Stephanie Coontz Brings It Home With "For Better and Worse"

Itore through For Better and Worse yesterday (release day) and today. Of course, I had been waiting for it. Over the last several years I have periodically had the privilege of corresponding with Stephanie about it, providing whatever assistance I could with data and interpreting family demographic trends — some of which I’m thrilled to see in these pages. But beyond the personal connection (though I will still call her Stephanie), this book is an essential breath of fresh air in today’s marriage and family cultural discourse.

Each of her books has changed the way I think about families, and together the body of her work has formed the historical foundation of my understanding. It started for me with, The Way We Never Were (first published in 1992, revised and reissued in 2016). In his 1993 review in the American Historical Review, Steven Mintz summarized: “Her concluding message is that nostalgia for a mythical golden age of stable, intact families should not prevent us from addressing the novel problems of the present.” Stephanie extended her canvas geographically and chronologically in the 2006 book, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, which offered a sweeping narrative account of the emergence of love as a basis for marriage, and its implications, in the process profoundly destabilizing the contemporary mythmaking around — again — traditional families.

Her 2011 book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, was deeply revelatory and emotionally gripping — so much so that I still remember where I was when I read different parts of it. It was history, but alive and intimate, with interviews but also rich readings of diaries and letters and articles from the post-WWII period. I don’t remember the 1960s from real life, but reading that book more than anything else made me feel I could understand America’s — by historical standards — truly bizarre society at that time from women’s perspective.

For Better and Worse

Anyway! For Better and Worse brings us up to the present, not just updating of the story she has told for decades, but reflecting the process of continuously studying and learning that should be a model for any scholar working today. These are some of my notes.

In this book, Stephanie pursues the evolution of patriarchal norms and practices, the pathways of acquiescence and resistance, the commonalities and diversities, the are most relevant to today. For example, she frames the story of modern patriarchy around the appearance of the “Mrs. Man’s Name” practice for naming married women, which was unique to our era. “Mrs.” originally referred to a women of higher social status, whether married or not — as with men, who only were titled “Mr.” if they had a certain status. Identifying women as Mrs. Man’s First Name Last Name only emerged in the late 19th century — and lasted less than 100 years.

Of particular interest in that story is the emergence of a stricter gender essentialism — separate spheres — and its ties to family structure and practices, around the late 18th century.

“Domesticity gave women who wouldn’t have qualified as a ‘Mrs.’ in the old social order an alternative source of respect and influence. Instead of being ‘deputies,’ valued for their productive contributions to the household but bound to obey their husbands, wives could become experts in a world of family rituals and neighborly interactions in which men played a more marginal role than in the past. Women’s enhanced reputation for morality and compassion even allowed some women to enter teaching and nursing jobs before marriage and after marriage to take a larger role in religious and charitable work.”

The tradeoff was severe, of course. As women of a certain status got a new kind of deference, “Such deference, however, was not a tribute to the recipient’s power, but instead to her presumed defenselessness.”

Essentialism — not just of gender, but of race as well — partly emerged in response to the democratic ideals of the Revolutionary period and after. “‘The wife submits to the husband as the husband submits to the Crown’ was a typical justification for wifely subordination,” she writes. “But with two kings recently beheaded by their subjects, that analogy now raised uncomfortable possibilities.” If humans had inherent rights, how could those in power deny rights to their subordinates? They had to be seen as less than human. The resulting ideologies constructed women who had to be protected from society — and society that had to be protected from people who weren’t White.

This was the context for the extreme practice of erasing women’s identities with Mrs. His Name. It was often said Stephanie reports, that a woman’s name should appear in print only on the occasions of her birth, marriage, and death. Women with high status husbands mostly did not object. For example, the widow of President Tyler, Julia Gardiner, used to signed her letters, “Mrs. Ex-President Tyler.” This history bequeathed to us the legacy of a “benevolent sexism” that give some women credit for being smart and altruistic while punishing those who seek real power and authority — which is sharply resurgent of women’s rising educational and occupational attainment.

And what about men? The men who were practicing “traditional” masculinity in the 19th century — more secure in their gender’s dominance than today’s perhaps — did not consider it a manly necessity to hide their emotions. Diaries and letters between men from the period of America’s founding show “male friends sentimentally commemorating the anniversaries of their first meeting, reproaching one another for failing to answer letters, weeping with joy or loneliness, gushing about the pleasure of their reunions, and confiding their anxieties about whether their feelings for a special woman were reciprocated.” Real men of the 19th century, dropped from a time machine onto TikTok today, would be endlessly bullied by MAGA as low-T girlie men.

Diversion: I didn’t know about John Ibson’s 2002 book, Picturing Men, so I had to go get a bootlegged copy immediately. It’s full of images like this one from an 1870 photography studio, showing the common practice of male friends posing on each other’s laps.

In the late 19th century, as women started getting higher education and entering into formerly all male occupations, like clerical jobs, the ideal form of middle-class masculinity (tragically) shifted away from kindness and vulnerability to stoicism and mastery: “The original middle-class ideal of ‘manliness’ was conceptualized as the opposite of childishness — and also the opposite of what middle-class men viewed as lower-class belligerence and upper-class arrogance. But in the late nineteenth century that gave way to a new and very different model of ‘manliness’ or ‘masculinity’ as the opposite of femininity. The resultant pressure on males to demonstrate their manhood instead of their adulthood has been good for neither sex.” Later, she notes, girl children went through a parallel process of self definition, as evidenced by their dolls shifting from babies to Barbies. Becoming a woman became less about growing up and more about growing apart from men.

In the fallout from this transition, women are much more able to have close, intimate friendships with other women than men do with their peers. On the one hand that means no more holding hands in public for male friends, on the other it means that aggressive men have often been taken for granted as acting according to their essential gender identity, leaving women and children responsible for managing their abuse. (Stephanie is at pains to couch the following sentiment with appropriate cautions: our society would be better off if we had ways to tolerate or even encourage more casual, nonsexual touching.)

Marriage and nostalgia

Ultimately, Stephanie wants us to identify and then escape from two opposing “earworms”: that marriage used to be great but now it’s bad (one way or another), and that it is inherently oppressive. She writes: “I believe knowing the actual history of marriage can help people attune themselves to more complex melodies and become comfortable with a wider range of harmonies.” The amazing power of history (and education) is its capacity to show how the things we’re stressing and fighting about today are — or are not — bequeathed to us by historical habits and forces. That’s essential for identifying and solving the problems we actually can, and understanding those we can’t.

The wisdom in this perspective runs deep. And nowhere is that more in evidence than in her discussion of nostalgia. Crucially, she explains how her thinking on the question has changed since “the nostalgia trap” subtitle of The Way We Never Were. She has come to realize that, “Some types of nostalgia are actually healthy. And when it comes to dealing with unhealthy nostalgia, I’ve come to believe that the only thing worse than pandering to it is failing to acknowledge the genuine injuries or anxieties that produce it.”

The history of nostalgia itself is fascinating — the word is from the Greek nostos (homeward journey), and algos (pain). First defined as a pathology, basically homesickness, it was a real sickness — especially among soldiers, at least through the Civil War, but also among people who were forced to move by economic circumstance (or slavery). And people really died from it. The severity of the condition receded with the development of modern personalities raised on rapid change, and with communication technology that allowed people stay in touch with their folks back home.

That was personal nostalgia, the feeling of missing home. Today’s nostalgia, the kind that is politically weaponized, is not the feeling of missing a real experience – but the tendency to “idealize a whole, and often wholly misremembered, set of social arrangements and political institutions from another era.” Psychological research shows this is associated with acting judgmental and hostile to strangers. And, highly relevant for today’s MAGA moment, it is less felt by people who have left home, and more often by people whose communities have been left behind. Think: the rural Nazis that formed the base for Mussolini, Hitler, and Trump’s ascendance.

Such nostalgia isn’t helpful, obviously, but it is worth knowing what we lost from the post-WWII period instead of just attacking it. It was “the fifties,” that mythological but also real period for families that Stephanie’s scholarship, perhaps more than any other historian’s, has come to define. For one thing, we lost “much more extensive government-funded job creation, stricter regulation of businesses and banks, higher tax rates on the wealthy than today, and stronger guardrails against financial piracy,” In that era, unions were better protected. The government built parks. Living standards were rising. Racism and segregation were extreme, but economically, unions and business regulation raised the floor for all workers, including Black workers. Giant infrastructure projects like the interstate system, and the expansion of higher education, dominated the landscape. CEOs had incomes 20-times the typical worker, compared with 300-times today. And yes, birth and marriage rates were much higher, for good and bad reasons. “The family” benefited from all this materially — even as, culturally, it was reinforced by the restrictions on women’s individual opportunities and other social constraints that tightly bound women to marriage. For better and worse.

To bring the narrative up to the present, I quote from the conclusion of Stephanie’s essay yesterday in the LA Times.

“Contrary to contemporary nostalgia brokers, the main threat to family life and social solidarity today isn’t the fact that couples who can’t get along can obtain a no-fault divorce. It’s not that women and girls have access to birth control and the fallback of abortion when needed. Nor is it that same-sex couples can now formalize their commitments the same way that different-sex couples do and can access alternative ways to have children.

“We need to address the underlying sources of pain and resentment: the reversal of the economic equalization of the 1950s and 1960s, the shredding of the social and medical safety net, the assault on hard-won protections for workers and consumers, and the extent to which middle- and lower-income families have been saddled with so many of the stressful inconveniences that are the flip side of the privileges accorded the rich.“

There’s much more where these notes came from! This book is wonderful, and you should read it, and if you teach families, or history, or the history of families, your students should too.

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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License

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