Articles
New York Times,
Usually Valentine's Day comes and goes with just a day or two of news media attention to courtship and marriage. Not this February. New Yorkers are debating whether to join the other 49 states in legalizing no-fault divorce - even while conservative pro-marriage groups elsewhere plead with their legislatures to repeal it. Meanwhile, Congress has just approved financing for new marriage education programs. And state courts in New Jersey and Washington are expected to rule soon on same-sex…
The Examiner
Many people believe that the instability of modern marriage exists because husbands and wives don't take their relationships as seriously as people did in the past.
Newsday
Stephanie Coontz teaches history at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and is the author of "Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage."
September 7, 2005
At first glance, labor this year seems to have much to celebrate.
The New York Times
THE last week has been tough for opponents of same-sex marriage. First Canadian and then Spanish legislators voted to legalize the practice, prompting American social conservatives to renew their call for a constitutional amendment banning such marriages here. James Dobson of the evangelical group Focus on the Family has warned that without that ban, marriage as we have known it for 5,000 years will be overturned.
The Christian Science Monitor
For hundreds of years, marital advice books have been written for women rather than men, because women were responsible for making a marriage work. And over all that time, their advice to women could be summed up in a single word: submit.
Baltimore Sun
THE PROBLEM with modern marriage, according to conventional wisdom, is that today's couples don't make marriage their top priority and put their relationship above all else. As one of my students once wrote, "People nowadays don't respect the marriage vowels." Perhaps she meant IOU.
But my research on the history of marriage convinces me that people now place a higher value on marriage than ever before in history. In fact, that's a big part of the problem.