Stephanie Coontz Quotes

#1. Putting women's traditional needs at the center of social planning is not reverse sexism. It's the best way to reverse the increasing economic vulnerability of men and women alike.

Stephanie Coontz

#2. But working women with retired husbands tend to be more dissatisfied with their marriages than any other type of wife.39

Stephanie Coontz

#3. The old equation has changed. Most families no longer save money by keeping wives at home. They lose by not having wives in the workplace, where women have more opportunities than in the past to earn decent wages.

Stephanie Coontz

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

Stephanie Coontz

#5. The historical weight of gender inequality has tended to concentrate women in lower-paid jobs with fewer benefits and at the same time made them primarily responsible for care giving.

Stephanie Coontz

#6. Many people felt much closer to their own sex than to what was seen as the literally "opposite" - and alien - sex. In letters and diaries, women often referred to men as "the grosser sex.

Stephanie Coontz

#7. 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.

Stephanie Coontz

#8. And many attorneys and judges have come to support legal recognition for same-sex unions because they are already having to deal with the division of assets and similar issues in de facto gay and lesbian divorces.

Stephanie Coontz

#9. A two-parent family based on love and commitment can be a wonderful thing, but historically speaking the "two-parent paradigm" has left an extraordinary amount of room for economic inequality, violence and male dominance.

Stephanie Coontz

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. In the late 1960s a woman in the poorer countries of the world typically had six children. Today the average is fewer than three. In fact, demographers now project that the world's population will begin to decline before 2050.47

Stephanie Coontz

#13. Once people came to believe that families should nurture children rather than exploit their labor, many began to feel that the legal consequences of illegitimacy for children were inhumane.

Stephanie Coontz

#14. Singlehood is not longer a state to be overcome as soon as possible. It has its own rewards. Marriage is not the gateway to adulthood anymore. For most people it's the dessert - desirable, but no longer the main course.

Stephanie Coontz

#15. The worst problems for children stem from parental conflict, before, during, and after divorce or within marriage.

Stephanie Coontz

#16. The benefits of feminism have been unequally distributed, because the move toward gender equality and gender neutrality has been countered to a large extent by the increase in economic inequality.

Stephanie Coontz

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. A significant minority of senior women I've interviewed say, 'Love the companionship, glad to live with him, but I spent my first marriage picking up after a man and I'm not going to do that anymore.

Stephanie Coontz

#22. There is a lack of collective support or social support for working people in America. We're told, "You can be, as an individual, anything you want to be, but it must be at something else's - or somebody else's - expense."

Stephanie Coontz

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

Stephanie Coontz

#24. When the prepared foods and drip-dry shirts that had eased the work of homemakers also made it possible for men to live comfortable, if sloppy, bachelor lives . . .

Stephanie Coontz

#25. 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

Stephanie Coontz

#26. What's been building since the 1980's is a new kind of social Darwinism that blames poverty and crime and the crisis of our youth on a breakdown of the family. That's what will last after this flurry on family values.

Stephanie Coontz

#27. Nostalgia wouldn't begin to capture your sense of loss, ... The Way We Really Are Coming to Terms With America's Changing Families.

Stephanie Coontz