Opting Out : : Women Messing with Marriage around the World / / ed. by Dinah Hannaford, Joanna Davidson.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2022 English
• MitwirkendeR: Berta, Péter,; Davidson, Joanna,; Freeman, Carla,; G'Sell, Brady,; G’Sell, Brady,; Hannaford, Dinah,; Jones, Carla,; Lamb, Sarah,; Medeiros, Melanie A.,; Nelson, Laura C.,; Pauli, Julia,; Solway, Jacqueline,; Takeyama, Akiko,; Walters, Kimberly,
• HerausgeberIn: Davidson, Joanna,; Hannaford, Dinah,
• Place / Publishing House: New Brunswick, NJ : : Rutgers University Press, , [2022]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (260 p.) :; 3 b&w images

Women around the world are opting out of marriage. Through nuanced ethnographic accounts of the ways that women are moving the needle on marital norms and practices, Opting Out reveals the conditions that make this widespread phenomenon possible in places where marriage has long been obligatory. Each chapter invites readers into the lives of particular women and the changing circumstances in which these lives unfold - sometimes painfully, sometimes humorously, and always unexpectedly. Taken together, the essays in this volume prompt the following questions: Why is marriage so consistently disappointing for women? When the rewards of economic stability and the social status that marriage confers are troubled, does marriage offer women anything compelling at all? Across diverse geographic contexts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this book offers sensitive and powerful portrayals of women as they escape or reshape marriage into a more rewarding arrangement.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Series Foreword -- Introduction -- PART ONE. Never Married -- 1. Almost Married -- 2. Single in Botswana -- 3. Freedom to Choose? -- 4. Single Women’s Invisibility in South Korea’s First Decades -- PART TWO. Outside of Marriage -- 5. Pathivratha Precarity -- 6. Respectability and Black Brazilian Women’s Decisions to “Opt Out” of Remarriage -- 7. The Upward Mobility of Matrifocality and the Enigma of Bajan Marriage -- 8. Messing with Remarriage -- PART THREE. Within Marriage -- 9. Extramarital Intimacy -- 10. “What’s Wrong with These Mens?” -- 11. The Appeal of Absent Husbands in Contemporary Senegal -- 12. “Not a Normal Wife” -- Acknowledgments -- References -- Notes on Contributors -- Index