Quotes from Stephanie Coontz

Even as more wives took paying jobs during the Depression, their unpaid workload increased. Less able to afford the conveniences that had begun to lighten the homemaker's load in the 1920s, women had to sew more of their own clothes, can more of their own preserves, do more of their cooking from scratch. "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without" was a popular saying of the day.

Nowadays a bitter wife or husband might ask, "Whatever possessed me to think I loved you enough to marry you?" Through most of the past, he or she was more likely to have asked, "Whatever possessed me to marry you just because I loved you?

Women had to discard the doctrines of sexual purity that so often led to frigidity in marriage. Entrepreneurs were glad to help. For just ten cents a woman could buy a discreetly wrapped book titled How I Kept My Husband, which instructed her in how to give oral sex.32

Couples in the Paleolithic world would never have fantasized about running off by themselves to their own little retreats in the forest. No Stone Age lovers would have imagined in their wildest dreams that they could or should be "everything" to each other. That way lay death.

If it is hard to find a 'natural' parent-child relationship in this variety of family arrangements, it is also difficult to make pat historical judgments about what kind of family is best for children.

There are many people who claim they can provide you with a road map. But in fact, on virtually every issue concerning marriage today, most personal advice gurus and policy makers lag behind the real changes transforming marriage.

Legitimate brothers were all too likely to go to war over an inheritance. Bastards had to hitch their fortunes to the king and his designated heir, and many kings produced them with abandon.

More than half of Spanish women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine are single. The rate of marriage in Italy is much lower than in the United States. Japan shares with Scandinavia the distinction of having the highest percentage of unmarried women between age twenty and forty of anywhere in the world.44

as long as we respond to the uncertainties with common sense, flexibility, and affection, most of us can be, in therapist Donald Winnicott's words, "good enough" parents.

One study showed an increase of thirty points in IQ scores of orphaned children who were moved from a poor institution to a better one.

To my mind, it is better to have regrets about the good aspects of your former marriage because you were able to work past some of your accumulated resentments than to have no regrets because you had to ratchet up the hostility to get out in the first place.

In 1975, which was the height of the women's movement, I thought I'd write a book on women's history. But in searching for a topic, I realized that there were few places in history where men and women interacted. Finally, it hit me: 'Oh, look at the family. That's the one place.'

When I speak on work-family issues to audiences around the country, some of the biggest complaints I hear come from individuals who are described by the census as living in 'non-family households.' They resent the fact that their family responsibilities literally don't 'count,' either for society or for their employers.

Using the existence of a marriage license to determine when the state should protect interpersonal relationships is increasingly impractical.

There's nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain.

It is ironic that so many politicians claim to defend traditional Christian values of 'faith and family.' In fact, a radical antifamily ideology permeates Christ's teaching, and the early Christian tradition often set faith and family against each other.

Many alternatives to traditional marriage have emerged. People feel free to shop around, experimenting with several living arrangements in succession. And when people do marry, they have different expectations and goals.

Marriage is no longer the only place where people make major life transitions and decisions, enter into commitments, or incur obligations.

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.

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.

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.

Contrary to popular opinion, 'Leave it to Beaver' was not a documentary.

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.

S]ince the dawn of civilization, getting in-laws has been one of marriage's most important functions.