英文非婚同居和父母身份-如此而已吗-欧洲观点kiernan.pdfVIP

Unmarried cohabitation and parenthood: here to stay? European perspectives Kathleen Kiernan London School of Economics and Political Science Conference on Public Policy and the Future of the Family th October 25 2002 Unmarried cohabitation and parenthood: here to stay? European perspectives Introduction In many Western European nations few developments in family life have been quite as dramatic as the recent rises in unmarried cohabitation and having children outside of marriage. These developments raise questions about the hegemony of legal marriage as the basis of family life and many of the assumptions on which public policies are built. Although cohabitation is often regarded as a recent development it includes a range of living arrangements some of which are novel whilst others are more traditional. Prior to the 1970s, cohabiting unions were largely statistically invisible, and may well have been socially invisible outside of the local community or milieu. In some European countries there were sub-groups of the population who were more prone to cohabitation than others: the poor; those whose marriages had broken-up but were unable to obtain a divorce; certain groups of rural dwellers; and groups who were ideologically opposed to marriage. Although there are few statistical data on how common cohabitation was in the past there is evidence from parish register data for Britain, that stable, non-marital procreative unions in earlier periods, going back several centuries, often attained the status of legal marriage (Laslett et al). Moreover, cohabitation after a marriage breaks down and between marriages is unlikely to be a recent development as common sense alone would suggest that in periods when divorces were less easy to obtain people might well choose to cohabit. Charles Booth in his studies of the labouring population in London noted that those who were most likely to be cohabiting were older formerly m