Second chance family. Young widow Kristina Montgomery moves to Kiptohanock, Virginia, hoping it will give her and her teenage son, Gray, a fresh start. She longs for the peace and quiet only a small town can provide. But her plans are thwarted by her new neighbor, Canyon Collier, a former Coast Guard pilot and a crop duster. Gray is instantly drawn to the pilot and his teenage niece, Jade – and Kristina's not far behind. She and Canyon are soon bonding over parenting their charges and their spark becomes undeniable. Could it be that the spirited pilot is just what Kristina needs to teach her heart to soar again?
In 1755 Benjamin Franklin observed "a man without a wife is but half a man" and since then historians have taken Franklin at his word. In Citizen Bachelors, John Gilbert McCurdy demonstrates that Franklin's comment was only one side of a much larger conversation. Early Americans vigorously debated the status of unmarried men and this debate was instrumental in the creation of American citizenship. In a sweeping examination of the bachelor in early America, McCurdy fleshes out a largely unexamined aspect of the history of gender. Single men were instrumental to the settlement of the United States and for most of the seventeenth century their presence was not particularly problematic. However, as the colonies matured, Americans began to worry about those who stood outside the family. Lawmakers began to limit the freedoms of single men with laws requiring bachelors to pay higher taxes and face harsher penalties for crimes than married men, while moralists began to decry the sexual immorality of unmarried men. But many resisted these new tactics, including single men who reveled in their hedonistic reputations by delighting in sexual horseplay without marital consequences. At the time of the Revolution, these conflicting views were confronted head-on. As the incipient American state needed men to stand at the forefront of the fight for independence, the bachelor came to be seen as possessing just the sort of political, social, and economic agency associated with citizenship in a democratic society. When the war was won, these men demanded an end to their unequal treatment, sometimes grudgingly, and the citizen bachelor was welcomed into American society. Drawing on sources as varied as laws, diaries, political manifestos, and newspapers, McCurdy shows that in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the bachelor was a simultaneously suspicious and desirable figure: suspicious because he was not tethered to family and household obligations yet desirable because he was free to study, devote himself to political office, and fight and die in battle. He suggests that this dichotomy remains with us to this day and thus it is in early America that we find the origins of the modern-day identity of the bachelor as a symbol of masculine independence. McCurdy also observes that by extending citizenship to bachelors, the founders affirmed their commitment to individual freedom, a commitment that has subsequently come to define the very essence of American citizenship.
Make-Believe Marriage When newborn twins are dropped on Charles Wanlass’s doorstep—along with a note begging him to protect them—he knows he needs help to give them a proper home. The only solution: entering a marriage of convenience with mail-order bride Willow Granger. But soon the handsome pastor longs for their make-believe family to become real… Willow will do whatever it takes to keep her missing friend’s babies safe. She’s drawn to Charles’s steadfast caring and honesty, but she’s sure she doesn’t have the proper background or courage to ever be a worthy wife or mother. But as danger closes in, she and Charles will risk everything to face down their fears—and turn their temporary home into a lifetime of love.
The lives of early Japanese and Chinese settlers in British Columbia have come to define the Asian experience in Canada. Yet many men travelled beyond British Columbia to settle in small Prairie towns and cities. Chinese bachelors opened the region's first laundries and Chinese cafes. They maintained ties to the Old World and negotiated a place in the new by fostering a vibrant homosocial culture based on friendship, everyday religious practices, the example of Sun Yat-sen, and the sharing of food. This exploration of the intersection of gender and migration in rural Canada, in particular, offers new takes on the Chinese quest for identity in North America in general. With a preface by the Honourable Inky Mark, former Member of Parliament for Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette.
Bachelors, Bastards, and Nomadic Masculinity is, firstly, a thematic exploration of bachelor figures and male bastards in literary works by Guy de Maupassant and André Gide. The coupling of Maupassant and Gide is appropriate for such an analysis, not only because of their mutual treatment of illegitimacy, but also because each writer represents varieties of bachelors and bastards from disparate social classes and subcultures, each writing during contiguous moments of socio-legal changes particularly related to divorce law and women’s rights, which consequently have great influence on the legal destiny of illegitimate or “natural” children. Napoleon’s Civil Code of 1804 provides the legal (patriarchal) framework for the period of this study of illegitimacy, from about 1870 to 1925. The Civil Code saw numerous changes during this period. The Naquet Law of 1884, which reestablished limited legal divorce, represents the central socio-legal event of the turn of the century in matters of legitimacy, whereas the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the First World War furnish chronological bookends for this book. Besides through history, law, and sociology, this book treats illegitimacy through the lens of various branches of gender and sexual theory, particularly the study of masculinities, and a handful of other important critical theories, most importantly those of Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, Todd Reeser, Charles Stivale, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Bachelors and bastards are two principal players in the representation of illegitimacy in Maupassant and Gide, but this study considers the theme of illegitimacy as extended beyond simple questions of legitimate versus illegitimate children. The male bastard is only one of the "Counterfeit" characters examined in these authors' fictional texts. This book is divided into three parts which consider specific thematic elements of their "bastard narratives". Part One frames the representation in fiction of bachelor figures and how they contribute to, or the roles they play in, instances of illegitimacy. Part Two springs from and develops the metaphor of the "counterfeit coin," whether represented by a bastard son, an affected schoolboy, a false priest, or a pretentious littérateur. Part Three explains the concept of "nomadic masculine" practices; such practices include nomadic styles of masculinity development as well as the bastard's nomadism.
The four Logan brothers, Adam, Bart, Charlie and Dirk along with their good friend Euan Eunson have enjoyed their bachelor life style, but one by one they succumb to the feelings they have developed for the five women in their lives. Which of the bachelors will be the first to enter into matrimony; will Adam admit his feelings for Lorna; will Bart fight his attraction to Joanne; will Charlie ever shut up long enough to declare his feelings for Helen; will Dirk finally have to do the chasing to win Carly and last, but not least, will Euan gain the happiness he desires with Ellie.........'
Standing up for gentlemen who prefer to avoid matrimony, Terry Reed explores, explains and defends the unsteady reputation of wondrous bachelordom against its traditionally soiled reputation, its questionable eccentricities, its ill-comprehended motivations and its ostensibly nefarious ends.
The bachelor has long held an ambivalent, uncomfortable and even at times unfriendly position in society. This book carefully considers the complicated relationships between the modern queer bachelor and interior design, material culture and aesthetics in Britain between 1885 and 1957. The seven deadly sins of the modern bachelor (queerness, idolatry, askesis, decadence, the decorative, glamour and artifice) comprise a contested site and reveal in their respective ways the distinctly queer twinning of shame and resistance. It pays close attention to the interiors of Lord Ronald Gower, Alfred Taylor, Oscar Wilde, Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts, Edward Perry Warren and John Marshall, Sir Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, Noël Coward and Cecil Beaton. Richly illustrated and written in a lively and accessible manner, Bachelors of a different sort is at once theoretically ambitious and rich in its use of archival and various historical sources.
