Pundits and politicians love to pontificate about strengthening traditional marriage. But as someone who has studied marriage forms and family life for more than three decades, I wonder how many of them have the faintest idea of what they're talking about.
I suppose they mean the "traditional" marriage of one man and one woman.
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 marriage.
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.
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 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.
Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with American's Changing Families, offers her take on the following social issues:
There's no evidence that most teens are any more irresponsible or destructive than teens were in the past, but they lack something that many older men grew up with: meaningful work with adult mentors.
Apprenticeships, summer jobs in their parents' workplace and community service are possible remedies.
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.
Everyone knows that the intensification of work in the global economy and the erosion of the male-breadwinner family have created a crisis for parents organizing child care and couples trying to juggle work and married life. But what most people don't realize is that the male-breadwinner family was invented only 150 years ago, to solve an earlier crisis of work, marriage and family life. The current crisis is as broad as its predecessor, and its ultimate resolution no more predictable now than the future was understandable in the mid-19th century.
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.
Since the last presidential election, "values" has been a buzzword for political pundits and talking heads. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have rushed to affirm their commitment to strong family values and the traditional value of marriage.