-How we define the term the American family varies widely depending on the decade and the person attempting to do the defining. The onset of urbanization, the rise of consumerist culture and the related alterations in the workforce, globalization, the reinterpretation of gender and sexual roles and opportunities, technology, and the increasing number of people whose personal lives have gone public have become family issues, and here general readers learn about the major cultural and historical trends. The authors wisely begin with a chronology listing major legislation and events that affected family life, then describe courtship, cohabitation, marriage, divorce, remarriage, bereavement, domestic arrangements and traditions, the relationship between work and family life, the changing ways of mothers and motherhood, the roles of men in families, children and adolescents, family abuse and neglect and alternative family forms. —Reference & Research Book News

-"This volume, which will be especially useful in classes on family sociology, draws on an extensive secondary literature to chronicle a century of changes in family size, structure, roles, functions, rituals, and power dynamics. . . . The volume's greatest strength lies in reminding readers that rather than being fixed and unchanging, families, across the past century, have been dynamic, ever-changing systems in which change has been neither steady nor predictable. . . . Especially noteworthy are the book's discussions of the shifting experiences of stepfamilies, grandparenthood, and widowhood." —Journal of Social History