Marriage Norms Research Articles

Female reproductive competition within families in rural Gambia

Many studies show that the extended human family can be helpful in raising offspring, with maternal grandmothers, in particular, improving offspring survival. However, less attention has been given to competition between female kin and co-residents. It has been argued that reproductive conflict between generations explains the evolution of menopause in cooperatively breeding species where females disperse, and that older females are related to the offspring of younger females through their sons, whereas younger, incoming females are unrelated to older females. This means the pattern of help will be asymmetric, so older females lose in reproductive conflict and become 'sterile helpers'. Here, we seek evidence for female reproductive competition using longitudinal demographic data from a rural Gambian population, and examine when women are helping or harming each other's reproductive success. We find that older women benefit and younger women suffer costs of reproductive competition with women in their compound. But the opposite is found for mothers and daughters; if mother and daughter's reproductive spans overlap, the older woman reduces her reproduction if the younger woman (daughter) reproduces, whereas daughters' fertility is unaffected by their mothers' reproduction. Married daughters are not generally co-resident with their mothers, so we find not only competition effects with co-resident females, but also with daughters who have dispersed. Dispersal varies across human societies, but our results suggest reproductive conflict could be influencing reproductive scheduling whatever the dispersal pattern. A cultural norm of late male marriage reduces paternal grandmother/daughter-in-law reproductive overlap almost to zero in this population. We argue that cultural norms surrounding residence and marriage are themselves cultural adaptations to reduce reproductive conflict between generations in human families.

Breadwinners and Homemakers: Migration and Changing Conjugal Expectations in Rural Bangladesh

The literature on marriage norms and aspirations across societies largely sees the institution as static – a tool for the assertion of masculinities and subordination of women. The changing meanings of marriage and conjugality in the contemporary context of globalisation have received scant attention. Based on research in rural Bangladesh, this article questions the usefulness of notions of autonomy and dependence in understanding conjugal relations and expectations in a context of widespread migration for extended periods, especially to overseas destinations, where mutuality is crucial for social reproduction, though in clearly gender-demarcated domains.

Must Love Kill the Family Firm? Some Exploratory Evidence

Family firms depend on a succession of capable heirs to stay afloat. If talent and IQ are inherited, this problem is mitigated. If, however, progeny talent and IQ display mean reversion (or worse), family firms are eventually doomed. Since family firms persist, solutions to this succession problem must exist. We submit that marriage can transfuse outside talent and reinvigorate family firms. This implies that changes to the institution of marriage—notably, a decline in arranged marriages in favor of marriages for “love”—bode ill for the survival of family firms. Consistent with this, the predominance of family firms correlates strongly across countries with plausible proxies for arranged marriage norms.

Muslims in Britain: Race, Place and Identities * Edited by PETER HOPKINS and RICHARD GALE.

This volume uses the concept of place to challenge the public perception of British Muslims as homogeneous and the associated perception that there is a uniform British Muslim political identity. ‘Place’ denotes a focus on the spatial or geographic aspects of people’s lives, including their economic, historical and political locations. As such, it provides a thread that links the different contributions, resulting in a volume that has greater intellectual coherence than some of the other recent collections of writing on the identity and identity politics of Muslims in Britain. The contributions are organized in three parts, after a review by the editors—a geographer and a sociologist—of the history and demography of Muslims in Britain and an introduction to the theme of place. Part I contains UK-based chapters on British Muslims as individuals at work, in education and at home. More accurately, these five chapters are about people of South Asian heritage, who constitute the majority (68%) of British Muslims. Deborah Philips examines the extent to which UK-raised Pakistani, Kashmiri and Bangladeshi women in Oldham, Rochdale and Bradford have created a home physically apart from their in-laws and rejected the norms of marriage and motherhood of their parents’ generation. Sophie Bowlby and Sally Lloyd-Evans examine the workplace experiences of Pakistanis in Reading and Slough and ask if the relative socio-economic disadvantage of British Muslims as a whole arises from being Muslim or for other reasons. Claire Dwyer and Bindi Shah consider the extent to which Pakistani women in Slough are taking up new opportunities by participating in higher and further education. Louise Archer turns to Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims boys in a town in northern England and, using some striking interview extracts, examines the links between the rhetoric of Muslim identity and local assertions of masculinity.

QUEER UNIONS: Same-Sex Spouses Marrying Tradition and Innovation

Same-sex civil marriage is a focal point of debate among social conservatives, feminists, queer critics and lesbian and gay assimilationists. In this paper, I draw on in-depth interviews of thirty same-sex married spouses to explore how actual same-sex marriages relate to these debates. Among these spouses, civil marriage is perceived to provide significant legal, social and psychological resources that, in effect, consolidate the nuclear family and the institution of marriage. Yet, conversely, these spouses do not uniformly embrace traditional norms of marriage, but, rather, adopt a range of nontraditional norms and practices that, in effect, destabilize the traditional marital form. In sociological terms, however, their complexity is not surprising, as contemporary lesbians and gay men are dually socialized in the dialectic of a dominant “meaning-constitutive” tradition (Gross 2005) that valorizes (heterosexual) marriage and kinship, on the one hand, but a queer-meaning constitutive tradition that promotes sexual freedom and nontraditional gender relations, on the other. In this sense, one important sociological question for the future is the extent to which the increasing availability of same-sex marriage will transform the dialectic, eroding the structural conditions that underpin a distinctive queer meaning-constitutive tradition and, in turn, same-sex marital innovation.

Hook-Up Culture: Setting a New Research Agenda

Summarizing the major findings of literature on hook-up culture, we propose a new research agenda focusing on when and why this sexual subculture emerged. We explore a series of hypotheses to explain this sexual paradigm shift, including college and university policies, the gender distribution of students, changes in the nature of alcohol use, access to and consumption of pornography, the increased sexual content of non-pornographic media, rising self-objectification and narcissism, new marriage norms, and perceptions of sexual risk. We then recommend new directions for research, emphasizing the need to explore structural and psychological as well as cultural factors, the role of discrete events alongside slowly emerging social change, the need for intersectional research and studies of non-college-attending and post-college youth, and the benefits of longitudinal and cross-college designs.

Changing Attitudes toward Marriage and Children in Six Countries

This article examines changes in attitudes toward marriage and children in Austria, (West) Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the U.S. using the data from the 1988, 1994, and 2002 waves of the International Social Survey Programe (ISSP). Consistent with the ideas of the second demographic transition and the rise of post-materialism, public opinion in these countries is shifting away from traditional norms of universal marriage and childbearing. Female, never married, better educated, employed, and relatively secularized individuals hold less traditional views about marriage and children in all countries. Furthermore, attitudes of married and never married in Austria and Germany, males and females in the U.S. became more polarized, which might be attributed to public policies to increase fertility and promote traditional marriage in these countries. Large unexplained cross-national differences also point at the importance of contextual factors for understanding recent changes in support for marriage and children.

The impact of HIV and high‐risk behaviours on the wives of married men who have sex with men and injection drug users: implications for HIV prevention

BackgroundHIV/AIDS in India disproportionately affects women, not by their own risks, but by those of their partners, generally their spouses. We address two marginalized populations at elevated risk of acquiring HIV: women who are married to men who also have sex with men (MSM) and wives of injection drug users (IDUs).MethodsWe used a combination of focus groups (qualitative) and structured surveys (quantitative) to identify the risks that high-risk men pose to their low-risk wives and/or sexual partners. Married MSM were identified using respondent-driven recruitment in Tamil Nadu, India, and were interviewed by trainer assessors. A sample of wives of injection drug users in Chennai were recruited from men enrolled in a cohort study of the epidemiology of drug use among IDUs in Chennai, and completed a face-to-face survey. Focus groups were held with all groups of study participants, and the outcomes transcribed and analyzed for major themes on family, HIV and issues related to stigma, discrimination and disclosure.ResultsUsing mixed-methods research, married MSM are shown to not disclose their sexual practices to their wives, whether due to internalized homophobia, fear of stigma and discrimination, personal embarrassment or changing sexual mores. Married MSM in India largely follow the prevailing norm of marriage to the opposite sex and having a child to satisfy social pressures. Male IDUs cannot hide their drug use as easily as married MSM, but they also avoid disclosure. The majority of their wives learn of their drug-using behaviour only after they are married, making them generally helpless to protect themselves. Fear of poverty and negative influences on children were the major impacts associated with continuing drug use.ConclusionsWe propose a research and prevention agenda to address the HIV risks encountered by families of high-risk men in the Indian and other low- and middle-income country contexts.

Social Norms of Sexuality and Marriage of the Aged

Social Norms of Sexuality and Marriage of the Aged

Must Love Kill the Family Firm?

Family firms depend on a succession of capable heirs to stay afloat. If talent and IQ are inherited, this problem is mitigated. If, however, progeny talent and IQ display mean reversion (or worse), family firms are eventually doomed. This is the essence of the critique of family firms in Burkart, Panunzi and Shleifer (2003). Since family firms persist, solutions to this succession problem must exist. We submit that marriage can transfuse outside talent and reinvigorate family firms. This implies that changes to the institution of marriage - notably, a decline in arranged marriages in favor of marriages for love - bode ill for the survival of family firms. Consistent with this, the predominance of family firms correlates strongly across countries with plausible proxies for arranged marriage norms. Interestingly, family firm dominance interacted with arranged marriage norms also correlates with lower GDP per capita, suggesting that cultural inertia may also impede convergence to more efficient economic organization.

Ethnic diversity, traditional norms, and marriage behaviour in Indonesia

What role do cultural norms play in shaping individual behaviour and how does this relationship change with rapid socio-economic development? While modernization and convergence theories predict a weakened relationship between culture and behaviour as individuals rely less on family and community members for economic opportunities, recent research suggests that such norms can persist and continue to influence behaviour. We explored this question for Indonesia, asking whether cultural norms for age at marriage and post-marriage residence—as embodied in local ethnicity-based laws and customs known as ‘adat’—relate to actual marriage behaviour. We demonstrate that adat norms are strong predictors of marriage behaviour, both over time and net of large increases in educational attainment. Our results suggest more generally that traditional marriage norms can persist even when a society is in the process of rapid socio-economic development.

Ambivalent Sexism and Power-Related Gender-role Ideology in Marriage

Glick-Fiske's (1996) Ambivalent Sexism Inventory(ASI) and a new Gender-Role Ideology in Marriage (GRIM) inventory examine ambivalent sexism toward women, predicting power-related, gender-role beliefs about mate selection and marriage norms. Mainland Chinese, 552, and 252 U.S. undergraduates participated. Results indicated that Chinese and men most endorsed hostile sexism; Chinese women more than U.S. women accepted benevolent sexism. Both Chinese genders prefer home-oriented mates (women especially seeking a provider and upholding him; men especially endorsing male-success/female-housework, male dominance, and possibly violence). Both U.S. genders prefer considerate mates (men especially seeking an attractive one). Despite gender and culture differences in means, ASI-GRIM correlations replicate across those subgroups: Benevolence predicts initial mate selection; hostility predicts subsequent marriage norms.

Debating Women's Health: Reflections in Popular Hindi Print-Culture

This paper tries to delineate the intervention of ‘educated section’ of Bañaras with Western medicine, scientific knowledge about reproduction, reproductive organs and mechanical means of contraception and the manner in which it was discussed in the public sphere. In this context, this study explores the way women have been represented, shown or projected in the twentieth century in popular Hindi print culture. It further shows how scientific knowledge about reproduction was invoked in public? What were the debates about norms of marriage, procreation and pleasure? For this purpose, this paper examines Premchand's Godan, medical tracts published in Hindi and advertisements of contraceptives and aphrodisiacs placed in Hindi newspapers and journals. It argues that this intervention generated a rich corpus of medical tracts in Hindi which familiarize the scientific notion about body, sex and reproduction among ‘the masses* or those within the broad circumference of a reading public. Nevertheless, their main concern was only about a healthy mate progeny and man ‘s pleasure thus marginalizing woman. The ‘educated section ‘, in their engagement at various levels, sought a new pedagogical role in public life by disseminating this knowledge in paternalistic form to women and married couples. However their primary agenda was to build a ‘strong’, ‘virile' and ‘masculine’ nation. Women were expected to be ‘good’ wives and mothers, and reproduce/nourish healthy male children for this nation. On the basis of our exploration one can perhaps argue that the tracts and the debates opened issues related to sex/sexual pleasure and sexuality to the public domain.

On the Variation of Divorce Risks in Europe: Findings from a Meta-Analysis of European Longitudinal Studies

The aim of this article is to integrate empirical research on divorce risks in Europe and to explain the variation of empirical findings between European countries by the different levels of modernization and differences in the strength of marriage norms. We focus on the effects of premarital cohabitation, the presence of children, and the experience with parental divorce on marital stability. More than 260 studies on divorce risks could be identified, and 120 were used for further meta-analytical examinations. We show that there is considerable heterogeneity of divorce risks within as well as between countries. Explaining the variation of effect sizes between European countries, it could be shown that in countries where more rigid marriage norms prevail cohabitation has a stronger effect on marital stability than in countries where marriage norms are weaker. Furthermore, the lower the divorce barriers are, the weaker is the association between the parental divorce and the divorce risk of the offspring.

Marriage at the Drop of a Hat: Housing and Partnership in South Africa's Urban African Townships, 1920s-1960s

This paper holds a lens to the politics of marriage in South Africa's urban African townships, by way of a study of so-called 'house marriages': marriages transacted for the sake of a house. This was a mode of marriage that flouted all the established norms of Christian and customary marriage; yet it proliferated, and by the late 1960s, accounted for a significant proportion of partnerships in South Africa's cities and towns. The paper shows that this trend marked in the first instance the increasingly interventionist role played by the South African state in producing the sphere of African domesticity, along with the conditions of sexual and emotional intimacy. But the profusion of house marriages was also bound up with cultural shifts within urban African communities. While house marriages were persistently condemned as immoral and inauthentic by some, other township residents took a different view. Over time, the meaning of these partnerships was refashioned, so that house marriages were increasingly normalized as a legitimate, even respectable, mode of partnership.

American Marriage in the Early Twenty-First Century

During the past century the U.S. family system has seen vast changes--in marriage and divorce rates, cohabitation, childbearing, sexual behavior, and women's work outside the home. Andrew Cherlin reviews these historic changes, noting that marriage remains the most common living arrangement for raising children, but that children, especially poor and minority children, are increasingly likely to grow up in single-parent families and to experience family instability. Cherlin describes the economic and cultural forces that have transformed family life. Job market changes have drawn married women into the work force and deprived less-educated men of the blue-collar jobs by which they traditionally supported their families. And effective contraception and legalized abortion have eroded the norm of marriage before childbearing. Cherlin notes that sentiment in favor of marriage appears to be stronger in the United States than in other developed countries. The share of U.S. adults who are likely to marry is higher, but so is the share likely to divorce. U.S. children are also more likely to live in single-parent families at some time in their childhood. Although nearly all Americans, whether poor or well-to-do, hold to marriage as an ideal, today marriage is increasingly optional. To a greater extent than ever before, individuals can choose whether to form a family on their own, in a cohabiting relationship, or in a marriage. Given U.S. patterns of swift transitions into and out of marriage and high rates of single parenthood, American policymakers eager to promote marriage are unlikely to be able to raise U.S. family stability to levels typical of other developed countries. Consequently, a family policy that relies too heavily on marriage will not help the many children destined to live in single-parent and cohabiting families--many of them poor--during their formative years. Assistance must be directed to needy families, regardless of their household structure. Policymakers must craft a careful balance of marriage-based and marriage-neutral programs to provide adequate support to American children.

Many Ways of Becoming a Woman: The Case of Unmarried Israeli-Palestinian "Girls"

Unmarried Israeli-Palestinian women are normatively expected to virgins and social juniors, yet in practice their handling of their sexuality, and by extension their femininity, produces a range of social personas. While some indeed submissive and suppressed, others undergo sexual maturation. Detailed ethnographic attention to their lifestyles, and particularly to their sexuality, disproves any stereotypic impressions held of this group of Arab women. As liminal persons, unmarried women serve not only as delineators of normative female sexuality, but also as agents of change who expand the norm and make it more inclusive. Contextualizing the phenomenon historically, the analysis considers how this adjustment of gender responds to larger concerns with modernity and marginality. (Sexuality, virginity, gender, liminality) Linguistically referred to as girls (banat), unmarried Palestinian women in Israel have a strong likelihood of being barred from adult femininity, as well as being generally marginalized. Local explanations of the use of girls as a form of reference to unmarried women emphasize their assumed virginal state. The term banat also means daughters, which highlights the second aspect of their classification. As those who remain daughters (byithallin banat), their primary role remains the one they have in their family of orientation, which has no adult position for them. They therefore allegedly fixed in an ongoing child-like status. The linguistic gesture of infantilizing and desexualizing unmarried women represents a normative expectation that the passage to womanhood should occur in a specific, institutionalized form. Against this narrow expectation, this ethnography of unmarried women (1) discloses a wide diversity of personal types, ranging from extremely submissive or girlish to outgoing and charismatic individuals who can hardly be described as girls. This essay focuses on the sexuality of these women, and uses their liminality as a prism to understand notions of womanhood in Israeli-Palestinian culture generally. Formal and practical forms of local knowledge are not consistent with the local conviction that unless females marry, they cannot mature in a socially accepted way. Despite the stigma associated with the term banat, many unmarried females overcome the pitfalls set by the norm of marriage and do attain womanhood. These persons successfully resist their restriction to become sexually mature, social adults. In so doing, many of them manage not to lose moral standing. Against heavy odds, some even manage to increase their respectability. At the same time, they liminal personas, habituating an interstitial space between normative age and gender categories. The ways in which unmarried females handle their sexuality, and by extension their femininity, range from extreme suppression to self-rejoicing sexual awakening. As liminal personas, unmarried women serve not only as delineations of normative female sexuality, but also as agents of change who expand the norm and make it more inclusive. Considering that structure-antistructure energies are historically informed, the analysis here looks at how this adjustment of gender responds to larger concerns with modernity and marginality. UNMARRIED WOMEN (2) Brief ethnographic descriptions of three unmarried women living in the same urban community exemplify the diversity of lifestyles, life opportunities, and personality types representative of unmarried Israeli-Palestinian women. They vary in their religious affiliations, social class, housing conditions, education, employment, and family relationships. Rose, a 32-year-old Christian woman, is the oldest of six siblings and a high-school graduate. She has worked eight years as the secretary of a local contractor, a job she likes and takes pride in, for a minimum-wage salary. For the past few years, her family has had hard economic times: This year has been the hardest in all my life. …

A Society without Fathers or Husbands: The Na of China (review)

Reviewed by: A Society without Fathers or Husbands: The Na of China C. Fred Blake (bio) Hua Cai . A Society without Fathers or Husbands: The Na of China. Translated by Asti Hustvedt. New York: Zone Books, 2001. 505 pp. Hardcover $33.00, ISBN 1-890951-12-9. Future studies of human social organization will be obliged to take account of Cai Hua's work on Na kinship. The Na are a cultural minority of thirty-thousand mountain farmers in northern Yunnan. Their mode of organizing sexuality and reproduction without husbands or fathers provides yet another in a long history of challenges to anthropological definitions of marriage and family. One index of this unusual system is the kinship terminology: it is "strictly classificatory" and reckons consanguineous links only through women. The system fits none of the basic types proposed by anthropologist George P. Murdock, who did the last comprehensive study on human social organization fifty years ago. In Cai's estimation, the Na system represents a newly discovered ethnological type. From the indigenous perspective, however, the consequence of challenging a definition has more pertinence if it is due to resisting the moral sensibilities of a ruling power. In this case the ruling power's ideas about sex and family are defined by Han-Chinese norms of marriage, which Na custom rejects. The consequence is that mandarins of the former Qing dynasty and agents of the communist regime have tried to make the Na accept the Han institution of marriage. The attempt in the 1960s to force marriage on the Na was especially heavy-handed and regrettably used information gathered from Na informants by anthropologists. But despite these attempts and despite the effects of other cultural changes, the Na way of reckoning descent and organizing domestic life and sexual practice has showed an amazing resilience. Even those Na who stood to gain materially by the redistribution of land rejected land reform when the communists sought to bypass their localized matrilineal descent groups or matrilignées. Cai grounds his ethnography in the history of Na encounters with the state. He argues that the three-tier system of consumption-based status groups was an accommodation of the matrilineal system to the imperial power of the Qing dynasty. The "aristocratic" tier was formed when the local prefect (zhifu) was obliged to adopt the concept of paternity, the patronymic, and marriage in order to legitimate his heirs in service to the central government. But this was mostly veneer since the prefect's lignée never adopted the paternal transmission of consanguinity. Cai details the design and stratagems of the status system, the social mobility, the ritual rebellions, the consortiums between tiers, and the consequent problems of inheritance. Communist power was more successful in supplanting this local pecking order by recruiting Na leaders into the party-state apparatus than it was in changing Na domestic practices. [End Page 103] The core of Cai's study is the domestic organization of sexual practices in which there are no husbands or fathers. The basic unit of social production and reproduction is the matrilignée, which is formed from several generations domiciled around the solidarity between mothers and daughter and between sisters and brothers. The sibling incest taboo is rigorously observed to the extent that even the slightest evocation of sex among consanguine relatives of the opposite sex is forbidden: the sister must bed a man from another lignée in order to perpetuate her own (and her brother's) lignée. Since the sexual encounter takes place in the domicile of her lignée, it must be furtive to avoid her brothers. What is so unusual, however, is that "the identity of her children's genitors is never important" (p. 296). Conversely, men express no wish to sire children. The basic, customary, and ubiquitous mode of sexual encounter is the furtive visit. This type of visitation has a man creeping into a woman's bed after nightfall and leaving before dawn. (Women do not visit men in their domiciles.) The visit is supposed to be an obligation-free encounter, and there is no involvement of the woman's mother or brothers. When a man arrives at a woman's...

Continuity and Change in Marital Quality Between 1980 and 2000

We use data from two national surveys of married individuals—one from 1980 and the other from 2000—to understand how three dimensions of marital quality changed during this period. Marital happiness and divorce proneness changed little between 1980 and 2000, but marital interaction declined significantly. A decomposition analysis suggested that offsetting trends affected marital quality. Increases in marital heterogamy, premarital cohabitation, wives' extended hours of employment, and wives' job demands were associated with declines in multiple dimensions of marital quality. In contrast, increases in economic resources, decision‐making equality, nontraditional attitudes toward gender, and support for the norm of lifelong marriage were associated with improvements in multiple dimensions of marital quality. Increases in husbands' share of housework appeared to depress marital quality among husbands but to improve marital quality among wives.

Sustaining Charisma Mormon Sectarian Culture and the Struggle for Plural Marriage, 1852–1890

Through the latter half of the nineteenth century, Mormons in the United States engaged in a highly charged struggle to defend a religious principle—plural marriage (polygyny)—against political and cultural opposition among non-Mormon groups and institutions. The practice of plural marriage, however, remained statistically rare, hierarchical, and rooted in Victorian marriage and family norms. Moreover, the struggle took place as Mormon communities and businesses gradually assimilated to mainstream institutional and political economics. This article asks why, in light of such ambiguities, the Latterday Saints defended plural marriage with such vigor, capitulating only in the face of the most aggressive federal anti-polygamy legislation. I argue that plural marriage was a vital symbol of early Mormon sectarian identity, and that sustained activism in support of the principle allowed Mormons to embody the radical "peculiarity" of the church's charismatic origins. This has theoretical implications for an understanding of charisma as a complex and fundamentally socio-cultural phenomenon.