Marriage Sociology

In Why Have Kids?, Valenti explores these controversial questions through on-the-ground reporting, startling new research, and her own unique experiences as a mom. She moves beyond the black and white “mommy wars” over natural parenting, discipline, and work-life balance to explore a more nuanced reality: one filled with ambivalence, joy, guilt, and exhaustion. Would-be parents must navigate the decision to have children amidst a daunting combination of cultural expectations and hard facts.

At age 34 Jo Piazza got her romantic-comedy ending when she met the man of her dreams on a boat in the Galápagos Islands and was engaged three months later. But before long Jo found herself riddled with questions. How do you make a marriage work in a world where you no longer need to be married? How does an independent, strong-willed feminist become someone's partner - all the time?

More than a decade after the New York Times best-selling anthology The Bitch in the House spoke up loud and clear for a generation of young women, nine of the original contributors are back - along with 16 captivating new voices - sharing their ruminations from an older, stronger, and wiser perspective about love, sex, work, family, independence, body image, health, and aging: the critical flash points of women's lives today.

In colorful and moving details, this audiobook explores how polyamorous relationships come to be, how they grow and change, how they manage the ins and outs of daily family life, and how they cope with the challenges they face both within their families and from society. Using polyamorists own words, Dr. Elisabeth Sheff examines polyamorous households and reveals their advantages, disadvantages, and the daily lives of those living in them.

In her first book of comic strips, Emma reflects on social and feminist issues by means of simple line drawings, dissecting the mental load, ie all that invisible and unpaid organizing, list-making and planning women do to manage their lives, and the lives of their family members. Most of us carry some form of mental load - about our work, household responsibilities, financial obligations and personal life; but what makes up that burden and how it's distributed within households and understood in offices is not always equal or fair.

A look at how commercialization has transformed youth sports from fun into a heavily commercialized and profitable venture. Examining the youth sports economy from many sides - the major corporations, the small entrepreneurs, the coaches, the parents, and, of course, the kids - Hyman probes the reasons for rapid changes in what gets bought and sold in this lucrative marketplace. He reveals the effects on kids and profiles the individuals and communities bucking this destructive trend of commercialization.

Small Animals is a riveting examination of the ways our culture of competitive, anxious, and judgmental parenting has profoundly altered the experiences of parents and children. In her signature style - by turns funny, penetrating, and always illuminating - which has dazzled millions of fans and been called "striking" by the New York Times Book Review and "beautiful" by the National Book Critics Circle, Brooks offers a provocative, compelling portrait of parenthood in America and calls us to examine what we most value in our relationships with our children and one another.

On May 23, 2009, Amanda Stott-Smith drove to the middle of the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon, and dropped her two children into the Willamette River. Forty minutes later, rescuers found the body of four-year-old Eldon. Miraculously, his seven-year-old sister, Trinity, was saved. As the public cried out for blood, Amanda was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.

Every year, more than 3.5 million children under age 15 require medical treatment for sports injuries, nearly half of which are the result of simple overuse. Journalist Mark Hyman investigates the evolution of youth sports from mere games to full-on quests to turn children into tomorrow's superstar athletes by pushing them beyond physical and emotional limits. Opening up a crucial discussion about the perils of youth-sports culture today, Hyman offers the solutions and answers we need.

In her refreshing and forthright voice, Anne-Marie Slaughter returns with her vision for what true equality between men and women really means and how we can get there. She uncovers the missing piece of the puzzle, presenting a new focus that can reunite the women's movement and provide a common banner under which both men and women can advance and thrive.

Medieval history is often written as a series of battles and territorial shifts. But the essential contributions of women during this period have been too often relegated to the dustbin of history. In Women in the Middle Ages, Frances and Joseph Gies reclaim this lost history, in a lively historical survey that charts the evolution of women’s roles throughout the period and profiles eight individual women in depth.

Parents everywhere want their children to be happy and do well. Yet how parents seek to achieve this ambition varies enormously. Through personal anecdotes and original research, Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti reveal that in countries with increasing economic inequality, such as the United States, parents push harder to ensure their children have a path to security and success.

C. J. Schneider found herself in the middle of a perfect storm after giving birth to her third child and moving to a new neighborhood. Conditions for misery and postpartum depression were ideal: She was isolated, lonely, and exhausted with three young children at home. As she started talking with other mothers, she realized that she was not alone in her experience of feeling alone. In her unique voice, Schneider intelligently and compassionately offers practical advice on how to create the essential community that mothers need.

In our society the act of infidelity is usually associated with the husband. But what happens when the wife cheats? Very little is written about how the husband and children deal with the lies, deceit, betrayal, and abandonment when the wife violates the martial vows. Follow one man's journey as he and his two young daughters cope the devastation that occurs when the wife cheats.

Here is a revolutionary perspective on the relationship between religion and science that builds a bridge between people of all beliefs.

Clint Smith’s vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are poems that meditate on what it means to raise a family in a world filled with constant social and political tumult.

According to the 2010 US census, more than 70 percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis. Dianne Stewart begins in the colonial era, when slave owners denied Blacks the right to marry, divided families, and, in many cases, raped enslaved women and girls. Later, during Reconstruction and the ensuing decades, violence split couples again as millions embarked on the Great Migration north.

When it comes to relationships, theres no shortage of advice from self-help experts, pick-up artists, and glossy magazines. But modern-day myths of attraction often have no basis in fact or worse are rooted in little more than misogyny. In Attraction Explained, psychologist Viren Swami debunks these myths and draws on cutting-edge research to provide a ground-breaking and evidence-based account of relationship formation.

The winner of France's prestigious Prix Femina Essai (2009), this imaginative and captivating audiobook explores the many dimensions of the room in which we spend so much of our lives - the bedroom. Eminent cultural historian Michelle Perrot traces the evolution of the bedroom from the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans to today, examining its myriad forms and functions, from royal king's chamber to child's sleeping quarters to lovers' trysting place to monk's cell.

For a brief moment on December 27, 2007, life came to a standstill in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto, the country's former prime minister and the first woman ever to lead a Muslim country, had been assassinated at a political rally just outside Islamabad. Back in Karachi--Bhutto's birthplace and Pakistan's other great metropolis--Rafia Zakaria's family was suffering through a crisis of its own: her uncle Sohail, the man who had brought shame upon the family, was near death.