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Megan Sweeney tells an intimate story about family, selfhood, and love and loss, showing how her lifetime practice of sewing and mending clothes becomes a way of living.

This book features in-depth oral interviews with eleven incarcerated women, each of whom offers a narrative of her life and her reading experiences within prison walls. The women share powerful stories about their complex and diverse efforts to negotiate difficult relationships, exercise agency in restrictive circumstances, and find meaning and beauty in the midst of pain. Their shared emphases on abuse, poverty, addiction, and mental illness illuminate the pathways that lead many women to prison and suggest possibilities for addressing the profound social problems that fuel crime. Framing the narratives within an analytic introduction and reflective afterword, the editor highlights the crucial intellectual work that the incarcerated women perform despite myriad restrictions on reading and education in U.S. prisons. These women use the limited reading materials available to them as sources of guidance and support and as tools for self-reflection and self-education. Through their creative engagements with books, the women learn to reframe their own life stories, situate their experiences in relation to broader social patterns, deepen their understanding of others, experiment with new ways of being, and maintain a sense of connection with their fellow citizens on both sides of the prison fence.

Sweeney examines how incarcerated women read three popular genres of books-- narratives of victimization, urban crime fiction, and self-help books--to come to terms with their pasts, negotiate their present experiences, and reach toward different futures. She outlines the history of reading and education in U.S. prisons, highlighting how the increasing dehumanization of prisoners has resulted in diminished prison libraries and restricted opportunities for reading

Sweeney examines how incarcerated women read three popular genres of books-- narratives of victimization, urban crime fiction, and self-help books--to come to terms with their pasts, negotiate their present experiences, and reach toward different futures. She outlines the history of reading and education in U.S. prisons, highlighting how the increasing dehumanization of prisoners has resulted in diminished prison libraries and restricted opportunities for reading.

This research draws on extensive data from the General Social Survey (GSS) and the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) to shed new light on change and variability in family life. I address two overarching questions. First, how did variability in marriage timing change over the course of the twentieth century? Second, did changes in the variability of marriage timing occur broadly across socioeconomic groups, or have they been limited to the top or bottom of the socioeconomic ladder? Because identifying consistent measures of socioeconomic standing over broad historical periods is not straightforward, and because one's own socioeconomic standing may be in part flow from marriage decisions, I triangulate results using multiple measures of social standing. Although the magnitude and timing of changes in age of first marriage vary somewhat across social class, my results point to generally similar underlying trends across class groups. Social class variation in marriage patterns is well documented, yet explanations for the changing variability in marriage timing over the course of the twentieth century also needs to consider factors that could have affected all social class groups to some extent.

In what ways do childbearing patterns in the contemporary United States vary for white, black, and Hispanic women? Why do these differences exist? Although completed family size is currently similar for white and black women, and only modestly larger for Hispanic women, we highlight persistent differences across groups with respect to the timing of childbearing, the relationship context of childbearing, and the extent to which births are intended. We next evaluate key explanations for these differences. Guided by a proximate determinants approach, we focus here on patterns of sexual activity, contraceptive use, and postconception outcomes such as abortion and changes in mothers' relationship status. We find contraceptive use to be a particularly important contributor to racial and ethnic differences in childbearing, yet reasons for varying contraception use itself remain insufficiently understood. We end by reflecting on promising directions for further research.

BACKGROUND Discussions of cohabitation's place in family formation regimes frequently emphasize comparisons of reproductive behavior among married versus cohabiting couples. Many argue that the rise in cohabitation may have been fueled by availability of highly effective contraception, but that differences in contraceptive use between married and cohabiting couples should diminish as cohabitation becomes more established. OBJECTIVE We ask whether cohabiting women in the United States, Spain, and France are more likely than married women in these countries to use the most effective contraceptive methods and reversible methods. We also investigate whether the association between union status and contraceptive use has changed since the mid-1990s. METHODS Using data from the U.S. National Survey of Family Growth, the Spanish Fertility, Family and Values Survey, the French Gender and Generations Survey, and the Fertility and Family Surveys, we first descriptively compare contraceptive use patterns of cohabiting women to those of married women and then estimate regression models to adjust for group differences in key background factors. RESULTS Net of differences in age and parity, cohabitors were more likely than married women to use the most effective contraceptives in the mid-1990s' United States and France, yet notably not in Spain even when cohabitation was relatively uncommon. The case of Spain thus refutes the assumption that highly effective contraception is a necessary precursor for dramatic growth in cohabitation. ; We gratefully acknowledge funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 320116 for the research project FamiliesAndSocieties and from the European Research Council via an ERC Consolidator Grant REPROGENE (615603 awarded to M. Mills) ; Peer reviewed