Of the many literary phenomena that sprang up in eighteenth-century England and later became a staple of Victorian culture, one that has received little attention until now is the “Family Bible with Notes.” Published in serial parts to make it affordable, the Family Bible was designed to enhance the family’s status and sense of national and imperial identity.
Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies reveals in its study of the production and consumption of British commercial Family Bibles startling changes in “family values.” Advertised in the eighteenth century as providing the family with access to “universal knowledge,” these Bibles suddenly shifted in the early nineteenth century to Bibles with bracketed sections marked “to be omitted from family reading” and reserved for reading “in the closet” by the “Master of the family.” These disciplinary Bibles were paralleled by Family Bibles designed to appeal to the newly important female consumer. Illustrations featured saintly women and charming children, and “family registers” with vignettes of family life emphasized the prominent role of the “angel in the house.”
As Mary Wilson Carpenter documents in Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies, the elaborate notes and “elegant engravings” in these Bibles bring to light a wealth of detail about the English commonsense view of such taboo subjects as same-sex relations, masturbation, menstruation, and circumcision. Her reading of literary texts by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the context of these commercial representations of the “Authorized Version” or King James translation of the Bible indicates that when the Victorians spoke about religion, they were also frequently speaking about sex.
On a summer day in 1980 in Niederfeulen, Luxembourg, Suzanne Bunkers pored over parish records of her maternal ancestors, immigrants to the rural American Midwest in the mid 1800s. Suddenly, chance led her to the name Simmerl and to the missing piece in the genealogical puzzle that had brought her so far: Susanna Simmerl, Bunkers' paternal great-great-grandmother, who had given birth to an illegitimate daughter in 1856 before coming to America. Finding Susanna was the catalyst for Bunkers' intensely personal book, which blends history, memory, and imagination into a drama of two women's lives within their multigenerational family.
Families today are experiencing untold pressures and are expected to shoulder enormous burdens at a time when resources for support are becoming ever scarcer. This important book examines the effects of stress on both children and parents and explores various strategies for coping.
The authors—experts in child health and development and in business and social policy—emphasize that the problems of the family and of its members cannot be considered individually. They view the family as a dynamic system whose health is vitally related to its internal relationships and its interactions with other social networks. Stress in this context can be either a positive or a negative influence on the family’s effectiveness in raising children, depending on the personal and public resources available.
The strength of the book lies in its integrated approach to a many-sided problem. The authors provide reviews of research, clinical applications, and theoretical discussions, including several frameworks for understanding the constellation of factors within the family that affect children’s development. They examine specific situations that can present families with formidable challenges: unemployment, divorce, two-career families, single parenthood,teenage pregnancy, demands from the workplace. Some of these situations are traumatic but brief; others, such as chronic illness, require long-term coping strategies. The authors show the similarities that underlie these stressful situations—how they can affect the fabric of family life and the development of the young child.
The emphasis throughout the book is on policy implications: the urgent need for more enlightened and supportive corporate and government involvement. Unless we make the well-being of the family a priority, the number of children in adverse situations will continue to increase. This book will serve as an indispensable guide to psychologists, pediatricians, psychiatrists, educators, business executives, and government officials.
Drawing on the rich resources of The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: Complete Documentary Edition, a DVD version of Lincoln's complete legal papers, In Tender Consideration scans the full range of family woes that antebellum Americans took to the law. Deserted wives, destitute widows, jilted brides with illegitimate children, and slandered women brought their cases before the courts, often receiving a surprising degree of sympathy and support.
Through the stories of dozens of individuals who took legal action to obtain a divorce, contest a will, prosecute a rapist, or assert rights to family property, this volume illuminates the legal status of women and children in Illinois and their experiences with the law in action. Contributors document how the courts viewed children and how they responded to inheritance, custody, and other types of cases involving children or their interests. These cases also highlight Lincoln's life in law, placing him more clearly within the context of the legal culture in which he lived and raising intriguing questions about the influence of his legal life on his subsequent political one.
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