Stephanie Coontz

An analysis of the institution of marriage detailing how marriages have evolved from loveless unions to their current state, in an exposé that reveals the impacts of Victorian-inspired marital intimacy, divorce, and alternative lifestyles.

from obedience to intimacy or how love conquered marriage

Marriage, a history

The Way We Never Were examines two centuries of American family life and shatters a series of myths and half-truths that burden modern families. Placing current family dilemmas in the context of far-reaching economic, political, and demographic changes, Coontz sheds new light on such contemporary concerns as parenting, privacy, love, the division of labor along gender lines, the black family, feminism, and sexual practice.

American Families And The Nostalgia Trap

The Way We Never Were

An analysis of the institution of marriage detailing how marriages have evolved from loveless unions to their current state, in an exposâe that reveals the impacts of Victorian-inspired marital intimacy, divorce, and alternative lifestyles.

From Obedience to Intimacy, Or how Love Conquered Marriage

Marriage, a History

In 1963, Betty Friedan unleashed a storm of controversy with her bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique. Hundreds of women wrote to her to say that the book had transformed, even saved, their lives. Nearly half a century later, many women still recall where they were when they first read it. In A Strange Stirring, historian Stephanie Coontz examines the dawn of the 1960s, when the sexual revolution had barely begun, newspapers advertised for "perky, attractive gal typists," but married women were told to stay home, and husbands controlled almost every aspect of family life. Based on exhaustive research and interviews, and challenging both conservative and liberal myths about Friedan, A Strange Stirring brilliantly illuminates how a generation of women came to realize that their dissatisfaction with domestic life didn't't reflect their personal weakness but rather a social and political injustice.

The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s

A Strange Stirring

Current debates about the future of the family are often based on serious misconceptions about its past. Arguing that there is no biologically mandated or universally functional family form, Stephanie Coontz traces the complexity and variety of family arrangements in American history, from Native American kin groups to the emergence of the dominant middle-class family ideal in the 1890s. Surveying and synthesizing a vast range of previous scholarship, as well as engaging more particular studies of family life from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Coontz offers a highly original account of the shifting structure and function of American families. Her account challenges standard interpretations of the early hegemony of middle-class privacy and "affective individualism," pointing to the rich tradition of alternative family behaviors among various ethnic and socioeconomic groups in America, and arguing that even middle-class families went through several transformations in the course of the nineteenth centure. The present dominant family form, grounded in close interpersonal relations and premised on domestic consumption of mass-produced household goods has arisen, Coontz argues, from a long and complex series of changing political and economic conjunctures, as well as from the destruction or incorporation of several alternative family systems. A clear conception of American capitalism's combined and uneven development is therefore essential if we are to understand the history of the family as a key social and economic unit. Lucid and detailed, The Social Origins of Private Life is likely to become the standard history of its subject.

A History of American Families, 1600-1900

The Social Origins of Private Life

Peta Henderson

“To some a book on the origins of sexual inequality is absurd. Male dominance seems to them a universal, if not inevitable, phenomenon that has been with us since the dawn of our species. The essays in this volume offer differing perspectives on the development of sex-role differentiation and sexual inequality, but share a belief that these phenomena did have social origins, origins that must be sought in sociohistorical events and processes.” In this way Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson introduce a book which fills a yawning gap in Marxist and feminist theory of recent years. Women’s Work, Men’s Property brings together specialist historical and anthropological skills of a group of American and French feminists to examine the origins of the sexual division of labor, the nature of pre-state kinship societies, the position of women in slave-based societies, and the specific forms taken by the oppression of women in archaic Greece. Men’s Work, Women’s Property will be welcomed by teachers and students of women’s studies and anyone with an interest in the biological, psychological and historical roots of sexual inequality.

The Origins of Gender and Class

Women's Work, Men's Property

Essays discuss the origins of the sexual division of labor, the role of women in ancient societies, and the nature of slavery

"To some a book on the origins of sexual inequality is absurd. Male dominance seems to them a universal, if not inevitable, phenomenon that has been with us since the dawn of our species. The essays in this volume offer differing perspectives on the development of sex-role differentiation and sexual inequality, but share a belief that these phenomena did have social origins, origins that must be sought in sociohistorical events and processes." In this way Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson introduce a book which fills a yawning gap in Marxist and feminist theory of recent years. Women's Work, Men's Property brings together specialist historical and anthropological skills of a group of American and French feminists to examine the origins of the sexual division of labor, the nature of pre-state kinship societies, the position of women in slave-based societies, and the specific forms taken by the oppression of women in archaic Greece. Men's Work, Women's Property will be welcomed by teachers and students of women's studies and anyone with an interest in the biological, psychological and historical roots of sexual inequality.

Maya Parson

Gabrielle Raley

This collection by leading scholars discusses race, gender and class stressing their effects on American families.

A Multicultural Reader

American Families

What Socialists Stand for

Private Profit and Social Decay

Life in Capitalist America

In the past forty years, American families have become more racially and ethnically diverse than ever before. Different family forms and living arrangements have also multiplied, with single-parent families, cohabiting couples with children, divorced couples with children, stepfamilies, and newly-visible same-sex families. During the same period, socioeconomic inequality among families has risen to levels not seen since the 1920s. This second edition of American Families offers several benefits: clear conceptual focus new attention to the historical origins of contemporary family diversity well-chosen essays by leading names from across the curriculum explores the interactions between race-ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality in shaping family life cCompletely updated and expanded bibliography of related sources new companion website with student and instructor resources to enhance learning. Leading off with a comprehensive and teachable introduction to the topic, this completely updated, revised, and expanded second edition of Stephanie Coontz's classic collection American Families remains the best resource available on family diversity in America. For additional information and classroom resources please visit the American Families companion website at www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415958219.

Chronicles the impact of Betty Friedan's landmark feminist book "The Feminine Mystique" on stay-at-home married women of the early 1960s, who had become dissatisfied with domestic life.

Stephanie Coontz, the author of The Way We Never Were, now turns her attention to the mythology that surrounds today’s family—the demonizing of “untraditional” family forms and marriage and parenting issues. She argues that while it’s not crazy to miss the more hopeful economic trends of the 1950s and 1960s, few would want to go back to the gender roles and race relations of those years. Mothers are going to remain in the workforce, family diversity is here to stay, and the nuclear family can no longer handle all the responsibilities of elder care and childrearing.Coontz gives a balanced account of how these changes affect families, both positively and negatively, but she rejects the notion that the new diversity is a sentence of doom. Every family has distinctive resources and special vulnerabilities, and there are ways to help each one build on its strengths and minimize its weaknesses.The book provides a meticulously researched, balanced account showing why a historically informed perspective on family life can be as much help to people in sorting through family issues as going into therapy—and much more help than listening to today’s political debates.

Stephanie Coontz

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