Quotes from Stephanie Coontz

It is pointless to construct a hierarchy of who hurt more, and whether one kind of pain was more or less justified than another.

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.

People have always loved a love story. But for most of the past our ancestors did not try to live in one.

But the biggest single obstacle to making personal happiness the foremost goal of marriage was that women needed to marry in order to survive.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Although some studies show that paid work enhances women's self-esteem, which can improve their parenting, others suggest that single mothers in low-wage jobs are just as depressed, hostile, and fatalistic as single mothers on welfare. And contrary to widespread popular belief, higher levels of welfare assistance in a neighborhood tend to decrease the impact of resource deprivation on crime rates.22

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.

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

For families with larger amounts of wealth, marriages in the ancient world were the equivalent of today's business mergers or investment partnerships.

The hybrid idea that a woman can be fully absorbed with her youngsters while simultaneously maintaining passionate sexual excitement with her husband was a 1950s invention that drove thousands of women to therapists, tranquilizers, or alcohol when they actually tried to live up to it.

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

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.

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.

Because we live so much of our adult lives as singles, it no longer makes sense to assume that marriage is the only way people will organize their obligations and commitments.

In 1992, I critiqued the panic over growing family diversity. My skepticism about the doomsayers has since been proven correct.

Social changes always involve trade-offs.

Historically, it has required a combination of favorable employment trends and active government intervention to lower the percentage of people in poverty and raise living standards for the working middle class.

The origins of modern marital instability lie largely in the triumph of what many people believe to be marriage's traditional role - providing love, intimacy, fidelity, and mutual fulfillment. The truth is that for centuries, marriage was stable precisely because it was not expected to provide such benefits.

Whatever their relative valuation of the single and married states, most societies in history made sharp distinctions between those who married and those who remained single: They were seen as mutually exclusive ways of life, with different legal rights and social obligations.

Over the ages, some societies have accorded far less value and respect to singles than to married individuals.