Quotes by Stephanie Coontz

Stephanie Coontz

… 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.

Family

Lasts

Politics

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.

Men

Minorities

Senior

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.

Commitment

Economic Inequality

Two

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.

Ideas

People

Stress

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

Beavers

Documentaries

Opinion

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.

America

Children

Together

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.

Mean

Past

People

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.

Daughter

Girl

Mother

Hollywood overstates both the romance of marriage and the prevalence of divorce. Celebrities have divorce rates that are atypical and higher than most couples. I suspect that in celebrity marriages, there are huge egos on both sides and they do seem to encourage unrealistic expectations about falling in love. The problem with our romantic culture is that you can love someone you don’t respect and the marriage can run out of gas with that formula. Respect is essential – not just respecting your partner but being sure your partner equally respects you.

Couple

Falling In Love

Running

I think that divorce is a vital escape hatch for people stuck in marriage and it is not a sentence of doom either for adults or children. The community should develop better support systems for saving or restoring potentially healthy marriages.But we should also help people who decide to divorce have healthier partings.

Children

Divorce

Thinking

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America

Beavers

Care

Children

Commitment

Country

Couple

Daughter

Divorce

Documentaries

Economic Inequality

Falling In Love

Family

Feminism

Girl

Giving

Historical

Home

Husband

Ideas

Independent

Jobs

Kids

Lasts

Long

Loss

Mean

Men

Minorities

Misuse

Money

Mother

Moving

Needs

Opinion

Overcoming

Past

People

Politics

Problem

Religious

Running

Senior

Sexy

Single

Stress

Support

Thinking

Together

Two

The Future Blueprint

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Quotes by Stephanie Coontz

Stephanie Coontz

… 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.

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.

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.

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

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Topics by Stephanie Coontz

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The Future Blueprint

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

The Autobiography

The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

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