Stephanie Coontz

A brilliant examination of how Betty Friedans revolutionary book The Feminine Mystique liberated women in the 1960sand what it means to women today. An illuminating analysis of the book that helped launch the movement that freed women to participate more fully in American society. Wall Street Journal In 1963, Betty Friedan unleashed a storm of controversy with her bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique. In A Strange Stirring, acclaimed historian Stephanie Coontz takes us back to the early 1960swhen women who wanted more out of life than housekeeping were labeled deviant, sexual hypocrisy and economic discrimination were rampant, and husbands controlled almost every aspect of family life. Using extensive research and moving, personal interviews to examine what Friedans book meant to the women and men who read it then, Coontz shows how Friedan stirred thousands of women to realize that their depression and self-doubt reflected not a personal weakness but a political injustice. She also explores what is and is not relevant about Friedans message today.

The classic, myth-shattering history of the American family. The Way We Never Wereeffectively demolishes the normal, traditional nuclear family as neither normal nor traditional, and not even nuclear. Nation Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary, a mans 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 examines 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. Coontz explores how the clash between growing gender equality and rising 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 is a potent corrective to dangerous nostalgia for an American tradition that never really existed.

A provocative, authoritative reckoning with the past and future of marriage, explaining why its become more rewarding as well as riskierMarriage rates have fallen dramatically since the 1970s. Yet far from devaluing marriage, people still overwhelmingly describe marriage as the highest commitment they can imagine. Most Americans say they want to marry eventually, and couples who do marry have a lower chance of divorce than at any time since the 1970s. Increasingly, though, people tell pollsters they have no idea if they actually will end up married. And unlike in the past, young women are more uncertain than young men.In For Better and Worse, Stephanie Coontzauthor of the rich, provocative, and entertaining book Marriage, A Historyunravels the roots of such paradoxical trends. Examining five critical periods of historical transformation, she reveals how shifting romantic ideals, gender expectations, sexual mores, and cultural myths have bequeathed us a welter of contradictory beliefs, dysfunctional habits, and emotional earworms that make it hard to adjust our family relationships to the social and economic challenges of twenty-first-century life.Coontz demonstrates that todays widespread nostalgia for a seemingly more stable past is an understandable reaction to heightened economic insecurity and eroding social solidarities. But trying to reproduce a largely imaginary golden age of marriage from the past simply locks us into a restricted future.Current public debates about marriage are dominated by two diametrically opposed groups. One argues that marriage is the only sure route to personal happiness and social stability; the other, that marriage is inherently oppressive. Coontz puts forward a radical middle ground, pointing to surprising new research on the personal changes and the policy innovations that can help people create successful relationships, in or out of marriage.

Just when the clamor over "traditional" marriage couldnt get any louder, along comes this groundbreaking book to ask, "What tradition?" In Marriage, a History, historian and marriage expert Stephanie Coontz takes readers from the marital intrigues of ancient Babylon to the torments of Victorian lovers to demonstrate how recent the idea of marrying for love isand how absurd it would have seemed to most of our ancestors. It was when marriage moved into the emotional sphere in the nineteenth century, she argues, that it suffered as an institution just as it began to thrive as a personal relationship. This enlightening and hugely entertaining book brings intelligence, perspective, and wit to todays marital debate.

Rebosante de sorpresas y rica en revelaciones, Stephanie Coontz nos ofrece una visión novedosa y penetrante de una institución que creíamos conocer bien. Historia del matrimonio no es sólo una revision de los mas variados enfoques culturales e historicos del matrimonio; es un analisis sutil y sin embargo imparcial de algunas de las cuestiones mas importantes y generadoras de debate de nuestros dias, de interes para todo aquel a quien le importe el futuro de nuestra sociedad.