- APOLOGIES
- HEALTHY MARRIAGES – HEALTHY FAMILIES CONFERENCE JUNE 2011
- THE EVOLUTION OF MARRIAGE – HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
- CELIBACY AND VIRGINITY – ONE WOMAN’S PERSPECTIVE
- APOLOGIES
I somehow typed June 8 instead of January 8 (they both start with J??) for the airing of the Fox family film and the launch of the LOVE IS promo. A lot of you let me know but I didn’t see your emails in time to sent the correction. I hope most of you figured it out.....
I’ll try to get the next notice right – for the film Dear Annie on the same series. - diane
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- HEALTHY MARRIAGES – HEALTHY FAMILIES CONFERENCE JUNE 2011
NARME, the National Association of Relationship and Marriage Educators, has set their first annual “Healthy Marriages – Healthy Families” conference for June 27-30, 2011 in Houston and have issued a Call for Presenters. Visit their website http://www.narmeconference.com/ for details. On the site it explains that sessions will be 90 mins long and should “provide insightful information that will enhance the abilities of organizations, practitioners, and/or individuals to provide services to couples, fathers, families, and youth and single adults from diverse backgrounds including information on effective programs for marriages, fatherhood and families, best practices, tools and resources, and research. They will also offer one, two and three day trainings in marriage and family education programs during the body of the conference.
Download the application here: http://www.narmeconference.com/index.php?option=com_rsform&Itemid=53
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- THE EVOLUTION OF MARRIAGE – HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Stephanie Coontz
The Washington Post, Sunday Outlook section
January 9, 2011
. . . We are near the end of a two-stage revolution in the social understanding and legal definition of marriage. This revolution has overturned the most traditional functions of the institution: to reinforce differences in wealth and power and to establish distinct and unequal roles for men and women under the law.
For millennia, marriage was about property and power rather than love. Parents arranged their children's unions to expand the family labor force, gain well-connected in-laws and seal business deals. Sometimes, to consolidate inheritances, parents prevented their younger children from marrying at all. For many people, marriage was an unavoidable duty. For others, it was a privilege, not a right. Often, servants, slaves and paupers were forbidden to wed.
But a little more than two centuries ago, people began to believe that they had a right to choose their partners on the basis of love rather than having their marriages arranged to suit the interests of parents or the state. . . .
. . . . Over the ages, marriage enforced an unequal division of labor, wealth and power between men and women. Traditional English and American law gave the husband sole control over all property that his wife brought to their marriage and any income she earned during it. Husbands had the legal right - and the duty - to impose their will by force. A husband couldn't cede any rights to his wife, said the courts, "because that would presuppose her separate existence," according to Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws.
By the early 19th century, the old ideas that women needed to be under male authority because they were more prone to sexual passion and religious error than men, and that husbands ruled the home just as monarchs ruled their kingdoms, had given way to a gentler but equally rigid gender ideology. Men were recast as benevolent breadwinners who exercised authority not because they were the patriarchal bosses of the family labor force, but because they were women's natural providers and protectors. Women were frail dependents whose nurturing nature and innate sexual purity predisposed them to sweet submission.
This redefinition of gender allowed 19th-century Americans to reconcile the new ideal of married love with a continued claim that husbands and wives had completely different rights and duties. And in the 20th century, even as the right of individuals to choose their partner became the cultural norm and legal reality, the insistence that marriage united two distinct gender stereotypes became increasingly shrill.
And, so on....for the full article:
http://tinyurl.com/4f9a7b8
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- CELIBACY AND VIRGINITY – ONE WOMAN’S PERSPECTIVE
Single, Female, Mormon, Alone
By Nichole Hardy
The New York Times / Modern Love Series
January 9, 2011
OF all the places I felt sure I’d never go, Planned Parenthood topped the list. . . . . I was a 35-year-old virgin, preparing for my own “first time,” which, incidentally, didn’t happen until I was well into 36.
I was not frigid, fearful or socially inept. Not overweight or unattractive. Didn’t suffer from halitosis or social anxiety disorder. I was a practicing Mormon, and Mormons “wait” until marriage. So I had waited, spent the first two decades of my adult life celibate and, for the most part, alone. Because only after the trial of my faith would I be blessed with an eternal marriage, which, I prayed, would also blow my mind in the bedroom.
It never occurred to me that I would remain unmarried, especially in a system where marriage is not only a commandment, but also one of life’s primary purposes. Turns out, though, that there is no place in that community for a single woman who doesn’t want children.
My only available choice within the church was to wait for my reward in heaven, as Mormon doctrine promises that single members denied marriage, family and sex lives on earth will have them after death. Needless to say, this wasn’t a compelling argument.
Most troubling was the fact that as I grew older I had the distinct sense of remaining a child in a woman’s body; virginity brought with it arrested development on the level of a handicapping condition, like the Russian orphans I’d read about whose lack of physical contact altered their neurobiology and prevented them from forming emotional bonds. Similarly, it felt as if celibacy was stunting my growth; it wasn’t just sex I lacked but relationships with men entirely. Too independent for Mormon men, and too much a virgin for the other set, I felt trapped in adolescence.
For the full article: http://tinyurl.com/4um63vx
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