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This chapter is based on 169 trials from Wuërttemberg, Esslingen, and Hall in which women were accused of incest. Their stories open a window on to complex feelings of dependency, aggression, and desire within families. They shed light on the emotional dynamics of particular kinship positions, for example that of brothers-in-law vis-a-vis the wives of brothers, and of stepfathers and stepdaughters. These relationships were common to early modern kinship systems, for spousal death and remarriage were ubiquitous. But they are usually ignored in a historiography of the family which still focuses on experiences within a parent-child triad familiar to modern people.

This chapter discusses a case where a drunken teenage girl was sexually molested by her stepfather. It considers that the police interview of the stepfather was classically flawed, because not only was the interviewer biased in his assumptions, the police failed to represent accurately what the suspects and witnesses said. It then studies the stepfather's schema during his conversations with the girl's mother (his ex-wife), including his intonation. This chapter also looks at the police's request for directives, which can lead the suspect to mention incriminating information.

The author's stepfather imputes his calamity to shaving on an unlucky day. The author describes the astrology and superstitions of the inhabitants of Hindústán, his visit to Sindhiah's court at Gwálior, and his departure. The prince pays his group's losses with a smile and enlists his stepfather in his service.

This chapter examines available knowledge on patricide. It begins by presenting basic information about patricide and steppatricide victims, offenders, and incidents over the 32-year period of 1976–2007. Data shows that most male parricide victims were killed in single-victim, single-offender homicides. Multiple-victim and multiple-offender incidents were rare. Most fathers and stepfathers were killed by children over age 18. Offenders who killed stepfathers tended to be younger than those who killed fathers. The average age of steppatricide offenders was 23, compared to 26 for patricide offenders. Juvenile offenders were significantly more likely than their adult counterparts to use firearms to kill fathers (79% vs. 54%) and stepfathers (72% vs. 58%). The chapter also reviews the literature on patricide, focusing first on studies of adult or predominantly adult male patricide offenders, followed by studies of females who killed fathers. After the discussion of the adult literature, case studies of male and female adolescent parricide offenders are synthesized.

This chapter examines prejudices against stepfathers, as seen in laws, court decisions, and legal treatises. The law made stepfathers powerful and potentially dangerous individuals. Although the law required fathers to provide for their children, a stepfather had no legal obligation to support the children of another man, but he could choose to take on the role. Marrying a widow with children gave a man financial power, few obligations, and the freedom to act the hero or the villain, as his character and circumstances led him.

This chapter describes how prejudice against stepfamilies still influence people's perception in the modern world. Stepfathers, stepmothers, and stepchildren are still burdened by stereotypes. Some changes have occurred as a result of the changing status of women, but the overall impression of stepfamilies remains negative. Stepfathers still struggle with cultural suspicion, although this is seen more of a physical than financial threat. Stepmothers still have to counter the image of the fairy-tale stepmother. Stepchildren are still seen as victims not only of parents' divorce but also of parent remarriage.

In his personal essay On Peripersonal Space, Brian Blanchfield uses the concept of peripersonal space-the entire volume of space within a person's reach, or within a single conceivable momentary extension of his person-as a metaphor to explore the complicated relationship with his mother both throughout childhood and after coming out as gay in adulthood.

This chapter examines five films with family plots: Fatal Attraction, Someone to Watch Over Me, The Stepfather, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Shoot the Moon. In Fatal Attraction, the sex makes no compelling claims of its own; rather, it’s a double-edged symbol of danger outside the home, cozy security within it. Someone to Watch Over Me is also supposed to be about adultery but is really about male role confusion. The ghost of patriarchy past haunts both movies, and it emerges as the bloodthirsty main character of The Stepfather. In The Stepfather and Shoot the Moon the patriarchs run amok in response to the same thing: a loss of power that has left them without a sense of themselves. It’s a Wonderful Life celebrates the good family man as foundation of the social order. Ironically mirroring the marginality of women in the world, the men in all five movies are, when not actively endangering their families, at best peripheral to the islands of domesticity they’re supposed to head.

High mortality rates meant that many families lost a parent while the children were still young. This chapter explores the concerns of bereaved women and men deciding whether to remarry, and of children anticipating the arrival of a step-parent. Many families included a stepmother or stepfather, half-siblings or step-siblings, bringing new issues of sibling rivalry. Young children faced the possibility of neglect, cruelty, and the alienation of their own parent’s affections. Older children, especially in propertied families, worried about the threat to their inheritances. In practice, reconstituted families sometimes bonded very well and many coped adequately, but a minority ended in disaster. The chapter examines all these categories, including situations where the children became caught up in conflicts between husband and wife. There were other kinds of irregular families, too, and the chapter ends by exploring the situation of illegitimate half-siblings, and the issue of sibling incest.

Fourteen-year-old Annie Day felt that she was tricked into marrying her stepfather—her mother’s husband. She eventually had three children with him and then in her early 20s summoned the courage to divorce him and subsequently received both moral and financial support from her community. Not long afterwards, she married a man her own age monogamously and went on to document the ups and downs of their marriage, including some instances of physical abuse. Is monogamous marriage inherently better than polygamous marriage? Obscure nineteenth-century Mormon polygamous wives offered little personal experience that would suggest that they enjoyed polygamy, but they at least offered some detailed scenarios to help us understand how the religious practice played out in the rural Western United States.