215 Quotes by Stephanie Coontz

If we can learn anything from the past, it is how few precedents are now relevant in the changed marital landscape in which we operate today.

But the Newsweek claim was wrong even back in 1986. And by 2002 Hewlett’s “nowadays” was already three decades out-of-date. More women than ever before are marrying for the first time at age thirty, forty, fifty, and even sixty.

Medical textbooks of the day make it clear that these doctors brought their patients to orgasm. In fact, the mechanical vibrator was invented at the end of the nineteenth century to relieve physicians of this tedious and time-consuming chore!

In 1994, several students and I interviewed a ninety-five-year-old woman for an oral history project. She told us that as a teenager she went to the movies to learn the right way to kiss, and after the movie she and her boyfriend would drive to the local lovers’ lane to try out the new techniques. Overhearing, the woman sitting next to her in the nursing home lounge exclaimed: “Oh, my goodness, I always thought I was so bad for doing that!

More than half of Spanish women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine are single. The rate of marriage in Italy is much lower than in the United States. Japan shares with Scandinavia the distinction of having the highest percentage of unmarried women between age twenty and forty of anywhere in the world.44.

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.

Most parents would not allow more than one daughter to remain unmarried. So if one daughter had already declared herself a spinster, her sister had to conduct a marriage ceremony with a dead man, called marrying a tablet, to retain her independence. These women later told historians that “it was not so easy to find an unmarried dead man to marry,” so when one did become available, they vied with one another “to be the one who would get to marry him.

A woman in ancient China might bring one or more of her sisters to her husband’s home as backup wives. Eskimo couples often had cospousal arrangements, in which each partner had sexual relations with the other’s spouse. In Tibet and parts of India, Kashmir, and Nepal, a woman may be married to two or more brothers, all of whom share sexual access to her.20.

If the ascent of women has been much exaggerated, so has the descent of men.