Families have rarely been economically or socially self-sufficient; families have relied upon governmental assistance from the frontier times and beyond. By correcting these sorts of historical distortions, Coontz frees us up to learn the actual lessons of the past: Coontz ends her introduction with this: But by learning how complex and multifaceted the experience of family life has been in the past, along with the trade-offs, reversals, and diverse outcomes that have accompanied change, we may be able to develop a greater tolerance for the ambiguities of contemporary family life, rather than longing for a past that was never as idyllic or uncomplicated as we sometimes imagine Only when we have a realistic idea of how families have and have not worked in the past can we make informed decisions about how to support families in the present and improve our future.
She cites well and often. Truthfully, I want to own this book so I can return to it often. Originally published in , the edition I read has a Introduction and Epilogue, which, after 25 years, are an important addition.
- The Way We Never Were: American Families & the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz.
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- The Way We Never Were: American Families & the Nostalgia Trap.
In them Coontz extensively addresses the changes which have taken place since the publication of the first edition, and the ways in which her predictions have proved correct or not. She shows that the 's offered unusual opportunities for men to attend college, thanks to government programs, and that even for men who did not go to college a booming economy and strong job market allowed for early marriage and for a husband to securely support a family.
While I enjoyed most of the book very much, the last few chapters, 9, 10, and 11, contained less historical perspective, being more focused on the political and social causes of current issues and less on how these particular issues have been handled at earlier times in our history. Coontz does a fairly good job, for the most part, in offering a balanced presentation, but of course she does have opinions about which developments are good and which are not, and who is most to blame when things go wrong, and the sections of the book which offer commentary on current situations are the most likely to irritate readers who don't share all of the author's views.
Despite agreeing with her much of the time, I still found these chapters a bit sloggish — she does best when she is offering a historical view of the American family. Which, thankfully, is what she does for the greater part of the book. Three and a half stars, rounded up but I'd rather have had that half-star option! View all 5 comments. Mar 29, Kelly marked it as to-read. Looks unsurprising but perhaps useful for arguments with the next pushy social conservative I meet. View all 10 comments. May 10, K rated it really liked it Shelves: Well, if you thought Donna Reed represented a long line of traditional family values, or even the typical s family, it seems you were mistaken.
Stephanie Coontz is here to disabuse you of that notion. She unpacks several myths, one at a time, including the idea that American families were always self-reliant, the idea that women were always stay-at-home, hands-on mothers, the idea that alcoholism, drug abuse, and teen pregnancy are modern-day problems, etc. This book was informative, and the Well, if you thought Donna Reed represented a long line of traditional family values, or even the typical s family, it seems you were mistaken. This book was informative, and the subject matter highly provocative.
That being said, it was a dense read. Additionally, there were times when I felt Coontz had a bit of an agenda; she appears to be on a bit of a soapbox against blame-the-victim thinking with regard to poverty. While I'm never a fan of blame-the-victim thinking, I wasn't always sure where Coontz's factual information ended and her agenda began. Worth a read if the subject matter interests you but be advised that it's a commitment, and should be read critically. Feb 25, Miles rated it really liked it. My mother is a professor of American history, and many of my earliest memories pertaining to her professional life involve her unabashed enthusiasm for this book.
Now that I've finally taken the time to read it, I understand why it made such a strong impression. Given that Coontz's book is now more than two decades old, I was expecting that it would perhaps have little to offer someone mired in the concerns of a twenty-first century young adult. And while I found myself glossing over much of the My mother is a professor of American history, and many of my earliest memories pertaining to her professional life involve her unabashed enthusiasm for this book.
And while I found myself glossing over much of the statistical information most of which I assume is too outdated to be useful outside a purely historical context , I was delighted to find that The Way We Never Were offers a highly intelligent and nuanced look at family life in twentieth century American history. Using the family as a focal lens, the book generates a precise and intriguing image of American communities, economics, and politics in the early s.
Best and worst of all, it provides frighteningly prescient insights about the risks we face if we sustain certain courses of action inimical to the health of our democracy. And while I'd love to report that we've blazed a new trail in the two decades since this book's original publication, all I can do is marvel at Coontz's remarkable assessment of American problems and lament our continuing inability to address the core issues that are bringing this country to its knees.
The most important of these is the hollowing out of the American middle class and the ever-widening gap between normal citizens and the ultra-wealthy, especially when it comes to quality of life and political influence. As mentioned, my one major critique of this book is that its statistics are only useful for someone seeking to understand where American families were in the early s. This is a problem faced by any aging history book, so I can't fault Coontz for it.
Her commendably straightforward writing demonstrates a rare mixture of ambiguity and clarity, making her arguments both accessible and also appropriately difficult to nail down. History, Coontz reminds us, is never as simple as we'd like it to be. She takes careful aim at traditional historical narratives, which typically seek to establish one or two central metaphors and then bend historical events to fit them.
The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
Coontz makes it her mission to expose such narratives for what they are: Coontz is not naive enough to think she can exempt herself entirely from the hordes of historians seeking to condense history for the purposes of analysis and communication to a wide audience, but she maintains a high level of scholarly integrity by carefully circumscribing the follies of both liberal and conservative ideologies.
I carefully parsed her assertions for signs of unfair bias, but ultimately had to conclude that her motives stem from a sincere desire to serve up an authentic historical account, rather than from feckless ideology. It's a "truth be told" approach, and an admirable one. And while she certainly does not shy away from the huge obstacles families face when trying to overcome powers beyond their immediate control, Coontz's larger purpose is to point out that the process of reviving America, insofar as it is possible, must start inside each of us and then slowly expand into our family circles and greater communities.
Coontz refuses to let anyone off the hook, although she is appropriately sympathetic with the most vulnerable members of our society, most of whom lack the stability and resources to concern themselves with matters beyond daily survival and the maintenance of highly parochial bonds. Through the painstaking process of setting up accepted myths and then exposing the ways they fail to sow the seeds of pragmatic action, she implores us to get comfortable with ambiguity and run historical events through multiple, self-correcting filters.
One key way way to achieve this balance is to consider how various ideological factions liberal, conservative, libertarian, etc. To her credit, Coontz's personal agenda doesn't appear to extend beyond the general goal of improving life for all Americans; she successfully eschews sectarianism, and instead focuses on laying bare our true enemy: While this book was fascinating to me for intellectual reasons, it also achieved a deeper level of personal resonance. Coontz was able to penetrate my armor of reasoning and reach my more vulnerable, emotional side.
She did this by defrocking some of the mechanisms I use to justify my own lifestyle, most notably my readiness to embrace cynicism about the prospects of success for almost any social or political movement. Like many millennials, I have little faith in collective action. I often scoff at people who want to "make a difference" beyond the world they can see and touch, even as I harbor small illusions of somehow being able to do so.
These illusions almost always involve achieving some small, personal goal, or one that I share with a small number of like-minded people. I don't blame myself entirely for embracing this kind of thinking, which is endemic in my generation as well as in our increasingly polarized American communities, but I also can't distance myself entirely from this approach to life.
It's always easier to stay on the sidelines and claim status as a non-participant when things don't work out. Beyond my personal aspirations, which seem to grow ever smaller and less ambitious as the years pass, this has been my general approach to life.
And I think it's fair to say that won't change very much, certainly not very quickly.
Table of Contents: The way we never were :
But Coontz's book has helped to articulate something in me, the reawakening of a need for community that always lurks under the surface. Time will tell whether this desire will transcend beyond mere velleity, but for now it has gained a greater degree of influence in my committee of self. Nov 18, Becca rated it it was amazing. Assumptions so deep and unexamined that they seem like Truth are carefully teased out into the open, and examined in the light of history.
You think that we've got new and original family problems these days? Unprecedented government meddling into family affairs? Rigid definitions or overly lax ones? Hah-- nothing is new under the sun. Coontz takes us through American history and explores chapter-by-chapter such Truthy ideas as Families stand on their own two feet, A Man's home is his castle, The Feminist movement is responsible for domestic failure, First comes love then marriage then baby, as well as mind-blowing historical discussions of the ideas of women and men's separate spheres, and love, and consumerism This book is a wonderful education.
It reminds me of the meaning of education, the real reason to go to college and read books-- there are things you can't intuit by yourself-- you have to be shown. Your assumptions have to be brought forward in your mind and compared with facts. With that said, there's nothing confrontational about this book. A marvelously relevant history book. Any discussion of "the family" broils with political heat, but not this one.
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She stands so solidly on a foundation of historical facts that all sides of a discussion will be stumped and enlightened. Absolutely everybody who is a member of a family, or thinks families are important should read this book. My one criticism of the book is that it is 15 years old. I am anxious to know what she would report on the American Family in the last couple of decades.
Jan 03, Trudy rated it really liked it. This is another of the sociology books that has caused me to be pretty skeptical of most blanket statements we hear about how things are. This, in particular, is about our collective past. Coontz uncovers facts and figures that contradict the popular myth of the family of the 50s, 60s and earlier, as well as shining a light on both conservatives' and liberals' tendencies to blame the other for society's ills. Though it contributed to making me a skeptic, it is also encouraging. If you like your This is another of the sociology books that has caused me to be pretty skeptical of most blanket statements we hear about how things are.
If you like your life, but are afraid you aren't doing it right, relax. We hear about families in crisis and the breakdown of society and how if we could only return to traditional values, life would be just peachy again. The idea of s families being more self-reliant than modern families, buying a home on one income? No problem if the families included a returned soldier. Teenage pregnancy a modern problem, driven by easy access to birth control and the liberal media? Coontz points out that there was actually more teen pregnancy in the s. The prescription drug problem is not exactly a new issue either.
The Way We Never Were is something of a dry read. They pop up every now and then in between long passages of statistics. Those pages are difficult to read even if the subject matter is not tough to process. Much of the book is written in a manner akin to that of a textbook but there are somewhat random passages in which Coontz begins speaking in the first person. The previous chapter had just ended Chapter 3 by saying that the self-reliant family will be proven to be a historical myth in the next chapter.
Did she seriously just use a personal anecdote to prove her point? The Way We Never were was originally published in but still sounds current almost twenty years later. With the current controversy about social networking websites sharing personal information, how much information the government should be collecting on private citizens i. Americans today are fully engrossed in consumer culture. Life in the s was no different.
In the past, women found fulfillment outside the home. Household staff helped raise the children and keep house and mothers involved themselves in various forms of social work. They believed that motherhood was a political force. Traditionally, mothers took care of children, not just their own children. I really wanted to love this book. And I was raised in what most people would find a freakishly conservative family. I love debunking the myths I was raised to mindlessly accept as fact so a book dispelling myths about the traditional family seemed like exactly my cup of tea.
But I cracked the book open and was almost immediately bored to death. Chapter 1 defines the traditional family. But who really has a traditional family? Does anyone in the year really still believe the s family is any kind of model for life? But if you found yourself viewing the past with a pair of rosy-colored nostalgia glasses and pining for a traditional lifestyle, The Way We Never Were is happy to hand you a lens cleaner.
View all 3 comments. Nov 22, E rated it it was ok Shelves: Coontz presents a much-needed argument on the futility of conservative nostalgia for "the good old days," chock-full of statistics. Anyone advocating a patriarchal family model taken from back in time when men, women, and children knew their place needs to study the history of the American family first, and Coontz adeptly proves that few have.
Gender roles have almost always been determined by economic systems, and throughout history couples have engaged in premarital sex, domestic violence has Coontz presents a much-needed argument on the futility of conservative nostalgia for "the good old days," chock-full of statistics. Domestic violence and incest, she points out, have in fact always occurred more commonly in families with rigid, patriarchal gender roles like those emblazoned on TV in the 's.
Unfortunately, Coontz spends little time addressing those who advocate the 's ideal that never existed and why they do, perhaps because she hopes to give her arguments bipartisan appeal. She mentions the fact that the greatest change since the 's has been the empowerment of women to take charge of birth control when engaging in pre-marital sex and the opening of the workforce to middle class as well as working class women.
All her evidence contradicts the cries of the angry backlash against women's rights, gay rights, single mothers, and "immorality," and proves that in the end it all comes down to the threat these movements pose to patriarchy. Hesistant to identify her opponents, she doesn't emphasize it. She also fails to address the central role television has had in this national debate, albeit at the crux of her argument is the fictional American family conservatives love to cite as their model. While pornography, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, and swearing have always existed, the invention of the television and sitcoms posed the question of how much of it should be nationally on display in our homes every evening.
Social critics can pretend all they want that families like the Cleavers dominated the suburbs as well as the airwaves back in the day, but in truth the Simpsons and their ilk were everywhere. My relatives at the time reflected back the Cleavers' nuclear family image while in fact there was alcoholism, previous marriages, abortion, and teen pregnancy. The difference between that generation and mine is that their non-idealistic family moments remain family secrets. With ninety pages of end notes and almost ten statistics per paragraph, the book is much more of an academic thesis than a social or political commentary.
This is excellent in terms of giving her argument more substance than all her opponents' books combined, but it makes for a dry read. I had bought it under the impression that her writing style would be as fluid and wry as it was in the introduction, but she scrapped it to make room for statistics. Jul 26, Erik Graff rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: This is an accessible, highly entertaining and salutory demythologization of prevalent beliefs about the decline of the American society and its traditional "family values" by an Evergreen State University professor with a gift for teaching.
All Fox television commentators and Tea Party leaders should be forced to read and review the thing. Jul 02, Sdluvingit rated it liked it. Every political cycle we see an increase of claims that the American family is in decline and many of our woes are due to this decline.
Coontz believes that many of the social issues today are blamed on the dissolution of the traditional family when Every political cycle we see an increase of claims that the American family is in decline and many of our woes are due to this decline.
Coontz believes that many of the social issues today are blamed on the dissolution of the traditional family when in fact families are the ones impacted and affected by these issues, not the cause. Many reports of the decline of the American family are based on singular studies taken without historical, economic, and social context. Coontz looks at these in context with other current societal issues and shows there are much more reasonable explanations. This is important in determining how we can develop policies that address the real issues impacting families and affect real solutions to the problems.
What I got from this is the greatest single factor impacting families is economic; poverty, especially childhood poverty, is the greatest predictor of family dysfunction. Without understanding the true issues, solutions that actually address them are very difficult to come by.
One caveat, this book was published in but holds up well.
Jul 07, Janice rated it liked it. This is an interesting book even though it's quite old now, I'll just quote a couple of paragraphs. During WWII, Americans had saved at a rate more than three times higher than in the decades before or since. This myth-shattering examination of two centuries of American family life banishes the misconceptions about the past that cloud current debate about "family values. Without minimizing the serious new problems in American families, Coontz warns that a consoling nostalgia for a largely mythical past of "traditional values" is a trap that can only cripple our capacity to solve today's problems.
From "a man's home was his castle" to "traditional families never asked for a handout," this provocative book explodes cherished illusions about the past. Organized around a series of myths and half-truths that burden modern families, the book sheds new light on such contemporary concerns as parenting, privacy, love, the division of labor along gender lines, the black family, feminism, and sexual practice. In the nineteenth century, the age of sexual consent in some states was nine or ten, and alcoholism and drug abuse were more rampant than today Teenage childbearing peaked in the fabulous family-oriented s Marriages in pioneer days lasted a shorter time than they do now.
Placing current family dilemmas in the context of far-reaching economic, political, and demographic changes, The Way We Never Were shows that people have not suddenly and inexplicably "gone bad" and points to ways that we can help families do better.
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Seeing our own family pains as part of a larger social predicament means that we can stop the cycle of guilt or blame and face the real issues constructively, Coontz writes. The historical evidence reveals that families have always been in flux and often in crisis, and that families have been most successful wherever they have built meaningful networks beyond their own boundaries. Placing the American family in its historical, cultural, economic, and philosophic context Coontz co-ed.
Two models of the American family have been on view in this political season.