Opting Out: Women Messing with Marriage around the World (Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts)

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. "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"-- Provided by publisher 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 Opting Out offers sensitive and powerful ethnographic portrayals of women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America who are quietly opting out of marriage. Across these diverse geographic contexts, this edited volume shows that women are the (often unwitting, mostly unacknowledged) protagonists of profound changes in marriage, gender, and kinship.