Takes a comparative perspective on family life and childhood in the past half century in Russia and Eastern Europe, highlighting similarities and differences. Focuses on the problematic domains of ...the institutions and laws devised to cope with family difficulties, and discusses the social strains created by the transition from communist to post-communist national systems. In addition to the substantial historic analysis, actual challenges are also discussed. The essays examine the changing gender roles, alterations in legal systems, the burdens faced by married and unmarried women who are mothers, the contrasts between government rhteoric and the implementation of policies toward marriage, children and parenthood. By addressing the specifics of welfare politics under the Communist rule and the directions of their transformation in 1990–2000s, this book contributes to the understanding of social institutions and family policies in these countries and the problems of dealing with the socialist past that this region face.
Russia's Great Reforms of 1861 were sweeping social and legal changes that aimed to modernize the country. In the following decades, rapid industrialization and urbanization profoundly transformed ...Russia's social, economic, and cultural landscape. Barbara Alpern Engel explores the personal, cultural, and political consequences of these dramatic changes, focusing on their impact on intimate life and expectations and the resulting challenges to the traditional, patriarchal family order, the cornerstone of Russia's authoritarian political and religious regime. The widely perceived "marriage crisis" had far-reaching legal, institutional, and political ramifications. InBreaking the Ties That Bound, Engel draws on exceptionally rich archival documentation-in particular, on petitions for marital separation and the materials generated by the ensuing investigations-to explore changing notions of marital relations, domesticity, childrearing, and intimate life among ordinary men and women in imperial Russia.
Engel illustrates with unparalleled vividness the human consequences of the marriage crisis. Her research reveals in myriad ways that the new and more individualistic values of the capitalist marketplace and commercial culture challenged traditional definitions of gender roles and encouraged the self-creation of new social identities. Engel captures the intimate experiences of women and men of the lower and middling classes in their own words, documenting instances not only of physical, mental, and emotional abuse but also of resistance and independence. These changes challenged Russia's rigid political order, forcing a range of state agents, up to and including those who spoke directly in the name of the tsar, to rethink traditional understandings of gender norms and family law. This remarkable social history is thus also a contribution to our understanding of the deepening political crisis of autocracy.
What is a life worth? In the wake of eugenics, new quantitative racist practices that valued life for the sake of economic futures flourished. In The Economization of Life, Michelle Murphy ...provocatively describes the twentieth- century rise of infrastructures of calculation and experiment aimed at governing population for the sake of national economy, pinpointing the spread of a potent biopolitical logic: some must not be born so that others might live more prosperously. Resituating the history of postcolonial neoliberal technique in expert circuits between the United Statesand Bangladesh, Murphy traces the methods and imaginaries through which family planning calculated lives not worth living, lives not worth saving, and lives not worth being born. The resulting archive of thick data transmuted into financialized "Invest in a Girl" campaigns that reframed survival as a question of human capital. The book challenges readers to reject the economy as our collective container and to refuse population as a term of reproductive justice.
Lost to the state Rockhill, Elena Khlinovskaya
2010., 20101215, 2010, 2010-12-15, 20100101
eBook
Childhood held a special place in Soviet society: seen as the key to a better future, children were imagined as the only privileged class. Therefore, the rapid emergence in post-Soviet Russia of the ...vast numbers of vulnerable 'social orphans', or children who have living relatives but grow up in residential care institutions, caught the public by surprise, leading to discussions of the role and place of childhood in the new society. Based on an in-depth study the author explores dissonance between new post-Soviet forms of family and economy, and lingering Soviet attitudes, revealing social orphans as an embodiment of a long-standing power struggle between the state and the family. The author uncovers parallels between (post-) Soviet and Western practices in child welfare and attitudes towards 'bad' mothers, and proposes a new way of interpreting kinship where the state is an integral member.
Through nostalgic idealizations of motherhood, family, and the home, influential leaders in early twentieth-century America constructed and legitimated a range of reforms that promoted human ...reproduction. Their pronatalism emerged from a modernist conviction that reproduction and population could be regulated. European countries sought to regulate or encourage reproduction through legislation; America, by contrast, fostered ideological and cultural ideas of pronatalism through what Laura Lovett calls "nostalgic modernism," which romanticized agrarianism and promoted scientific racism and eugenics.Lovett looks closely at the ideologies of five influential American figures: Mary Lease's maternalist agenda, Florence Sherbon's eugenic "fitter families" campaign, George Maxwell's "homecroft" movement of land reclamation and home building, Theodore Roosevelt's campaign for conservation and country life, and Edward Ross's sociological theory of race suicide and social control. Demonstrating the historical circumstances that linked agrarianism, racism, and pronatalism, Lovett shows how reproductive conformity was manufactured, how it was promoted, and why it was coercive. In addition to contributing to scholarship in American history, gender studies, rural studies, and environmental history, Lovett's study sheds light on the rhetoric of "family values" that has regained currency in recent years.
Early care and education for many children in the U.S. is in crisis. The period between birth and kindergarten is a critical time for child development, and socioeconomic disparities that begin early ...in children's lives contribute to starkly different long-term outcomes for adults. Yet, compared to other advanced economies, high-quality child care and preschool in the U.S. are scarce and prohibitively expensive for many middle class and most disadvantaged families. To what extent can early-life interventions provide these children with the opportunities that their affluent peers enjoy and contribute to reduced social inequality in the long term? "Cradle to Kindergarten" offers a comprehensive, evidence-based strategy that diagnoses the obstacles to accessible early education and charts a path to opportunity for all children. The U.S. government invests less in children under the age of five than do most other developed nations. Most working families must seek private child care, which means that children from low-income households, who would benefit most from high-quality early education, are the least likely to attend them. Existing policies, such as pre-kindergarten in some states, are only partial solutions. To address these deficiencies, the authors propose to overhaul the early care system, beginning with a federal paid parental leave policy that provides both mothers and fathers with time and financial support after the birth of a child. They also advocate increased public benefits, including an expansion of the child care tax credit, and a new child care assurance program that subsidizes the cost of early care for low- and moderate-income families. They also propose that universal, high-quality early education in the states should start by age three, and a reform of the Head Start program that would include more intensive services for families living in areas of concentrated poverty and experiencing multiple adversities from the earliest point in these most disadvantaged children's lives. They conclude with an implementation plan and contend that these reforms are attainable within a ten-year timeline. Reducing educational and economic inequalities requires that all children have robust opportunities to learn, fully develop their capacities, and have a fair shot at success. "Cradle to Kindergarten" presents a blueprint for fulfilling this promise by expanding access to educational and financial resources at a critical stage of child development.
Why has progress toward gender equality in the workplace and at home stalled in recent decades? A growing body of scholarship suggests that persistently gendered workplace norms and policies limit ...men's and women's ability to create gender egalitarian relationships at home. In this article, we build on and extend prior research by examining the extent to which institutional constraints, including workplace policies, affect young, unmarried men's and women's preferences for their future work-family arrangements. We also examine how these effects vary across education levels. Drawing on original survey-experimental data, we ask respondents how they would like to structure their future relationships while experimentally manipulating the degree of institutional constraint under which they state their preferences. Two clear patterns emerge. First, as constraints are removed and men and women can opt for an egalitarian relationship, the majority choose this option, regardless of gender or education level. Second, women's relationship structure preferences are more responsive than men's to the removal of institutional constraints through supportive work-family policy interventions. These findings shed light on important questions about the role of institutions in shaping work-family preferences, underscoring the notion that seemingly gender-traditional work-family decisions are largely contingent on the constraints of current workplaces.
This article develops and empirically evaluates an institutional theory of gender inequalities in business start-up, ownership, and growth orientation. I argue that in contexts in which institutional ...arrangements such as paid leave, subsidized childcare, and part-time employment opportunities mitigate work-family conflict, women are less likely to opt for business ownership as a fallback employment strategy. As a result, women in these contexts may be relatively less well represented among entrepreneurs as a whole but more well represented in growth-oriented forms of entrepreneurship. To evaluate this claim, I analyze survey data from 24 countries over the span of eight years. Multilevel analyses show that supportive work–family institutions are associated with larger gender gaps in the odds of early-stage and established business ownership but smaller gender gaps among business owners in terms of their business size, growth aspirations, and propensity to innovate or use new technology. Consistent with my theoretical argument, women business owners are also less likely to report pursuing entrepreneurship because they lacked attractive employment options in contexts in which supportive institutions are in place. Findings suggest that institutional contexts characterized by salient work–family conflict may fuel women's aggregate representation in business activity but reinforce their segregation into less growth-oriented (and thus lower-status) ventures.
This study analyzes the impact of work-family policies (WFP) on job performance, and the possible moderating role of gender and family responsibilities. Hypothesis testing was performed using a ...structural equation model based on a PLS-SEM approach applied to a sample of 1511 employees of the Spanish banking sector. The results show that neither the existence nor the accessibility of the WFP has a direct, positive impact on performance, unlike what we expected, but both have an indirect effect via the well-being generated by these policies. We also find that neither gender nor family responsibilities have a significant moderating role on these relations, contrary to what we initially expected.
Objective
We examine how state spending on children is associated with the size of socioeconomic gaps in maternal childcare time.
Background
Persistent socioeconomic divides in the amount and nature ...of parental time with children have prompted consideration of the factors that mitigate inequalities within the family. At both the national and local levels, the welfare state plays an important role in structuring opportunities for children. Thus, it is important to understand the institutional factors that shape parental behavior. Yet, little research examines how the social safety net is associated with family processes.
Method
Using rich data on maternal time with children from the American Time Use Surveys (2003–2016), combined with longitudinal data on public spending in states on major programs affecting children and families, we examine how state spending on children is associated with the size of socioeconomic gaps in maternal childcare time.
Results
We found that higher levels of state spending were associated with significant increases in childcare time among low‐educated mothers at both the extensive and intensive margin, increasing the likelihood of spending any minutes on primary childcare in a typical day, as well as increasing the number of minutes spent on childcare. In contrast, we observed no variation in the behavior of highly educated mothers as state spending changes.
Implications
State‐level investments could meaningfully narrow socioeconomic gaps in maternal time with children.
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