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22 books match the query 'Divorce'
After the Divorce
Grazia Deledda
Northwestern University Press, 1995
Winner of the 1926 Nobel Prize for Literature
The novel begins with Costantino Ledda's conviction and sentencing for the murder of his cruel uncle. Though innocent of the crime, he accepts the guilty verdict as punishment for marrying Giovanna Era through a civil ceremony rather than an expensive church wedding. When her husband is taken away, Giovanna has no way to provide for herself, her mother, and her son, who soon dies of malnutrition. Out of desperation she divorces Costantino, according to a new law for wives of convicts, and marries a wealthy but brutish landowner. When the true murderer confesses and Costantino returns, he and Giovanna begin a forbidden and ultimately destructive affair.
Deleda's tragic story of poverty, passion, and guilt portrays the primitive and remote world of the church, pre-Christian superstitions, and laws dictated from the mainland, in her native Sardinia, where society hangs in a delicate balance. Once this order is disrupted, none of these characters can escape the spiral of destruction dictated by fate, God, and society.
Chapters on Marriage and Divorce
Responses of Ibn Hanbal and Ibn RahwayhTranslated with introduction and notes by Susan A. Spectorsky
University of Texas Press, 1993
While western-derived legal codes have superseded Islamic law in many parts of the Muslim world, Islamic, Koran-based law still retains its force in the area of marriage and family relations, the area that is key to the status of women. This work makes available for the first time in English three compilations of responses to questions about family law given by two prominent Muslim jurists of the ninth century (third century of Islam)—Ahmad b. Hanbal, the eponymous founder of the Hanbali rite of Sunni Islam (the one dominant in Saudi Arabia), and Ishaq b. Rahwayh. These compilations are basic sources for the study of the development of legal thinking in Islam.
The introduction to the translation locates the compilations in a historical context and elucidates how the various issues of family law are treated. An appendix contains a collation of the significant variants among the manuscripts and printed versions of the Arabic texts. The volume concludes with a topical index and an index of names.
Conjugal Rights
Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, GabonRachel Jean-Baptiste
Ohio University Press, 2014
Divorce Portals
The Postdivorce in Asian ContextsShalini Grover
Rutgers University Press, 2027
Across Asia and its global diasporas, marriage remains a dominant and public institution, and divorce generates widespread comment and concern. Breaking new ground, Divorce Portals reveals divorce to be generative of transformations in individual intimate lives and wider societies. Through compelling, sensitive ethnographic accounts inviting readers into the lives of people undergoing separation and divorce, chapters capture the antecedent-lives of uncoupling – the imaginary, anticipatory, and cautionary – and the afterlives of divorce, in the immediate aftermath and across life courses and generations. Chapters explore the vivid and bold new selves that divorcees are fashioning for themselves and highlight the intersecting inequalities that shape postdivorce predicaments, sometimes belying the hoped-for freedoms of divorce and remarriage. Together, chapters chart nascent and haltering accommodations of the single, repartnered, and queer. Across cases drawn from diverse geographic contexts, this book unlocks new, expansive, and accessible ways to think about divorce and its aftermath.
Edwardian Stories of Divorce
Janice Hubbard Harris
Rutgers University Press, 1996
Much as abortion in the United States today is a contentious issue used for scripting women's roles and potential into the national agenda, divorce was an issue dividing England in the Edwardian era. According to Janice Harris, anything and everything, from illicit sex and family values to the Garden of Eden, wrath of children, poverty of women, nature of cruelty, scandal of America, threat of Germany, and future of England were part of the debate over divorce. Living under marriage laws far more restrictive than those of their Protestant neighbors, Edwardian women and men campaigned for reform with a barrage of compelling stories. Organizing her analysis around three major sources of narrative on divorce––the Sunday papers, the Report of the Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial causes, and the novel––Harris uncovers a war of words and a competition of tales. In raising questions about the winners, losers, and spoils, Harris expands our understanding of the history of divorce, the wars between the sexes, and the political import of those wars.
In the end, she presents a complex and lively story herself, one that illuminates battles over marriage and divorce taking place in our own era as well. This humane book on a long-neglected subject marks an important contribution to narrative studies and Edwardian history.
Great Expectations
Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian AmericaElaine Tyler May
University of Chicago Press, 1983
Gross Misbehavior and Wickedness
A Notorious Divorce in Early Twentieth-Century AmericaJean Elson
Temple University Press, 2017
Gross Misbehavior and Wickedness—the charges Nina levied at James for his adultery (with the family governess) and extreme cruelty—recounts the protracted legal proceedings in juicy detail.
Jean Elson uses court documents, correspondence, journals, and interviews with descendants to recount the salacious case. In the process, she underscores how divorce—in an era when women needed husbands for economic support—was associated with women’s aspirations for independence and rights. The Walkers’ dispute, replete with plot twists and memorable characters, sheds light on a critical period in the evolution of American culture.
Intimate Disconnections
Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary JapanAllison Alexy
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Relating the intensely personal stories from people experiencing different stages of divorce, Alexy provides a rich ethnography of Japan while also speaking more broadly to contemporary visions of love and marriage during an era in which neoliberal values are prompting wide-ranging transformations in homes across the globe.
Islamic Divorce in the Twenty-First Century
A Global PerspectiveErin E. Stiles
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia
ChaeRan Y. Freeze
Brandeis University Press, 2001
Legislating the French Family
Feminism, Theater, and Republican Politics: 1870-1920Jean Elisabeth Pedersen
Rutgers University Press, 2003
Marriage In A Culture Of Divorce
Karla B. Hackstaff
Temple University Press, 1999
Marriage in a Culture of Divorce examines the shifting meanings of divorce and gender for two generations of middle-class, married couples. Hackstaff finds that new social and economic conditions both support and undermine the efforts of spouses to redefine the meaning of marriage in a culture of divorce. The definitions of marriage, divorce, and gender have changed for all, but more for the young than the old, and more for women than for men. While some spouses in both generations believe that marriage is for life and that men should dominate in marriage, the younger generation of spouses increasingly construct marriage as contingent rather than forever.
Hackstaff presents this evidence in archival case studies of couples married in the 1950s, which she then contrasts with her own case studies of people married during the 1970s, finding evidence of a significant shift in who does the emotional work of maintaining the relationship. It is primarily the woman in the '50s couples who "monitors" the marriage, whereas in the '70s couples both husband and wife support a "marital work ethic," including couples therapy in some cases.
The words and actions of the couples Hackstaff follows in depth - the '50s Stones, Dominicks, Hamptons, and McIntyres, and the '70s Turners, Clement-Leonettis, Greens, Kason-Morrises, and Nakatos -- reveal the changes and contradictory tendencies of married life in the U.S. There are traditional relationships characterized by male dominance, there are couples striving for gender equality, there are partners pulling together, and partners pulling apart.
Those debating "family values" should not forget, Hackstaff contends, that there are costs associated with marriage culture as well as divorce culture, and they should view divorce as a transitional means for defining marriage in an egalitarian direction. She convincingly illustrates her controversial position, that although divorce has its cost to society, the divorce culture empowers wives and challenges the legacy of male dominance that previously set the conditions for marriage endurance.
Marriage and Divorce in the Jewish State
Israel's Civil WarSusan M. Weiss and Netty C. Gross-Horowitz
Brandeis University Press, 2012
Marriage, Divorce, and Distress in Northeast Brazil
Black Women's Perspectives on Love, Respect, and KinshipMedeiros, Melanie A.
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Money, Marriage, and Madness
The Life of Anna OttKim E. Nielsen
University of Illinois Press, 2020
Kim E. Nielsen explores a life at once irregular and unexceptional. Historical and institutional structures, like her whiteness and laws that liberalized divorce and women's ability to control their property, opened up uncommon possibilities for Ott. Other structures, from domestic violence in the home to rampant sexism and ableism outside of it, remained a part of even affluent women's lives. Money, Marriage, and Madness tells a forgotten story of how the legal and medical cultures of the time shaped one woman—and what her life tells us about power and society in nineteenth century America.
Raw Edges
A MemoirPhyllis Barber
University of Nevada Press, 2012
When Phyllis Barber’s thirty-three-year marriage ended, she had to redefine herself as a woman, a mother, and an artist. Raw Edges is her moving account of the “lean years” that followed her divorce. It is interwoven with a narrative of the marriage of two gifted people that begins with “sealing” in a Mormon temple, endures through the birth of four sons and the development of two careers, and founders when the couple’s personal needs no longer match their aspirations or the rigid strictures of Mormon life. Raw Edges reflects the predicament that many women experience as their marriages disintegrate and they fail to achieve their own expectations as well as those set by their society and their faith. It is also a story of hope, of how a woman overcome by grief and confusion eventually finds a new approach to life.
Recovering Origins
A Unique Healing Program for Adult Children of DivorceMargaret Harper McCarthy
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
Sacred Divorce
Religion, Therapeutic Culture, and Ending Life PartnershipsJenkins, Kathleen E
Rutgers University Press, 2014
For more than five years, Jenkins observed religious support groups and workshops for the divorced and interviewed religious practitioners in the midst of divorces, along with clergy members who advised them. Her findings appear here in the form of eloquent and revealing stories about individuals managing emotions in ways that make divorce a meaningful, even sacred process. Clergy from mainline Protestant denominations to Baptist churches, Jewish congregations, Unitarian fellowships, and Catholic parishes talk about the concealed nature of divorce in their congregations. Sacred Divorce describes their cautious attempts to overcome such barriers, and to assemble meaningful symbols and practices for members by becoming compassionate listeners, delivering careful sermons, refitting existing practices like Catholic annulments and Jewish divorce documents (gets), and constructing new rituals.
With attention to religious, ethnic, and class variations, covering age groups from early thirties to mid-sixties and separations of only a few months to up to twenty years, Sacred Divorce offers remarkable insight into individual and cultural responses to divorce and the social emotions and spiritual strategies that the clergy and the faithful employ to find meaning in the breach. At once a sociological document, an ethnographic analysis, and testament of personal experience, Sacred Divorce provides guidance, strategies and answers to readers looking for answers and those looking to heal.
Silent Revolution
The Transformation of Divorce Law in the United StatesHerbert Jacob
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Since 1966, divorce laws in the United States have undergone a radical transformation. No-fault divorce is now universally available. Alimony functions simply as a brief transitional payment to help a dependent spouse become independent. Most states divide assets at divorce according to a community property scheme, and, whenever possible, many courts prefer to award custody of children to the mother and the father jointly.
These changes in policy represent a profound departure from traditional American values, and yet the legislation by which they were enacted was treated as a technical correction of minor problems. No-fault divorce, for example, was a response to the increasing number of fraudulent divorce petitions. Since couples were often forced to manufacture the evidence of guilt that many states required, and since judges frequently looked the other way, legal reformers sought no more than to bring divorce statutes into line with current practice.
On the basis of such observations, Jacob formulates a new theory of routine—as opposed to conflictual—policy-making processes. Many potentially controversial policies—divorce law reforms among them—pass unnoticed in America because legislators treat them as matters of routine. Jacob's is indeed the most plausible account of the enormous number and steady flow of policy decisions made by state legislatures. It also explains why no attention was paid to the effect divorce reform would have on divorced women and their children, a subject that has become increasingly controversial and that, consequently, is not likely to be handled by the routine policy-making process in the future.
The Illusion of Equality
The Rhetoric and Reality of Divorce ReformMartha Albertson Fineman
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Uneven Developments
The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian EnglandMary Poovey
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Asserting that the organization of sexual difference is a social, not natural, phenomenon, Poovey shows how representations of gender took the form of a binary opposition in mid-Victorian culture. She then reveals the role of this opposition in various discourses and institutions—medical, legal, moral, and literary. The resulting oppositions, partly because they depended on the subordination of one term to another, were always unstable. Poovey contends that this instability helps explain why various institutional versions of binary logic developed unevenly. This unevenness, in turn, helped to account for the emergence in the 1850s of a genuine oppositional voice: the voice of an organized, politicized feminist movement.
Drawing on a wide range of sources—parliamentary debates, novels, medical lectures, feminist analyses of work, middle-class periodicals on demesticity—Poovey examines various controversies that provide glimpses of the ways in which representations of gender were simultaneously constructed, deployed, and contested. These include debates about the use of chloroform in childbirth, the first divorce law, the professional status of writers, the plight of governesses, and the nature of the nursing corps. Uneven Developments is a contribution to the feminist analysis of culture and ideology that challenges the isolation of literary texts from other kinds of writing and the isolation of women's issues from economic and political histories.
Unfit For Marriage
Impotent Spouses On Trial In The Basque Region Of Spain, 1650-1750Edward J. Behrend-Martinez
University of Nevada Press, 2014
The Catholic Church of early modern Europe intended the sacrament of matrimony to represent a lifelong commitment, and it allowed few grounds for the dissolution of an unhappy marriage. One was nonconsummation owing to the sexual impotency of one of the partners. Even then, an annulment was granted only after a church court had conducted a lengthy investigation of the case, soliciting testimony from numerous witnesses as well as from the aggrieved couple, and had subjected the allegedly impotent spouse (and sometimes both spouses) to an intimate physical examination.
Edward J. Behrend-Martinez has studied the transcripts of eighty-three impotency trials conducted by the ecclesiastical court of Calahorra (La Rioja), a Spanish diocese with urban and rural parishes, both Basque and Castilian. From these records, he draws a detailed, fascinating portrait of private life and public sexuality in early modern Europe. These trials were far more than a salacious inquiry into the intimate details of other people’s lives. The church valued marital sex as a cornerstone of stable society, intended not only for procreation but also for maintaining domestic harmony. Every couple’s sex life, however private in practice or intention, was a matter of public and ecclesiastical concern. Unfit for Marriage offers vivid accounts of marital sex and the role that property, gender, and personal preference played in marriage in early modern Europe. It is essential reading for anyone interested in social history, sexuality, gender studies, canon law, legal history, and the history of divorce in western Europe.