215 Quotes by Stephanie Coontz

For families with larger amounts of wealth, marriages in the ancient world were the equivalent of today’s business mergers or investment partnerships.

A study of what happened as various states adopted no-fault divorce laws in the 1970s and 1980s found that in the first five years following adoption, wives’ suicide rates fell by 8 to 13 percent, and domestic violence rates within marriage dropped by 30 percent.

Given the deeply rooted Christian suspicion of sexuality, however, the new view of women as intrinsically asexual improved their reputation. Whereas women had once been considered snares of the devil, they were now viewed as sexual innocents whose purity should inspire all decent men to control their own sexual impulses and baser appetites.

But the biggest single obstacle to making personal happiness the foremost goal of marriage was that women needed to marry in order to survive.

But working women with retired husbands tend to be more dissatisfied with their marriages than any other type of wife.39.

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.

As the power behind the throne, the Fujiwaras not only maneuvered the young emperors into marrying their own aunts but ensured that emperors abdicated at an early age, so that each emperor was a young man easily manipulated by the family’s elders. Thus the emperor himself had little real authority. To “capture the king” – to have the emperor father a son with one’s daughter – was the route to political power in the Japanese court .

By 1952 there were two million more working wives than there had been at the height of World War II.

Would-be rulers justified their authority on the basis of their ancestry. Whether they claimed descent from the gods or from an earlier king or legendary hero, their legitimacy depended on the purity of their parents’ bloodlines and the validity of their parents’ marriages. In a world where most of the upper class was busily establishing pretensions to noble blood, the best way to bolster one’s legitimacy was to marry someone who also had an august line of ancestors.