Opting Out

Women around the world are opting out of marriage. Through nuanced ethnographic accounts of the ways that women are moving the needle on marital norms and practices, Opting Out reveals the conditions that make this widespread phenomenon possible in places where marriage has long been obligatory. Each chapter invites readers into the lives of particular women and the changing circumstances in which these lives unfold – sometimes painfully, sometimes humorously, and always unexpectedly. Taken together, the essays in this volume prompt the following questions: Why is marriage so consistently disappointing for women? When the rewards of economic stability and the social status that marriage confers are troubled, does marriage offer women anything compelling at all? Across diverse geographic contexts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this book offers sensitive and powerful portrayals of women as they escape or reshape marriage into a more rewarding arrangement.

Opting Out offers sensitive and powerful ethnographic portrayals of women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America who are quietly opting out of marriage. Across these diverse geographic contexts,this edited volume shows that women are the (often unwitting, mostly unacknowledged) protagonists of profound changes in marriage, gender, and kinship.
 

Joanna Davidson is an associate professor of anthropology at Boston University. She is the author of Sacred Rice: An Ethnography of Identity, Environment, and Development in Rural West Africa.
Dinah Hannaford is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Houston. She is the author of Marriage Without Borders: Transnational Spouses in Neoliberal Senegal.  

Series Foreword by Péter Berta
Introduction: Messing with Marriage by Joanna Davidson and Dinah Hannaford
Part I. Never Married
1. Almost Married: Two Generations of Single Mothers in Namibia by Julia Pauli
2. Single in Botswana by Jacqueline Solway
3.  Freedom to Choose? Singlehood, Gender, and Sexuality in India by Sarah Lamb
4. Single Women’s Invisibility in South Korea’s First Decades by Laura C. Nelson
Part II. Outside of Marriage
5. Pathivratha Precarity: Sex Work on the Other Side of Marriage in South India by Kimberly Walters
6. Respectability & Black Brazilian Women’s Decisions to ‘Opt Out’ of Remarriage by Melanie Medeiros
7. The Upward Mobility of Matrifocality and the Enigma of Bajan Marriage by Carla Freeman
8. Messing with Remarriage: The Problem of Widows in Guinea-Bissau by Joanna Davidson
Part III. Within Marriage
9. Extramarital Intimacy: Juggling Femininity, Marriage, and Commercial Sex in Contemporary Japan by Akiko Takeyama
10. “What’s Wrong with These Mens?”: Reworking relationships and finding foreign love in the new South Africa by Brady G’Sell
11. The Appeal of Absent Husbands in Contemporary Senegal by Dinah Hannaford
12. “Not a normal wife”: Marrying Activism and Aberrance in Indonesia by Carla Jones
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Contributors
Index

"Grounded in superb ethnographic chapters drawn from all over the world, Opting Out explores the diverse ways in which women exert agency in and against marriage. With fresh insight into practices that occur in every society, this collection delivers a rich and rewarding comparative examination of an astonishingly overlooked aspect of everyday life."

"Provocatively and engagingly, this volume provides compelling ethnographic evidence of the changes marriage is undergoing around the world. The impact of these changes raises profound questions, not only about the future of marriage itself, but which, as these essays show, go to the heart of gender relations and their intersection with politics, economics and religion."

"Grounded in superb ethnographic chapters drawn from all over the world, Opting Out explores the diverse ways in which women exert agency in and against marriage. With fresh insight into practices that occur in every society, this collection delivers a rich and rewarding comparative examination of an astonishingly overlooked aspect of everyday life."