Opting Out

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 ci...

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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.

Series Foreword by Péter Berta
Introduction: Messing with Marriage by Joanna Davidson and Dinah Hannaford
Part I. Never Married
1. Almost Married: Two Generations of Single Mothers in Namibia by Julia Pauli
2. Single in Botswana by Jacqueline Solway
3. Freedom to Choose? Singlehood, Gender, and Sexuality in India by Sarah Lamb
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Series Foreword by Péter Berta
Introduction: Messing with Marriage by Joanna Davidson and Dinah Hannaford
Part I. Never Married
1. Almost Married: Two Generations of Single Mothers in Namibia by Julia Pauli
2. Single in Botswana by Jacqueline Solway
3. Freedom to Choose? Singlehood, Gender, and Sexuality in India by Sarah Lamb
4. Single Women’s Invisibility in South Korea’s First Decades by Laura C. Nelson
Part II. Outside of Marriage
5. Pathivratha Precarity: Sex Work on the Other Side of Marriage in South India by Kimberly Walters
6. Respectability & Black Brazilian Women’s Decisions to ‘Opt Out’ of Remarriage by Melanie Medeiros
7. The Upward Mobility of Matrifocality and the Enigma of Bajan Marriage by Carla Freeman
8. Messing with Remarriage: The Problem of Widows in Guinea-Bissau by Joanna Davidson
Part III. Within Marriage
9. Extramarital Intimacy: Juggling Femininity, Marriage, and Commercial Sex in Contemporary Japan by Akiko Takeyama
10. “What’s Wrong with These Mens?”: Reworking relationships and finding foreign love in the new South Africa by Brady G’Sell
11. The Appeal of Absent Husbands in Contemporary Senegal by Dinah Hannaford
12. “Not a normal wife”: Marrying Activism and Aberrance in Indonesia by Carla Jones
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
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