Enduring love? Attitudes to family and inheritance law in England and Wales.

This paper reports on the findings from a large-scale study of public attitudes to inheritance law, particularly the rules on intestacy. It argues that far from the assumption that the family' is in terminal decline, people in England and Wales still view their most important relationships, at least for the purposes of inheritance law, as centred on a narrow, nuclear family model. However, there is also widespread acceptance of re-partnering and cohabitation, producing generally high levels of support for including cohabitants in the intestacy rules and for ensuring that children from former relationships are protected. We argue that these views are underpinned by a continuing sense of responsibility to the members of one's nuclear family, arising from notions of sharing and commitment, dependency and support, and a sense of lineage.

Creating egalitarian families among the adult children of Turkish- and Polish-origin immigrants in Sweden.

This article analyzes the factors shaping egalitarian family relationships among those with two Swedish-born parents and those with at least one parent born in Poland or Turkey. We ask: (1) What factors affect sharing domestic tasks and do they also shape the division of child care responsibilities? (2) Do these effects differ, depending on the extent of exposure to Swedish life? We analyze data from a longitudinal survey conducted between 1999 and 2003. Holding egalitarian work­family attitudes affects actual sharing of housework, but much more for those growing up in more socially integrated than in less integrated families.

Child fostering chains among Ovambo families in Namibia, Southern Africa.

Childcare across sub-Saharan Africa is often socially distributed among adults, with care by the biological mother being one of several options available for children. Children typically move within and outside of large extended kin networks. Based on an ethnographic study of four Ovambo families in Namibia, this article seeks to understand the cultural logic of fostering. Several themes that emerged from the study are discussed here, including the varied motivations of fostering, the cultural scripts of equality, and the rules of reciprocity in exchange, which are involved. Education shapes a mother's choices of care-giving and creates both a supply of children and a demand on households. The implications for HIV/AIDS orphans are discussed.

A life-course approach to studying transitions among Canadian seniors in couple-only households.

This study tracked the occurrence of death, widowhood, institutionalization, and coresidence with others between 1994 and 2002 for a nationally representative sample of 1,580 Canadian respondents who, at initial interview, were aged 55 and older and living in a couple-only household. Although the majority of seniors remained in a couple-only household throughout the duration of the survey, nearly one in four who experienced a first transition underwent one or more subsequent transitions. Age, economic resources, and health were significant predictors of a specific first transition and multiple transitions. More work is needed to understand the dynamics of the aging process.

Divorce in early modern rural Japan: household and individual life course in northeastern villages, 1716-1870.

Drawing data from the local population registers in two northeastern agricultural villages, this study examines the patterns and factors associated with divorce in preindustrial Japan. Divorce was easy and common during this period. More than two thirds of first marriages dissolved in divorce before individuals reached age fifty. Discrete-time event history analysis is applied to demonstrate how economic condition and household context influenced the likelihood of divorce for females. Risk of divorce was extremely high in the first three years and among uxorilocal marriages. Propensity of divorce increased upon economic stress in the community and among households of lower social status. Presence of parents, siblings, and children had strong bearings on marriage to continue.

They would if they could: class, gender, and popular representation of English divorce litigation, 1858-1908.

A systematic sample of the petitions presented to the English Divorce Court from 1858 through 1908 makes it possible to assess the differential contribution of discrete social and economic subgroups to the litigation the Court oversaw. An examination of four of these -- the titled aristocracy, those employed in the theater, those in receipt of financial aid, and laborers -- shows that English divorce litigants exhibited a broader social profile than commonly attributed to it by the newspaper coverage of divorce litigation, which gave a skewed impression of its social profile. Analysis of these cases underscores the gendered, class, and geographically inflected demand for divorce in a judicial setting that imposed severe restrictions on access to divorce as a remedy for marital breakdown.

Symptoms of another life: time, possibility, and domestic relations in Chile's credit economy.

In this article, I explore the synergy and disjunctures of the consumer credit system and care for the mentally ill and addicted in the lifeworlds of the urban poor in Santiago, Chile. In Chile, the expansion of the credit system has had a double-edged effect on the poor. Although it produces perpetual indebtedness, it also is a resource amid unstable labor. Following an extended family over several years, this article examines how women take up credit through a wider field of domestic relations and institutions to care for kin with mental illness and addiction within the home. Such gestures of care enact a temporality of waiting, allowing different, but unpredictable, aspects of others to emerge. Through longitudinal ethnographic research with this family, I demonstrate both how possibility is actualized within the home as symptoms of illness and forms of domestic violence, and how a wider network of dependencies­from neighbors to lending institutions­shapes the temporality of relations within the home. Such a study of care in relation to the credit economy may offer other analytic perspectives on discourses of individualism, consumerism, and cost-effectiveness accompanying the expansion of consumer credit as they are absorbed into the everyday.

Making time for the children: self-temporalization and the cultivation of the antisuicidal subject in south India.

This article examines suicide prevention among children in India's "suicide capital" of Kerala to interrogate the ways temporalization practices inform the cultivation of ethical, life-avowing subjects in late capitalism. As economic liberalization and migration expand consumer aspiration in Kerala, mental health experts link the quickening of material gratification in middle-class parenting to the production of insatiable, maladjusted, and impulsively suicidal children. Experiences of accelerated time through consumption in "modern" Kerala parenting practice reflect ideas about the threats of globalization that are informed both by national economic shifts and by nostalgia for the state's communist and developmentalist histories, suggesting that late capitalism's time­space compression is not a universalist phenomenon so much as one that is unevenly experienced through regionally specific renderings of the past. I demonstrate how experts position the Malayali child as uniquely vulnerable to the fatal dangers of immediate gratification, and thus exhort parents to retemporalize children through didactic games built around the deferral of desires for everyday consumer items. Teaching children how to wait as a pleasurable and explicitly antisuicidal way of being reveals anxieties, contestations, and contradictions concerning what ought to constitute "quality" investment in children as temporal subjects of late capitalism. The article concludes by bringing efforts to save elite lives into conversation with suicide prevention among migrants to draw out the ways distinct vulnerabilities and conditions of precarity situate waiting subjects in radically different ways against the prospect of self-destruction.

"Children of the city": juvenile justice, property, and place in England and Scotland, 1945-60.

This article uses cases studies of Dundee and Manchester to explain juvenile property-offending in terms of young people's use of objects and spaces in the period 1945-60. A composite picture is assembled of objects stolen, which reflects growth of the specifically "teenage" consumer market as well as continued significance of young people's contribution to family economies. Concerns about youth, property, and space were reported in newspapers in terms of vandalism and hooliganism. "Play" and "nuisance" were overlapping and contested categories; re-education of young people in the correct use of place, space, and property was a key aim of the postwar juvenile justice system.

Marriage and the family in a Maltese parish: St. Mary's (Qrendi) in the eighteenth century.

This article addresses the Maltese traditional family, taking St. Mary's (Qrendi) as a test case. It results that couples married in their early twenties, while a high proportion of men and women never married at all. Marriage was not popular so that one-fifth of all marriages were remarriages. Very few widows remarried and it was only for some economic reason that they sought another man. There is no evidence though that a high rate of celibacy resulted in flagrant promiscuity even if there is evidence that the Qrendin were not so particular about their sex life. No birth control was practiced within marriage and children followed one another regularly. This brings into relief the parents' unconcern for their offspring's future as well as the inferior status of women because husbands made their wives several offspring. Relations between the spouses were poor so that dissatisfied couples went their own ways.

"Revolting to humanity": oversights, limitations, and complications of the English Legitimacy Act of 1926.

This article analyses three areas that limited the effectiveness of the English Legitimacy Act of 1926. First, re-registration was public, expensive, and time-consuming. Second, the Treasury Office used the change in the law of intestacy to refuse more distant relatives' claims on estates. Third, the law separated legitimacy from nationality, thus denying citizenship to legitimated children born abroad of British fathers and foreign mothers. In short, both because of parliamentary oversights and civil servants' narrow interpretations of the law, relatively few children took advantage of the Act, and the minority who did, rather than being 'illegitimate' or 'legitimate', were a third category, the 'legitimated'.

Changing notions of lone motherhood in twentieth-century Finland.

Through written life stories of lone mothers, this article examines changes in lone motherhood in twentieth-century Finland. While the older life-story writers' narratives are clearly influenced by an 'ethos of survival' and the regulation of female sexuality, the younger writers relate their experiences with the help of scripts on gender equality and the psychological importance of 'good' parenting. These narrative shifts point to important changes in cultural scripts on women's positions in families, on the labour market, and in society.

Domestic relations in Brazil: legacies and horizons.

Grounded in literature review and an ethnographic study, this article examines contemporary Brazilian domestic life. Relations among women (employers and maids) and between women and men are analyzed with a focus on the home as a space in which gender, race, and class inequalities are constantly reproduced. The article argues that what happens in domestic life is constitutive of wider social divisions and that the domestic is a universe integral to the national social context. A case in point is the connection between the widespread use of paid domestic labor and the naturalization of black women as subservient, complementing the pairing of whiteness and class entitlement. Another case is the buffering role of maids in the development of gender conflicts in well-off homes, thus blurring gender hierarchies at a broader scale. Locating the domestic within the recent discussion on global domestic labor, the article compares particularities of Brazilian domestic life to those elsewhere.

Queer kinship practices in non-western contexts: French Polynesia's gender-variant parents and the law of La République.

French Polynesia is an overseas collectivity of France whose kinship practices accommodate transgender parenting through the involvement of gender-variant (mahu) people in childrearing, including as adoptive parents in customary (faamu) adoption. While the existence and visibility of gender-variant people in French Polynesia is well documented, there is no literature on their involvement in parenting, reflecting a more general dearth of research on LGBT parenting in non-Western contexts. Drawing on the author's fieldwork in French Polynesia, this article fills this gap. The article also discusses the negative implications of France's ambivalence towards LGBT parenting for French Polynesian gender-variant parents and the children they raise.

Intra-household conflicts in migration decisionmaking: return and pendulum migration in Morocco.

By analyzing the migration behavior and transnational residential strategies of first-generation, aging migrants from a particular Moroccan sending region, this study contributes to a conceptual critique of migration theories that identify the household as the most relevant decisionmaking unit. It highlights the role of intra-household power inequalities and conflicts in migration decisionmaking as well as the effects of migration decisions for intra-household power relations. Many labor migrants who left Morocco to work in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s did not realize their wish to return but instead ended up reunifying their families at the destination. An increasing proportion adopts a pendulum migration strategy to reconcile their own wish to retain strong ties with Morocco with the reluctance of children and spouses to return. Migrants who unilaterally decided not to reunify their families usually return after their active working life. However, this unilateral decision also blocks legal entry into Europe for their children, which has generated considerable intergenerational tensions.

Stem families and joint families in comparative historical perspective.

This note revisits the author's June 2009 PDR article, "Reconsidering the Northwest European family system." Using an array of contemporary and historical census microdata from around the world with simple controls for agricultural employment and demographic structure, I detected no significant differences in complex family structure between nineteenth-century Western Europe and North America and twentieth-century developing countries. This article adds two new measures designed to detect stem families and joint families. The results suggest that Western Europeans and North Americans have had a long-standing aversion to joint family living arrangements, and that this pattern cannot be easily ascribed to demographic and economic conditions.

Growing up without parents: socialisation and gender relations in orphaned-child-headed households in rural Zimbabwe.

The most distressing consequences of the HIV/AIDS pandemic's impact on children has been the development of child-headed households (CHHs). Child 'only' households challenge notions of the ideal home, family, and 'normal' childhood, as well as undermining international attempts to institute children's rights. The development of these households raises practical questions about how the children will cope without parental guidance during their childhood and how this experience will affect their adulthood. Drawing on ethnographic research with five child heads and their siblings, this article explores how orphaned children living in 'child only' households organise themselves in terms of household domestic and paid work roles, explores the socialisation of children by children and the negotiation of teenage girls' movement. Further, it examines whether the orphaned children are in some way attempting to 'mimic' previously existing family/household gender relations after parental death. The study showed that all members in the CHHs irrespective of age and gender are an integral part of household labour including food production. Although there is masculinisation of domestic chores in boys 'only' households, roles are distributed by age. On the other hand, households with a gender mix tended to follow traditional gender norms. Conflict often arose when boys controlled teenage girls' movement and sexuality. There is a need for further research on CHHs to better understand orphans' experiences, and to inform policy interventions.