Top 90 Stephanie Coontz Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “This was not just an American phenomenon. A survey of twenty-one industrial countries reported that in the 1970s and 1980s female employment rose twice or even three times as fast as the growth in total employment. In almost every case, married women accounted for the majority of the increase in women’s workforce participation.35.”

— Stephanie Coontz

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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!”

— Stephanie Coontz

55. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

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

— Stephanie Coontz

57. “Even as more wives took paying jobs during the Depression, their unpaid workload increased. Less able to afford the conveniences that had begun to lighten the homemaker’s load in the 1920s, women had to sew more of their own clothes, can more of their own preserves, do more of their cooking from scratch. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” was a popular saying of the day.”

— Stephanie Coontz

58. “Couples in the Paleolithic world would never have fantasized about running off by themselves to their own little retreats in the forest. No Stone Age lovers would have imagined in their wildest dreams that they could or should be “everything” to each other. That way lay death.”

— Stephanie Coontz

59. “If it is hard to find a ‘natural’ parent-child relationship in this variety of family arrangements, it is also difficult to make pat historical judgments about what kind of family is best for children.”

— Stephanie Coontz

60. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

61. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

62. “The fact is, however, that depending on support beyond the family has been the rule rather than the exception in American history, despite recurring myths about individual achievement and family enterprise.”

— Stephanie Coontz

63. “The benefits of feminism have been unequally distributed, because the move toward gender equality and gender neutrality has been countered to a large extent by the increase in economic inequality.”

— Stephanie Coontz

64. “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

65. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

66. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

67. “Unlike scholarly journals, mass-market advice books are rarely reviewed by experts in the field. Instead of getting tested research findings, most of the time you get what some author claims worked for him or her, or what someone thinks might work for you, or what some publisher’s marketing department hopes you will think might work for you, all mixed in with “time-tested rules” that might have worked in the past but no longer hold true.”

— Stephanie Coontz

68. “There are many people who claim they can provide you with a road map. But in fact, on virtually every issue concerning marriage today, most personal advice gurus and policy makers lag behind the real changes transforming marriage.”

— Stephanie Coontz

69. “Generalizations about the negative results of day care in America are extremely suspect, since the United States, unlike Europe, has almost no national legislation establishing a minimum quality of care. Most studies thus average together both high-quality and low-quality child-care situations.”

— Stephanie Coontz

70. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

71. “In the late 1960s a woman in the poorer countries of the world typically had six children. Today the average is fewer than three. In fact, demographers now project that the world’s population will begin to decline before 2050.47.”

— Stephanie Coontz

72. “Our most powerful visions of traditional families derive from images that are still delivered to our homes in countless reruns of 1950s television sitcoms.”

— Stephanie Coontz

73. “Indeed, in a majority of marriages today the couple has already lived together.”

— Stephanie Coontz

74. “Considerable research, however, links the notorious inefficiency of state spending in America to the tendency of professionals to ‘medicalize’ problems, making them a matter of individual ignorance or family pathology that only ‘experts’ can resolve. This means that federal funding often creates new career paths for professionals rather than gives poor families the resources to help themselves.”

— Stephanie Coontz

75. “It is pointless to construct a hierarchy of who hurt more, and whether one kind of pain was more or less justified than another.”

— Stephanie Coontz

76. “Although some studies show that paid work enhances women’s self-esteem, which can improve their parenting, others suggest that single mothers in low-wage jobs are just as depressed, hostile, and fatalistic as single mothers on welfare. And contrary to widespread popular belief, higher levels of welfare assistance in a neighborhood tend to decrease the impact of resource deprivation on crime rates.22.”

— Stephanie Coontz

77. “It is impossible to sort out neatly in order of importance all the factors that rearranged social and political life between the 1960s and the 1990s and in the process transformed marriage as well. Sometimes it is even hard to say which changes caused the transformation and which were consequences. But the changes were not effected by a single generation or a particular political ideology.”

— Stephanie Coontz

78. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

79. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

80. “Selective memory is not a bad thing when it leads children to forget arguments in the back seat of the car and to look forward to their next vacation. But it’s a serious problem when it leads grown-ups to try to re-create a past that either never existed at all or whose seemingly attractive features were inextricably linked to injustices and restrictions on liberty that few Americans would tolerate today.”

— Stephanie Coontz

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

— Stephanie Coontz

82. “Today married people in Western Europe and North America are generally happier, healthier, and better protected against economic setbacks and psychological depression than people in any other living arrangement.”

— Stephanie Coontz

83. “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!”

— Stephanie Coontz

84. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

85. “But love in marriage was seen as a bonus, not as a necessity. The great Roman statesman Cicero exchanged many loving letters with his wife, Terentia, during their thirty-year marriage. But that didn’t stop him from divorcing her when she was no longer able to support him in the style to which he had become accustomed.16.”

— Stephanie Coontz

86. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

87. “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.”

— Stephanie Coontz

88. “In Christian texts prior to the seventeenth century, the word love usually referred to feelings toward God or neighbors rather than toward a spouse.”

— Stephanie Coontz

89. “Ultimately, however, whether it is mother, wife, or child who keeps a man going, or whether a woman focuses her self-sacrifice on parent, husband, or child, the simultaneous connection and contrast between nurturing within the family and competition outside it leads to a profound sense of loneliness.”

— Stephanie Coontz

90. “Certainly people fell in love during those thousands of years, sometimes with their own spouses. But marriage was not fundamentally about love.”

— Stephanie Coontz