Quotes from Stephanie Coontz

Certainly people fell in love during those thousands of years, sometimes with their own spouses. But marriage was not fundamentally about love. It was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love.

If we can learn anything from the past, it is how few precedents are now relevant in the changed marital landscape in which we operate today.

The idea that in prehistoric times a man would spend his life hunting only for the benefit of his own wife and children, who were dependent solely upon his hunting prowess for survival, is simply a projection of 1950s marital norms onto the past.

Unlike scholarly journals, mass-market advice books are rarely reviewed by experts in the field. Instead of getting tested research findings, most of the time you get what some author claims worked for him or her, or what someone thinks might work for you, or what some publisher's marketing department hopes you will think might work for you, all mixed in with "time-tested rules" that might have worked in the past but no longer hold true.

But the Newsweek claim was wrong even back in 1986. And by 2002 Hewlett's "nowadays" was already three decades out-of-date. More women than ever before are marrying for the first time at age thirty, forty, fifty, and even sixty.

Even today, Young says, marriage is "the cornerstone of patriarchal power." Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard argue that marriage is one of the primary ways that "men benefit from, and exploit, the work of women."23

If you've ever tried to alter your own marital patterns you know that change doesn't happen overnight. In history, as in personal life, there are very few moments or events that mark a complete turning point. It takes a long time for ideas to filter through different social groups. Typically, individuals adopt only a few new behaviors at any one time, and old habits hang on long after most people have agreed they should be dropped.

Medical textbooks of the day make it clear that these doctors brought their patients to orgasm. In fact, the mechanical vibrator was invented at the end of the nineteenth century to relieve physicians of this tedious and time-consuming chore!

On the North American plains in the 1930s, a Kiowa Indian woman commented to a researcher that "a woman can always get another husband, but she has only one brother.

By 1952 there were two million more working wives than there had been at the height of World War II.

During the rule of the Southern Dynasties (A.D. 317-589), one Chinese princess argued that she, like her brother the emperor, was entitled to a harem. Her wishes prevailed, and she was assigned thirty male "concubines."10

Yet there were logical reasons for a king to prefer the charms of a concubine or a merchant's daughter over those of his highborn wife. A commoner had no powerful kin to dilute her loyalty to the king.

But all these examples of differing marital and sexual norms make it difficult to claim there is some universal model for the success or happiness of a marriage.

There were fewer female physicians in 1930 than at the start of the 1920s, and women were a smaller proportion of the college population.

Those who advocate that today's youth should be taught abstinence or deferred gratification rather than sex education will find no 1950s model for such restraint. 'Heavy petting' became a norm of dating in this period, while the proportion of white brides who were pregnant at marriage more than doubled. Teen birthrates soar, reaching highs that have not been equaled since.

The home economics experts believed that modern household tools made this investment of time an element of woman's self-fulfillment rather than, as formerly, an act of self-sacrifice. Any woman who was dissatisfied with her domestic role now that she had such helpful appliances, they argued, suffered from "personal maladjustment.

In Christian texts prior to the seventeenth century, the word love usually referred to feelings toward God or neighbors rather than toward a spouse.

What about traditional Chinese and Sudanese ghost or spirit marriages, in which one of the partners is actually dead? In these societies a youth might be given in marriage to the dead son or daughter of another family, in order to forge closer ties between the two sets of relatives.

Males are also damaged by gender expectations that have changed enough to erode many old sources of masculine self-esteem but not enough to lessen the pressures on them to maintain or reinvent manly behaviors and images.29

A date took place in the public sphere, away from home. It involved money, because when you moved from drinking mother's lemonade on the front porch to buying Cokes at a restaurant, someone had to pay. And because in the context of women's second-class economic status, the boy would have to pay, a girl could not ask a boy to take her out. The initiative thus shifted from the girl and her family to the boy.

In 1994, several students and I interviewed a ninety-five-year-old woman for an oral history project. She told us that as a teenager she went to the movies to learn the right way to kiss, and after the movie she and her boyfriend would drive to the local lovers' lane to try out the new techniques. Overhearing, the woman sitting next to her in the nursing home lounge exclaimed: "Oh, my goodness, I always thought I was so bad for doing that!

Switching marital partners sometimes took place with as little emotional turmoil as we might feel in switching phone companies. Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 B.C.) divorced his wife Marcia and arranged for her to marry his friend Hortensius, in order to strengthen the friendship and family connections

the entire notion of the state undermining some primordial family privacy is a myth, because the nuclear family has never existed as an autonomous, private unit except where it was the synthetic creation of outside forces. The strong nuclear family is in large measure a creation of the strong state.

The Athenians reasoned that a rapist did not pose a threat to the husband's household property because the woman could be counted on to dislike the rapist. But "he who achieves his end by persuasion," said the legislators, gained access not only to the woman's body but to her husband's storeroom.29