[Marxism] "no precedents for ... marriage ... today"

[Brian Shannon <Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://makeashorterlink.com/?V4972111B

A Conversation: Stephanie Coontz on 'Marriage, A History' and Steven 
Mintz on 'Huck's Raft'

       BOSTON, May 12 (AScribe Newswire) -- On May 13, authors and 
historians Stephanie Coontz and Steven Mintz spoke about their new 
books and about the changing family landscape at a luncheon for 
journalists and family researchers and clinicians sponsored by the 
Council on Contemporary Families in Boston. Shortly before, they 
offered these thoughts on families and history.

       Q. Why did you write a new book on families and history?

       COONTZ: Before I started to write "Marriage, A History: From 
Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage," [Viking Press] I 
kept getting questions about marriage trends from journalists and 
policy-makers, and realized that I wasn't entirely sure that my answers 
were correct any longer. I've spent a lot of my scholarly life 
explaining to people that much of what they think is new in family life 
is in fact very traditional -- such as the presence of large numbers of 
single-parent families and stepfamilies, or the prevalence of 
co-provider families, where both the husband and wife share 
breadwinning. The female homemaker marriage, for example, is extremely 
rare, both historically and cross-culturally. In the past I also tended 
to downplay the sense of crisis that people associate with family 
change, pointing out that people have been predicting the death of 
marriage and the family in every generation for at least 2,000 years.

       But the more I looked at the international data on marriage, the 
more I had to admit that something really new was going on. So I went 
back further than I ever had before into the historical record, trying 
to figure out what changed when, and why. I have come to believe that 
there are no precedents for the role that marriage plays in society 
today, or for the roles of men and women within marriage. Marriage has 
changed for everyone, even people who believe in traditional marriage 
and think they are in one.

       MINTZ: I wrote "Huck's Raft: A history of American childhood" 
[Harvard University Press] in part for personal reasons -- my sons were 
just about to exit childhood and this represented an effort to cope 
with that painful transition -- and in part to make sense of the 
enormous changes that are occurring in growing up today. My 
sons'experience of childhood was radically different from mine, in some 
ways better and in some ways worse -- but different nonetheless. As a 
society, we had gone through a series of panics over children's 
well-being, over stranger abduction, youth violence, and declining 
academic performance, and I wanted to place these contemporary concerns 
in historical perspective.

       Q. Isn't the notion of "the changing family" old news?

       MINTZ: Maybe it is old news, but the changes haven't been 
understood or addressed adequately. Childhood today is being radically 
reconfigured. Some of the changes are obvious, but others are less 
visible. The demographic changes are the most readily apparent. 
Children today are more diverse than at any time in American history. 
There are more only children than ever before; a remarkable 42 percent 
of households with children have just one child.

       Technology has contributed to a revolution in children's play. 
More than ever before, many of children's leisure activities are 
technologically mediated and take place inside their bedroom (which is 
less a retreat than an entertainment center). At the same time, kids' 
activities outside the home are much more highly structured and 
supervised than in the past, from play dates for the youngest kids to 
organized sports as they grow older. Unstructured play and outdoor 
activities for children 3 to 11 declined nearly 40 percent between the 
early 1980s and late 1990s.

       Perhaps the most striking development is that adolescent 
behavior begins earlier and ends later. As a result of an information 
revolution, from a very young age, kids are exposed to sexual and 
adult-themed materials. Meanwhile, contemporary children have an 
unprecedented involvement in consumer culture. Children's spending has 
roughly doubled every 10 years for the past three decades, and tripled 
in the 1990s.

       COONTZ: The international, irreversible revolution in marriage 
and family life is changing everything we used to think we knew about 
who marries, who divorces, what makes for high marital quality, why 
people marry, how singles fare later in life. Generalizations that were 
true just 20 or 30 years ago no longer hold up. For example, it used to 
be that the more education a woman had, the less likely she was to 
marry. That's ceased to be true in the past two decades. During the 
1990s, the marriages of college-educated women became more stable than 
they had been in the 1970s, and the marriage of less-educated women 
became less stable.

       Many policy-makers and marital educators are still operating on 
the basis of outdated information. And that poses serious problems for 
individuals who try to take their advice and for social programs that 
don't fit modern realities. So it's time to take a close look at what 
has changed and what the consequences are. The consequences are very 
different now than they were even 20 or 30 years ago, and in many 
respects they've gotten better in the last 10 years. For example, the 
early stage of marital rearrangements was accompanied by a feminization 
of poverty and by rising levels of youthful violence. But poverty is 
increasingly becoming de-feminized today, and youthful crime rates have 
fallen by 56 percent since 1992.

       Q. What family policies have worked in the past -- and what is 
working now?

       COONTZ: Through most of history, people realized that nuclear 
families couldn't stand on their own two feet. In the past, communities 
or extended kin stepped in to help these families function (or force 
them to function in a certain way, even if they didn't want to.) In the 
1950s, government was very active in helping young families get off on 
a firm economic footing, through programs such as the GI bill and 
investment in single-family housing. Today, however, we delude 
ourselves that families of the past didn't need any help, so we fail to 
develop new policies to meet new realities, such as the needs of 
dual-earner couples. We need the equivalent of a new GI bill for 
families today, married divorced, and unmarried alike, to help people 
deal with work stress, economic pressures, and parenting dilemmas.

       Q. Now the downside: What family policies have been failures -- 
and are there failing family policies now?

       COONTZ: One reason marriage used to be stable -- even up until 
the 1970s -- was that individuals had much lower expectations of 
marriage, and far more outside pressures on them to put up with things 
that most people today would consider to be intolerable. A marriage 
that works in today's climate of choice can be more fair, fulfilling, 
and happy than most people of the past would ever dared to hope; but 
the same choices that allow people to construct a marriage around their 
mutual needs also allow them to part if they don't feel their needs are 
being met.

       It's pretty clear that short of a revolution as coercive as that 
of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, we're not going to be able to 
go back to the policies that used to force people to enter and stay in 
marriage: the strict controls that community elites and employers 
exerted over other people's personal life; the economic dependence of 
women on men; the vicious penalties for having or being an 
"illegitimate" kid (penalties that made infanticide rates much higher 
in the past than they are today.) So we need to come up with policies 
that help people make healthier choices rather than count on reviving 
policies that close off choices. And at this stage in history, those 
choices may not always involve marriage. We need to recognize that 
there are healthy as well as unhealthy ways to remain single or to be 
divorced, just as there are healthy and unhealthy ways to be married.

       Q. Does love matter in families? Or does it just make things 
messy?

       COONTZ: Love matters more than ever before in history. It does 
make things messy sometimes, but at this point it has become the main 
glue of family life. Marriages used to be held together by economic 
necessity, political coercion, and the legal inequality of women and 
children. Now love and personal commitment are the main glue for 
marriage, and they have to be renewed over the course of the marriage, 
not just taken for granted. To make that work, we may have to learn to 
define love itself differently than in the past. For thousands of 
years, we defined love in terms of romanticized gender stereotypes. Now 
we need to construct it as a combination of friendship and passion 
between equals.

       MINTZ: Your question makes me think of the social role of love, 
not just the intimate one: Adults love their own children, but whether 
Americans love children as a whole is more ambiguous. From the vantage 
point of history, one of the most striking themes is the erosion of a 
collective commitment to children as a social group. No country spends 
more on children's education, entertainment, or social welfare. But 
certain older commitments appear to be breaking down. The idea of 
universal public education has broken down, with a vast expansion in 
the proportion of children in private or religious schools. Segregation 
by class and race has actually increased. And as preschools and primary 
and secondary schools have ratcheted up their expectations an earlier 
faith in age appropriate learning has broken.

       Our society is unique, first, in our tendency to label normal 
childish behavior as pathological; second, in the expectations we 
impose upon children and our willingness to push them academically, 
athletically, and in many other ways as a way of fulfilling parental 
needs; and third, the degree to which well-meaning child advocacy 
groups, a sensationalistic media, rapacious marketers and opportunist 
politicians exploit children for their own purposes.

       Q. What do you want to work on next?

       COONTZ: I'm hoping to extend my studies of marriage to other 
parts of the world. I think this is an international revolution that is 
happening everywhere, but of course it takes different forms and has 
different consequences in different places. I want to figure out what 
things tend to make the transition to the new marriage system easier 
and less disruptive, and what things make it worse. It's pretty clear 
that in the U.S., we have had more upheaval associated with these 
changes than in many other industrial countries. We have higher levels 
of child poverty than several countries that have lower levels of 
two-parent families. Oddly enough, the United States has fewer children 
being raised by both parents than in several other countries where 
marriage rates are lower and there are more out-of-wedlock births. One 
study found that on average, children in Norway spend 89 percent of 
their childhood living with both parents, while in the U.S., the figure 
is only 67 percent.

       MINTZ: For two centuries, Americans have struggled to define 
this country's values, its identity, and what it stands for. Our 
current "culture war" is only the latest example of this on-going 
"moral civil war." I am in the process of writing a book that traces 
this struggle over national self-definition, which, I will argue, is 
our country's true history.

       - - - -

       ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

       Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at The 
Evergreen State College and is the Director of Research and Public 
Education for the Council on Contemporary Families. The author of the 
award-winning "The Way We Never Were: American Families and the 
Nostalgia Trap," she has written about marriage and family issues in 
many national journals including The New York Times, The Washington 
Post, The Wall Street Journal, Harper's, Chicago Tribune, and Vogue, 
and has appeared on Oprah, Crossfire, CBS This Morning, CNN, Fox, ABC 
and NBC Nightly News. Her work has been translated into Japanese, 
German, French, and Spanish. CONTACT: Professor Coontz, coontzs@xxxxxxx

       Steven Mintz CCF Co-Chair and John and Rebecca Moores Professor 
of History at the University of Houston, is a leading authority on the 
history of families and children. His books include "Domestic 
Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life," "A Prison of 
Expectations: The Family in Victorian Culture," and, most recently, 
"Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood," which has received the 
Association of American Publishers award for the best scholarly book of 
2004, the Organization of American Historians 2005 prize for the best 
work of social history, and the 2005 Texas Institute of Letters award 
for the best non-fiction book. CONTACT: Professor Mintz, smintz@xxxxxx _______________________________________________
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