Top 125 Quotes & Sayings by Stephanie Coontz - Page 2

In 1975, which was the height of the women's movement, I thought I'd write a book on women's history. But in searching for a topic, I realized that there were few places in history where men and women interacted. Finally, it hit me: 'Oh, look at the family. That's the one place.'

Donald Trump has tapped into a deep vein of racism, nativism, and misogyny.

The place where we keep our clothes isn't always the only place where we keep our commitments.

We must recognize that there are healthy as well as unhealthy ways to be single or to be divorced, just as there are healthy and unhealthy ways to be married.

Being a feminist is not about how successful, talented, and assertive you are in your own life. It's about whether you support the struggle to overcome the limiting gendered stereotypes and barriers that force so many women to restrict their aspirations as workers, to fulfill their aspirations as parents, and force so many men to do the opposite.

Because we live so much of our adult lives as singles, it no longer makes sense to assume that marriage is the only way people will organize their obligations and commitments.

No single choice about how to organize work and family life is right or possible - for every family. And every choice has tradeoffs.

Feminism insists on women's right to make choices - about whether to marry, whether to have children, whether to combine work and family or to focus on one over the other. It also urges men and women to share the joys and burdens of family life and calls on society to place a higher priority on supporting caregiving work.

When liberals dismiss all Trump supporters as racists, this only fuels their anger.

It is ironic that so many politicians claim to defend traditional Christian values of 'faith and family.' In fact, a radical antifamily ideology permeates Christ's teaching, and the early Christian tradition often set faith and family against each other.

Feminism needs a political program because gender inequality has been fostered by political decisions.

Liberal politicians, in celebrating the benefits of modernization, free trade, diverse families, and the rise of more women and minorities into political and economic prominence, have often glossed over the pain of white blue-collar communities.

Inequality was written into the creation of the American Republic when our Founding Fathers denied voting rights to women.

Presidents Reagan and the first George Bush never used the vile language of some Trump supporters, but both blamed scarce resources and decaying communities on 'welfare queens' and black criminals like Willie Horton.

Unemployment, low wages, and poverty discourage family formation and erode family stability, making it less likely that individuals will marry in the first place and more likely that their marriages will dissolve.

In the 1970s, family history wasn't yet thought of a serious field for study. I was terrified of being laughed at by other historians. I called my book 'The Social Origins of Private Life.' It should have been 'As Pompous as You Want to Be.' Every sentence was academic jargon, and if I said X, I qualified it with Y.

Educated parents find more time to spend with their children by reducing time dedicated to home-based activities that involve little interaction with children.

When I speak on work-family issues to audiences around the country, some of the biggest complaints I hear come from individuals who are described by the census as living in 'non-family households.' They resent the fact that their family responsibilities literally don't 'count,' either for society or for their employers.

Second marriages can and do create 'real' families.

Cooking ought to be, quite literally, child's play. And every child ought to have access to the game. Just don't tell them it's healthy.

Americans are right to believe the American Dream is fading. But that dream only became a possibility for white men as a result of the labor struggles and reforms of the New Deal, and it began to extend to minorities and women only after the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

You can't judge a family's health by the form it's in at a given moment.

Nostalgia is a very human trait.

Too often, tributes to the home-cooked meal assume every family has a schedule that gets everyone home by 5:30 P.M. And too many recipes treat cooking as a solitary pursuit that requires the cook - still most often Mom - to take time away from other family interactions and chores.

Having more education is one of the biggest predictors of women having careers.

As soon as love became the driving force behind marriage, people began to demand the right to remain single if they had not found love or to divorce if they fell out of love.

During the 1960s, rising real wages for low-income and high-income workers, due in part to rapid economic growth and the spread of unionization, worked in tandem with expanding government support systems to improve Americans' well-being.

The notion that marriage is an impediment to commitments to the larger community is a long-standing one - and one reason early Christians did not place the institution at the top of their moral hierarchy, complaining that married couples cared more about pleasing each other than doing the Lord's work.

Throughout history, people with few educational or economic resources and little bargaining power have often looked to authoritarian, ruthless people to stand up for them.

Historically, it has required a combination of favorable employment trends and active government intervention to lower the percentage of people in poverty and raise living standards for the working middle class.

Over the ages, some societies have accorded far less value and respect to singles than to married individuals.

Trump made his fortune manipulating tax laws and stiffing small businessmen, creating a few well-paying jobs along the way. Vulnerable people looking to master 'the art of the deal' learned the hard way that Trump held all the cards.

Parents who obsess about every detail of child-rearing and orchestrate their children's 'resumes' may run themselves ragged while their own personal identities and adult relationships wither for lack of care.

For most of America's history, people typically aspired to acquire 'a competency' rather than great riches. A competency meant the ability to comfortably sustain a household without depending on others. 'Competence' also meant being capable and reliable. The American Dream was that people who worked hard and capably could support their families.

Economically as well as emotionally, modern marriage has become like an affluent gated community. It has become harder for low-income Americans to enter and sustain.

As time passes, the actual complexity of our history - even of our own personal experience - gets buried under the weight of the ideal image.

The origins of modern marital instability lie largely in the triumph of what many people believe to be marriage's traditional role - providing love, intimacy, fidelity, and mutual fulfillment. The truth is that for centuries, marriage was stable precisely because it was not expected to provide such benefits.

Graduating from high school is certainly a good idea, but it's no longer much protection against poverty.

We need to push for work-family practices and policies that allow individuals to customize their work lives according to their changing individual preferences and family obligations, not just their traditional gender roles.

In 1992, I critiqued the panic over growing family diversity. My skepticism about the doomsayers has since been proven correct.

The idea that academics should remain ''above the fray'' only gives ideologues license to misuse our work.

Increasingly, men are realizing exactly that - that having an educated, economically independent partner reduces the pressure on them to be the sole provider. Many men are also beginning to understand that participating in housework and childcare can be rewarding. Women with higher education and/or earnings are so much less likely than other women to divorce, that by age 40, they are more likely to be married than any other group of women.

When parents are educated about how not to involve children in their conflicts and co-parent amicably, a lot of the ill effects of divorce can be alleviated. Divorce is always painful. But kids in a high-conflict marriage or low-conflict but contemptuous ones are often better off in the long run when the parent can disengage.

I think that divorce is a vital escape hatch for people stuck in marriage and it is not a sentence of doom either for adults or children. The community should develop better support systems for saving or restoring potentially healthy marriages.But we should also help people who decide to divorce have healthier partings.

Nostalgia wouldn't begin to capture your sense of loss, ... The Way We Really Are Coming to Terms With America's Changing Families.

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."

Women are told that we can have the most exciting, glamorous, demanding, rewarding careers ever but we also have to be constantly sexy and sexually interested, and when we have children we have to spend more time with our kids. Of course you can't really do all three of those things at once, so we feel this tremendous stress.

There is one group of people - social conservatives, religious conservatives - who honestly feel that women's place is in the home and that wives should submit to their husbands.

Contrary to popular opinion, 'Leave it to Beaver' was not a documentary.

Extended families have never been the norm in America; the highest figure for extended-family households ever recorded in Americanhistory is 20 percent. Contrary to the popular myth that industrialization destroyed "traditional" extended families, this high point occurred between 1850 and 1885, during the most intensive period of early industrialization. Many of these extended families, and most "producing" families of the time, depended on the labor of children; they were held together by dire necessity and sometimes by brute force.

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

A significant minority of senior women I've interviewed say, 'Love the companionship, glad to live with him, but I spent my first marriage picking up after a man and I'm not going to do that anymore.

The historical weight of gender inequality has tended to concentrate women in lower-paid jobs with fewer benefits, at the same time made them primarily responsible for care giving.

For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish ora German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.

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.

We urgently need a debate about the best ways of supporting families in modern America, without blinders that prevent us from seeing the full extent of dependence and interdependence in American life. As long as we pretend that only poor or abnormal families need outside assistance, we will shortchange poor families, overcompensate rich ones, and fail to come up with effective policies for helping families in the middle.

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.

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.

There is no going back to a time when most women will feel compelled to enter or stay in a bad marriage just for economic security or social respectability. So today, the best way to get women once more interested in getting married and having children is for men to accept women's new insistence on equality. This is, I think, why educated women in America, are now more pro - marriage and more disapproving of divorce than other groups of women who have less experience with egalitarian partners or less clout in getting their needs met in relationships.

Families have always been in flux and often in crisis; they have never lived up to nostalgic notions about "the way things used tobe." But that doesn't mean the malaise and anxiety people feel about modern families are delusions, that everything would be fine if we would only realize that the past was not all it's cracked up to be. . . . Even if things were not always right in families of the past, it seems clear that some things have newly gone wrong.