Who is stephanie coontz

Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Maria Shriver ,. Olivia Morgan Editor ,. Karen Skelton Editor. Stephanie Coontz Editor ,. Peta Henderson Editor ,. Lila Leibowitz Contributor. Maya Parson Editor ,. Gabrielle Raley Editor. Quotes by Stephanie Coontz. She is interested in the trade-offs and paradoxes of historical changes in family life, gender relations, and intimate partnerships.

Coontz has appeared on numerous television news and talk programs, including "The Colbert Report," "Oprah," "The Today Show," and msnbc 's "The Cycle," and frequently offers media training workshops for academics. She also regularly writes op-eds for the New York Times and cnn. Today Americans spend less than half of their years between 18 and 55 as part of a married couple, down from 80 percent in thes.

And 41 percent of people 55 and older are unmarried. So as we've brought this diversity into visibility and increasingly legitimized that diversity, we've opened the way for all sorts of positive things. For example, preventing people from being forced to stay in a heterosexual marriage when, in fact, their impulses go the other way, or forcing people to stay in an unfair or unsatisfying marriage, which has been a huge relief for many people, I mean, literally a life saver.

In every state that adopted no-fault divorce, the next five years saw twenty-percent declines in the suicide rates of wives. But again, it certainly opened up more opportunities for people to make more bad choices, more opportunities for failure.

It's opened new opportunities to misjudge how much work it takes to build a new family form in an environment where the economy, the work practices, the school schedules, and the emotional expectations favor—privilege—one family form. So you have some people being overly optimistic about how easy it is to carve out a new life — they might say, "Oh, I can be a single mom, no problem," and they're not prepared for the difficulties they'll encounter.

So I think that it does have some negative effects, but I would emphasize that these changes are not going back underground. They've had tremendous positive effects by rescuing people from very difficult situations and they pose us the challenge of helping people make more informed choices. In Marriage, A History , you show love and intimacy have become more important to marriages. How has that evolution contributed to the rise in male caregiving?

This is one of the real, unambiguous good news stories that we're finding. When the women's movement first encouraged women to make these demands on their husbands, to spend more time at home, it caused a lot of conflict in families. And I think the conservatives are quite right to say that women's liberation destabilized marriage.

But as men made adjustments—and they really have—the result has been tremendous good news, that, first of all, these adjustments have strengthened marriage. Men who do more caregiving have more satisfying marriages, they are less likely to have their wives leave them, and their kids do better.

It's a win-win situation, because if the parents do divorce, men who have been involved in such caregiving are much less likely to walk away from their kids. They have developed an independent relationship with the kids that is no longer mediated through the mom, and they don't have that old-fashioned idea that, "Since I no longer get the mom's services, so I can't relate to the kids either.

So I think that there are all sorts of positive things about it. There's a myth in sociology and among many feminists that there's been a stalled revolution, that there's been a lagged one, but the fact is that men are changing very rapidly. In fact, as a historian, I have to say that they are changing, in a period of thirty years, in ways that took most women years of thinking and activism.

Every cohort of men is doing more in the house, and if you look within a cohort, the longer a man's wife has worked, the more likely he is to do caregiving and housework. This is a huge change. How has the rising importance of love in marriage contributed to the emergence of gay and lesbian families? Social conservatives claim, as James Dobson put it, that gay and lesbian marriage is turning 5, years of tradition on its head. I actually believe that 5, years of tradition has been turned on its head, but it was heterosexuals who did it, and they changed marriage in ways that encouraged gays and lesbians to say, now this institution applies to us — after, in fact, having rejected that institution, because of its rigidity and inequality.

I think this is good evidence that the institution has been evolving in a way that means it is not inherently oppressive.