Top 90 Stephanie Coontz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Like it or not, today we are all pioneers, picking our way through uncharted and unstable territory. The old rules are no longer reliable guides to work out modern gender roles and build a secure foundation for marriage. Wherever it is that people want to end up in their family relations today, even if they are totally committed to creating a so-called traditional marrige, they have to get there by a different route from the past.”

— Stephanie Coontz

2. “A full-time housewife’s work at home could usually save a family more than she could earn in wages.33.”

— Stephanie Coontz

3. “People have always loved a love story. But for most of the past our ancestors did not try to live in one.”

— Stephanie Coontz

4. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

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

— Stephanie Coontz

6. “As all these barriers to single living and personal autonomy gradually eroded, society’s ability to pressure people into marrying, or keep them in a marriage against their wishes, was drastically curtailed. People no longer needed to marry in order to construct successful lives or long-lasting sexual relationships. With that, thousands of years of tradition came to an end.”

— Stephanie Coontz

7. “Until fifty years ago, men typically under-reported how much household work or child care they did because they did not want to admit to doing “women’s work.” It is a huge step forward that men think they should say they do more than they actually do.”

— Stephanie Coontz

8. “One missionary warned a Naskapi man that if he did not impose tighter controls on his wife, he would never know for sure which of the children she bore belonged to him. The Indian was equally shocked that this mattered to Europeans. “You French people,” he replied, “love only your own children; but we love all the children of our tribe.”17.”

— Stephanie Coontz

9. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

10. “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.””

— Stephanie Coontz

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

— Stephanie Coontz

12. “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 .”

— Stephanie Coontz

13. “The cultural consensus that everyone should marry and form a male breadwinner family was like a steamroller that crushed every alternative view. By the end of the 1950s even people who had grown up in completely different family systems had come to believe that universal marriage at a young age into a male breadwinner family was the traditional and permanent form of marriage.”

— Stephanie Coontz

14. “When a woman had to seek work because her husband lost his job, this threatened the “modern” ideas of masculinity and marriage that most men had come to embrace over the previous two decades. Unemployed men often lost their sense of identity and became demoralized. Many turned to drink. Tempers flared at home. It is not surprising, then, that the experience of the Depression undercut the societal support for working women that had emerged in the early years of the twentieth century.”

— Stephanie Coontz

15. “Another limit on intimate marriage in the nineteenth century was that many people still held the Enlightenment view that love developed slowly out of admiration, respect, and appreciation of someone’s good character. Coupled with the taboos on expressions of sexual desire, these values meant that the love one felt for a sweetheart often was not seen as qualitatively different from the feeling one might have for a sister, a friend, or even an idea.”

— Stephanie Coontz

16. “Even today, Young says, marriage is “the cornerstone of patriarchal power.” Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard argue that marriage is one of the primary ways that “men benefit from, and exploit, the work of women.”23.”

— Stephanie Coontz

17. “The hybrid idea that a woman can be fully absorbed with her youngsters while simultaneously maintaining passionate sexual excitement with her husband was a 1950s invention that drove thousands of women to therapists, tranquilizers, or alcohol when they actually tried to live up to it.”

— Stephanie Coontz

18. “Nowadays a bitter wife or husband might ask, “Whatever possessed me to think I loved you enough to marry you?” Through most of the past, he or she was more likely to have asked, “Whatever possessed me to marry you just because I loved you?”

— Stephanie Coontz

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

— Stephanie Coontz

20. “Trying to adopt a consistent position on whether state intervention is good or bad for privacy may be like demanding that scientists choose whether light consists of waves or particles, when it consists of both.”

— Stephanie Coontz

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

— Stephanie Coontz

22. “The breakdown of the wall separating marriage from nonmarriage has been described by some legal historians and sociologists as the deinstitutionalization or delegalization of marriage or even, with a French twist, as demariage. I like historian Nancy Cott’s observation that it is akin to what happened in Europe and America when legislators disestablished their state religion.”

— Stephanie Coontz

23. “Legitimate brothers were all too likely to go to war over an inheritance. Bastards had to hitch their fortunes to the king and his designated heir, and many kings produced them with abandon.”

— Stephanie Coontz

24. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

25. “The Bella Coola and the Kwakiutl societies of the Pacific Northwest provide a striking example of how establishing connections between kin groups sometimes took precedence over sexual or reproductive issues in determining marriage. If two families wished to trade with each other, but no suitable matches were available, a marriage contract might be drawn up between one individual and another’s foot or even with a dog belonging to the family of the desired in-laws!”

— Stephanie Coontz

26. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

27. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

28. “Men repeatedly noted how much easier it was to talk to other males than to women, and their journals often expressed the worry that being married to an angel might not be as easy as it sounded.”

— Stephanie Coontz

29. “But a woman’s right to leave a marriage can also be a lifesaver for men. The Centers on Disease Control reports that the rate at which husbands were killed by their wives fell by approximately two-thirds between 1981 and 1998, in part because women could more easily leave their partners.32.”

— Stephanie Coontz

30. “Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that in states that adopted unilateral divorce, this was followed, on average, by a 20 percent reduction in the number of married women committing suicide, as well as a significant drop in domestic violence for both men and women.”

— Stephanie Coontz

31. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

32. “The idea that in prehistoric times a man would spend his life hunting only for the benefit of his own wife and children, who were dependent solely upon his hunting prowess for survival, is simply a projection of 1950s marital norms onto the past.”

— Stephanie Coontz

33. “Twenty-six American states passed laws explicitly prohibiting or limiting the employment of married women in various fields. By 1940 more than three-quarters of the school systems in the United States refused to hire married women as teachers.9.”

— Stephanie Coontz

34. “I do not believe, then, that marriage was invented to oppress women any more than it was invented to protect them. In most cases, marriage probably originated as an informal way of organizing sexual companionship, child rearing, and the daily tasks of life.”

— Stephanie Coontz

35. “In Europe and the United States today such an arrangement would be a surefire recipe for jealousy, bitter breakups, and very mixed-up kids. But among the Bari people this practice was in the best interests of the child. The secondary fathers were expected to provide the child with fish and game, with the result that a child with a secondary father was twice as likely to live to the age of fifteen as a brother or sister without such a father.32.”

— Stephanie Coontz

36. “In practice, Athenian democracy was very limited. There were twice as many slaves as citizens, and no woman or foreigner had citizenship rights. But for those who were included, this nascent democracy had extraordinary implications, undercutting the ability of aristocratic families to build and maintain their private power bases.”

— Stephanie Coontz

37. “The Victorians did not have some secret formula, since lost, about how to expect the best of marriage and still put up with the worst. Rather, they were much more accepting than we are today of a huge gap between rhetoric and reality, expectation and actual experience. In large part, this was because they had no other choice.”

— Stephanie Coontz

38. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

39. “Whenever people propose that we go back to the traditional family, I always suggest that they pick a ballpark date for the family they have in mind. Once pinned down, they are invariably unwilling to accept the package deal that comes with their chosen model.”

— Stephanie Coontz

40. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

41. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

42. “Up until 1950 most families’ discretionary income did not cover much more than an occasional meal away from home; a beer or two after work; a weekly trip to the movies, amusement park, or beach; and perhaps a yearly vacation, usually spent at the home of relatives. Few households had washing machines and dryers. Refrigerators had only tiny spaces for freezing ice and had to be defrosted at least once a week. Few houses had separate bedrooms for all the children.”

— Stephanie Coontz

43. “Males are also damaged by gender expectations that have changed enough to erode many old sources of masculine self-esteem but not enough to lessen the pressures on them to maintain or reinvent “manly” behaviors and images.29.”

— Stephanie Coontz

44. “The big problem is how hard it is to achieve equal relationships in a society whose work policies, school schedules, and social programs were constructed on the assumption that male breadwinner families would always be the norm. Tensions between men and women today stem less from different aspirations than from the difficulties they face translating their ideals into practice.”

— Stephanie Coontz

45. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

46. “But all these examples of differing marital and sexual norms make it difficult to claim there is some universal model for the success or happiness of a marriage.”

— Stephanie Coontz

47. “However, couples have to think carefully about what it takes to build, deepen, and sustain commitments that are now almost completely voluntary. Modern marriages cannot just glide down the well-worn paths of the past.”

— Stephanie Coontz

48. “What about traditional Chinese and Sudanese ghost or spirit marriages, in which one of the partners is actually dead? In these societies a youth might be given in marriage to the dead son or daughter of another family, in order to forge closer ties between the two sets of relatives.”

— Stephanie Coontz

49. “High male earnings have also become less important to women. A 2001 poll in the United States found that 80 percent of women in their twenties believed that having a husband who can talk about his feelings was more important than having one who makes a good living.11.”

— Stephanie Coontz

50. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz