Suchergebnisse

"The first history of American adulthood, The Prime of Life examines how succeeding generations of Americans dealt with the primary tasks of adulthood: Navigating the passage from youth to maturity, achieving intimacy and connection, raising the next generation, experiencing work's pleasures and pains, and wresting meaning from life's losses and stresses. Highly attentive to class, ethnicity, gender, and race, this book draws upon a wealth of private letters and other previously untapped sources to challenge a host of misconceptions that distort public thinking today. These include the myths that the transition to adulthood was smoother and more seamless in the past and that adulthood was more stable and predictable than it has since become. But this book does something more. It underscores women's historical role in driving fundamental changes in attitudes toward love, friendship, marriage, childrearing, and work. It demonstrates the ways that social class has differentiated adult experience. It also reconstructs the emotional interior of a life stage too often treated as fit only for self-help books or novels dealing with the travails of the suburban middle class. It not only recaptures adulthood's joys and disappointments, its hopes and frustrated expectations, its soaring dreams and bitter regrets, it demonstrates that development across the life span is shaped less by psychology than by cultural and historical circumstances"--Provided by publisher

Steven Mintz reconstructs the emotional interior of a life stage too often relegated to self-help books and domestic melodramas. He describes the challenges of adulthood today and puts them into perspective by exploring how past generations achieved intimacy and connection, raised children, sought meaning in work, and responded to loss.

Steven Mintz lays out some of the complex ways age functions, both to describe expected processes of maturation and to allot legal statuses and categories of responsibility. Like other scholars, he likens the category of age to that of gender as a way to organize power, but points out that age has less definitional power than gender and has undergone more change over time as a prescriptive system. He sees age, paradoxically, as gaining power as a prescriptive system while gender loses it.-M.S.

The article offers an interpretive synthesis of recent scholarship on family law and government regulation of the family. It traces changes in family law from the colonial era to the present and concludes with an analysis of family law as a discourse involving four broad themes: the law's social functions; the social values upheld by law; the relative responsibility of private individuals and the larger society for enforcing values; and the ways in which the law intervenes in family affairs.