I have the good fortune of serving as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Council on Contemporary Families, an organization that has as its goal to make good research and practitioner knowledge on families more visible to more audiences. Our 18^th Conference, Families As They Really Are: Demographics, Disparities, and Debates, held at the University of Texas at Austin on March 4 and 5, was a wonderful way to make this enhanced visibility of new findings about families happen.

As I listened to the insightful presentations, many of which thoughtfully referenced each other as the conference unfolded, I discovered a theme threaded throughout: Understanding contemporary families’ lives as they really are requires making invisible things more visible, especially as we discuss demographics, disparities and debates in family research, policy, and practice.

And here is how that happened.

First, some presenters showed the audience that there is invisibility of resources for some families, thus furthering disparities between groups. Our first keynote address, offered by Wendy Manning, helped us see how the amount of support in communities in which LGB families live can shape their relationship stability – more visible perceived support means more stability. We learned from Jenifer Bratter and Ellen Whitehead that grandparent support for mothers of biracial children is less visible than it is for mothers whose children are one race, complicating the notion that we are becoming a postracial society. Marcia Carlson showed how family-friendly policies for non-married parents are less visible in the U.S. as compared to many other countries. Carla Pfeffer presented her qualitative findings about women whose boyfriends and husbands haven’t always been recognized as men, leading to feelings of invisibility as they are pushed out of gay and lesbian social spaces. Liana Sayer drew attention to the lack of leisure time for families who have high work and family demands and exposed the invisible role of television use as a dominant (though declining) leisure time activity. And Debra Umberson’s presentation on the racialized impact of death on surviving family members struck an emotional chord with the audience when she asked us to think about how powerful an impact race is on family resources when African-Americans are disproportionately rendered literally invisible through premature death.

Second, presentations focused on the invisibility of entire groups and categories from demographic research on, and practice with, families.  Our second keynote address, offered by Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, included findings from diversitydatakids.org – a project she directs that has as its goal to make data, policies, and programs that enhance outcomes for disadvantaged children more visible to scholars, practitioners, and families. Kelly Raley’s work on marriage rates showed how women without a college degree need to be more visible in research questions about women’s likelihood to marry, which is crucial to highlight since the decline in women ever married is concentrated among the least advantaged. And Daniel Carlson’s work on household division of labor showed how the increasingly visible population of men who do more housework than their female partners (a counter-conventional arrangement, which means it’s still less visible than women doing more housework) may be more about unemployment patterns than men’s preferences to participate more in household labor.

Third, presenters highlighted how their work asked new questions, thus revealing the Invisibility of research questions that get at new ways to see the complexity of actual family experiences and debates. Fenaba Addo’s research on young adults’ decisions about money showed us that the role of financial decision-making in the process of deciding to cohabit is less visible in research than outcomes, finding that combining a credit card account with a cohabiting partner may elicit warning signals because it is a debt that does not build joint capital (like a mortgage does). Sharon Sassler’s presentation highlighted that what’s missing from research on cohabitation is the paradox that less-educated couples may find living together initially attractive and advantageous, but in the long run the relationship is less stable than it is for college-educated individuals. Zhenchao Qian’s work on marital endogamy rendered visible the finding that foreign-born Hispanics reinforce Hispanic boundaries while U.S.-born Hispanics are more likely to make visible multiple paths of marital assimilation across races and ethnic groups. And Yolanda Padilla’s work on remittances for immigrants (mostly Mexican and Central American), made visible the strength of ties between immigrant families and their families at home, something that counters the misperception that immigrants sever social ties before coming to the U.S.

The presentations, along with a collection of stellar graduate student flash sessions and a panel on debates about poverty, early childcare, and reproductive health policy, made visible many formerly invisible counter-intuitive claims about families. This is where the conference theme, indeed the ethos of CCF, really shines. In order to understand families as they really are, we must continue to push our research and practice into new lines of questioning with new data, new groups of people, new interventions, and new ideas for removing disadvantages for families so that they can thrive.

So, what was visible at this year’s CCF Conference in Austin? Excitement, engagement, and energy. And not just because of the breakfast tacos. This year’s Media Awards winners, Ashley Cleek from Al Jazeera America and Dan Carsen from Alabama’s NPR Station WBHM, exemplified the mission of CCF in their acceptance speeches. Both highlighted how their work as journalists is to make counter-intuitive and surprising findings about families more apparent, even if it doesn’t seem like breaking news.

To me, the 2016 CCF Conference has done precisely that, in large part due to the amazing work of conference organizers Kristi Williams and Corinne Reczek, as well as members of the UT Executive Office and all of the UT sponsors. Let’s continue the CCF project of making visible the latest greatest (and perhaps surprising) research and practice on families to a wide audience.

If you want to find the titles of the works and affiliations of the presenters I reference here, please browse the conference program at https://contemporaryfamilies.org/2016-ccf-conference/2016-ccf-conference-program/.

Originally printed on The Conversation.

Last month, Tom Porton, an award-winning, veteran Bronx high school teacher, handed in his resignation after colliding with the school’s principal. Porton had distributed HIV/AIDS education fliers listing nonsexual ways of “Making Love Without Doin’ It” (including advice to “read a book together”).

What does it say when a teacher who encourages students to discuss nonsexual ways to express love causes controversy? And how do discussions at school about sex affect teenagers? Do adults lose teenagers’ trust when they are not allowed to speak frankly about how to create healthy intimacy?

My cross-national research on adolescent sexuality shows a profound discomfort in American society not just with teenage sex, but with teenage love. And the silence among adults that results – in families, schools and the culture at large – may take a particular toll on adolescent boys.

What does love have to do with it? 

Political battles have raged for decades about whether and how public school students in the U.S. should be taught about condoms and other forms of contraception even though the majority of American youth lose their virginity during their teenage years.

The United States has seen more political strife and cultural controversy around adolescent sexuality than many other countries that went through a sexual revolution in the 1960s and ‘70’s. The Netherlands is an interesting comparative case: Like the U.S., Dutch society was culturally conservative in the 1950s. But Dutch society emerged from the sexual revolution with a more positive approach to adolescent sexuality, one that center-stages love.

American curricula tend to focus on physical acts and dangers – disease and pregnancy – often eschewing positive discussions of sexual pleasure or emotional intimacy.

Feminist scholars have critiqued American sex education for its overemphasis of danger and risk, noting the cost to teenage girls. Scholars have argued that the “missing discourse” of girls’ desire impedes their sense of power in and outside of relationships, leaving them poorly equipped to negotiate consent, safety and sexual satisfaction.

But scholars have paid less attention to the missing discourse of teenage love in American sex education, and its effects on boys, who confront a broader culture that provides scant recognition of, or support for, their emotional needs.

In comparison, sex education in the Netherlands tends to frame boys’ and girls’ sexual development in the context of their feelings for and relationships with others. Curricula include discussions of fun and exciting feelings. They also validate young people’s experience of love.

For example, the title of a widely used Dutch sex education curriculum is “Long Live Love, which is notable both for the celebration of sexual development, and for couching that development in terms of love.

Another example is of a PBS News Hour video, which shows a Dutch teacher engaging a group of 11-year olds in a conversation about what it feels like to be in love, and the proper protocol for breaking up (not via text message).

After watching the video, a male student at the University of Massachusetts spoke wistfully about what was missing from his own sex education experiences, stating, with a hint of outrage in his voice, “No one talks with us about love!”

‘Dirty little boys, get away!’ 

The differences between American and Dutch sex education curricula reflect broader cultural differences in the ways adults talk about young people and their motivations.

In interviews I conducted with Dutch and American parents of high school sophomores, the Dutch parents spoke about teenage sexuality in the context of their children falling in love.

One Dutch mother recalled that her son was “interested in girlfriends at a very early age and then he was also often intensely in love.” Her son would not have been unusual. Ninety percent of Dutch 12- to 14-year-old boys, surveyed in a national study, reported that they had been in love.

By contrast, American parents were very skeptical of love during the teenage years. They attributed adolescent sexuality to biological urges – particularly with regard to boys. I found it to be so, across the political spectrum.

Parents portrayed boys as slaves to their hormones. One self-described liberal mother said, “Most teenage boys would fuck anything that would sit still”.

A conservative father, who was anxious about his daughter’s dating, stated: “I’m a parent of a teenage cheerleader. I’m very concerned: ‘Dirty little boys! Get away! Get away!'”

What do boys want? 

I found that boys in both cultures are looking for intimacy and relationships, not only sex. But they differed in how much they believed they fit the norm.

The Dutch boys thought that their desire to combine sex with relationships was normal, whereas American boys tended to see themselves as exceptionally romantic.

Says Randy, an American boy I interviewed:

“If you ask some guys, they’ll say it’s mainly for the sex or whatever [that they get together with a girl], but with me, you have to have a relationship with the person before you have sex with her…. I’d say I’m exceptional”.

Randy is far from exceptional. In one U.S. survey, boys chose having a girlfriend and no sex over having sex and no girlfriend by two to one.

Other research too has shown American teenage boys – across racial and ethnic groups – crave intimacy, and are as emotionally invested as girls are in romantic relationships.

American boys end up paying a price for a culture that does not support their needs for intimacy. For the issue is that while boys crave closeness, they are expected to act as if they are emotionally invulnerable. Among the American boys I interviewed, I observed a conflict between their desires and the prevailing masculinity norms – if they admit to valuing romantic love, they risk being viewed as “unmasculine.”

Unrealistic and unfair expectations about boys’ lack of emotional vulnerability, in turn, make it harder for them to navigate both platonic and romantic relationships. One study found that as boys move through the teenage years, masculinity norms (beliefs that men should be tough and not behave in ways marked as “feminine”), particularly the stigma of homosexuality, make it harder to maintain close same-sex friendships, leaving boys lonely and sometimes depressed.

With less practice sustaining intimacy, boys enter romantic relationships less confident and less skilled. Ironically, many boys end up less prepared for, but more emotionally reliant on, heterosexual contacts.

Talk to us

When I asked my students to brainstorm about ideal sex education programs, based on research, they recommended focusing more on relationships. These young men suggested that having older boys mentor young boys, showing that it is normal for boys to value relationships could challenge the idea that it’s not masculine to need emotional closeness.

Certainly, such peer mentoring might go a long way to counteract the gender stereotypes and rigid masculinity norms that research has shown adversely affect boys’ sexual health.

The flyer Porton distributed invited an intergenerational conversation about emotional intimacy that is missing from most classrooms and boys’ lives. And it’s a conversation boys appear eager to have.

Amy Schalet is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

Reprinted from Chicago Tribune.  

Feminists my age and older — I’m in my late 50s — have been shocked to find how few young women are as excited as most of us by the prospect of having a female president. We grew up in a world where there were no powerful female role models — in politics, business or even in the movies — and where we were sternly warned against entertaining any aspirations of our own. We were expected to find our sense of achievement and meaning in the accomplishments of our future husbands and sons. Betty Friedan famously described how “the feminine mystique” forced women and girls of that era to conform to stifling stereotypes that caused long-term damage to their self-esteem and happiness. What a thrill it is, for many of us, regardless of our personal politics, to see a woman so close to smashing the stereotypes that held us back for so long. And why, we wonder, can’t young women see what it would mean for women everywhere to have such a role model?

But maybe at this moment in history we are looking to the wrong sex to find people who feel the anguish that gender stereotypes can cause. At this moment, could boys need gender equality even more than girls?

It’s no accident that the older women berating millennials’ supposed lack of feminism are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. These women grew up in an era when gender stereotyping was so pervasive it organized the course of every woman’s life, whatever her class, race, education or politics. Being a woman colored every aspect of life, and every choice to be anything more than a wife required us to defy powerful social norms. During the consciousness-raising meetings of the 1970s and 1980s, almost every young woman had a story about the pain she had felt when told that she wasn’t “being a lady” or worse still, was “acting like a man.”

That’s changed for young women. In my interviews with millennials for a forthcoming book, I found that it was the young men, not the young women, who told painful stories about their experiences with gender stereotyping. Feminism has so changed the world that young women no longer feel constrained in their girlhood even during their transition to adulthood. Research suggests gender consciousness will develop later of course, as women face the motherhood penalty at work and the growing pay gap with men as they age. But right now, everyone tells them “you go, girl.”

But if gender is invisible to most girls transitioning to adulthood, it is all too real to the boys who still get bullied for not “being a man” or for “acting like a girl.” I heard stories that turn my stomach about young men being teased for wanting to take a ballet class, or ridiculed in their adolescence because they’d rather hang in the kitchen with their sisters than play football with the guys in the family. Girls are increasingly allowed the freedom to be anything they want to be, but boys are still pressured to “man up.” As Stephanie Coontz, a historian and director of research for the Council on Contemporary Families, suggests, “Gender stereotyping of women is still real, but it tends to kick in after a woman leaves school and starts trying to combine her personal life and work life. It’s OK now for a girl to be a tomboy or an athlete or a great student. But the gender-typing of boys kicks in very young, and the penalties for gender-nonconformity are harsh.”

At this point in millennials’ lives, in this feminist-influenced you-go-girl world, young women understand gender to be a personal attribute, not a socially imposed identity. Why would they support a woman for president because she shared their sex category? The millennial women in my sample mostly claim never to have experienced sexism, and even if they may in the future, that’s not going to affect their votes now.

Perhaps a candidate who wants to open up opportunities that are limited because of sex should start talking to male millennials who increasingly express discontent with the pressures to be the primary breadwinner and not to take time off at work when they have a new baby at home or need to be available to help their mother die in her own home, with dignity. Young women feel they have the option to have a full-time career but also to cut back if they feel the need (at least if they are married to partners with incomes) but men do not. Men are beginning to resent the freedom women have for “choices” when they have none.

Perhaps Hillary Clinton should explain to young men how much better off they would be if they had a female president who appreciates their desire for a more balanced life than the masculine mystique allows. They may now be more ready to listen than are the young women who still labor under the illusion that they can have it all without men’s lives changing.

Barbara J. Risman, a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is on sabbatical at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is also a senior scholar at the Council on Contemporary Families.

Linda Nielsen is a Council on Contemporary Families Expert, as well as a professor of Educational and Adolescent Psychology at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Most of Nielsen’s research centers around the relationship between fathers and daughters. Nielsen’s research gained national attention when Pantene—the shampoo brand—reached out to her in hopes of creating a Super Bowl ad that was inspired by her research and centered around the importance of father-daughter relationships. Nielsen answered a few questions for us about her research, her own family, and any advice that she has:

Q: First, a challenge: what’s one single thing you “know” with certainty, after years of research into modern families?

LN: After writing books and articles about fathers and daughters for nearly three decades, the one single thing I know about father-daughter relationships is that most fathers and daughters would both like to have a more communicative, more comfortable, more personal relationship with one another. Both would like to spend more one on one time together without other family members involved – especially during the daughter’s teenage years when society generally discourages anything more than dad being involved in his daughters’ athletic or academic life – or being her banking machine.

Q: What does your family–both family-of-origin and family-of-choice–look like, and how does that fit with what you know about American families today? Are there points of dissonance? more...

A January Huffington Post article reported on a recent study that showed that 43.5 percent of single mothers get fewer than seven hours of sleep, and 52 percent wake up feeling unrested. Kristi Williams, sociologist and senior scholar for the Council on Contemporary Families raised some good questions for HuffPo readers. In the reporter’s words, Williams noted that “the study doesn’t actually show whether single parenthood causes sleep problems. Because single parenthood is also concentrated among poor and racial minority groups, it’s hard to tell whether being a single parent, being poor or being part of a certain minority group is a stronger factor in poor sleep and poor health.” Williams put it succinctly: “Family policy is health policy.” more...

In the midst of the Vietnam War, universities across the country became centers of political dissent against U.S. imperialism abroad and the quagmire that continued for years. Faculty and students galvanized behind anti-war messages that pushed the boundaries of traditional classroom environments. On the 24^th of March in 1965, the faculty at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor came together to disrupt business as usual. Over two hundred faculty cancelled classes in favor of anti-war discussions, seminars, and lectures. These open forums lasted hours – upwards of 12 hours at a time – and engulfed the campus in critical discourse. Shortly after, Columbia University adapted a similar model and soon, so did many other schools. This was the birth of the teach-in.

In 2016, a time in our history when the U.S. incarcerates more of its own citizens than any other country, the time for disruption of business as usual at the university is overdue. As the #BlackLivesMatter movement continues to push the socio-political discourses on police brutality, mass incarceration, and the assaults on communities of color, the call for faculty at Framingham State University to connect our classrooms and teaching in alliance with the movement emerged through conversation, and this is the story of a new kind of teach-in we’re holding this week.

When we talked about a teach-in, we paused at the question, how? Like other colleges and universities, our campus includes many students who are tied to full-time or near full-time employment and intensive family commitments. Students, open to learning and activism, are stretched thin by financial and family burdens. Thus, while #BlackLivesMatter teach-ins outside of traditional classrooms have been occurring at other institutions across the country (Cornell and Missouri to name two), our model was centered within our classrooms, and evolved into a campus-wide re-direction of our courses for a week this semester.

The initial conversations was just with me and my soc colleagues. As sociologists, connecting our classrooms with ongoing issues of social justice is routine. Soc classes are (at times) a site for activism, a place that can push learning towards deconstructing power, and a space that offers transformative lenses on the world. Such ideas are not unique to sociology, but for many other disciplines, the connections between social justice, activism, and teaching are not so intrinsic. We knew we could work with sociology. Yet, we wanted to reach across all the disciplines.

My colleague had a simple idea: why not just ask our fellow faculty if they would adapt their Spring course content to relate to the #BlackLivesMatter movement? Would they be willing to adjust their courses during the same week? We asked…and had 30 classes enrolled after a day of mentioning it to colleagues. And now, for the week of February 22-26, over 88 faculty from 30+ disciplines in 143 classes will explicitly link #BlackLivesMatter to their course content and student communities.

The plans have been remarkable. Communication Arts Professor Leslie Starobin will discuss Life Magazine’s coverage of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s with her Photojournalism students. Psychology Professor Dawn Vreven’s Cognitive Psychology students will look at research related to implicit bias. Flint, Michigan, is a focus in Biochemistry—as well as in Counseling Psychology. Sociology students are taking on topics ranging from Black lesbian families and respectability politics, to the case for reparations, and the foundations of mass incarceration. Many professors report having changed more than just this week in their classes. Online classes, graduate classes, freshman classes, and senior seminars have all found a way to connect.

Colleagues from disciplines that don’t automatically come to mind have stepped up. Physics professor Vandana Singh and her advanced physics students will examine the status of Black physicists in their field. Economics professor Luis Rosero and his Money and Banking students will look at “The Color of Money” and red lining. Computer scientist David Keil and his Information Technology students will examine the role of phone-videoing and social media in revealing the details of events that have needed to come to light.

The culmination is a Town Hall Meeting on Wednesday, March 2. It is a chance for everyone to hear from others about what they did. Our planning for this event, too, is pretty basic. Students will speak in brief at the beginning about the origins and influence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. The central activity is people sharing their teach-in experiences from the past week—rather than some kind of panel or lecture. The creation of a common space after the week of teach-in courses bridges faculty innovation, student engagement, and activism. Holistically, hundreds of distinct classroom environments from a multitude of applied perspectives will come together to deepen our community’s commitment to the #BlackLivesMatter mission. Rather than a “conclusive” event, the Town Hall Meeting will involve addressing not only where we are in the present but also where we are going.

There will be other days for panels, structured dialogue, lectures, and more planning and other focused and topical demonstrations. Students are developing a speakers’ bureau to continue focused dialogues in dorms, clubs, and classrooms. But, this day is for students and faculty to see how vast and wide the significance of #BlackLivesMatter and to consider deeper engagement. My colleagues Virginia Rutter, Lina Rincón, and Patricia Sanchez-Connally were partners in growing this idea. I’ll report back how it goes. The creation of the necessary spaces, dialogues, and momentum is the spark that bridges classrooms with activism.

Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Framingham State University in Framingham, MA.

In January of 2013, Texas became one of several states to ban Planned Parenthood and its affiliates from using public funds to pay for health care. A February 3 New England Journal of Medicine study, “Effects of Removal of Planned Parenthood from the Texas Women’s Health Program,” examined the consequences, and Joseph Potter, Professor of Sociology at University of Texas-Austin, one of the study’s co-authors, will discuss the results  at the CCF 2016 Annual Conference.

Why is this study so important?

The NEJM study demonstrates the consequences of excluding Planned Parenthood affiliates from Texas’s fee-for-service family planning program. To do this, the authors evaluated rates of contraceptive-method provision, method continuation through the program, and childbirth covered by Medicaid two years before the exclusion and two years after the exclusion. The data in this study was drawn from all Medicaid claims from 2011 through 2014. 

As for results?

Once the exclusion was in place, provision of the most effective reversible methods of contraception (such as IUDs, implants, and injectable contraception) decreased and Medicaid-paid births increased among injectable contraceptive users. Specifically, claims for IUDs and implants declined 31 percent, claims for injectable contraceptives declined 35 percent, and Medicaid-paid deliveries increased by 27 percent among users of injectable contraception. So, by excluding affiliates of abortion providers (chiefly Planned Parenthood) led to reducing women’s access to highly effective contraception and the subsequent increase in Medicaid-paid births.

Dedicated women’s health providers matter.

“Simply put, dedicated women’s health providers matter. Providers who are mission-driven and have the requisite experience and knowledge appear to be critical for the delivery of the most effective methods of contraception—IUDs, implants, and injectables. From a demographic perspective, this is important because both national studies and local studies show that these methods dramatically decrease unintended pregnancy. We also have accumulating evidence that there is unmet demand for these methods in Texas” noted Dr. Potter in a press release from the NEJM. He went on to say “While this paper does not tell us much about women’s experiences after the exclusion, we have evidence from another study, recently published in the journal of Contraception, that Planned Parenthood clients encountered barriers such as unnecessary exams, multiple visits, and additional costs as they tried to find a new provider after January 2013.”

Hear more about this study at the CCF Conference.

The roll-back on women’s access to affordable and accessible reproductive health care is at a record high in Texas and around the country. Dr. Potter will update participants on controversial topics surrounding family policy, as well as outline key aspects of the public debate at The Council on Contemporary Families 2016 Annual Conference: Families as They Really Are: Demographics, Disparities, and Debate. The conference, at University of Texas-Austin, March 4 and 5, will be host to a range of topics and debates that will engage scholars from multiple disciplines. To hear from Dr. Joseph Potter, and learn details about the CCF 2016 Annual Conference visit here.

The NEJM article is coauthored by Amanda J. Stevenson, Imelda M. Flores-Vasquez, Richard L. Allgeyer, Pete Schenkkan, and Joseph E. Potter.

Molly McNulty is a CCF Public Affairs Intern at Framingham State University. She is a joint Sociology and Education major.

I decided to take a methods course in the Women’s Studies department this spring. The first assignment was to identify a word central to our research interests and to trace the etymology of our choice. As a sociologist primarily interested in families and inequality, I decided on the word marriage, thinking it might offer insight into the transformation of American families today.

Although marriage has been a universal social institution throughout recorded history, with one exception (the Na people of China), there is no consensus on a definition of marriage.[i] When researching the word’s origins, I started where I always do, with historian and family scholar Stephanie Coontz. In her book “Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage,” Coontz details in Chapter 2 the historical challenges of defining precisely what marriage means. Across societies and time, marriage has included (but has not been limited to) the union of: two families; one man and one woman; one woman and one ghost; one man and many women; two people who have a child together; and one woman and all brothers in a family. More recently, regulations of personal unions have centered around age, race, and sex (e.g., in the U.S., minimum age limits, Loving v. Virginia, Obergefell v. Hodges).

While marriage regulates social rights and obligations, nearly every function of marriage has been achieved by a mechanism other than marriage in one society or another. According to Coontz, stories that marriage was invented either for the protection of women or to keep women oppressed are probably not true. More likely, Coontz argues, marriage was an informal social mechanism to organize the daily tasks of life, sexual relationships, and child rearing. As greater economic disparity grew, marriage transitioned from functioning as a vehicle for creating community connections into a means to consolidate resources and transmit property. The meaning of marriage shifted dramatically in the twentieth century, moving from an institutional marriage to a companionate marriage.[ii] Essentially, spouses were assumed to be each other’s friend, a role not central to earlier definitions of marriage.[iii] The second transition was from companionate marriages to individualized marriages. In this conceptualization, the emphasis is on personal development whereby marriage leads to fulfillment and growth for both partners.

It is challenging to untangle contemporary definitions of marriage from definitions of wife and husband. Wife is a noun, defined in relation to another. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, wife means “the woman someone is married to.” Wives often take on adjectives such as military wife, political wife, housewife, and so on.[iv] Author Anne Kingston reports the first appearance of the word wife in the Bible is in Genesis 2:18: “And the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.” As a concept, wife understood, quite literally, as a helpmate. Husband, on the other hand, is either a noun or a verb, meaning “a male partner in a marriage,” “to save,” “a frugal manager,” or “to till the ground, to cultivate.”

Last year, the definition of marriage was central to the U.S. Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges, which ultimately granted same-sex couples the right to marry in the U.S. While a somewhat oversimplified interpretation, the case hinged on the Justices’ acceptance that the definition of marriage evolves over time.[v] Justice Kennedy wrote, on behalf of the majority: “The history of marriage is one of both continuity and change. Changes, such as the decline of arranged marriages and the abandonment of the law of coverture, have worked deep transformations in the structure of marriage, affecting aspects of marriage once viewed as essential. These new insights have strengthened, not weakened, the institution. Changed understandings of marriage are characteristic of a Nation where new dimensions of freedom become apparent to new generations.” Kennedy added, “This view of marriage as timeless and unchanging was contradicted by an abundance of scholarly work.”[vi]

For further fun, I decided to see what Google images appear with the search term “marriage definition.” Some of my favorites, because they are insightful, funny, appalling, or thought-provoking, are posted below. Full disclosure, I skipped the hate-filled images.

Joanna R. Pepin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland. She primarily researches romantic relationships and inequality, such as power between partners and the association between romantic partnerships and social stratification.

Follow her on Twitter: @CoffeeBaseball

[i] Coontz, Stephanie. 2005. Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Reprint edition. New York: Penguin Books.

[ii] Cherlin, Andrew J. 2004. “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage.” Journal of Marriage and Family 66(4):848–61.

[iii] Burgess, Ernest W. and Harvey J. Locke. 1945. The Family: From Institution to Companionship. New York: American Book Company.

[iv] Kingston, Anne. 2004. The Meaning of Wife: A Provocative Look at Women and Marriage in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Picador.

[v] Obergefell v. Hodges. 576 U.S. ___ 2015. Justia Law. Retrieved February 1, 2016 (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/576/14-556/).

[vi] Perry, David M. 2015. “A New Right Grounded in the Long History of Marriage.” The Atlantic, June 26. Retrieved February 1, 2016 (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/history-marriage-supreme-court/396443/).

Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz, “Disclosure of Same-Sex Intimate Partner Violence to Police among Lesbian, Gays, and Bisexuals,” Social Currents. 2015

Perception of the police is a heavily discussed topic these days. At the same time, police are often under-utilized when it comes to domestic crimes, such as intimate partner violence (IPV). There is, unfortunately, a history of police homophobia, which means that they are even more under-utilized when it comes to intimate partner violence among lesbians, gays, and bisexuals (LGB). This is the area of focus provided by Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz (twitter: @XGuadalupeDiaz) who analyzed data involving comfort of the LGB community in terms of disclosing intimate partner violence to the police. Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz is an assistant professor of sociology and criminology at Framingham State University who studies applied sociology, intimate partner violence, victimization, and gender and sexualities.

In his recent article, Guadalupe-Diaz analyzed data that was collected by a local nonprofit in the southeastern part of the United States. Through local nonprofits that served LGB-identified people as well as via media popular among LGB-identified people, participants were invited to take an online survey that asked questions about the respondent’s socio-demographics, their intimate partner violence experiences, and their comfort with disclosing information to the police. Some of the questions that they were asked dealt with if the respondent felt that law enforcement officers were sensitive to issues that surround LGB individuals and if the respondent felt that law enforcement officers were homophobic. more...

The Council on Contemporary Families (CCF) is pleased to present its Twelfth Annual Media Awards at 4:15pm on Friday, March 4th at the Liberal Arts Building (118 Inner Campus Dr.), University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, at the CCF annual conference, “Families as They Really Are: Demographics, Disparities, and Debates.”

The CCF media awards honor outstanding journalism that contributes to the public understanding of contemporary family issues. Honorees are invited to speak for five minutes on emerging issues affecting American families and how CCF members and supporters can help the media cover these stories effectively.

The 2016 Award for Print Coverage of Family Issues goes to Ashley Cleek for her piece, “Filthy Water and Shoddy Sewers Plague Poor Black Belt Counties,” which appeared on Al Jazeera America. Her reporting explores the intersections of race, socioeconomic status, and geographic location in terms of a local public health crisis that continues to threaten southern communities and families. Cleek highlights the serious structural challenges these communities face and how ongoing water contamination issues endanger children and families in the “Black Belt,” a poverty-ridden region in Alabama that now faces the emergence of parasitic diseases in children in record numbers.

Ashley Cleek is a radio reporter and producer living in Birmingham, Alabama. Ashley has reported stories in Turkey, Ukraine, India, and Russia for American, German and British radio. Her stories have appeared on radio programs, The World and Marketplace and on websites such as PBS’s The Tehran Bureau, Al Jazeera America, and the Atlantic.

The 2016 Award for Radio Coverage of Family Issues goes to Dan Carsen for his four-part radio series, “Bilingual Education in the South,” originally produced for Renaissance Journalism’s Equity Reporting Fellowship Project. Among other things, this series highlights Georgia’s unusual-for-the-Deep-South efforts to increase academic success and language proficiency by using multi-lingual educational programs in K-12 curricula. Teachers, administrators, parents, and children are all given voice in this series, which blends scholastic research with the pragmatic realities faced by English-as-a-second-language children and families, especially in other Deep South states where politics and policy have not caught up with research. But Dan’s reporting emphasizes the positive impacts these programs can have on a range of outcomes, from knowledge mastery to future economic prospects, and draws attention to overlooked facets of contemporary debates about immigration.

Dan Carsen is the Southern Education Desk reporter at WBHM in Birmingham; his work has been recognized and honored by multiple groups, including previously by CCF in 2013. He’s been a teacher, a teacher trainer, a newspaper reporter, a radio commentator, and an editor at an educational publishing house. His writing and reporting have won numerous regional and national awards. His outside interests include basketball, kayaking, sailing, mountain biking, percussion, and hoping his children let him sleep.

About the CCF Media Awards: The CCF media awards were established in 2002 as part of the Council’s commitment to enhancing the public understanding of trends in American family life. “All too often, changes in U.S. family patterns are painted in stark, better-or-worse terms that ignore the nuanced and complex realities of family life today. The Awards Committee looked for articles that put individual family issues in larger social context. This kind of coverage offers the public a balanced picture of the trade-offs, strengths and weaknesses in many different family arrangements and structures,” explained Stephanie Coontz, CCF’s Director of Research and Public Education. The CCF media awards committee will call for nominations for the 2017 awards in the fall of 2016. Please visit www.contemporaryfamilies.org for information.

The Council on Contemporary Families’ 18^th Annual Conference: “Families As They Really Are: Demographics, Disparities, and Debates,” convenes experts on youth well-being and international adoption, parenting and intimate relationships, fertility, sexuality, and partner selection, transnational families, and interventions for immigrant families that work. The conference will be held at the Liberal Arts Building on March 4-5, 2016, and is hosted by the University of Texas at Austin.

Christie Boxer is Assistant Professor of Sociology & Criminal Justice at Adrian College and is Chair of CCF’s Media Awards Committee. Other media awards committee members included: Ashton Applewhite, Allison Pugh, and Arielle Kuperberg.