Notes

Marriage was defined as a socially acknowledged and legally approved heterosexual sexual union between two adults (Giddens 1993). Marriage remains a major rite of passage in many societies and traditionally it has been
marked by elaborate marriage ceremonies and ritual. The custom in Ireland
that the bride’s father pays for the wedding and ‘gives her away’ is reflective of
more elaborate formal exchanges of economic resources that took place in the
past (a dowry system known as the ‘match’ was a widely practised form of
arranged marriage in Ireland into the twentieth century). In patriarchal
societies, this transaction typically represented the direct transfer of a bride
from her family of origin to her family of procreation and formal entry into
adulthood. A new set of community and kinship relationships is then created
by marriage and reproduction renews the social group.

For much of the twentieth century, social theorists tended to define the
basic concepts of family, kinship and marriage through the lens of the nuclear
family. The middle decades of the twentieth century have been described as a
golden age for marriage and the nuclear family in Europe and the developed
world (Lunn ef al. 2009: 12). More people were married and married at a
younger age than at any other time in the modern era. According to Giddens
(1993: 391), the nuclear family was defined as two adults living together in a
household with their own or adopted children. In most societies, nuclear
families were, however, embedded in a larger kinship network of some type:
the extended family.

However, in recent decades, previously accepted definitions of family, kin-
ship, marriage and reproduction through the lens of the nuclear family have
been fundamentally challenged by the proliferation of more diverse expres-
sions of family and ‘personal’ life in Western societies (Smart 2007). For
example, in the case of divorce and re-marriage, complex new sets of kinship
relationships can be created in ‘reconstituted’ or ‘blended’ families. Con-
temporary studies show that increasing numbers of children in the West now
adapt to and live with step-parents who may, for instance, have previous
children of their own, and post-divorce childhood has been coined an intrinsic
feature of twenty-first-century families (Smart 2007). Likewise, recent decades
have witnessed a greater acceptance of gay partnerships and same-sex famil-
ies, evident in Ireland, for instance, in the decriminalization of homosexuality
in 1993 and in the passing of the Civil Partnership and Obligations of Coha-
bitants Act 2010. New reproductive technologies, involving donor sperm and
egg or surrogacy, for instance, are also fundamentally challenging the tradi-
tional relationship between family, biology and reproduction. Heterosexual