Suchergebnisse

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.