Stephanie Coontz Quotations

Life is filled with trade-offs, and I worry that it's so easy to slip from descriptions of problems to one-size-fits-all prescription,

The only thing that can replace (the emptiness) is a new sense of community. It's more than the sum of the individual losses.

Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage.

There is still an expectation that men have to know what their wives are doing and have to control them,

You have to make a family where you can find it.

Even 25 years ago, most people were reliant on their friends to fix them up. People in their 40s and 50s don't want to be hanging out at bars. Now they have access to this incredible pool of single people their age.

This is a new phenomenon ? not the mercenary quality, but the fact that people are willing to risk this kind of money, just to say they're married. Love has been so idealized that at the top, the rich are willing to throw good money after bad to see if they can get the magic ring.

The depth and influence of the radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s are often exaggerated.

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.

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

Women are told that we can have the most exciting, glamorous, demanding, rewarding careers ever but we also have to be constantly sexy and sexually interested, and when we have children we have to spend more time with our kids. Of course you can't really do all three of those things at once, so we feel this tremendous stress.

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

The idea that academics should remain ''above the fray'' only gives ideologues license to misuse our work.

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.

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."

Almost all scholarly research carries practical and political implications. Better that we should spell these out ourselves than leave that task to people with a vested interest in stressing only some of the implications and falsifying others. The idea that academics should remain "above the fray" only gives ideologues license to misuse our work.

... 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.

Families have always been in flux and often in crisis; they have never lived up to nostalgic notions about "the way things used tobe." But that doesn't mean the malaise and anxiety people feel about modern families are delusions, that everything would be fine if we would only realize that the past was not all it's cracked up to be. . . . Even if things were not always right in families of the past, it seems clear that some things have newly gone wrong.

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.

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.

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

We urgently need a debate about the best ways of supporting families in modern America, without blinders that prevent us from seeing the full extent of dependence and interdependence in American life. As long as we pretend that only poor or abnormal families need outside assistance, we will shortchange poor families, overcompensate rich ones, and fail to come up with effective policies for helping families in the middle.

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.

For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish ora German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.

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.

Extended families have never been the norm in America; the highest figure for extended-family households ever recorded in Americanhistory is 20 percent. Contrary to the popular myth that industrialization destroyed "traditional" extended families, this high point occurred between 1850 and 1885, during the most intensive period of early industrialization. Many of these extended families, and most "producing" families of the time, depended on the labor of children; they were held together by dire necessity and sometimes by brute force.