Background
Coontz, Stephanie Jean was born on August 31, 1944 in Seattle, Washington, United States. Daughter of Sidney Coontz and Patricia (McIntosh) Waddington.
( Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary, a man’s home ...)
Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary, a man’s home has never been his castle, and 50s marriages weren’t without strifeno matter what those who long for a bygone era of family values” might say. In The Way We Never Were, acclaimed historian Stephanie Coontz provides a myth-shattering examination of two centuries of the American family, banishing the 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. Without minimizing the serious new problems facing modern American families, Coontz warns that nostalgia for a largely mythical age of traditional values” is a trap that can only cripple our capacity to solve today's problems. This revised edition includes a new introduction and epilogue, looking at how well the original 1992 publication predicted current trends and 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 our dangerous nostalgia for an American tradition that never really existed.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465098835/?tag=2022091-20
(Current debates about the future of the family are often ...)
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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0860919072/?tag=2022091-20
author History and family studies educator
Coontz, Stephanie Jean was born on August 31, 1944 in Seattle, Washington, United States. Daughter of Sidney Coontz and Patricia (McIntosh) Waddington.
Bachelor with honors, University California, Berkeley, 1966. Master of Arts, University Washington, Seattle, 1970.
Member of faculty, Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington, since 1975. Fellow The National Faculty. Lecturer Inquiring Minds Speakers program Washington Humanities Commission, 1989-1991.
( Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary, a man’s home ...)
(Current debates about the future of the family are often ...)
(The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgi...)
Member American Studies Association, American History Association, Organization American Historians.
1 child, Kristopher.