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A DULTS traditionally populate all society’s positions of political and social authority. In medieval Europe no one under twelve could have an official role in government. Decisions on going to war, taxation, the law, the economy, religious belief and cultural direction were all made by mature men (and to some extent women). As a result, ‘adulthood’ confirmed its pre
4 Early adulthood and family formation No place like mammy’s home. (Holmquist – Irish Times 16 October 2010) In 2010, a Eurostat report showing that almost half of all European adults aged eighteen to thirty-four years were still living with at least one of their parents led to consternation – and some amusement – in media reports in Ireland (Holmquist, 2010). Census 2011 revealed that just over a third of young Irish adults in this age group were still living with a parent or parents (CSO Statbank CD217). However, media attention has subsequently moved on to
5 Adulthood and activism in the 1970s Against the background of late-sixties debates over sexuality and the changing social and sexual practices of the young, Women’s Liberation thrust questions of women’s and men’s roles and relations into the forefront of activist life. In the spring of 1969 Sheila Rowbotham’s pamphlet, Women’s Liberation and the New Politics, argued that ‘profound social transformation’ required revolutionary change in the way human beings related to one another.1 Couched in a discourse of subjectivity and affect, it championed political
In a footnote to his 1919 essay, ‘The Uncanny’ (‘Das Unheimliche’), Freud perfunctorily reports a strange encounter with himself. While he was traveling by train, a mirrored door in his compartment swung open, whereupon Freud was confronted with a distasteful-looking stranger intruding into his private space, a stranger whom he momentarily recognized as a reflection of himself.2 If we use Freud‘s own analysis in ‘The Uncanny’, derived from Otto Rank‘s work on the double, the power of this disconcerting episode could be attributed to the adult fear of the double, transmogrified from the animistic or childhood projection of a friendly double, another self who served as a protection against danger or death, into a fearful emblem of ones own mortality in the more repressed adult mind.3 That is, in our early state of primary narcissism we familiarize the strange world around us by projecting outward versions of ourselves; however, as adults who have discovered that we are not the source of all being, the unexpected appearance of an alternate self is initially frightening and unrecognizable. Freuds initial impression of himself as an alien intruder is uncanny because the scene is suffused with a supernatural aura and recalls him to a primary narcissistic fear. A double is a distorted version of a being already in existence, thus engendering the fear that the double is the real, original self who has come to take our place. Or, as Françoise Meltzer has noted, ‘the double entails the seeing of self as other, and thus forces the admission of mortality’ (229). Unexpected sightings of doubles in adulthood also confirm the validity of the sensation evoked by the super-ego which oversees and watches the self as it engages in worldly transactions. Seeing double may support the paranoid suspicion that an individual is actually two people, one divided against the other. As Rank demonstrates in his study, the double, as an emblem,of the soul, carries both a positive and negative valence. On the one hand our existence is confirmed by seeking reflections, versions of ourselves in mirrors, photographs, offspring, etc., yet if we are taken unawares by a double, we quail from it as a supernatural visitant. Thus the unsolicited sighting of a double, an embodiment of unsurmounted supernaturalism, marks the eruption of the uncanny into everyday life.
. , Hebenstreit , C. L. and Judson , S. S. ( 2016 ), ‘ An Examination of the Gender Inclusiveness of Current Theories of Sexual Violence in Adulthood: Recognising Male Victims, Female Perpetrators, and Same-Sex Violence ’, Trauma, Violence, & Abuse , 17 : 2 , 133 – 48 , doi: 10.1177/1524838014566721 . United
politicised during the conflict, blurring lines between civilians and fighters ( Wild et al. , 2018 ; Pendle, 2015 ). Our findings show that child marriage practices are linked to cattle raiding through the concept of bride price, underpinned by the norm of girls marrying before adulthood. Existing literature documents that girls marry around the age of 15, that cattle form part of the bride price, and that boys and young men may raid cattle in order to pay that bride price ( Glowacki and Wrangham, 2015 ; Lacey, 2013 ; Jok, 1999 ). Participants in our study discussed
: 7) led to better educational opportunities, state-supported day care, the right to vote and high female employment rates, especially in the public sector. However, official discourse did not reflect many women’s lived experiences. Despite the variety of Syrian women’s actual occupations, ideals of marriage and parenting as markers of social adulthood persisted ( Rabo, 2008 ), and women’s salaries were often considered a means to attracting husbands, and
Family Rhythms is a comprehensive, user-friendly text that opens a new window on family change in Ireland. The authors draw on major new qualitative longitudinal datasets to develop a rich account of continuity and change in the textures, meanings and rhythms of family life in Ireland since the early years of the state. Consistent with the recent turn to more inductive approaches in family studies, the book focuses on changing everyday practices in different family life stages: childhood, early adulthood, the middle years and grandparenthood. Readers acquire insights on the diverse experiences of family life from different historical and generational points of view and on the associated challenges for social policy. Throughout, qualitative findings are placed in the context of societal shifts in demography, value systems, household economies, and patterns of kinship, community and public life. For each life stage, the Irish experience is also placed in a comparative European context. The book includes a state-of-the-art introduction to contemporary sociological perspectives on family life and introduces readers to the wealth of historical and contemporary research on family life in Ireland. Highlighted panels invite readers to look in more detail at selected landmark Irish studies and to explore extracts from the qualitative data for themselves.
One of the key aims of this book is to offer a synthesis of the main findings of current research on age. It is intended as an outline survey and consequently the scope of the book is deliberately broad: it covers two centuries, considers the large land mass of Western Europe with its diverse languages, customs and cultures, and ranges across the social spectrum. The book focuses solely on the Christian West, including consideration on the extent to which social rank influenced life expectancy, the methods and goals of upbringing, marriage patterns and funerary memorialisation. The book also demonstrates how extensive that range can be. Examples are drawn from manorial accounts, tax assessments, spiritual writings, didactic literature, romances, elegies, art and architecture. The main thrust is that age formed an essential part of a person's identity in late medieval Europe. During adolescence, men and women progressively took on their adult roles. Three chapters are devoted to educating girls. The book discusses young people's period of transition between childhood and adulthood. It draws attention to pious young women who fought against marriage and wanted a chaste life. Divergences between northern and southern Europe in terms of marriage patterns, family formation, opportunities for women and attitudes towards death and its rituals are discussed. The book shows that attitudes towards the undeveloped young meant that children had few legal responsibilities. Another aim of the book is to consider the changing opportunities and possibilities for people as they progressed through life.
profound unlikelihood of finding success, let alone happiness or fulfilment, became emblematic for university students in the wake of the crisis. This was a generation who had at least some memory of a ‘before’, a moment of neoliberal optimism. But today a new generation is emerging into adulthood for whom neoliberalism, financialisation, and their anxieties are all they have ever known. As this new