215 Quotes by Stephanie Coontz

Yet there were logical reasons for a king to prefer the charms of a concubine or a merchant’s daughter over those of his highborn wife. A commoner had no powerful kin to dilute her loyalty to the king.

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.

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.

Certainly people fell in love during those thousands of years, sometimes with their own spouses. But marriage was not fundamentally about love. It was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love.

If you’ve ever tried to alter your own marital patterns you know that change doesn’t happen overnight. In history, as in personal life, there are very few moments or events that mark a complete turning point. It takes a long time for ideas to filter through different social groups. Typically, individuals adopt only a few new behaviors at any one time, and old habits hang on long after most people have agreed they should be dropped.

The home economics experts believed that modern household tools made this investment of time an element of woman’s self-fulfillment rather than, as formerly, an act of self-sacrifice. Any woman who was dissatisfied with her domestic role now that she had such helpful appliances, they argued, suffered from “personal maladjustment.

Despite humane intentions, an overemphasis on personal responsibility for strengthening family values encourages a way of thinking that leads to moralizing rather than mobilizing for concrete reforms.

A date took place in the public sphere, away from home. It involved money, because when you moved from drinking mother’s lemonade on the front porch to buying Cokes at a restaurant, someone had to pay. And because in the context of women’s second-class economic status, the boy would have to pay, a girl could not ask a boy to take her out. The initiative thus shifted from the girl and her family to the boy.

Nearly every plaintiff testified in almost exactly the same words, describing behavior that included the exact minimum requirements and even the precise legal phrases needed for a fault-based divorce. “The number of cruel spouses in Chicago, both male and female, who strike their marriage partners in the face exactly twice, without provocation, leaving visible marks, is remarkable,” noted the author of one 1950s divorce study.15.