The Way We Never Were Quotes

“Like most visions of a 'golden age', the 'traditional family' evaporates on closer examination. It is an ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that never coexisted in the same time and place.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Contrary to popular opinion, 'Leave it to Beaver' was not a documentary.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“The hybrid idea that a woman can be fully absorbed with her youngsters while simultaneously maintaining passionate sexual excitement with her husband was a 1950s invention that drove thousands of women to therapists, tranquilizers, or alcohol when they actually tried to live up to it.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Although some studies show that paid work enhances women's self-esteem, which can improve their parenting, others suggest that single mothers in low-wage jobs are just as depressed, hostile, and fatalistic as single mothers on welfare. And contrary to widespread popular belief, higher levels of welfare assistance in a neighborhood tend to decrease the impact of resource deprivation on crime rates.22”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“At one time, marrying at an older age than average raised a woman’s chance of divorce. Today, every year a woman postpones marriage, right into her thirties, reduces her risk of divorce.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Ultimately, however, whether it is mother, wife, or child who keeps a man going, or whether a woman focuses her self-sacrifice on parent, husband, or child, the simultaneous connection and contrast between nurturing within the family and competition outside it leads to a profound sense of loneliness.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“To handle social obligations and interdependency in the twenty-first century, we must abandon any illusion that we can or should revive some largely mythical traditional family. We need to invent new family traditions and find ways of reworking older community ones, not wallow in nostalgia for the past or heap contempt on people whose family values do not live up to ours. There are good grounds of hope that we can develop such new traditions, but only if we discard simplistic solutions based on romanticization of the past.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Much hysteria about the 'underclass' and the spread of 'alien' values is what psychologists call projection. Instead of facing disturbing tendencies in ourselves, we attribute them to someone or something external -- drug dealers, unwed mothers, inner-city teens, or Satanist cults. But blaming the 'underclass' for drugs, violence, sexual exploitation, materialism, or self-indulgence lets the 'overclass' off the hook. It also ignores the privatistic retreat from social engagement that has been a hallmark of middle-class response to recent social dilemmas.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Generalizations about the negative results of day care in America are extremely suspect, since the United States, unlike Europe, has almost no national legislation establishing a minimum quality of care. Most studies thus average together both high-quality and low-quality child-care situations.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Several studies show that it is a woman's degree of satisfaction with either the housewife role or paid work, and the continuity of her work experience when she does work, that best correlates with positive outcomes in her children.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Considerable research, however, links the notorious inefficiency of state spending in America to the tendency of professionals to 'medicalize' problems, making them a matter of individual ignorance or family pathology that only 'experts' can resolve. This means that federal funding often creates new career paths for professionals rather than gives poor families the resources to help themselves.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Trying to adopt a consistent position on whether state intervention is good or bad for privacy may be like demanding that scientists choose whether light consists of waves or particles, when it consists of both.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“The fact is, however, that depending on support beyond the family has been the rule rather than the exception in American history, despite recurring myths about individual achievement and family enterprise.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Even when a couple manages to establish harmonious family commitments, the stereotypes on which these commitments rest often make life outside the family even more harsh for people who do not or cannot conform to gender expectations. The more women are defined in terms of an ideal myth, for example, the more possible it is for men to ignore or actively abuse women who do not meet that ideal. Thus, in the nineteenth century, the cult of True Womanhood was perfectly compatible with the exploitation of female slaves and factory workers. In the twentieth century, a recurring theme in rape and sexual harassment cases has been the notion that if a woman has ever departed from ideal behavior in any way, she has no real 'womanhood' to be violated or offended. The wives and mothers of rapists almost invariably, and usually in good faith, defend them as the soul of chivalry -- at least toward women who conform to the prevailing myths.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Since women have historically been expected to do the work of managing emotions, many have learned to read men, to interpret their nonverbal signals and ambiguous remarks, anticipating what men want or need and what will be unwelcome to them. Men have not been trained to interpret female signals with the same sensitivity, but rather to expect that women will reinterpret, make allowances for, translate into 'prettier' form, or simply absorb men's remarks and behaviors. This is a fundamental issue in sexual harassment. Some men deny any responsibility to read women's signals; others are honestly confused about how they can learn to tell what is acceptable and what is not. In either case, feminists insist, men must recognize that their older definitions of normal male-female interactions were based on the assumption that men bear no responsibility for fine-tuning relationships -- and that this has to change.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Those who advocate that today's youth should be taught abstinence or deferred gratification rather than sex education will find no 1950s model for such restraint. 'Heavy petting' became a norm of dating in this period, while the proportion of white brides who were pregnant at marriage more than doubled. Teen birthrates soar, reaching highs that have not been equaled since.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Our most powerful visions of traditional families derive from images that are still delivered to our homes in countless reruns of 1950s television sitcoms.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Despite humane intentions, an overemphasis on personal responsibility for strengthening family values encourages a way of thinking that leads to moralizing rather than mobilizing for concrete reforms.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Part of the problem in making simple generalizations about what is happening to marriage is that there has been a polarization of experiences. Marriages are much more likely to be ended by divorce today, but marriages that do last are described by their participants as happier than those in the past and are far more likely to confer such happiness over many years. It is important to remember that the 50 percent divorce rate estimates are calculated in terms of a forty-year period and that many marriages in the past were terminated well before that by the death of one partner.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Whenever people propose that we go back to the traditional family, I always suggest that they pick a ballpark date for the family they have in mind. Once pinned down, they are invariably unwilling to accept the package deal that comes with their chosen model.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“A study of what happened as various states adopted no-fault divorce laws in the 1970s and 1980s found that in the first five years following adoption, wives' suicide rates fell by 8 to 13 percent, and domestic violence rates within marriage dropped by 30 percent.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Selective memory is not a bad thing when it leads children to forget arguments in the back seat of the car and to look forward to their next vacation. But it's a serious problem when it leads grown-ups to try to re-create a past that either never existed at all or whose seemingly attractive features were inextricably linked to injustices and restrictions on liberty that few Americans would tolerate today.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“the entire notion of the state undermining some primordial family privacy is a myth, because the nuclear family has never existed as an autonomous, private unit except where it was the synthetic creation of outside forces. The strong nuclear family is in large measure a creation of the strong state.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Males are also damaged by gender expectations that have changed enough to erode many old sources of masculine self-esteem but not enough to lessen the pressures on them to maintain or reinvent "manly" behaviors and images.29”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“One study found that the presence of a man in a household, as late as 1981, created about eight hours of additional work for a woman per week—almost three weeks of unpaid work per year itself.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“The main way out of poverty, furthermore, for women as well as for men, remains work, not marriage.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“When two researchers controlled for paternal inaccessibility, they found that the sons of relatively uninvolved fathers in intact homes had the same kind of academic deficits as did boys in mother-only families.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“The 1960s generation did not invent premarital and out-of-wedlock sex. Indeed, the straitlaced sexual morality of nineteenth-century Anglo-American societies, partly revived in the 1950s, seems to have been a historical and cultural aberration.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“It is ironic that conservative moralists helped to create the very institutions and bureaucracies that they now experience as a threat.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“One study showed an increase of thirty points in IQ scores of orphaned children who were moved from a poor institution to a better one.”
― Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap