Chapter 5 examines how, via the daily parade of summonses, a variety of actors employed local courtrooms to shape the social and cultural contours of marriage and affiliation. As in other aspects of metropolitan life, the courtroom was not merely a venue for the expression of law or norms that were constituted elsewhere or a space for the enforcement of middle-class standards of morality. Legal structures originally developed to protect patriarchal privilege could, to some degree, be co-opted by women instead. Several decades before working-class women could directly shape the terrain of formal politics, they were effectively navigating the terrain of local courtrooms and influencing both their daily practices and the meanings that emerged from them. Their engagement demonstrates how crucial working-class women were to recasting the nature of the state in this period. The adaption of the state to address familial matters occurred in tandem with the adaption of women to the mechanisms of the state.

The first chapter deals with women's various roles within their families and households and covers women of all classes indiscriminately (except for the imperial family). It starts with their central positions as wives, throwing light on the traditional wifely virtues and Roman marital ideals but also on marital problems, including divorce and even murder. The first part is followed by separate parts on women's roles as mothers, daughters, grandmothers, siblings and other relations such as aunts and nieces, and on women's roles in foster families and step families, thus presenting a lively overview of women's various familial roles in the course of their lives and the expectations that went with these different roles. The inscriptions and graffiti record feelings of joy at childbirth, love and praise for a happy marriage, attachment between mothers and children and mourning and anger at bereavement. Many epitaphs express the wish to have died first or the hope to be reunited in death.

The vast majority of manumitted female palace slaves who left the imperial harem later married. Just as the Enderun prepared men to serve the dynasty outside the palace, the protocol, etiquette, and training provided to female slaves in the imperial harem prepared them for their future role in the outside world. Chapter 3 examines the women’s marriage patterns and asks the question: To what extent did palace affiliation impact their marriages? An analysis of the social and professional profile of the husbands shows that a great majority of the women married members of the askeri class, and that these marriages had strategic and symbolic importance for the imperial household. It traces the implications of their marriages for the women themselves, for their husbands, and for the imperial court in the sociopolitical context of the era. The chapter demonstrates that by way of marriage, women’s affiliation to the imperial court took on a different form, and they continued to play a role, albeit a new one, in the political structure.

Margarita de Sossa’s freedom journey was defiant and entrepreneurial. In her early twenties, still enslaved in Portugal, she took possession of her body; after refusing to endure her owner’s sexual demands, he sold her, and she was transported to Mexico. There, she purchased her freedom with money earned as a healer and then conducted an enviable business as an innkeeper. Sossa’s biography provides striking insights into how she conceptualized freedom in terms that included – but was not limited to – legal manumission. Her transatlantic biography offers a rare insight into the life of a free black woman (and former slave) in late sixteenth-century Puebla, who sought to establish various degrees of freedom for herself. Whether she was refusing to acquiesce to an abusive owner, embracing entrepreneurship, marrying, purchasing her own slave property, or later using the courts to petition for divorce. Sossa continued to advocate on her own behalf. Her biography shows that obtaining legal manumission was not always equivalent to independence and autonomy, particularly if married to an abusive husband, or if financial successes inspired the envy of neighbors.

This chapter describes the breeding cycle of kestrels from egg laying to the nestling-rearing phase. It illustrates the different reproductive strategies of males and females, the endogenous mechanisms and environmental conditions that affect the laying date and the clutch size, the adaptive meanings of egg volume and of hatching asynchrony, and the factors that affect the probability of nestlings surviving until fledging.

Chapter 6 discusses children’s relationships with their parents when a mother had migrated while a father stayed at home. This configuration was rare because it so contravened local gender norms it usually signalled inherent family vulnerabilities, typically economic hardship and a father’s physical impairment or else marital discord. In these ‘weak’ families, academically gifted children held out some hope to their parents that with support from the mother’s remittances, the family could strengthen over time. But in families where parents’ relationships were discordant, migrant mothers could be side-lined, while the parents’ divorce or a father’s death could trigger a migrant mother’s complete exit from the striving team. Men whose wives had migrated alone were at gravest risk of negative gender assessment if they earned little. They therefore tried to shore up their masculine worth by entrusting the ‘women’s work’ of childcare to the children’s grandmothers while stressing their commitments outside the home. But intimacy could still develop between the left-behind fathers and children. The family circumstances and the academic aptitude of the children of lone-migrant mothers differed but these children all had to contend with striving pressures and with managing relationships in families perceived by others to be social oddities.

Intimate relationships exist around the world, throughout the lifespan, and are influential in every domain of peoples’ lives. This chapter provides a brief review of the literature on intimate dating and marital relationships including processes such as attraction and relationship initiation, relationship maintenance, and relationship dissolution. A few theoretical perspectives (evolutionary, interdependence, attachment, self-expansion) are highlighted throughout the chapter. A main focus of this review is discussing intimate relationships in the context of gender and culture, including limitations in our current knowledge and suggestions for future research.

This chapter argues that the period is marked by creative legal solutions designed to undermine ecclesiastical control of marital dissolution. The civil courts had begun to consider marriage cases which in 1660 would have been deemed the business of the consistory courts. The canon law prohibition on remarriage after divorce was undermined by private parliamentary acts which dissolved marriages and permitted those involved to remarry. The increasing use of formal and informal private deeds of settlement in which spouses agreed to live apart also weakened strict adherence to church regulations. While these changes did not represent a complete secularisation of Irish marriage law and regulations, they do suggest that men and women were willing to be flexible in their interpretation of church guidelines, particularly when they were considering how to end a problematic union. According to canon law, which guided both the ecclesiastical and civil courts in determining marriage litigation, there were two types of divorce. The first, a vinculo matrimonii (i.e. from the chains of marriage) was, in effect, a judgment that the marriage was null and void because it had never existed in the first place. Far more common in the consistory court and its secular successor were applications for divorce a mensa et thoro or from ‘bed and board’. This was essentially a request for a judicial separation rather than a divorce. Unlike a vinculo matrimonii, a divorce a mensa et thoro did not permit either partner to remarry.

Chapter 2 contends that the seemingly innocent attempt to document citizens through Operation Family (1959–1965) developed into an instrument for consolidating state power. This Ministry of Justice campaign to legalize extra-legal unions and register undocumented Cubans provoked a surge in marriage, a direct consequence – this chapter demonstrates – of fixed-term laws that concurrently restricted the power of the judiciary. The chapter also argues that Cuban leadership advanced legal matrimony in order to supplant female heads of household, whose participation in the paid-labor force could support men engaged in illegal or counterrevolutionary activities. Las Villas and Matanzas, provinces where counterrevolutionaries most threatened revolutionary government authority, had the highest rates of legal marriage during the peak years of the marriage campaign. These two provinces were also predominantly white, suggesting that MINJUS prioritized the regulation and reformation of rural, Hispanic white couples over those of Afro-Cubans. The second half of the chapter examines the inauguration of Wedding Palaces and material benefits meant to incentivize marriage. Popular discourse suggested that Cubans were marrying (and divorcing) in high numbers in order to take advantage of the increased purchasing power allocated to newlyweds. In these ways, couples showed themselves reluctant to acquiesce to the state’s marital expectations.

In order to understand contemporary Saudi society, it is imperative to focus on local contexts, particularly as Saudi society is not a homogeneous entity. Local context does not necessarily refer to the Kingdom as a unitary body, but rather to specific constituencies and regional areas. This comprehension of diverse Saudi societies is more nuanced and expansive than the traditional perspective of a relatively homogeneous Saudi society as it allows for a greater variation in the study of young Saudi male perceptions of masculinity, gender relations and marriage in everyday life. This chapter discusses perceptions of masculinity, attitudes to gender relations and the vexing problems of making a ‘good’ marriage as related to accepted Saudi socio-cultural norms. In fact, many young men maintain that a Saudi ‘social dictatorship’ exists, one based on historical socio-tribal attitudes and customs rather than solely Islamic jurisprudence and religious norms. Indeed, there is widespread recognition that these socio-cultural norms frequently govern the way ‘things are supposed to be’ in the community. Failure to follow these accepted practices can lead to family conflict and, significantly, ‘loss of face’ within society.

This chapter argues that the National Socialist regime, despite its urge to penetrate and control all facets of individuals’ lives, did nevertheless also acknowledge and uphold certain notions of spatial and domestic privacy, if not always consistently. In order to explore this, the chapter examines the actions of the judiciary in relation to private space in different types of court cases. These cases include breaches of domestic peace; ‘treachery towards the state’ where utterances critical of the regime were made within the home; marital relations and marital conflicts within family law; and the law on tenancy. Overall, the chapter shows that National Socialism enabled those whom it deemed ‘desirable’ to enjoy a domestic life and to pursue private interests, but the degrees of privacy granted by the law were at no point guaranteed and were regarded as privileges that could be revoked.

This chapter explores personal property and the desire for possessions as a dimension of private life in Nazi Germany. It examines the regime’s promotion of ‘German advertising’ as part of its drive against ‘Jewish’ business and asks how far, if at all, popular aspirations for consumer goods were accommodated within a dictatorship that was geared to a war economy at the expense of private consumption. It goes on to ask how far and with what arguments the regime in wartime encouraged private saving, and it shows that the promotional material used by savings banks often encouraged private saving using arguments – even in wartime – that focused less on patriotic duty than on personal dreams of material possessions. In promoting wartime saving, the regime thus in many respects continued its pre-war encouragement of private consumer aspirations, even if such aspirations were largely deferred.

This chapter examines the career of the novelist and advice columnist Walther von Hollander during the Third Reich, setting it in the context of his longer career before and after Nazism and in particular his prominence as an advice columnist in post-war West Germany. It argues that von Hollander’s books and letters to his readers during the Nazi period contained an ambivalent mix of messages. On one hand, he promoted the idea that individual personal happiness could be achieved during self-optimisation and conscious effort applied to personal relationships. This notion, characteristic of contemporary Western societies, was not specific to Nazism. On the other hand, his advice was also tinged with elements of Nazi ideology that promised to dissolve and eradicate the disappointments associated with individuality through an orientation towards the wider community and the nation.

This chapter examines the home leave granted to soldiers during the Second World War as a fundamental dimension of private life for millions of Germans in wartime. It explores the topic from a number of different perspectives. It outlines the regime’s policies and propaganda regarding home leave as a privilege, focusing on the regime’s goals and its conflicting impulses both to control the time men spent away from their military duties and to allow some degree of undisturbed privacy. The chapter then examines personal letters between home and front in order to explore the expectations and experiences relating to home leave on the part of the men on leave and their wives or girlfriends and families. Finally, it uses cases from military and civil courts to show instances of marital conflict and domestic violence associated with home leave.