What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Labor migration was a common strategy for Portuguese families at the turn of the twentieth century. For married migrants, it was a gendered strategy that combined male labor abroad with female management of the home. Separation created tensions and led to negotiations of marital roles and expectations. For families separated by migration, letters provided the main vehicle to express, maintain, and restore affective ties in a transnational context, as well as to discuss strategies and decisions within shared understandings of love, duty, and reciprocity. This chapter analyzes the language of emotions used to convey ideas of migration as a family project, to sustain affective relations, and to nurture emotional connections. It focuses on expressions of responsibility and sacrifice as gendered manifestations of transnational affect

Marabel Morgan Defines “The Total Woman”

In 1973, Marabel Morgan published the phenomenally successful evangelical marriage manual Total Woman. Morgan has always insisted that she had no political intention in publishing this book, but its traditionalist vision of marital roles meant that she was very quickly drawn into contemporary arguments about gender, family, and feminism. The boundaries of the political realm were shifting in the 1970s, as Morgan’s experience demonstrates. This chapter traces the mid-twentieth-century development of a national evangelical women’s subculture that produced figures like Morgan and disseminated conservative ideas about gender and family in the purportedly apolitical venues of marital advice, women’s magazines, and inspirational conferences.

Somethin’ Went Hard agin Her Mind

Freedmen and freedwomen suffered emotionally and materially after emancipation, even while many of the circumstances related to enslavement that had triggered their suffering as slaves ended. Like southern whites, they had lived in a war zone and suffered from the exigencies of civil war: deprivation, starvation, and dislocation. New obstacles, too, emerged as the formerly enslaved experienced freedom: they lacked shelter, food, medical care, and stable employment. The path to freedom was strewn with new obstacles: uncertainty, negotiating new terms of employment, redefining marital roles and relationships, racial violence and abuse. Many freed African Americans struggled emotionally and psychologically under the new conditions of emancipation and entered insane asylums or became suicidal. Despite increasing numbers of black patients in asylums and a purported ‘rise in insanity’ among blacks, southern whites continued to believe the region’s black population was impervious to melancholy because they were an inferior, content, uncivilized race whose simple needs were met. Instead, insane blacks were deemed ‘manic,’ a condition resulting from ex-slaves receiving freedom and responsibilities they were ill-equipped to handle. A racialized construction of suffering and mental illness emerged after the war; melancholy and suicide were reserved for whites, madness and mania for southern blacks.

Marital Relationship in Greek Families Raising a Child with a Severe Disability

Introducción. El objetivo del estudio fue examinar los aspectos importantes de la relación marital: satisfacción marital, la representación del cónyuge de la relación marital, roles y límites en las familias con un niño con una discapacidad grave. Además, este estudio compara las familias con un niño con una discapacidad grave a los que tienen hijos sin discapacidad, con las mismas características.Método. La muestra se compone de 120 participantes provenientes de familias nucleares (30 parejas con un niño con una discapacidad severa y 30 parejas con niños sin discapacidad) de una clase socio-económica media y con residencia permanente en la isla de Rodas (Grecia). Este trabajo constituye una investigación cualitativa con elementos cuantitativos comparativos. Los datos fueron recolectados a través de la Escala de Felicidad Μarital y entrevistas semi-estructuradas.Resultados. Los resultados sugieren que no hay diferencias estadísticamente significativas entre los grupos en su relación marital, sin embargo, el matrimonio, en las parejas con un niño con discapacidad está, en gran parte, determinada por las necesidades del niño. Aunque las madres de niños con discapacidad severa realizan la mayoría de las responsabilidades relacionadas con los niños, las parejas parecen salvaguardar su equilibrio mediante la realización de funciones altamente complementarias.Conclusión. Hay más similitudes que diferencias entre las parejas que crían niños con o sin discapacidad respecto a la satisfacción marital, asignación de funciones, la representación de la relación marital y límites. Los futuros esfuerzos de investigación deben dirigirse al estudio de la relación marital con el objetivo de la familia, los profesionales médicos y los educadores para incluir a los cónyuges en la evaluación y tratamiento del niño con una discapacidad grave, para incorporar a las familias en la atención del niño y la educación.

Single Women and the Transition to Marriage in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo

This paper considers the transition to adulthood in East Asia by exploring the experiences of single women between the ages of 25 and 45 years in the cities of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo. The paper argues that single women encounter difficulties negotiating marriage in the three cities due to problems in marriage markets, expectations of fertility upon marriage, and conflicts between educational and employment opportunities and marital roles. It also finds that in the three cities, women articulated two models of marriage, namely, a gender duty model based on expectations of gendered role fulfilment and a companionate model. The paper suggests that the specific configuration of marriage models differs in the three cities due to differences in the historical and social backgrounds of the cities and the larger national and regional contexts.