Stephanie Coontz > Quotes

“Like most visions of a 'golden age', the 'traditional family' evaporates on closer examination. It is an ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that never coexisted in the same time and place.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“College graduates and women with higher earnings are now more likely to marry than women with less education and lower wages, although they generally marry at an older age. The legal profession is one big exception to this generalization. Female attorneys are less likely to ever marry, to have children, or to remarry after divorce than women in other professions. But an even higher proportion of male attorneys are childless, suggesting there might be something about this career that is unfriendly to everyone’s family life, not just women’s.”
― Stephanie Coontz (Author), Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage

“Like it or not, today we are all pioneers, picking our way through uncharted and unstable territory. The old rules are no longer reliable guides to work out modern gender roles and build a secure foundation for marriage. Wherever it is that people want to end up in their family relations today, even if they are totally committed to creating a so-called traditional marrige, they have to get there by a different route from the past.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

“It is pointless to construct a hierarchy of who hurt more, and whether one kind of pain was more or less justified than another.”
― Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique & American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s

“Another limit on intimate marriage in the nineteenth century was that many people still held the Enlightenment view that love developed slowly out of admiration, respect, and appreciation of someone’s good character. Coupled with the taboos on expressions of sexual desire, these values meant that the love one felt for a sweetheart often was not seen as qualitatively different from the feeling one might have for a sister, a friend, or even an idea.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“The Victorians did not have some secret formula, since lost, about how to expect the best of marriage and still put up with the worst. Rather, they were much more accepting than we are today of a huge gap between rhetoric and reality, expectation and actual experience. In large part, this was because they had no other choice.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“Contrary to popular opinion, 'Leave it to Beaver' was not a documentary.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“[S]ince the dawn of civilization, getting in-laws has been one of marriage's most important functions.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

“Popular culture became saturated with sex. The new advertising industry quickly discovered the appeal of a provocatively posed woman. Silent movies in the United States contained so much sexual innuendo that the government instituted film censorship in 1910. Even after censorship, movies could get pretty steamy. Young people in the 1920s went to see films like Flaming Youth, advertised as an exposé of “neckers, petters, white kisses, red kisses, pleasure-mad daughters, sensation-craving mothers, by an author who didn’t dare sign his name.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“By limiting their moral concerns to domestic and sexual behavior, many members of the middle class were able to ignore the harsh realities of life for the lower classes or even to blame working people’s problems on their not being sufficiently committed to domesticity and female purity. Yet the establishment of a male breadwinner/female homemaker family in the middle and upper classes often required large sections of the lower class to be unable to do so.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“Moving lockstep through a series of predictable transitions is no longer a route to personal security. Each man and woman must put together a highly individualized sequence of transitions in and out of school, work, and marriage in order to take advantage of shifting opportunities and respond to unexpected setbacks--a "do-it-yourself biolography.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

“In the 1950s married couples represented 80 percent all households in the United States. By the beginning of the twenty-first century they were less than 51 percent, and married couples with children were just 25 percent of all households.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“They also fought to raise the age at which a girl could be deemed to consent to sex. Through much of the nineteenth century, most U.S. states set the age of consent for girls at ten, eleven, or twelve. In Delaware, it was seven!41 By the end of the nineteenth century reformers in the United States and Europe had established sixteen to eighteen as the legal age of consent.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“Once married, the woman was supposed to let down her sexual barriers, but this put new pressures on wives. The nineteenth-century focus on female purity had inhibited sexual openness between husband and wife, but it had also accorded women a high moral stature that made it difficult for a man to insist on sex if his wife was unwilling. The twentieth-century preoccupation with the orgasm, by contrast, entitled a woman to more sexual consideration in lovemaking but increased the pressure on her to have sex whenever it was suggested.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“Despite the rhetorical reverence our society accords motherhood and fatherhood, in reality the everyday work of parenting garners little social respect and even less practical support.”
― Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique & American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s

“One missionary warned a Naskapi man that if he did not impose tighter controls on his wife, he would never know for sure which of the children she bore belonged to him. The Indian was equally shocked that this mattered to Europeans. “You French people,” he replied, “love only your own children; but we love all the children of our tribe.”17”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“Men repeatedly noted how much easier it was to talk to other males than to women, and their journals often expressed the worry that being married to an angel might not be as easy as it sounded.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“For families with larger amounts of wealth, marriages in the ancient world were the equivalent of today’s business mergers or investment partnerships.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“People have always loved a love story. But for most of the past our ancestors did not try to live in one.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“The Bella Coola and the Kwakiutl societies of the Pacific Northwest provide a striking example of how establishing connections between kin groups sometimes took precedence over sexual or reproductive issues in determining marriage. If two families wished to trade with each other, but no suitable matches were available, a marriage contract might be drawn up between one individual and another’s foot or even with a dog belonging to the family of the desired in-laws!”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“But the biggest single obstacle to making personal happiness the foremost goal of marriage was that women needed to marry in order to survive.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“That process culminated in the 1950s in the short-lived pattern that people have since come to think of as traditional marriage. So in the 1970s, when the inherent instability of the love-based marriage reasserted itself, millions of people were taken completely by surprise. Having lost any collective memory of the convulsions that occurred when the love match was first introduced and the crisis that followed its modernization in the 1920s, they could not understand why this kind of marriage, which they thought had prevailed for thousands of years, was being abandoned by the younger generation.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“But a woman’s right to leave a marriage can also be a lifesaver for men. The Centers on Disease Control reports that the rate at which husbands were killed by their wives fell by approximately two-thirds between 1981 and 1998, in part because women could more easily leave their partners.32”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“The expectation of mutual fidelity is a rather recent invention. Numerous cultures have allowed husbands to seek sexual gratification outside marriage. Less frequently, but often enough to challenge common preconceptions, wives have also been allowed to do this without threatening the marriage. In a study of 109 societies, anthropologists found that only 48 forbade extramarital sex to both husbands and wives.27”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“But there was as yet no way of living on cash alone. Household production was still essential for survival because few commodities could be bought ready to use. Even store-bought chickens needed to be plucked. Factory-made fabrics had to be cut and sewn. Most families had to make their own bread, and the flour they bought came with bugs, small stones, and other impurities that had to be picked out by hand. As a result, in the early stages of the cash economy most families still needed someone to specialize in household production while other family members devoted more hours to wage earning. Typically, that someone was the wife.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“In Austria in the eighteenth century, lower-class married couples commonly lived apart for many years as servants in other people’s houses, taking their meals with their employers rather than their spouses. All these people would be puzzled by our periodic panics about how rarely contemporary families sit down to dinner together.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“I do not believe, then, that marriage was invented to oppress women any more than it was invented to protect them. In most cases, marriage probably originated as an informal way of organizing sexual companionship, child rearing, and the daily tasks of life.”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“High male earnings have also become less important to women. A 2001 poll in the United States found that 80 percent of women in their twenties believed that having a husband who can talk about his feelings was more important than having one who makes a good living.11”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“But love in marriage was seen as a bonus, not as a necessity. The great Roman statesman Cicero exchanged many loving letters with his wife, Terentia, during their thirty-year marriage. But that didn’t stop him from divorcing her when she was no longer able to support him in the style to which he had become accustomed.16”
― Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy

“Up until 1900, more than half the graduates from women's colleges remained single, many of them carving out careers in new fields such as social work.”
― Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique & American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s