American Families: A Multicultural Reader / Edition 2

by Stephanie Coontz

Overview

In the past forty years, American families have become more racially and ethnically diverse than ever before. Different family forms and living arrangements have also multiplied, with single-parent families, cohabiting couples with children, divorced couples with children, stepfamilies, and newly-visible same-sex families. During the same period, socioeconomic inequality among families has risen to levels not seen since the 1920s.

This second edition of American Families offers several benefits:

• clear conceptual focus
• new attention to the historical origins of contemporary family diversity
• well-chosen essays by leading names from across the curriculum
• explores the interactions between race-ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality in shaping family life
• cCompletely updated and expanded bibliography of related sources
• new companion website with student and instructor resources to enhance learning.

Leading off with a comprehensive and teachable introduction to the topic, this completely updated, revised, and expanded second edition of Stephanie Coontz's classic collection American Families remains the best resource available on family diversity in America.

For additional information and classroom resources please visit the American Families companion website at www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415958219.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415958202
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/06/2008
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	484
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Stephanie Coontz is Professor of Family History at the Evergreen State College. She is the author of numerous books, including Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage.

Maya Parson is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Gabrielle Raley is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Stephanie Coontz -- Introduction

I. THE AMERICAN TRADITION OF FAMILY DIVERSITY

Bonnie Thornton Dill -- Fictive Kin, Paper sons, and Compadrazgo:

Women of Color and the Struggle for Family Survival

David Wallace Adams -- Excerpts

from Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928

Niara Sudarkasa -- Interpreting the African Heritage in Afro-American Family Organization

Evelyn Nakano Glenn -- Split Household. Small Producer and Dual Wage

Earner: An Analysis of Chinese-American Family Strategies

Stephanie Coontz -- Working Class Families, 1870-1890

George J. Sanchez -- Excerpts from Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945

Jacqueline

Jones -- Southern Diaspora: Origins of the Northern "Underclass"

II. INTEGRATING RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER INTO FAMILY THEORY

Rayna Rapp -- Family and Class in Contemporary America: Notes Toward an Understanding of Ideology

Patricia Hill Collins --

Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood

Karen Brodkin Sacks -- Toward a Unified Theory of Class, Race, and Gender

Maxine Baca Zinn -- Social Science Theorizing for Latino Families in the Age of Diversity

III. WORKING CLASS

AND INNER-CITY FAMILIES UNDER ECONOMIC STRESS

Thomas Sugrue -- Poor Families in an Era of Urban Transformation: The "Underclass" Family in Myth and Reality

Gabrielle Raley -- No Good Choices: Teenage Childbearing, Concentrated Poverty, and Welfare Reform

Lillian B. Rubin -- Excerpts from Families on the Fault Line: America's Working Class Speaks About the Family, the Economy, Race and Ethnicity

IV. GLOBALIZATION AND THE NEW IMMIGRANT FAMILIES

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo -- Women and Children First: New

Directions in Anti-Immigrant Politics

Grace Chang -- Global Exchange: The World Bank, "Welfare Reform," and the Global Trade in Filipina Workers

Nazli Kibria -- Migration and Vietnamese American Women: Remaking Ethnicity V. WORK-FAMILY ISSUES

Sarah

Ryan -- Management by Stress: The Reorganization of Work Hits Home in the 1990s

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Michael A. Messner -- Gender Displays and Men's Power: The "New Man" and the Mexican Immigrant Man

Tamara Anderson and Beth Vail --

Child Care Dilemmas in Contemporary Families

VI. FAMILY DIVERSITY: NEW MODELS AND OLD

Judith Stacey -- Gay and Lesbian Families are Here; All Our Families are Queer; Let's Get Used to It!

Beverly Greene and Nancy Boyd-Franklin -- African American

Lesbians: Issues in Couples Therapy

Michelle Harrison -- Social Construction of Mary Beth Whitehead

Barbara Katz Rothman -- Comment on Harrison: The Commodification of Motherhood

Maria P. P. Root -- Resolving "Other" Status: Identity Development of

Biracial Individuals

Margaret Crosbie-Burnett and William Julius Wilson -- Use of African- American Family Structures and Functioning to Address the Challenges of European-American Postdivorce Families

VII. RECOGNIZING DIVERSITY, ENCOURAGING SOLIDARITY

Roger Lawson and William Julius Wilson -- Poverty, Social Rights, and the Quality of Citizenship

Stephen Steinberg --The Case for a Race Specific Policy

Judith Stacey -- The Family Values Fable

African-American Family)

Editorial Reviews

'What a collection of articles! Stephanie Coontz has gathered together the writing of many of the most important scholars of our time to address one of the most important issues of our time – the growing diversity of American families. A great choice for undergraduate classrooms and an addition to any scholar’s bookshelf.' – Barbara J. Risman, Author of Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition

'American Families provides a powerful exploration of the challenges facing contemporary families. From the historical roots of inequality to tools to theorize the meanings of difference, this collection provides engaging readings that illustrate American past and present struggles, laced with hope for the future.' – Jennifer A. Reich, Author of Fixing Families: Parents, Power, and the Child Welfare System

 

'American Families is a marvel – the authors have identified some the very best and clearest new scholarship. The book affords an accurate, thoughtful and thought-provoking glimpse at family life in the US as it really is.' –- Linda Gordon, Author of The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction

'The book is ideal for undergraduate teaching purposes. Family researchers, however, will also want to have this in-depth yet accessible resource on their shelves. Beyond the substantive findings presented, several chapters do a great job of synthesizing a range of scholarship related to family diversity and outlining potentially fruitful avenues for subsequent theorizing and research. I highly recommend this volume. Several articles left me wanting more, excited about the unanswered questions and future research possibilities related to family diversity. Coontz's volume takes a big leap forward in shifting issues of diversity to the center of family research.' –- Jennifer Utrata, Assistant Professor, University of Puget Sound, in the Journal of Marriage and Family

What a collection of articles! Stephanie Coontz has gathered together the writing of many of the most important scholars of our time to address one of the most important issues of our time—the growing diversity of American Families. A great choice for undergraduate classrooms and an addition to any scholar’s bookshelf.

—Barbara J. Risman, author of Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition

American Families provides a powerful exploration of the challenges facing contemporary families. From the historical roots of inequality to tools to theorize the meanings of difference, this collection provides engaging readings that illustrate American past and present struggles, laced with hope for the future.

—Jennifer A. Reich, author of Fixing Families: Parents, Power, and the Child Welfare System (Routledge)

 

American Families is a marvel—the authors have identified some the very best and clearest new scholarship. The book affords an accurate, thoughtful and thought-provoking glimpse at family life in the US as it really is.

—Linda Gordon, author of The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction

From the Publisher

This is the best single-volume guide I know to the way we live now. -- Nation

Katha Pollitt

This book, which arose from the demands of Coontz's family history course at Evergreen State College, continues the project Coontz ably began in four previous monographs (most recently, The Way We Really Are, LJ 4/1/97). The 29 chapters have been multifariously culled, many excerpted from books, with the aim of showing varieties of family life when factors of race, class, gender, locale, and different historical periods are considered independently. There are, for instance, chapters about African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Filipinas, Vietnamese, Chinese, immigrants, lesbians, motherhood, the poor, teenage mothers, and class consciousness in various times and places. There are no articles about middle- or upper-class families or those of northern European origin. Some of the authors are well known (e.g., W.J. Wilson, Thomas J. Sugrue), while others are newcomers. With nothing quite like it in its breadth of treatment, this is an excellent resource for college students or the engaged reader looking for a scholarly introduction.--Janice Dunham, John Jay Coll. Lib., New York

Library Journal

A reader for a two-quarter seminar on race, class, and gender in family scholarship. Selections shed light on debates in family diversity, revealing that in every historical period, the US has had several distinct but interconnected family systems, all of which form part of a larger constellation of power relations, unequal access to resources, and struggles over ideological representations of family life. Topics include American Indians and the boarding school experience, social science theorizing for Latino families, gay and lesbian families, and biracial identity. No index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)

Booknews