Marriage Of Youth Research Articles

Специфика брачно-семейных отношений молодежи Подмосковья

Специфика брачно-семейных отношений молодежи Подмосковья

The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience

The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience

American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States by Nicholas L. Syrett

Reviewed by: American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States by Nicholas L. Syrett James Schmidt American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States. By Nicholas L. Syrett. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. xiv + 354 pp. Cloth $34.95. In 2017, New Yorkers made a shocking discovery: children as young as fourteen could legally marry. "I don't think people even knew this," New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo told the New York Times. Governor Cuomo's paucity of historical knowledge could have been remedied if had he read Nicholas Syrett's brilliant new book, American Child Bride. Syrett provides a sweeping history of youthful brides from the colonial era to the present and simultaneously offers a trenchant critique of the institution of marriage itself. Despite numerous waves of reform, child marriage has been relatively common and relatively accepted throughout US history, a fact that evinces Americans' "great faith" in the "powers of marriage" (7). Indeed, as Syrett demonstrates throughout the book, marriage turns a young person into a legal adult, and frequently "this was an appealing prospect for many youth" (9). Arguing strongly for youthful agency, the book stresses that many, if not most, child brides and grooms "believed that they were making choices" (9). Arranged roughly chronologically, the book opens with an investigation of child marriage in the period before it became a cause for concern. Early chapters hinge on the notion that "age-consciousness—the belief that one's age is a fundamental part of one's personal and social identity—did not exist as it does now" (20). Earlier restrictions focused on parental rights to property or service. Youthful matrimony in early American history also contained considerable diversity, and Syrett devotes valuable sections to such topics as Mormon plural marriage and Native American marital traditions. [End Page 470] The mid-nineteenth century saw both critical legal developments that shored up youthful marriage and the emergence of the first full-blown critiques. Syrett restores Parton v. Hervey, an 1854 Massachusetts decision, to its rightful place as a leading case in US legal history. The case upheld youthful marriage to ensure "the maintenance of public morality" (78). Even as youthful matrimony gained judicial sanction, critics began to examine the practice. Medical authorities offered a physiological argument, while early women's rights advocates such as Elizabeth Oakes Smith focused on the harm to women's legal capacities. As the century drew on, these critiques morphed into a full-blown assault, and waves of legal restriction began. These departures depended on "the growing belief that children were fundamentally different from adults and that marriage was an adult institution that needed protecting from those who might not take it seriously, children among them" (122). While early reformers had focused on preventing divorce or sheltering women, campaigns after World War I rested squarely on "the language of child protection: youthful marriage was bad for children" (168). Although legal reform occurred in the usual scattered pattern, the right for young people to marry became increasingly restricted in the twentieth century. The final chapters follow the story to the present and center on examples of resistance, whether that be the continuity of child matrimony in rural areas such as the South, the crisis over middle-class youth of the baby boom generation, or the teen pregnancy panic of the 1970s and beyond. Throughout, Syrett stresses that young people, and young women in particular, married for reasons they saw as beneficial. The level of nuance in the book's argumentation is astonishing, and it makes the book highly valuable beyond the history of childhood and youth. Legal historians will observe the best of law and society studies practiced here, and social historians will find the perfect blend of demographic trend and illustrative narrative. Along with other works of the last decade or so, the book definitively establishes age and age-consciousness as major questions and categories of analysis. A book devoted to legal and social change could easily have lost sight of the real lives involved, but Syrett masterfully avoids this pitfall by opening and closing each chapter with a deeply narrated...

Sociological explanation of youth marriage delay in Tarom

Sociological explanation of youth marriage delay in Tarom

Dowries and Debts: Fuzhounese Youth Geographies of Fear, Resentment, and Obligation

Chinese family networks are often lauded as the source of Chinese American success in education and used as a bolstering tool to propagate myths of the model minority. This study of Fuzhounese youth, however, reveals that many Chinese American youth view getting married and having children as more important than educational status for establishing place and face in the United States. Against the backdrop of growing privatization of the nation’s economy and its emphasis on personal responsibility and worker flexibility, my analysis of the effects of familial obligations as a national and transnational debt complicates caricatures of Asian American families as the model minority. By calling attention to the negotiations that Fuzhounese youth make in order to forge economic relationships that take into consideration familial expectations, this article underscores the ways in which filial piety and obligations shape the marriage and educational aspirations of Fuzhounese youth.

The Nature and the Enforcement of Father’s Permission on Children's Marriage

Since the ratification of Article 1041 of the civil code in 1313 (1934 AD) the legal age of marriage and the status of child marriage in Iranian law, has had it ups and downs. Closing the gap between the legal age of marriage to that of natural (physical) and mental maturity in 1313(1934), legal restrictions of marriage of youth between 18 and 20 years of age in the Family Support Act, enacted in 1353, and the approval of the guardian of the marriage of a discriminative and indiscriminative minor in Article 1041, amended in 1361 (1982) and 1371 (1992), all indicate that the legislator is up against two powers; traditions and needs. The approval of Article 1041of the civil code, amended in 1381 in the Expediency Council, raises questions in regards to the reinstatement of, or the invalidation of the guardianship in marriage. This paper, by pursuing the two mutual reasons, shows a prudential tendency to the second point of view, an opinion which is consistent with legal principles and the family’s interest. In addition, it clarifies the sanction of permission of the guardian and the authority of the court.

Misconceived Metaphors: Irene Vilar’s Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict

Misconceived MetaphorsIrene Vilar’s Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict Mary Thompson (bio) Introduction For years it didn’t occur to me that there was anything to tell about abortion. Quite the opposite. There was much to forget. But I discovered that many other women were hungry to come to terms with a past scarred by cowardice and the need to cloak themselves in someone else’s power. Many had a history of repeat abortions. They, like me, were eager to find a language to articulate an experience they had seldom spoken about. My testimony is not unique. Beyond the antiseptic, practical language of Planned Parenthood and the legalistic or moralistic discourse of Roe v. Wade and its pro-choice and pro-life counterparts, there are few words to articulate individual, intimate accounts.1 For several years after finishing graduate course work in gender studies and while making initial forays into the academic job market, I worked in abortion providing as a patient advocate. During this clinical experience I regularly encountered women having repeat abortions, encounters for which pro-choice and academic discourse had not prepared me. In this sense I shared the experience of the abortion providers interviewed by feminist ethnographer Wendy Simonds, who observes that doing abortion work necessarily causes providers to rethink oversimplified pro-choice rhetoric.2 Similar to Simonds I shared the sense that while I view abortion as an empowering act, most women seeking abortion see it only as failure.3 This is particularly true of repeat abortion. Popularly denigrated as “using abortion as birth control,” repeat abortion is seen as a failure by many patients, policy makers, and some providers. It was therefore with apprehension and eagerness that I approached Irene Vilar’s 2009 memoir, Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict. Impossible Motherhood is the second memoir by Vilar, who was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, in 1969 and is an author and editor living on the US [End Page 132] mainland. Her earlier memoir, The Ladies’ Gallery (1996), about a turbulent period in her life during which she attempted suicide, was short-listed for the Mind Book of the Year Award (recognizing writing on mental health issues) and garnered critical attention as a Philadelphia Inquirer and Detroit Free Press notable book of the year. In it Vilar weaves her personal narrative into the histories of her mother and her notorious grandmother, Lolita Lebron.4 This first memoir constructs a lineage of female suffering, martyrdom, and depression in the context of colonialism, dwelling in particular on her grandmother’s single-minded focus on politics and nationalist myth-making and her mother’s suicide in 1977, when Vilar was only eight years old. Impossible Motherhood, published over ten years later, reflects at length on that earlier memoir, revealing a more complex context for Vilar’s struggles with depression and suicide as readers learn of her youthful marriage to her former professor, a man more than thirty years her senior with whom she had multiple unplanned pregnancies and abortions. Impossible Motherhood recounts how Vilar had fifteen abortions over sixteen years while in relationships with two men. It narrates a cycle of unplanned pregnancies motivated by lack of self-care and a secret desire to defy Vilar’s first husband. Each pregnancy was a rebellion against his wish to remain childless (and his belief that freedom for women is freedom from motherhood) but presented her with the frightening prospect of becoming a single mother. Vilar diagnoses herself as being an abortion “addict,” swinging between the highs and lows of control and chaos and only “cured” later in her second marriage by motherhood. Becoming a mother was significant, Vilar suggests, because it healed the trauma of losing her own mother, whose suicide, she speculates, arose from depression brought on by an unnecessary hysterectomy performed as part of a US-backed program of sterilizing Puerto Rican women. The memoir presents readers with a difficult, uncomfortable discussion of what “choice” looks like in women’s lives and how we are and are not the rational actors upon which pro-choice rhetoric and legislation is predicated. Considering the charged feelings surrounding repeat abortion, Vilar understandably struggled to get...

The meaning of perspective as a patriarchal ruling method in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is well-known as a romantic play with love and marriage of youth, but it is also evaluated as a strict patriarchal play with oppression of women and violence by men. This article aims to show that men can oppress women by controlling and distorting their perspectives, for example, controlling women’s perspectives can be a patriarchal ruling method used against women for social order and hierarchy. Violence is a common method for men to use against women to maintain their patriarchy. In this play, men use violence and also try to control women’s perspectives to maintain their rule. Hippolyta is controlled by the violence of Theseus and two young men in the woods are controlled by Oberon’s magic which makes them change their perspectives. Titania who struggles with Oberon is also controlled by his magic. Oberon controls people’s perspectives by his magic and makes them like what he intends. Hippolyta likes Bottom’s donkey head, and Demetrius likes Helena. By controlling people’s perspectives, Oberon can solve his and other’s problems and establish his power. Until now, men have used a lot of methods to control women, and in this play Shakespeare shows that controlling women’s perspectives can be a method to control and oppress women for social order. So men want to use irrational and supernatural power such as magic to oppress women, which can serve their patriarchy.

Lee Maynard: An Executive and Writer with an Outlaw Edge

Lee Maynard:An Executive and Writer with an Outlaw Edge George Brosi Lee Maynard is a man of many passions and pursuits. A very successful business consultant, he is also at home in the wilderness and carries with him a deep understanding of his native West Virginia. He has published more often for the staid Reader's Digest than for any other magazine, yet he took in stride the fact that his first book, Crum, was deemed unfit for sale and initially banned by Tamarack, the premier outlet for West Virginia books. The contrast between the proper style of Reader's Digest and his personal style of outlaw fiction does not seem to bother him. He just keeps writing. A short conversation with Lee Maynard is much more likely to reveal that once, on a whim, he drove his motorcycle from New Mexico up to the Arctic Circle than the fact that he has served as a college president. Lee Maynard was born in 1936 in his grandmother's parlor in Kenova, West Virginia. He lived there in Wayne County almost all the time until he graduated from Ceredo-Kenova High School in 1954. As an infant, he lived in a two-room cabin in what is now part of Cabwaylingo State Forest; he lived in Crum three different times and in Kenova on even more occasions. While Lee Maynard was growing up, his father was teaching in several Wayne County schools except for a couple of years when he worked at a Western Electric defense plant in Baltimore. Playing football was one of Lee Maynard's high school pleasures, but he didn't have the size to play at West Virginia University, which he entered in the fall of 1954 initially as a pharmacy major and then as a journalism major. In the spring of his senior year, in 1958, he dropped out and hit the road, ending up in Los Angeles. There, Lee Maynard lived on the streets for a few weeks, in his words, "long enough to know living on the streets sucks big time and to view the Army as a safe haven. How wrong can one guy be?" In the Army, Maynard became a military policeman and criminal investigator. His investigation work led him to cross paths—not gently—with a local police commissioner. "He gave me a pretty hard time. But I fixed his wagon—I married his daughter." [End Page 14] He married the commissioner's daughter in 1959. This youthful marriage lasted over fifty years until Helen's death in 2010. Part Seneca Indian, Helen proved sympathetic both to Maynard's wild side and his desire to make a difference. She, like him, also had a knack for businesses, especially those that promoted the work of native peoples. Maynard was honorably discharged ("by the skin of my teeth") from the Army in the summer of 1961 and immediately returned to wvu. The next spring, he graduated with a major in journalism. Right out of college he was hired as editor of the West Virginia Conservation Magazine by the Department of Natural Resources, for which he soon served as Assistant Director of the Information and Education Division. Maynard loved this job and considers it one of the best he ever had. While he was working there, his daughter, Darci, was born in 1962, and his son, Toran, in 1965. Significantly, Maynard's career started with a job that required great responsibility and competence and that served all kinds of outdoor enthusiasts and adventurers. This experience landed him the job of Director of Public Relations for the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce and the editorship of West Virginia Commerce. From there, he was appointed the Executive Secretary of the newly formed West Virginia Commission on Manpower, Technology and Training, an outgrowth of the 1960s "War on Poverty." To become, in 1967, the youngest secretary of a state department, who also wrote speeches for the governor, indeed represented a meteoric rise. During this time, Maynard commuted once a week from his home in Charleston to Huntington for graduate courses at Marshall University. Lee Maynard's success implementing and managing programs in West Virginia launched him...

Redrawing the boundaries of marriage

Key Words: cohabitation, cross-national comparisons, cross-national policies, marriage. The golden age of marriage that was prominent across many Western nations from the 1950s to the early part of the 1970s is well and truly over. In that era, youthful marriage, the near universality of marriage, and marriage stability were the key features of partnership behavior, and marriage was the preeminent setting for having children. In recent decades, with the rise in cohabitation, moves to later and fewer marriages, and increased divorce, partnerships between men and women have become more diverse and fragile, and children are increasingly born and reared outside marriage. These are the broad demographic trends that have occurred to varying degrees across and within developed nations and that underlie our concerns about marriage and its future. The articles in this issue go beyond demographic description to provide us with thoughtprovoking and illuminating insights into the nature and consequences of marriage and partnership behavior. My brief from Alexis Walker, the Editor, was not to critique the articles themselves but to use them as a launching point for my own observations on changing marriage patterns, the meaning of these changes, and the future might hold. My perspective is one of a social demographer who has spent the last quarter century studying family change in Britain and Europe. This has been far from a dull endeavor, as the pace of change has been quite breathtaking. At the time of writing this piece, I was a visiting scholar for a semester at Princeton University, and I was able to reflect first-hand on the noticeable differences in the discourse on marriage in the United States compared with that in European countries. If I was to put the difference somewhat baldly, it would be that in European countries, the policy and political discussions are less to do with what is best, cohabitation or marriage? and more about issues concerning how best to support families, particularly in their endeavors to raise children regardless of the marital status of their parents (European Observalory on Family Policy, 1996; H. M. Government, 1998; Millar & Warman, 1996). Fostering healthy partnerships and committed parenthood are more the focus of concern, which resonates with the conclusions of the paper by Ted Huston and Heidi Melz (2004) that the promotion of family well-being and stability requires a holistic approach, with attention to be given to the psychological, social, and economic needs (p. 943) of the partners. This is not to say that Europeans do not value marriage. For example, in 1998, only 11% of 25- to 34-year-olds in the European Union, which comprised 15 countries at that time, said that they were against marriage in response to a question in a Eurobarometer survey. Only France and Belgium, with around 20%, had higher proportions saying that they were against marriage, with most of the other countries being clustered in the 8%-11% range. Even in countries such as Sweden and Denmark, where cohabitation is the most prevalent, 90% of the young men and women were in favor of marriage (European Commission, 1998; author's analysis). Europeans are in favor of marriage, but they are not explicitly promarriage. The particular blend of new-right ideology, coupled with a fundamentalist religious fervor, probably underpins the strong promarriage movement in the United States, as well as the not-unrelated stronger disapproval of premarital sex. This is not the case in European nations (Scott, 1999). Although the so-called moral majority only enjoys a small minority of support, it has been noticeably more vocal and politically active in the United States compared with, for example, Great Britain, which is the European country where new-right thinkers have expressed similar concerns about the demise of marriage (Morgan, 2001; Rowthorn, 1999). Religious authorities in Europe are certainly not indifferent to is happening to marriage. …

Child Abuse in Saudi Arabia: Report of Ten Cases

Ten abused children under five years of age (four males, six females) were seen in King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre (KFSH&RC) between 1989G and 1992G. Two children died, five had serious injuries and three had moderately severe injuries. In one of the fatalities, the diagnosis was not suspected until four years after death, when her sister was diagnosed as a case of child abuse. Six children suffered varying degrees of physical neglect and abuse and sexual abuse. The remaining four children had Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Parentally induced illness should therefore be considered in the differential diagnosis of unusual illness with bizarre features, even if the parents' behavior appears normal.

The Duration of Marriage in a Divorcing Population: The Impact of Children

This paper examines the effect of the presence of children on the duration of marriage in the 1977 divorcing population of 11559 families in Butte Marin Sacramento and San Francisco counties in California. Marriages may differ in terms of the life cycle: youthful marriages may be for childbearing and spouse maturation middle aged marriages may be for companionship and dual career relationships and retirement marriages may meet the needs of old age. Multiple regression and elaboration analysis show that the number of children accounts for 38.5% of the variance in marriage duration much more than the number of children under age 2 (1.95%) or the number of preschool children under age 6 (1.27%). 50% of couples who have no children from their current marriages divorced within 5 years as compared to only 12.2% of couples with 1 or more children. The presence of children appears to delay divorce even among couples who eventually divorce. The presence of children under 2 is slightly associated with early divorce among divorcing couples. Increasing the husbands education virtually eliminates this relationship as does increasing the wifes education. The propensity to divorce decreases as husbands age at marriage increases; less effect exists for wives who marry under age 20. The relationship between propensity to divorce and the presence of children under 2 is strengthened if the husband and wife are black rather than white. The presence of children under age 2 is not as likely to lead to divorce if the husband has been married previously than if he has not. The 2nd hypothesis that the presence of children younger than age 2 is also associated with a longer duration of marriage is not supported.

Attitudes of West African Students toward Love and Marriage

While attitudes about love and marriage of youth in most Western countries have been studied, the Senegalese youths' attitudes represent the specific interests of a society in which traditional social and religious values of adolescents in school are challenged as they are exposed to new values and attitudes. Despite a growing preference for romantic love and a desire for greater self-assertion in selection of a mate, the youths' attitudes toward love and marriage remain generally conservative.

On Putting the Child Before the Marriage: Reply to Birdsall

Smiths reply to an article by Birdsall on fertility and economic change in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe refutes many of Birdsalls arguments. Smiths original argument was misunderstood. Birdsall appears to apply a theory of fertility change based on an economic interpretation of perceived costs and advantages of children in the household. This approach is not novel. It derives from a theory of fertility transition concerned with the changing relative costs of children in the process of industrialization. Birdsall can only validate empirically the phase of late industrialization and fertility by characterizing the whole nineteenth century as a period in which fertility continuously fell. This is done by Birdsall in a highly questionable fashion. Birdsall also seems too willing to accept the link between growing rural/protoindustrial activity and increasingly youthful female marriage age. These relationships are not straightforward and the evidence is too limited to provide a firm basis for generalization. It is doubtful whether the marital fertility evidence can withstand David Levines interpretation. Levine may also have overstated the case of fertility control. Birdsall states that the increasing significance of time-intensive and earnings-reducing children that develops with rising real wages would be expected to reveal a decline in marital fertility. The evidence for investigating this thesis is not very adequate according to Smith. There is too great a preoccupation with the prohibition on child labor as evidenced in the Factory Acts. This can produce an insensitivity to the great variety of experiences concerning child employment patterns.

Marital Dissolution, Early Motherhood and Early Marriage

The age at which a young woman marries appears to be related strongly to the probability that the marriage remains intact: older couples tend to make more stable pairings than those who wed while quite young. But youthful marriages are often accompanied by youthful childbearing. The effects of the age at which the woman 1st wed and the age at which she bore her 1st child on the likelihood that the marriage dissolved during this period were assessed net of each other and of other circumstances and characteristics of the woman. It was found that among young wives teenage parenthood did not appear to increase the risk of divorce or separation whereas teenage marriage significantly raised the probability of disruption. When the analysis was performed separately by race this pattern held among white wives; however for black wives a 1st birth before age 20 was found to increase instability more than a 1st marriage before that age. The finding that age at 1st marriage but not age at 1st birth is significantly related to the probability of marital dissolution appears robust in the total sample: among subsamples of wives all married at about the same age the age at which they had their 1st birth did not influence stability of marriages. Data were drawn from the US National Longitudinal Study of the Labor Market Experiences of Young Women which sampled over 5000 women aged 18-24 in 1968 with reinterviews each following year up to 1972. (authors modified)

Sex-Role Expectations Associated with Specific Household Tasks: Perceived Age and Employment Differences

Although sex and age appropriate behavior has been examined, little attention has been given to expectations for the redistribution of household tasks. A questionnaire administered to unmarried college students provides data on expectations for 10 household tasks in three age and employment situations and projections for one's own marriage. Neither age nor work status alone was the basis for the ascription of norms involving domestic tasks. But both youth and dual-career marriage were associated with more shared activities. Future research should focus on the relationship between general attitudes toward sex-role behavior and the redistribution of household tasks.

History and Philosophy of Science: A Marriage of Convenience?

In a recent article, Ronald Giere has argued that the currently fashionable union of history and philosophy of science is no more than a marriage of convenience, justified like so many youthful marriages by unhappiness with the parental homes – history and philosophy rather than by compatibility and mutual need. He allows that it is, for the moment at least, a convenience from the institutional standpoint to encourage the two to pair off together, but insists that this pairing has no “strong conceptual rationale.” In a session devoted to analyzing the directions in which philosophy of science is developing, this topic would seem to merit an important place, for it can hardly be gainsaid that one of the two most obvious shifts in the philosophy of science over the past fifteen years has been its growing involvement with the history of science; the other shift is, of course, the shift away from the empiricist orthodoxies inherited from the Vienna Circle.

Frequency, Duration, and Probability of Marriage and Divorce

Information on marital histories of adults in the entire United States is summarized from the Survey of Economic Opportunity. Four-fifths of whites and two-thirds of Negroes in the cohort who married at least 20 years ago had married only once. One-fourth of the whites and nearly one-half of the Negroes in this cohort with youthful marriages had experienced divorce. Intervals between marital events were generally shorter for whites than Negroes. Probabilities of marriage were highest for single men in their late twenties; this cohort had the lowest probability of divorce. Men with an incomplete high school or college education had high probabilities of early divorce and early remarriage. Poor men tended to postpone divorce and, after a short period of divorce, not to remarry.

Family Life Education

THE TREND in contemporary society toward youthful marriage has been the focus of numerous sociological studies. The apparent instability of these marriages shown clearly by divorce rates which are far above the norm have been illustrated by significant empirical evidence.2,3 This trend is receiving considerable encouragement from the adolescent milieu which is saturated with the vocabulary and symbols of romance, love, and marriage. Fairy tales, dolls, television, movies, and songs perpetuate the fantasies of love, how it feels to fall in love, what one does when in love, and how young people can maximize their opportunities to experience this state.

Research on Young Marriage: Implications for Family Life Education

During the past five years a small yet growing body of research related to youthful marriage has appeared but these data are scattered in the literature. The purpose of the present discussion is three-fold: [(1)] to attempt to summarize and integrate these research findings on young marriage; [(2)] to report some previously unpublished data; and [(3)] to indicate some of the implications of these findings for family life education. Research data are organized under several topics; some general implications are presented separately. The first task is to define what is meant by youthful marriage. (excerpt)