Waithood: Gender, Education, and Global Delays in Marriage and Childbearing

Product Description


The concept of “Waithood” was developed by political scientist Diane Singerman to describe the expanding period of time between adolescence and full adulthood as young people wait to secure steady employment and marry. The contributors to this volume employ the waithood concept as a frame for richly detailed ethnographic studies of “youth in waiting” from a variety of world areas, including the Middle East Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the U.S, revealing that whether voluntary or involuntary, the phenomenon of youth waithood necessitates a recognition of new gender and family roles.


Review


“This is a beautifully organized and very well edited volume… The chapters are rich both ethnographically and theoretically and as a whole this volume makes several unique and distinctive contributions to an interdisciplinary academic literature on kinship and reproduction”. • Lisa L. Wynn, President, Australian Anthropological Society


About the Author


Marcia C. Inhorn is William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Yale University, where she is the Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies. A specialist on Middle East gender, religion, and reproductive health issues, she is the author of six award-winning books, including her most recent, America’s Arab Refugees: Vulnerability and Health on the Margins (Stanford, 2018).


Nancy J. Smith-Hefner is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Boston University. She is a specialist of Southeast Asia, gender, and Islam. Her most recent book Islamizing Intimacies: Youth, Sexuality, and Gender in Contemporary Indonesia (Hawaii, 2019) is a study of the changing personal lives and sexual attitudes of educated, Muslim Javanese youth.