Marriage, cohabitation and parenthood

From Mannis' (1999) paper, we can see that the ongoing agency-structure debate that goes nowhere has hit also family studies. She refers to the stories of those who’s, according to her, “movement toward motherhood is an agentic oddyssey” (p. 126). What is agentic that is found in those well-employed, well-educated women with resources that is not agentic of those in worse conditions? Is it structure? Is it just that access to adoption and reproductive technology is more expensive? Are poor single mothers having children because they are less agentic? What does she mean? I am not sure if poor single mothers are less agentic, according to Valerie Mannis, and what would this imply, if true. She writes: “one can only imagine how much more ‘tough’ it must be for women with less advantages and fewer options” (p. 126). Of course having children is hard, and of course it is more difficult to be a parent with fewer resources. I wish she had done a true comparative study that could thus illuminate on the biases of this study.
After watching the videos, I have two brief comments. One, to what extent children’s social construction of marriage is changing and how is the media, especially TV, affecting children’s understanding and conceptualization of marriage? Second, I found interesting that in “The Defenders” the judge is a woman who has a bible and a flag of the US. I think that this talks about institutions and structures responsible for growing stigma against non-traditional families, about control and manipulation. What is the role of religion in defining marriage roles, attitudes and behaviors? In this sense, it is interesting what Le Bourdais and Lapierre-Adamcyk (2004) note in the comparison of Quebec and the rest of Canada with the United States and Sweden: “this cultural difference partly explains the divergent trends in cohabitation observed in Quebec and in the rest of Canada, but cannot account for the fact that Quebeckers now closely resemble their Swedish counterparts, who were not influenced by the Catholic Church. We argue that much of the evolution observed in Quebec has to do with changes in men’s and women’s roles” (p. 940).

1) In accounting for different patterns in cohabitation, motherhood, parenting and same-sex couples, how much can be explained by legal, cultural and economic factors?
2) How do you interpret the factors accounting for different relative risks of family disruption by type of union and region of residence (Le Bourdais & Lapierre-Adamcyk, 2004, 937)? What is the value of the marriage certificate? What are the causes and consequences of getting a paper certifying a union? What are the possible selection biases of marriage, cohabitation and parenthood?
3) Hochschild analyses the reactions of the ad for a personal assistant. If you are told that the man received thousands of applications, then would you read different her text? Do you blame the “offer” or the “demand” side of this labor-market transaction? Are married women living conditions of “personal assistants” only different to the one he is looking in the ad because sex is involved?