Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item The Socioeconomic Associations with Women's Partnership Formation and Dissolution in Russia, Germany, and the United States(2021) Zvavitch, Polina; Rendall, Michael S; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation consists of three studies that evaluate how women form partnerships, leave partnerships, and the economic outcomes of those partnerships. These demographic transitions and outcomes are evaluated in three country contexts with differing political, welfare regimes, social history. I use longitudinal data from Russia to analyze marital status differences and trends in in poverty risk. Contrary to assumptions that unmarried mothers will have higher risks of poverty over time as welfare policy weakens, unmarried mothers and married mothers’ risks of poverty came close to converging in the late 2000s. Second, I use German data to examine educational assortative mating in East and West Germany. I use the Revealed Preference Model (RPM). First, from bivariate analysis of the SOEP, I find that among the people who are partnering, they are doing so mostly homogamously in the East and the West. Highly educated women in the East are still less likely to partner somebody of a lower education status. The RPM estimated parameters then showed that in West Germany and East Germany alike, educationally hypergamous partnerships were most preferable. Though the availability of higher educated partners in East and West Germany are different, the preference for hypergamy remains. Finally, I move on to the United States to estimate the divorce risk of partners of various education levels. I use the Survey of Income and Program Participation, providing accurate representation of the contemporary U.S. The model estimates divorce risk using women’s own education, men’s own education, and their relative education levels. It reveals several persistent patterns. Women’s divorce risk decreases monotonically as education increases, so highly educated women have the lowest rate of divorce. Men’s education, however, is less of a determinant on the risk of divorce. Relative to hypergamy and homogamy, hypogamous unions (woman marrying a man of a lower education status than herself) were more likely to divorce. This study supports past research that finds the female breadwinner model the most volatile when it comes to likelihood of divorce and continued support for this trend into the 2010’s.Item Jewish Marriage and Divorce in America, 1830-1924(2020) Shaw Frank, Laura Rachel; Rozenblit, Marsha L; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The centrality of marriage to American identity dates back to the founding of the nation. Americans saw marriages by choice and for love as microcosms of their democracy in which the people chose their leaders and were bonded to them in a relationship of mutual trust and affection. During the era of mass migration to America from 1820-1924, the institution of marriage became a locus for debates over American identity. In myriad ways, American legal and societal norms made it clear that attaining full inclusion in the American polity meant interacting with the institution of marriage in a particularly American way. As Jews immigrated én masse to America in this period, they quickly understood that incorporating American legal and cultural norms with respect to marriage into their personal and communal lives was integral to their acculturation. Individual Jews adapted to the American milieu in certain ways, marrying for love (or at least pretending to do so), often at quintessentially American white weddings. However, such Jews simultaneously retained Jewish traditions and rituals both in spousal choice and in the celebration of their weddings, sometimes weaving their proud new American identities into those traditions and rituals. For their part, Jewish communal leaders worked tirelessly both within and outside the Jewish community to ensure that Jewish marriages were also American marriages. They exhorted their flocks to marry as respectable Americans, debated and changed Jewish marriage rituals to better fit American sensibilities, fought to attain legal imprimatur for rabbis to serve as marriage officiants on behalf of the state, weighed in on national conversations about issues related to marriage and divorce, and even worked with state authorities to punish those Jews whose behavior flouted American marriage norms and laws. Through their interactions with the American institution of marriage, American Jews simultaneously declared their Americanness and reshaped the definition of American marriage. Over the course of the century of mass Jewish migration to America, American Jews redefined both Jewish and American marriage and in so doing, reshaped both American Judaism and the contours of American identity.