"Our daughters? lives are not fairy tales with prewritten, happy endings. The threat against each of them is real, and the ending of the story is yet to be decided. In fact, the challenge is so great it will take a hero to save the day. A hero called?father. It is never too early for a father to create a plan to mentor, protect, guide, and love his daughter. It is never too late for a dad with an older daughter to reestablish relationship with her. Chockfull of effective tools and contagious hope, this empowering book helps parents work together to guide the girls they love on the path to maturity." -- from publisher's website.

Alice Miles kept this diary from 1868 to 1870. She was seventeen when she came from Paris to London and 'did' the Season. The Mileses were living in France for reasons of economy while Philip Miles waited to inherit a baronetcy. They knew 'everyone', so Alice was in the thick of the social round in both London and Paris, but her diary suggests that a faint hint of the raffish marred her triumph. Alice is astonishing, partly for the impudent energy of her writing, more for the complexity of her personality. Maggy Parsons has made an irrestible book of Alice's diary.

In the 1980s, Jane Collier revisited a village in Andalusia, where she and others had conducted fieldwork twenty years earlier, to investigate changes in family relationships and to explore the larger question of the development of a "modern subjectivity" among the people. Whereas the villagers she met in the sixties stressed the importance of meeting social obligations, the people she interviewed more recently emphasized the need to think for oneself: status concerns in choosing a spouse had apparently been replaced by romantic love, patriarchal authority by partnership marriages, parental demands for obedience by hopes of earning children's affection, mourners' respect for the dead by personal expressions of grief. In each of these areas, the author detected a modern concern for "producing oneself," which emerged with changes in how villagers experienced social inequality. Collier notes that when inheritance appeared to determine social status, villagers protected family reputations and properties by demonstrating concern for "what others might say." Once villagers began participating in the national job market, where individual achievement appeared to determine a worker's income, they focused on realizing their inner abilities and productive capacities. Sensitivity to one's feelings, thoughts, and aptitudes, along with "rational" assessments of the costs and benefits entailed in "choosing" how to use them, testified to a person's unceasing efforts to realize inner potentials. The author also traces shifts in the meaning of "tradition," suggesting that although "modern" people cannot "be" traditional, they must have traditions in order to produce themselves.