The Transformation of Partnerships: Canada, the Netherlands, and the Russian Federation in the Age of Modernity & the Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better off Financially. (Review Essay/Revue Critique)

Melinda Mills, The Transformation of Partnerships: Canada, The Netherlands, and the Russian Federation in the Age of Modernity. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Thela Thesis Population Studies Series, 2000, 278 pp. Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially. New York: Doubleday, 2000, 260pp. Books about marriage and relationships weigh heavily on the shelves of popular bookstores, as well as of sociologists. These two volumes bookend longstanding debates on marriage and intimate partnerships, changes in recent decades, and implications for lives/identities, taking profoundly different stances which lead to contrasting conclusions. The Transformation of Partnerships is an innovative sociological framing of a research question: what has changed or remained stable in union behaviours over time in three very different societies? The answers are found through pushing-of-the-art international comparative analyses, ground-breaking in themselves, contextualized by equally sophisticated theorization of intimate relations in late modernity. Previous studies of changing close relations, lean toward life course analysis or the changing contexts of women's life choices or opportunities. Mills asks how the constituents of modernity (increased insecurity, democracy, capitalism and individualization) in Canada, The Netherlands and the Russian Federation influence relationships, what contemporary social theory can add to what the data tell, and what interdependencies exist among disparate events or realms of life. Mills' book is set out in three major sections: explorations of theory (chapters 2 & 3), data and methodological approaches (chapters 4 & 5) , and empirical analyses and discussion (chapters 6-8). Chapter 9 summarizes the central findings of the study, assesses the usefulness of the theory and methodology, and concludes with discussion of the relevance of the study for research, policy and public understanding. Mills' findings are as intricate as her sociologically framed questions, and resonant with the complexities of intimate relations in modernity. In asking about transformations in partnerships over time and across cultural boundaries, her analysis is given a temporality and texture not often found in empirical studies of marriage or unions. The dynamic, and at times contentious, interrelationships of signification structures, meanings given to cohabitation and to marriage, and reified and reinforced by state policies and social practices come under her sharp gaze. She looks at the reflexive building of identities and monitoring of actions, both individual and structural. In unpeeling these layers of the social, she tells a tale of transforming partnerships not usually audible. Including all unions, for example, rather than only marriages, or marriages in comparison to cohabiting unions, she leads the reader to discover that the overall tendency to form intimate unions has been stable in the post-war period. It is the constellation of risks, social practices and reflexively built social identities that shape the forms intimate partnerships take. She adds further insight (and irony) by considering that unions form in the context of their own dissolution (for more on this, see Hackstaff, 1999). It is not only whether a union is legally binding that matters, but the levels of constraint and acceptability in dissolving the union in cultural, social and policy contexts. The ways in which partnerships form and dissolve in the three countries constructs structures of caregiving, of gender, of consumerism and of individualization. Marrying younger in the Russian Federation, for example, means more divorcees and widows at a time in life when Dutch and Canadian women are forming new partnerships. The weave of the tapestry of these approaches to unions crosstextures all other aspects of these societies. The Case for Marriage is Waite and Gallagher's large case title, but also an unequivocal stance that they argue with idealistic zeal. …

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