LAUSR

This article is concerned with examining the ways in which young women make choices about their family lives and in so doing reproduce traditional unequal gender norms and family practices. In a time when it is (supposedly) increasingly easy to live alternative lives (living apart together, for example), a significant number of young people continue to marry and live together in heteronormative family units. By exploring the narratives produced in interviews with 22 young, heterosexual British women, this article aims to understand why unequal gender norms continue to guide behavior regarding sexuality in relationships, name-changing on marriage, and household divisions of labor. Exploring how decisions are made in a bricolage of reflexive, habitual, and taken-for-granted ways, this article concludes that by piecing together ideas from past and present, constraint is reconfigured as choice in order to provide legitimacy and power over life decisions bounded by gendered expectations and inequalities.