Evelyn Radcliffe isn’t a wicked stepmother. She’s just out of her depth. While her friends in finishing school learned superior sweeping and threadspinning skills, Evelyn read economics textbooks. While they focused on snagging elite noblemen to marry, Evelyn attended Furnival’s Halle for Sounde Business Procedures. But instead of running her own consulting firm as she planned, Evelyn finds herself twice widowed with two teenage girls who are much more interested in royal weddings than business or profits. With money running out and opportunities dwindling, Evelyn reluctantly turns to finding husbands for her girls. Apparently, finding a carriage, a ball gown, and glass slippers are all in a day’s work for a stepmother. And if there’s profit to be made, Evelyn Radcliffe is the woman to find it.

Evelyn Radcliffe isn’t a wicked stepmother. She’s just out of her depth. While her friends in finishing school learned superior sweeping and threadspinning skills, Evelyn read economics textbooks. While they focused on snagging elite noblemen to marry, Evelyn attended Furnival’s Halle for Sounde Business Procedures. But instead of running her own consulting firm as she planned, Evelyn finds herself twice widowed with two teenage girls who are much more interested in royal weddings than business or profits. With money running out and opportunities dwindling, Evelyn reluctantly turns to finding husbands for her girls. Apparently, finding a carriage, a ball gown, and glass slippers are all in a day’s work for a stepmother. And if there’s profit to be made, Evelyn Radcliffe is the woman to find it.

Stepfamilies: History, Research, and Policy examines language use, laws, cultural stereotypes, media images, and social policies and practices to create an understanding of how predominant views about stepfamilies and stepfamily members are constructed within society. As the rates of divorce and remarriage continue to increase, it is more important than ever to overcome nuclear family ideology and abandon the model of research that compares stepfamilies with nonstepfamilies. This book shows you how honor and empowerment can be attained in new family structures and how alternative kin networks can be just as healthy as the traditional nuclear family unit.As this book examines the ability of different societies to integrate different family forms into mainstream notions of "family," you will realize the damaging effects of treating stepfamilies as incomplete, undesirable institutions. In fact, Stepfamilies: History, Research, and Policy will challenge your notions of family over and over again, as it discusses: key relationships in stepfamilies stepfather involvement in parenting after remarriage meaning of gender in a stepfamily differences in "investment" between biological and nonbiological parents demographic change and significant shifts in the social and cultural implications of stepfamilies attempting to reconstruct a household like that of a previous marriage the impact of stereotypes on the internal dynamics of stepfamilies and on the interactions of stepfamilies with outsiders the absence of guidelines and cultural norms for role performance and problem solving in stepfamiliesStepfamilies: History, Research, and Policy discusses both the difficulties of forming new families and households as well as the factors that promote family cohesiveness and integration in stepfamilies. From stereotypes of stepmothers to ambiguous legal relationships to child maltreatment in stepfamilies to sibling relations, there isn't much that the penetrating lens of this book leaves uncovered.

This unique guidebook identifies and evaluates resources that will help stepparents understand and better respond to the important issues that arise when families combine.

An anthology of folklore, poetry, short stories, and selections from longer fictional and non-fictional works.