ABSTRACT

From Prague to Tennessee to Brazil, it's hard to find a consensus on what constitutes an average family. In today's world, the nuclear family is rarely the standard family structure, if it ever was. Families of a New World brings together an important collection of original works to examine our understanding of family around the world and how that understanding is shaped by state policy. Using examples from both historical and modern countries around the world, essays demonstrate not only how state policies shape what the family should look and act like, but also how governments have appropriated and regulated an approved ideal of the family to further their own agendas.

chapter |14 pages

Introduction In a Family Way

Theorizing State and Familial Relations

part One|67 pages

Familialism as State Imagining

chapter 2|23 pages

The Promise of Things to Come

The Image of the Modern Family in State-Building, Colonial Occupation, and Revolution in Egypt, 1805–1922

chapter 3|24 pages

Familiar Territory

Prostitution, Empires, and the Question of U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico, 1849–1916

chapter 4|19 pages

Imagining the “New Jewish Family”

Gender and Nation in Early Zionism

part Two|73 pages

Familialism as State Building

chapter 5|14 pages

“Rooted in the Soil”

Family Ideals, Land Reclamation, and Irrigation Resettlement as Welfare in the United States, 1897–1933 1

chapter 6|20 pages

The State and the Widow

Pension Debates in Inter-War Years Australia

chapter 7|20 pages

Forging Families

Gender, Reform, and the Popular Front State in Chile

chapter 8|18 pages

Colonial Africa

Transforming Families for Their Own Benefit (and Ours)

part Three|87 pages

Familialism as State Reform

chapter 9|20 pages

Welfare Reform with a Familial Face

Reconstituting State and Domestic Relations in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe

chapter 10|17 pages

“They Say, ‘Oh God, I Don't Want to Live Like Her!'”

The Marginalization of Mothering in German Post-Socialism 1

chapter 11|21 pages

Reinstating the Family

Gender and the State-Formed Foundations of China's Flexible Labor Force 1

chapter 12|28 pages

Markets Not States?

The Weakness of State Social Provision for Breadwinning Men in the United States