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In the past forty years, American families have become more
racially and ethnically diverse than ever before. Different family
forms and living arrangements have also multiplied, with
single-parent families, cohabiting couples with children, divorced
couples with children, stepfamilies, and newly-visible same-sex
families. During the same period, socioeconomic inequality among
families has risen to levels not seen since the 1920s. This second
edition of American Families offers several benefits: clear
conceptual focus new attention to the historical origins of
contemporary family diversity well-chosen essays by leading names
from across the curriculum explores the interactions between
race-ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality in shaping family life
cCompletely updated and expanded bibliography of related sources
new companion website with student and instructor resources to
enhance learning. Leading off with a comprehensive and teachable
introduction to the topic, this completely updated, revised, and
expanded second edition of Stephanie Coontz's classic collection
American Families remains the best resource available on family
diversity in America. For additional information and classroom
resources please visit the American Families companion website at
www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415958219.
Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary, a man's home has never
been his castle, the'male breadwinner marriage' is the least
traditional family in history, and rape and sexual assault were far
higher in the 1970s than they are today. In The Way We Never Were ,
acclaimed historian Stephanie Coontz provides a myth-shattering
examination of two centuries of the American family, sweeping away
misconceptions about the past that cloud current debates about
domestic life. The 1950s do not present a workable model of how to
conduct our personal lives today, Coontz argues, and neither does
any other era from our cultural past. This revised edition includes
a new introduction and epilogue, looking at what has and has not
changed since the original publication in 1992, and exploring how
the clash between growing gender equality and growing economic
inequality is reshaping family life, marriage, and male-female
relationships in our modern era. Now more relevant than ever, The
Way We Never Were continues to be a potent corrective to dangerous
nostalgia for an American tradition that never really existed.
In the past forty years, American families have become more
racially and ethnically diverse than ever before. Different family
forms and living arrangements have also multiplied, with
single-parent families, cohabiting couples with children, divorced
couples with children, stepfamilies, and newly-visible same-sex
families. During the same period, socioeconomic inequality among
families has risen to levels not seen since the 1920s. This second
edition of American Families offers several benefits: clear
conceptual focus new attention to the historical origins of
contemporary family diversity well-chosen essays by leading names
from across the curriculum explores the interactions between
race-ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality in shaping family life
cCompletely updated and expanded bibliography of related sources
new companion website with student and instructor resources to
enhance learning. Leading off with a comprehensive and teachable
introduction to the topic, this completely updated, revised, and
expanded second edition of Stephanie Coontz's classic collection
American Families remains the best resource available on family
diversity in America. For additional information and classroom
resources please visit the American Families companion website at
www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415958219.
In this surprising landmark book, family historian Stephanie Coontz
explodes every cherished assumption about marriage, starting with
the notion of the traditional marriage. Forget Ozzie and Harriet.
Coontz reveals that through most of history, marriage was not a
relationship based on mutual love between a breadwinner husband and
an at-home wife but an institution devoted to acquiring in-laws and
improving the family labor force. How did marriage evolve from the
loveless, arranged unions that have endured from the dawn of
civilization into the sexualized, volatile relationships of today?
Coontz argues that the Victorians, with their radical emphasis on
marital intimacy and celebration of the individual, simultaneously
made marriage more satisfying and paved the way for alternative
lifestyles to thrive: divorce, gay marriage, living together,
single parenting. The diminished role of heterosexual marriage in
our society is not an aberration, insists Coontz, but the
consequence of centuries of irrevocable social change. "Marriage, A
History is an engaging narrative of astonishing scope and depth
that will stand as a milestone of social history and provoke debate
for years to come.
Current debates about the future of the family are often based on
serious misconceptions about its past. Arguing that there is no
biologically mandated or universally functional family form,
Stephanie Coontz traces the complexity and variety of family
arrangements in American history, from Native American kin groups
to the emergence of the dominant middle-class family ideal in the
1890s.
Surveying and synthesizing a vast range of previous scholarship, as
well as engaging more particular studies of family life from the
seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Coontz offers a highly
original account of the shifting structure and function of American
families. Her account challenges standard interpretations of the
early hegemony of middle-class privacy and affective individualism,
pointing to the rich tradition of alternative family behaviors
among various ethnic and socioeconomic groups in America, and
arguing that even middle-class families went through several
transformations in the course of the nineteenth centure.
The present dominant family form, grounded in close interpersonal
relations and premised on domestic consumption of mass-produced
household goods has arisen, Coontz argues, from a long and complex
series of changing political and economic conjunctures, as well as
from the destruction or incorporation of several alternative family
systems. A clear conception of American capitalism's combined and
uneven development is therefore essential if we are to understand
the history of the family as a key social and economic unit. Lucid
and detailed, The Social Origins of Private Life is likely to
become the standard history of its subject.
"To some a book on the "origins" of sexual inequality is absurd.
Male dominance seems to them a universal, if not inevitable,
phenomenon that has been with us since the dawn of our species. The
essays in this volume offer differing perspectives on the
development of sex-role differentiation and sexual inequality, but
share a belief that these phenomena "did" have social origins,
origins that must be sought in sociohistorical events and
processes."
In this way Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson introduce a book
which fills a yawning gap in Marxist and feminist theory of recent
years.
"Women's Work, Men's Property" brings together specialist
historical and anthropological skills of a group of American and
French feminists to examine the origins of the sexual division of
labor, the nature of pre-state kinship societies, the position of
women in slave-based societies, and the specific forms taken by the
oppression of women in archaic Greece.
"Men's Work, Women's Property" will be welcomed by teachers and
students of women's studies and anyone with an interest in the
biological, psychological and historical roots of sexual
inequality.
In 1963, Betty Friedan unleashed a storm of controversy with her
bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique . Women wrote to her by the
hundreds to say that the book had transformed, even saved, their
lives. Nearly half a century later, many women still recall where
they were and what they were doing when they first read the book.
In A Strange Stirring , prominent historian of women and marriage
Stephanie Coontz strips away the myths, examining what The Feminine
Mystique actually said, and which groups of women were affected.
Coontz takes us back to the early 1960s - the age of Mad Men - when
the sexual revolution was barely nascent, middle class wives stayed
at home, and husbands retained legal control over almost every
aspect of family life. Based on extensive research in the magazines
and popular culture of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, as well
as interviews with women and men who read The Feminine Mystique
shortly after its publication, A Strange Stirring brilliantly
illuminates how Friedan's book emboldened a generation of women to
realize that their boredom and dissatisfaction stemmed from
political injustice rather than personal weakness.
Stephanie Coontz, the author of The Way We Never Were, now turns
her attention to the mythology that surrounds today's family,the
demonizing of untraditional" family forms and marriage and
parenting issues. She argues that while it's not crazy to miss the
more hopeful economic trends of the 1950s and 1960s, few would want
to go back to the gender roles and race relations of those years.
Mothers are going to remain in the workforce, family diversity is
here to stay, and the nuclear family can no longer handle all the
responsibilities of elder care and childrearing.Coontz gives a
balanced account of how these changes affect families, both
positively and negatively, but she rejects the notion that the new
diversity is a sentence of doom. Every family has distinctive
resources and special vulnerabilities, and there are ways to help
each one build on its strengths and minimize its weaknesses.The
book provides a meticulously researched, balanced account showing
why a historically informed perspective on family life can be as
much help to people in sorting through family issues as going into
therapy,and much more help than listening to today's political
debates.
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