NancyF. Cott.Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2000). This engaging political history of marriage in the United States as a pivotal public institution demonstrates how the state has used it to impose Christian standards of morality on diverse communities of Native Americans, slaves, and new immigrants.
2.
AnthonyGiddens.The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford University Press, 1993). This is an optimistic, interpretive essay on the development of the individual pursuit of love and sexuality for their own sake as an intrinsic part of the transition to late modernity in the West.
3.
WilliamJ. Goode.World Revolution and Family Patterns (The Free Press, 1963). This classic example of the “family modernization thesis” remains one of the most cited works in family sociology. Goode studies post-World War II changes in gender and family patterns in five major regions of the world.
4.
JudithStacey.Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late 20th Century America. 2nd ed. (University of California Press, 1998). This ethnographic study of the impact of postindustrial society, feminism, and fundamentalism on working-class families in the Silicon Valley depicts the emergence of the postmodern family condition of diversity, fluidity, and political conflict.
5.
KathWeston.Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (Columbia University Press, 1991). This path-breaking urban ethnography examines how lesbians and gay men in San Francisco actively draw upon ties rooted in friendship and love, as well as biology, to construct their own forms of family and kinship.
