1st Edition

Changing Family Values Difference, Diversity and the Decline of Male Order

Edited By Gill Jagger, Caroline Wright Copyright 1999

    Changing Family Values offers a comprehensive introduction to contemporary debates and new research surrounding the family. It explores how we define traditional family values and how these values are perceived as being underthreat in contemporary society. Ranging across politics, social policy, law and sociology, the contributors focus on the diverse realities of contemporary family life. Issues covered include:
    * the recent backlash against single mothers
    * lesbian and gay families and the law
    * men's changing roles within the family
    * the future of the nuclear family.
    This book is ideal for courses covering the family, a central topic in sociology and women's studies.

    Notes on contributors, Acknowledgements, Introduction: changing family values, 1 End of century, end of family?: shifting discourses of family‘ crisis’, 2 Men, heterosexuality and the changing family: (re)constructing fatherhood in law and social policy, 3 Will boys be left on the shelf?, 4 Lesbian and gay families: legal perspectives, 5 Poor choices?: gender, agency and the underclass debate, 6 ‘Family values’ and Conservative government policy: 1979–97, 7 Family values and the nation-state, 8 Unpicking political communitarianism: a critique of ‘the communitarian family’, 9 From modern nuclear family households to postmodern diversity? The sociological construction of ‘families’, 10 Virtual social science and the politics of family values in the United States, Name index, Subject index

    Biography

    Gill Jagger, Caroline Wright