Journal of Marriage and Family

Mothering and motherhood are the subjects of a rapidly expanding body of literature. Considered in this decade review are two predominant streams in this work. One is the theorizing of mothering and motherhood and the other is the empirical study of...

This review documents the economic context within which American families lived in the 1990s. Despite nearly full employment and growing income and wealth for many Americans, problem areas included persistent racial gaps in economic well-being, growing...

Key Words: aging, decade review, family gerontology, middle years, older adults. Research on families in the middle and later years came into its own during the 1990s, documenting the complexity, malleability, and variety of older family connections....

Research conducted in the past decade on families with young children concentrated on 5 broad topics: (a) the transition to parenthood; (b) the importance of maternal sensitivity for children's attachment security and subsequent adjustment and social...

Key Words: feminist perspectives, feminist research, gender and families. This review provides a selective overview of scholarship on gender and families over the past decade. First, we discuss four characteristics of feminist perspectives to theoretical...

In the 1990s, the most popular theoretical and empirical research issue concerning the local ecologies of families focused on the impact of family structures (e.g., household composition) and processes (e.g., child management strategies) on the relationship...

The body of stepfamily research published this decade exceeded the entire output of the previous 90 years of the century. The complexity and quality of the scholarly work in this decade improved as well-better samples were obtained, methods were more...

This article reviews more than 200 scholarly articles and books on household labor published between 1989 and 1999. As a maturing area of study, this body of research has been concerned with understanding and documenting how housework is embedded in...

Throughout the 1990s, scholars interested in fatherhood have generated a voluminous, rich, and diverse body of work. We selectively review this literature with an eye toward prominent theoretical, methodological, and substantive issues. This burgeoning...

We use data from a variety of sources to describe recent dramatic changes in the composition, economic stability, and diversity of American families. The declining prevalence of early marriage, increasing level of marital dissolution, and growing tendency...

In an earlier editorial, I noted that good science has difficulty with compliance, in that innovation derives from noncompliance. In this volume, we have the opportunity to explore growth and innovation, to review advances of the last decade, and to...

This review highlights four themes emerging from the work and family literature of the 1990s. The first theme evolves from the historical legacy of the maternal employment literature with its focus on children's well-being. The second theme, work socialization,...