine. Yezierska felt uncomfortable with the trappings of success and rejected the compromises required for lucrative work in Hollywood. In contrast, Sonya Levien (1888–1960) gracefully scaled the ladders of assimilation and professional achievement. Ginsberg suggests that Levien shied away from confrontation because her anarchist father, Julius Opeskin, had been sentenced to hard labor in Siberia, but the negative examples of her friends may have been equally as powerful. Stokes suffered public [End Page 312] disgrace and financial hardship due to her dissenting political views. Yezierska, who dwelled on the contradictions between the old world and the new, seemed perpetually unhappy. In the early 1920s, Levien, her husband Carl Hovey, and their four children (two from Hovey's previous marriage) moved to Hollywood, where Levien established herself as a leading screenwriter...

Popular Music and Expectations of Love, Marriage, and Money in Post-war Sierra Leone

Popular Music and Expectations of Love, Marriage, and Money in Post-war Sierra Leone

Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion by Monica Carol Miller

Reviewed by: Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion by Monica Carol Miller Barbara Bennett MILLER, MONICA CAROL. Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion. Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2017. 174pp. $39.95 hardcover; $23.99 e-book. The thesis behind Monica Carol Miller’s new book, Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion, is compelling; that is, “that southern women have created physically ugly female characters in order to reject, subvert, and rebel against the narrow strictures of retrogressive southern gender expectations of marriage and motherhood” (2). This is a fascinating subject, considering the number of books that have been written about the belle and her place in southern literature and culture. Anyone interested in the female in the South would be drawn to this topic. The book is brief—a mere 150 pages of actual text—and is divided into an introduction, five chapters, and a short conclusion. Miller spends a great number of these few pages explaining her thesis: the introduction and first chapter (“What is Ugliness?”) define and reiterate her main idea and its “foundational claims”: 1) ugliness draws attention to itself; 2) ugliness is a result of “change over time” and “its relational, historical, geographical, and racial context”; 3) ugliness refers to both appearance and behavior; and 4) the “ugly plot” usually leads to a fate outside of marriage and motherhood. This theoretical discussion is lengthy, and by the time chapter two comes along the reader is eager for some specific examples. Miller’s strength comes when she engages directly with the primary texts that prove her thesis: her chapter on Scarlett in Gone with the Wind is especially interesting once Miller reminds the reader that Margaret Mitchell describes Scarlett as “not [End Page 569] beautiful.” Chapter three discusses Eudora Welty’s short stories, focusing mainly on the Medusa allusions found within them and Welty’s general use of the mythological in her work. The analyses of “Clytie” and “Petrified Man” are front and center and advance Miller’s thesis admirably. Chapter four, however, digresses from primary works back to theory, as she defines and explains her idea of the “ugly plot.” She does spend a great deal of time on Katherine Ann Porter’s novel The Old Order and Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth in the second half of the chapter, and this is a complete and well-written section, analyzing two often-overlooked novels from a fresh perspective. Chapter four turns to other contemporary authors such as Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, and Lee Smith in order to further Miller’s point that ugly characters often take different paths than marriage and motherhood, either by fate or choice. One of the problems with this book, however, is that Miller does not address primary works enough. The majority of the text is an engagement with a wide variety of secondary sources, which can be interesting but lacking in specificity and substance. Miller dedicates more than a half dozen pages to the theories of “staring”—fascinating, yes, but when she finally begins discussing the literature of Eudora Welty in that chapter, she focuses more on the mythic in Welty’s work rather than the physical act of gazing. (A missed opportunity here: if she were not so focused on Welty, Miller might have examined Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation,” in which the ugly Mary Grace can’t stop staring at Mrs. Turpin, as though she could read her ugly thoughts.) Too much time lingering on the theory of ugliness and not enough time looking at the myriad examples possible makes the book feel more like a graduate research paper proving that the author knows who has written on this subject and what has been said rather than being a fully imagined book of original insights into southern women’s literature. In another such example, Miller discusses the stereotype of the “maiden aunt” thoroughly, even quoting the definition found in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture—with a number of secondary sources backing her up. She mentions Faulkner’s Miss Rosa in Absalom, Absalom! and even Jane Austen’s spinster figures but never actually offers one specific example of such...

An Examination of the Expected Timing of Transitions into Adulthood among Rural Men and Women

The timing of transitions into adulthood has critical implications for early adulthood development, yet few research studies on this topic exist, particularly involving rural youth. We utilized a nationwide sample of geographically diverse rural youth from 34 rural locations in the United States to investigate adolescents’ expected transitions into adulthood. The vast majority of rural men and women planned to get married and become parents, however, women expected earlier transition times into adulthood. Results also indicated a number of individual, family, and community variables related to the expectation of marriage and parenthood and the expected timing of marriage and parenthood. Notably, we found that whereas women were generally more likely than men to plan to get married and become a parent, this observed gender gap decreased as educational aspirations increased.

“More than a Contract”: The Emergence of a State-Supported Marriage Welfare Service and the Politics of Emotional Life in Post-1945 Britain

AbstractThis article examines the seminal contributions of Britain's marriage counseling and therapy services toward cultivating a new emotional purpose for marriage in the decades following World War II. It presents two related narrative threads. First, it argues that psychologically oriented relationship services attracted government support because they supported the postwar ideal of a classless democratic society. Pioneering practitioners promoted a universalized view of citizens’ emotional relationships—rather than their socio-economic circumstances—as the determining fact of their lives. Second, it argues that these services provided a compelling language and set of concepts for articulating transforming understandings and expectations of marriage in the decades after 1945. To this end, the article reveals how the language and concepts of marriage therapists were mobilized by divorce reformers in the 1960s, and helped replace the offense model for divorce petitions with a less punitive psychological model of relationship “breakdown” in 1969. Britain's postwar marriage welfare services endowed stable harmonious families with crucial social and political importance as the bedrock for postwar social reconstruction and the most fitting environment for children and adults alike to develop into fully mature and self-realized democratic citizens.

Student loans or marriage? A look at the highly educated

I examine the relationship between student loans and marital status among individuals considering or pursuing graduate management education. Using data from a panel survey of registrants for the Graduate Management Admission Test, I show that the amount of accumulated student debt is negatively related to the probability of first marriage. The strength of the relationship diminishes with age, more so for women than for men. At the median age for the sample (24 years at test registration), the estimated decrease over a seven-year period is between 3 and 4 percentage points per $10,000 in student debt for men and a percentage point lower in absolute value for women. I use information on reported marriage expectations to show evidence that education expenditures and the amount of debt are correlated with anticipated marital status, but borrowers may not have perfect foresight about the long-term consequences of accumulating student debt.

Micro-Macro Interactions in Ethno-Religious Homogamy among Hui Muslims in Contemporary China: The Roles of Residential Concentration and Aging

Chinese Muslims have actively maintained religious endogamy. However, no research has assessed the role of local residential context in individual Muslims’ marital choices, nor have sociologists examined the heterogeneity in individual Muslims’ responses to such contextual influences. Using Chinese census data between 2000 and 2005, this paper offers a first investigation of such micro–macro interactions among the Hui, the largest Muslim ethnic group in China. Specifically, we test the effect of the Hui's residential concentration (at the prefecture level) on individual Hui's marital choices (exogamy/endogamy/singleness) and how this effect varies by gender and age. Several major findings emerge from our multilevel discrete-time competing-risk models, highlighting the impact of contextual factors, but also a level of individual resilience against aggregate-level cultural forces. While at younger ages, Hui can still afford to wait to contract an endogamous marriage; with aging, they started to choose exogamy to fulfill the expectation of universal marriage.

Marriage Expectations and Conflicts of Highly Educated Single Women: Based on Research in Shimane Prefecture and Tokyo Metropolitan Area

Marriage Expectations and Conflicts of Highly Educated Single Women: Based on Research in Shimane Prefecture and Tokyo Metropolitan Area

City Girls: The Nisei Social World in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 by Valerie J. Matsumoto

Reviewed by: City Girls: The Nisei Social World in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 by Valerie J. Matsumoto Shiho Imai City Girls: The Nisei Social World in Los Angeles, 1920–1950. By Valerie J. Matsumoto. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 312 pp. Hardcover $36.95. In her long-awaited book, Valerie Matsumoto explores the ethnocultural networks of young Japanese American women in California that served as a bulwark against the harsh racial climate characterizing the decades before and after World War II. Drawing on oral history interviews and the English language pages of the ethnic press, Matsumoto brings to life the ways in which the American-born Nisei, or second generation, honed their social skills and leadership potential through a variety of youth organizations at a time when they were mostly excluded from high school clubs and college fraternities and sororities. By 1940, there were nearly four hundred active Nisei organizations, including the likes of the Tartanettes, a Girl Reserve affiliated with Little Tokyo’s Union Church. Set against the backdrop of nativist restrictions and tense US-Japanese diplomatic relations, the book makes visible how these women’s social lives were at once similar and yet distinct from those of other racial groups. What is more, their stories help uncover and reconstruct a once-vibrant ethnic community that was lost to wartime uprooting and incarceration. Matsumoto is careful to place the Nisei experience in the context of larger conversations about “adolescence as a stage in life” in the early twentieth century (5). Focusing on what historian Vicki Ruiz calls “cultural coalescence,” we see the dynamics of cultural adaptation and maintenance paralleling the social world of Mexican American women. The process of navigating between their newfound American femininity and parental expectations of courtship, marriage, and work was “messy, exuberant, and variable,” as Matsumoto poignantly describes (83). As mainstream advice columns became an accepted means of self-improvement and advancement, Nisei women writers came to [End Page 513] lend their own literary voice to a generation coming of age. Mary Oyama, a key member of the Nisei Writers Group, was a popular advice columnist writing under the pseudonym “Deirdre” for the San Francisco Shin Sekai-Asahi. On the opposite side of the Pacific, the “modern girl,” or the Japanese equivalent of the American flapper, captured the hearts and minds of urban Japanese youth, as parents and critics alike tried to make sense of the powerful appeal of Western consumer culture. While some Nisei women enjoyed being cultural ambassadors, others questioned the community’s ethnic performances and their culturally prescribed gender roles. On one occasion, a hundred Nisei girls dressed in kimonos served as interpreters for the Japanese Naval Training Squadron while Nisei men were noticeably absent. Female club members were the face of Little Tokyo’s Nisei Week festival since its beginning in 1934, but the women’s traditional Japanese garb could also reinforce their exotic and foreign image. As US-Japan tensions increased, Nisei-only clubs came under fire, with little regard to their history of camaraderie and support. Following their forced relocation during World War II, Nisei women turned to their prewar successes to recreate their social life in an otherwise dreary, cheerless environment. Some provided a valuable link to the national war effort, where they exchanged thousands of letters with Nisei soldiers overseas. Nisei girls’ clubs continued to thrive during the postwar resettlement period, as they negotiated the expectations of the War Relocation Authority with their own hopes and trepidations about life beyond barbed wire. City Girls raises a number of important questions about community mobilization and empowerment that resonate with current affairs and concerns. As Matsumoto notes, some of these Nisei women would later play a pivotal role in the campaign for wartime redress and reparations in the 1970s and 1980s. Combining their organizational skills with political militancy, Nisei women were instrumental in the passage of the Civil Liberties Act in 1988. Yet their history also illustrates how the community could be at odds over strategies to bring about social change. Some unwittingly adopted mainstream stereotypes towards other minorities in their quest for racial inclusion, while others called for integrated membership for fear of appearing too “clannish” (206...

Beliefs About Wife Beating Among Social Work Students in Taiwan.

Based on an integrative framework, this study addresses the beliefs that a group of social work students from Taiwan had about wife beating. A self-administered questionnaire was filled out by 790 students (76.5% female, 23.5% male) spanning all 4 years of undergraduate studies. The results show that male students exhibited a greater tendency than their female counterparts to justify wife beating and to hold battered women responsible for violence against them. This tendency was also found among students who held traditional attitudes toward women, students who held patriarchal expectations of marriage, and students who had witnessed interparental violence in childhood. In addition, male students and students with traditional attitudes toward women exhibited the strongest tendency to believe that wives benefit from beating. Conversely, female students expressed more willingness than their male counterparts to help battered women, as did students who held liberal attitudes toward women and students who held egalitarian expectations of marriage. Furthermore, female students and those with liberal attitudes toward women tended to hold violent husbands responsible for their behavior, and to express support for punishing violent husbands. This article concludes with a discussion of the study's limitations and the results' implications for future research on the topic.

Waiting for Moonrise: Fasting, Storytelling, and Marriage in Provincial Rajasthan

Ethnographic encounters with women’s ritual storytelling in North India provide the central substance of this essay and contribute to the study of narrative transformations over time. I highlight two distinct although related themes. First, and most importantly, I consider women’s changing expectations of marriage, approaching these through intimate, conversational ethnographic accounts. Second, with an expanded scope stretching across regions as well as over decades, I observe variations as well as processes of standardization: how diverse tales associated with a specific ritual may ultimately be reduced to one standard plot. Such processes are hastened by all forms of media—print, film, and internet. My account here draws on long experience (intermittent visits and revisits between 1980 and 2015) in a single region of Rajasthan, North India. I focus on storytelling and other practices in the context of two women’s ritual fasts: Bari Tij (“Grand Third”) and Karva Chauth (“Pitcher Fourth”). The festival names refer to dates in the Hindu lunar calendar. In what follows I normally refer to Bari Tij simply as Tij.

Basic psychological needs predict participants' attitudes and expectations towards marriage

Although modern societies are characterized by a constant decrease in marriage rates and an increase in divorce rates, individuals today still hold positive attitudes towards marriage and parenthood, and aim to nurture a marital union themselves in their adult age. Nevertheless, individuals differ with respect to the degree in which they deliberately plan and strive to achieve such intimate unions. In addition, individuals differ with respect to the quality of their initial expectations towards future marriage, as well as their attitudes towards the possibility of a divorce. In explaining such individual differences, previous studies have emphasized the importance of primary family structure and experiences. Expanding these findings, the present study explored the influence of individuals' satisfaction with primary family relations, as well as personal psychological needs, on their intimacy goals, marriage expectations and attitudes towards divorce. The obtained results indicate the need for relatedness as the only significant predictor of intimacy goals. While the intimacy goal and the need for autonomy were identified as significant predictors of marriage idealization tendencies, the number of siblings, the need for autonomy, and marriage idealization tendencies were identified as significant predictors of attitudes towards divorce. These results confirm the importance of basic psychological needs in defining our relationships goals, as well as our attitudes and expectations towards future marriage and divorce.

A Review of Bridegroom, The Loving Story, and Bachelorette, 34: Challenging Cultural Expectations of Marriage

In this review, three films are discussed which together highlight common factors maintaining the status quo and cultural expectations surrounding marriage and romantic relationships in the United States, namely that marriage is between aman and woman of the same race and that women should be married (Cruz and Berson 2001; Depaulo and Morris 2006; Herek 2006). Please note that this review was informed by studies based on U.S. data. These films may benefit viewers in understanding that people who violate the status quo and cultural expectations of marriage are stigmatized and are subjected to negative stereotypes and discrimination. These negative consequences may vary depending on context of the status quo violation (samesex relationship, interracial relationship, and no relationship or being single), may be specific to U.S. culture, and have historically varied (Cruz and Berson 2001; Depaulo andMorris 2006; Herek 2006; Pew Research Center 2013). Examining these three violations of the cultural expectations of marriage has the potential to teach important lessons about the historical context of marriage laws and how to challenge factors that maintain the status quo and cultural expectations of marriage. As such we suggest and review three films: Bridegroom (same-sex marriage), The Loving Story (interracial marriage), and Bachelorette, 34 (singlism).

IRelate: A Comprehensive Approach Empowering Young Marines to Succeed at Intimate Relationships

As a result of the high rate at which young Marines are getting married and divorced, a group of Navy chaplains created a new comprehensive three stage intervention program entitled, Intimate Relationships Awareness, Training, and Enrichment program (iRelate) to address the various relationship needs of the single, engaged, and married Marines. This article presents preliminary program evaluation data for Stage I and Stage II of the iRelate program, with additional data from Marines that are engaged to be married and Marines that were in the process of getting divorced. Results showed, prior to attending Stage I and Stage II of the program, Marines presented with high levels of marriage idealism and overconfidence. Twenty-nine percent stated, because they are Marines, they are capable of taking on adult responsibilities and 32.4 % believed that marriage would require some effort. Of the Marines that were in the process of getting divorced, 40 % indicated that they were too young to be married, 50 % stated if they could do it over again they would have taken more time to get to know their spouse prior to getting married. The post course data indicated that the Marines’ level of idealism and overconfidence decreased, as 63.2 % of the Marines developed a more realistic expectation of marriage, by realizing that marriage will require a lot of hard work. Additionally, Marines felt more prepared for their marriage [t (177) = 7.62, p < 0.001, r2 = 0.25] suggesting that the program offers a significant benefit to the Marines.

“But the baby of course is the first object”: The Superfluous Infant in Trollope’s Comic Marriage Novel

Victorians Journal 55 “©at the baby of course is the first object”: The Superfluous Infant in Trollope’s Comic Marriage Novel by Tamara Wagner Trollope’s uncompromising realism imbues the everyday of highlife with a wry sense of comedy. He excels in detailing the familiar, laying bare the mundane private lives of the elite and ofthe middling classes that attempt to emulate or marry into these higher ranks of a rapidly changing society. Examples include the famous bedroom conversations of the Archdeacon and his wife in the Barchester Chronicles, the domestic lives of politicians in the Palliser series, and altogether his critical insight into marriage at a time when its significance as an alliance and a contract underwent crucial changes. Throughout his representations of married life, Trollope eschews sentimentality and sensationalism alike. In his autobiography, he might have asserted an ambiguity about “sensationalist and anti-sensationalist” writers and readers, claiming that a “good novel should be both [realistic and sensational], and both in the highest degree” (2.41-42); but his rejection of sentimentalism remained fervent. It arguably formed the most defining characteristic of his realism and was in pointed opposition to the style of Dickens, whom he dubbed “Mr. Popular Sentiment” in a particularly biting passage in The Warden. 1 In Trollope’s comic explorations of marriage and family life there is, however, a revealing doublesidedness in the way he places babies, an aspect of Victorian culture that, I further contend, has altogether been curiously sidelined in critical discussions. A close analysis of how Trollope engages with what he terms “Baby Worship” (ch. 16) in Barchester Towers helps us to re-evaluate the surprisingly neglected figure of the baby in Victorian literature. The comic marriage novel Is He Popenjoy? pits Trollope’s satirical evocation of “baby worship” against the larger 1 Compare Meckier (ch. 2) on what he has termed “the realism wars.” 56 Victorians Journal structural function of the expected heir as the pivot on which an outwardly conventional narrative ofinheritance can turn and thereby be turned into something else. “to impress her with the solemnity of married life”: expectations of Modem Marriage in Is fiePopenjoy? Is He Popenjoy? is Trollope’s most bizarrely comic marriage novel. It traces the coming of age of a young woman after her marriage, providing painstakingly detailed insight into married life in the Victorian upper and middle classes. The novel describes the transformation that “a little girl... not pretending to any self-action” (IHP 202) undergoes when she becomes a married woman, and how marriage makes her “learn to be a woman” (48). Yet the double­ standards inherent in her husband’s appreciation ofhow she “had lost her childish little timidities, and had bloomed forth a beautiful woman”—although, “as to the childish timidity, perhaps he would have preferred that it should not have been so quickly or so entirely banished” (315)—is presented tongue-in-cheek, as is his plan to “impress her with the solemnity of married life” (178). The lightheartedness ofone ofTrollope’s most refreshingly lively female characters is in pointed contrast to the ridiculed solemnity of her serious but “not very clever” husband (327). In detailing their contrasting expectations, shifting hopes, and ideas ofmarried life, the novel maps out diverging concepts of marriage, domestic realities, and a married woman’s rights and duties at the time. Although conventional approaches to Trollope’s fiction often take his provocatively blunt pronouncements—such as his notorious suggestion in North America that “[t]he best right a woman has is the right to a husband” (2.72)—at face value, Deborah Denenholz Morse’s seminal Women in Trollope’s Palliser Novels has instigated an important revaluation of his much more nuanced and often self­ consciously ambiguous representation of gender. More recently, in an essay entitled “Trollope the Feminist,” Morse adds that, in “his dissection of masculine privilege in Victorian culture and society,” Trollope’s “critique of the lassitude and misogyny of aristocratic Englishmen [is] coupled with his loving depiction of vibrant women,” such as a stablekeeper’s granddaughter in Is He Popenjoy?', Victorians Journal 57 thus “Trollope’s critique of gender is imbricated with a critique of social class and nationhood” (np...

“I’m No Swan”: The Ugly Plot from “Good Country People” to Eating the Cheshire Cat

MONICA CAROL MILLER Middle Georgia State University “I’m No Swan”: The Ugly Plot from “Good Country People” to Eating the Cheshire Cat. 1 FLANNERY O’CONNOR FAMOUSLY WROTE THAT THE REASON SOUTHERN literature is rife with freaks is because only southerners were able to recognize the freakish. Among the many characters considered under the umbrella of the freakish are ugly women, from O’Connor’s own Joy-Hulga in the 1955 short story “Good Country People” to more recent characters such as Helen Ellis’s Nicole Hicks in her 2000 novelEatingthe Cheshire Cat. These characters adopt an ugly appearance in order to opt out of the rigid expectations of southern gender roles: that they will conduct themselves in ways amenable to attracting appropriate male attention, marrying, and spending their time primarily as caregivers for their families. From Katherine Anne Porter’s Cousin Eva in her 1937 collection, The Old Order, whose weak chin doomed her to a life of spinsterhood, to Celie in Alice Walker’s 1982 novel The Color Purple, who was ugly but could work like a man, physically ugly female characters have stood in contrast to the more popular images of beautiful southern belles. While these characters have generally been considered under the capacious categories of the freakish or the grotesque, I am more interested in their less extreme—“ugly”—qualities. When asked in an interview about the influence of O’Connor on her work, Ellis zeroed in on O’Connor’s female characters like Joy-Hulga, observing that they were often physically ugly. Ellis went on to talk about her own southern childhood, and how “ugliness” was used to characterize not only appearance but also behavior. Like many raised in the South, Ellis grew up with the warning “Don’t be ugly!” to mean that she was misbehaving or acting inappropriately—a definition that, indeed, is a regionally-specific one (Personal Interview). This southern meaning of ugliness is helpful for identifying a tradition of ugly female characters who choose to adopt a physically ugly appearance as a way of 1 Portions of this essay appear in my book Being Ugly. 438 Monica Carol Miller opting out of the expectations of marriage and motherhood.2 This genealogy of ugly women includes, for example, any number of Lee Smith’s characters from the 1980s forward who, for various reasons, choose to opt out of marriage and motherhood by “letting themselves go” in a narrative form that I call the ugly plot.3 The ugly plot functions as a counterplot that undoes traditional love plots driven by compulsory heterosexuality, enabling characters with material advantages to choose a resistant, rebellious, and alternative existence outside of normative southern gender roles and marriage economies. Although we typically associate beauty with privilege, characters from O’Connor’s Joy-Hulga to Ellis’s Nicole demonstrate that ugliness also functions as a marker of privileged access to wealth and other resources. Despite advances in gender equity in the nation and the South, the myth of the southern belle simply will not die. In a 2011 article for the lifestyle magazine Garden and Gun, for example, Allison Glock insists upon the distinctiveness of southern women: To be born a Southern woman is to be made aware of your distinctiveness. And with it, the rules. The expectations. These vary some, but all follow the same basic template, which is, fundamentally, no matter what the circumstance, Southern women make the effort. Which is why even the girls in the trailer parks paint their nails. . . . And why you will never see Reese Witherspoon wearing sweatpants. Or Oprah take a nap. While there are numerous starting points for analyzing this description, what interests me is the relationship between beauty and “making an effort,” and the moral judgment implied by this relationship. Even if one is “born a Southern woman,” there is still a de Beauvoirean implication 2 See Freeman, The Wedding Complex, and Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition. 3 For Smith’s female characters, “letting yourself go” is a signal that a woman lacks the correct disposition for the compromises of marriage and motherhood. Certainly, “letting oneself go” contains an element of moral judgment, implying a failure of self-discipline...

Socializing the uprooted: The case of mothers from South Lebanon (SLA families) residing in Israel

This paper describes the socialization strategies of 12 uprooted Lebanese mothers in Israel and compares their strategies to those discussed in the immigration literature. Utilizing qualitative in depth interviews, we explore the maternal socialization goals and practices designed to preserve their culture of origin. Unlike immigrant parents who see themselves as needing to respond to their new culture, these uprooted mothers regard their exodus as temporary and fantasize about returning to Lebanon in the future. Thus, a major finding of this study is the socialization strategy that promotes the conservation of the past in a dream for the future. This strategy aims to promote the children's loyalty and their internalizing the notion that they do not belong in Israel. The mothers also attach great importance to the national identity of their children and use five different socialization practices to preserve it: modeling, cultural heritage and religious socialization, group solidarity, confronting discrimination and marriage expectations. Recognition of the complexity of contextual variations in cultural changes that inform parents’ socialization strategies and practices for their children may prove to be crucial for any policy or interventions directed toward uprooted populations.

Timing of Parental Divorce, Marriage Expectations, and Romance in Taiwan

Using data from the Taiwan Youth Project (TYP), this study attempts to delineate the effect of parental marital disruption and parental conflict on children’s romantic relationship formation as well as marriage expectations in young adulthood. In particular, a special effort is made to distinguish the timing of parental divorce and parental conflict on the process of forming intimate relationships. Young adults who experienced parental divorce at or before age 12 are compared with those whose parents divorced during adolescence. The results show that the effect of parental divorce and conflict on young adults’ outcome varies by the age of the child when parental divorce occurred. Young adults who experienced parental divorce during adolescence are more likely to report without marriage expectation. On the other hand, children whose parents divorced at or before age 12 are more likely to be involved in romantic relationships and to have more boy/girl friends. The implications of the changing family structure on future family systems are briefly discussed.