Women are faced with two choices. They can follow the lead of many female partners, who are held up as beacons of the progressive workplace, and hire a full-time nanny to spend 60 hours a week with their children. Or, they can resign ... The core difficulty is this. Women's responsibility for children prevents them from working traditional male hours. For too long, public discussion has focused on solving this problem by "freeing" women of that responsibility through short periods of maternity leave and large quantities of alternative care.

Over at Estee Lauder, where the 36-year-old, single mother Elizabeth Hurley was "the face" from 1995 to 2001 (she still does the adverts for Lauder fragrances), they signed up Carolyn Murphy, a 28-year-old model, as her replacement. Aerin Lauder, a company executive and best friend of Gwyneth Paltrow - apparently she wanted to sign up Paltrow but Paltrow wanted too much money - cited Murphy's idyllic family life and traditional values as the reason for their choice. "She's very devoted to her family," Lauder said. Murphy posed with her husband, Jake Schroeder, an entrepreneur who has many tattoos, in Vogue, talked about family values and then soon after the signing divorced. Schroeder returned to his surf camp in Costa Rica where the couple had met, leaving Murphy to care for their 18-month-old daughter, Dylan.

By neglecting the cultural and spiritual paths that lead us to monogamous relationships, we are further fracturing the family structure in America. Some may argue that Hip Hop doesn�t create poor family values, and I agree, to a certain extent. But music is definitely influential. Know that if Hip Hop is the art we say it is, and if Hip Hop is as revolutionary as we claim it is, then we should take on the tasks of checking our beloved artists and helping to rebuild many of our dysfunctional family lives.

Ackerloff et al. (1996) find that declines in the fractions of premaritally-conceived pregnancies resulting in marriage--that is, "shotgun marriages"--accounted for most of the increase in the non-marital first birth ratio from late 1960s to late 1980s.

The McWades got a "Divorce from Bed and Board," a rarely used statute that unlike a regular divorce does not break the bonds of matrimony: couples get to part ways physically and financially, but legally, they remain married. Experts estimate that only a handful of the 32,850 Jerseyans who filed for divorce last year sought a bed-and-board divorce. The state Administrative Office of the Courts doesn't even track them. Bed-and-board divorce is the closest thing New Jersey has to a legal separation used by other states, although in a bed-and board divorce, both spouses must agree to it. A legal separation generally is a step toward divorce in states where there is a mandatory waiting period. New Jersey has no such waiting period.

[P]arents and students organized separate proms for whites and blacks after school officials stopped sponsoring dances, in part because they wanted to avoid problems arising from interracial dating.

Across the Arab world today an average of 45 percent of married couples are related, according to Dr. Nadia Sakati, a pediatrician and senior consultant for the genetics research center at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh. In some parts of Saudi Arabia, particularly in the south, where Mrs. Hefthi was raised, the rate of marriage among blood relatives ranges from 55 to 70 percent, among the highest rates in the world, according to the Saudi government. Widespread inbreeding in Saudi Arabia has produced several genetic disorders, Saudi public health officials said, including the blood diseases of thalassemia, a potentially fatal hemoglobin deficiency, and sickle cell anemia. Spinal muscular atrophy and diabetes are also common, especially in the regions with the longest traditions of marriage between relatives. Dr. Sakati said she had also found links between inbreeding and deafness and muteness. Saudi health authorities, well aware of the enormous social and economic costs of marriage between family members, have quietly debated what to do for decades...

French feminists are in a fury, accusing their government of trying to return to the Gaullist 50s. They're angry because the French prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, has just announced a scheme to promote motherhood, committing �820m to help women stay at home to look after the children. In future, French families will be paid �800 (around �555) on the birth of their first child and will be able to claim �235 a month if one parent stays at home for the first six months of the child's life. All part of a sensible plan to reverse France's population decline and relieve pressure on the pensions system, according to the government. More cynically, an attempt to return to the days when women were stereotyped as mothers and home-makers, say the feminists.

So hold it, mes amies. If the French government wants to make it easier for women to have children in the first place and then take a decent amount of time off to look after them, this is all to the good. Why, our own chancellor was showered with praise when, in his recent Budget, he announced a �250 baby bond (or �500 for the poorest families) to be paid to every newborn. So long as employment rights, childcare facilities and, indeed, the rhetoric of government don't mean that women have to stay at home for ever, these efforts should be applauded.

The childhood sweethearts who announced they were expecting their first child last year have no immediate plans to marry.

To hear the Republicans tell it, you'd think these were family-friendly bills, something like Clinton's Family Leave Act, designed to help you balance the difficult combined demands of work and family. With such a smarm of butter over their visages do the Republicans go on about the joys of "flexibility" and "freedom of choice" that you would have to read the bills for maybe 30 seconds before figuring out they're about repealing the 40-hour workweek and ending overtime.

While no one would argue there aren't hardships in parenting, the difficulties Wolf describes - of labour, of the pain of a caesarean wound, of the exhaustion of waking up every two hours to feed a newborn - are temporary, after all. And what human endeavour worth doing is effort-free? But rather than be pleased about her life, the fact that she has combined a high-profile career with motherhood and marriage to a successful man, she has made a new career from dwelling on the negatives ... Wolf and the mothers she interviews to bolster her views seem simply to be afflicted by what American stress researchers last year called "yuppie kvetching" - over-pampered people in affluent countries whingeing about relatively trivial troubles. Their energy and the middle-class welfare money they crave would be better spent protecting the increasing numbers of children from dysfunctional households who will otherwise be neglected or abused or killed.

And marriage just doesn't mean what it used to as an institution. Especially not for those of us educated to spell and deconstruct patriarchy, and raised to strive for intimate substance as much as socio-economic form in our couplings.

what has become known as the "idolatry of the market," a consequence of the so-called "civilization of consumption," tends to reduce persons to things and to subordinate being to having. This seriously detracts from the dignity of the human person and makes promotion of human solidarity difficult at best.

"The movie is much more beautiful now, because there's sex," said a beaming Mohammed Taher, 18. Since Saturday, when the theater reopened with a freshly uncensored version of the low-budget flick, he has seen "Blue Chill" three times. Baghdad has gone through a revolution in the past three weeks, casting off decades of censorship and state control. Banned books, satellite dishes and video CDs are now sold on the street -- as are alcohol and women.

Paul Martin isn't ready to have Ottawa endorse same-sex marriages unless so ordered by the courts, but he said yesterday that government should consider leaving matrimony to the churches ... The front-runner in the Liberal leadership race said that one reasonable solution would be to follow the example of Quebec, which registers couples as partners, but leaves it to churches to register marriages.

In this connection, a word should be said for Fred Rogers. Mister Rogers does not make it into Hulbert�s book, because he was primarily a television personality. But he wrote several child-rearing manuals, the last of which, �The Mister Rogers Parenting Book,� was published shortly before his death, in February. In that book, he talks about how to get your child to stay in bed at night, and he gives completely ordinary, middle-of-the-road counsel: be nice but be firm. Then, like Spock on spanking, he adds tips, and they are everything: �Encourage your children to find ways to comfort themselves�maybe . . . making up a story, or imagining a pleasant �dream.�� Also, �Your child might find it comforting to have something of yours to keep through the night, like a glove or a small scarf.� Finally, �You may want to leave on a night light or decorate your child�s bedroom walls or ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stickers. Having a bit of light reminds children that there is still light somewhere, and that before long the daylight will come again.� The considerateness (the scarf, the glove) is touching, as is the resort to art (the story, the dream). But the last item is a stroke of genius, and not just for the child. In the dark of night, after the takeout dinner and the argument, parents, too, need to be told that there is still light somewhere, and that the daylight will come again.

Cindy Chavez -- the working-class girl from New Mexico who grew up to be one of San Jose's rising political stars -- is the councilwoman you want to have cocktails with. The doting mother who always asks about your kids. The Latina yenta who wants to set you up on a blind date. And some believe the smart and personable Chavez just may be San Jose's next mayor.

In a now classic paper, Stets and Straus (1990) referred to "the marriage license as a hitting license," and they implied that couples who are bound by the provisions of a legal contract may be abusive because of rights and normative expectations that are associated with the institution of marriage. Stets and Straus also found that couples in de facto marriages (i.e., living together without a marriage license) experienced even more violence than married couples.

"Childless but not by choice" is not the sum total of feminism's achievements, nor is it the only category that describes contemporary women. Other categories would include "childless by choice" and "single by choice". And plenty of women chose to have a child without a partner. To women in these categories, suggesting that feminism should have paid more attention to motherhood might sound strange, since some of them are quite happy with their lot.

"Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani will wed his companion, Judith Nathan, on May 24 in the ex-mayor's old home, Gracie Mansion, with Mayor Michael Bloomberg performing the ceremony."

"We all know during this time period that we had a huge economic boom, and people do better and have a better quality of life and are more likely to move to these life-changing life issues like marriage.''

The governor and House speaker have said they want to reduce the state's 80,000 divorces each year to establish a solid family foundation for reducing government and improving children's lives. A proposal in the Senate abolishes the Commission on Responsible Fatherhood and replaces it with the Commission on Marriage and Family Support. The new commission, within the Department of Children & Families, would focus on mothers and children as well as promoting fatherhood.

So living together before walking down the aisle improves the chances of marital success, does it? Not according to new research. In fact, work by Latrobe University sociologist David de Vaus has found it makes little difference. Dr de Vaus, an associate professor with Latrobe's School of Social Sciences, reached his conclusion after a study of men and women in 8,000 Australian households over the past two years. He reported in the university's Bulletin magazine that his results ran contrary to the popular belief that premarital cohabitation improved the chances of marriages lasting. It also contradicted research findings in the 1970s and 1980s that living together before marriage reduced the chance of success when the couples finally made it legal.