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Scholarship has highlighted the importance of kin relations for well-being in adulthood. Much focus has been on relationships between spouses and between parents and children. However, limited research has explored the role of adult sibling relationships in well-being, and no studies have made direct comparisons among the effects of tension with these multiple family members. Using data collected from 495 adult children nested within 254 families, we examined the differential impact of tension with mothers, siblings, and spouses on depressive symptoms in midlife. Separate multi-level regression analyses showed that tension with spouses, mothers, and siblings each predicted depressive symptoms. Combined analyses revealed that greater tension with spouses was associated with higher depressive symptoms, but tension with mothers and siblings was not. However, Wald tests comparing the strength of these associations between tension and depressive symptoms indicated that these associations did not significantly vary across family members. Interactions with gender indicated that tension with mothers was more strongly associated with higher depressive symptoms for women than men. These findings highlight the importance of the quality of relationships with family members on individuals’ psychological well-being, and call for researchers to consider multiple ties and gender when examining family relationships and well-being.

This ethnographic study obtains first-hand information on spousal abuse from Ethiopian immigrants in Israel. Data include 23 interviews with male and female immigrants of various ages and 10 professionals who worked with this community as well as observations and documents. The findings, verified by participants, show that during cultural transition, the immigrants code of honor, traditional conflict-solving institutions, and family role distribution disintegrate. This situation, exacerbated by economic distress, proved conducive to women s abuse. Lack of cultural sensitivity displayed by social services actually encouraged women to behave abusively toward their husbands and destroy their families. Discussion focuses on communication failures in spousal-abuse discourse between immigrants from Ethiopia and absorbing society, originating in differences in values, behavior, social representations, and insensitive culture theories.

“We were hiding in the bushes . . . it was the middle of the night. We were there for what seemed like hours, with border patrol helicopters circling overhead. I’ll never forget that night.” José was describing his first and only trip north. Like other men from his town, he had gone at a young age—he was nineteen at the time. He traveled with several men from the rancho, including a friend and two cousins. Now in his forties, José recalled the night that had been, as he stated, life-altering. The young men had gone by bus to

THE YEAR 2019 will mark half a millennium from the Spanish intrusion into central Mexico. Throughout this region and beyond, the Spaniards encountered a great world civilization, enormously complex and ancient, some small portions of which a few members of their society managed to record, motivated by conventional religious, economic, political, and legal concerns, although often as well by fascination with what they encountered.¹ As the postcontact society and economy changed, more rapidly in some areas than others, asserting and ascertaining the content of precontact Aztec law became a vital concern of Spanish missionaries,² colonists, colonial administrators, surviving indigenous elites,

The Christmas and New Year holidays of 1647/1648 should have been a joyous time for Ingrid Eriksdotter and her family. Eriksdotter and her husband, Ingemar Larsson, were an upstanding peasant couple. They farmed land in the Kålland region of Sweden that the nobleman Harald Stake owned, their older son lived in Gothenburg, and their younger son, thirteen-year-old Sven, was working as a servant on a nearby farm called Alebäck that Stake also owned. The holidays, however, turned out to be filled with discord and ultimately tragedy. During the holiday break, Eriksdotter and Larsson’s son Sven came home to visit his

Achilles Tatius’ novel,Leucippe and Clitophon, composed in the later second century C.E., is in dialogue with Chariton’sCallirhoe. Stylistically, it reflects the Atticism that was the hallmark of educational refinement during the Second Sophistic.¹ Callirhoe challenged the image of the adulteress because her second marriage was paradoxically due to her fidelity to her first husband and their unborn child. Allegations of adultery were made both outside and inside the courtroom, but Callirhoe rose above the fray with her honor intact. Responding to Chariton, Achilles Tatius invests substantial narrative space to an adultery plot, which does not valorize the generic

As we have seen in the trial scenes inLeucippe and Clitophon, the ambiguities of Clitophon and Melite’s liaison are observed in the breach rather than in the act, thus revealing the fault lines dividing custom from law, and public appearances from private realities. Paradoxically, in Achilles Tatius’ world, the fact of sexual intercourse was more pertinent to ascertaining the crime of adultery than to consummating the legal act of marriage. The over-determination of the intimate act of sexual intercourse runs counter to the law’s definition of marriage, which traditionally was first and foremost an economic contract. Yet, through the

In conclusion, the four trial scenes of Chariton’s novel reveal a range of attitudes to the law. In all, the character of the leader—the commander of Syracuse or the king of Persia—determines the integrity of the system of justice. The grandiose and spectacular venues of the Syracusan forum and agora and the Babylonian courtroom speak to of the form of legal consciousness that Ewick and Silbey call ‘Before the Law’, when the court is perceived as ‘an objective realm of disinterested action’. Yet both Hermocrates and the Persian king struggle between their private interests and their duty: Hermocrates

The early thirteenth-century fabliau Les Tresces tells the story of a knight whose wife takes a lover. Upon discovering the adulterous pair, the husband attempts to accost the lover, but the wife enables his escape. The husband throws his wife out of the house and forbids her to return. However, the wife plans a ruse to fool her husband and return to her home as an unjustly accused woman. She approaches a neighbor woman whom she physically resembles and asks her to pretend to be the adulterous wife and beg the knight to take her back. After much cajoling, the neighbor woman agrees. Though the neighbor was led to believe her efforts would restore the couple's marriage, what takes place is one of the most graphic descriptions of domestic violence within the fabliaux, and indeed within Old French literature as a whole:Out of the bed the husband surged, never had he a greater urge to beat a woman than to beat the one who knelt before his feet. On each foot he strapped a spur and nothing else, confronting her naked but for the shirt he wore. He came and seized her hair and bore her body down upon the ground. Around her head his fingers wound. He yanked and jerked and pushed and pulled until his hands could hardly hold. A hundred lines of blood he drew across her flanks and belly too, striking and raking with his spurs. … He beat, and kept on beating her and the more he beat, the angrier he got and heaped her with abuse … the woman wailed and sniffled and gulped for he had beaten her to a pulp … her outcry so abused his ears. He became enraged instead and jumped like a wild man from his bed, dripping sweat from grief and anger, then leaped before her with a dagger and cut her tresses off. The shock was so severe for her, it struck her dumb, and she could weep no more. Her heart was weary to the core and almost burst from so much weeping. At last the husband left her … the woman was forced to drag herself half dead [from the house].

InThe Merchant of Venice, Jessica stakes her claim to membership in the body of Christ on her marriage to the Christian Lorenzo. InOthello, Desdemona stakes her claim to membership in the body of Christ on her chastity—the preservation of her body “from any other unlawful touch.” Drawing on the deep historical construction of marriage as a vehicle for God’s extension of grace, Shakespeare’s tragedy places Othello and Desdemona’s union at the crossroads of salvation and damnation. At this crossroads, Desdemona’s fidelity to her husband ostensibly testifies to her Christian citizenship, if not also to her status as