Stephanie Coontz

Summer wedding season is upon us — but outdated, gendered traditions don't have to be

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Summer wedding season is upon us — but outdated, gendered traditions don't have to be prod_admin_user Tue, 07/16/2019 - 17:46

NBC News

July 31, 2019

Couples who follow stereotypical ideas about what a wife should do report the least satisfaction and the most conflict.

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Stephanie Coontz is the Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families and emeritus faculty of History and Family Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She currently serves as an advisor to MTV for its anti-bias campaign.

She is the author of five books on gender, family, and history, including Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage, which was cited in the US Supreme Court decision on marriage equality. She has edited and contributed chapters to more than 25 other books, and her writings have been translated into a dozen languages. See a complete list of her books.

In addition to long-form and academic writing, you may have seen her on television, including Oprah Winfrey, the Today Show, and PBS News Hour, or heard her interviewed on NPR. Coontz's articles have appeared in both popular and academic media, from The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Journal of Marriage and Family. Read selected articles.

As a passionate advocate for academics in public life, Coontz conducts media training workshops around the country, both for professional groups and at academic institutions, including Notre Dame, Columbia, and UCLA. Learn more about Coontz's speaking and workshops.

Video: Stephanie's 2020 commencement speech at The Evergreen State College: Sometimes there comes a crack in time.

Video: Stephanie's 8-minute talk at Love Equally at the Washington State Legislature celebration of same-sex marriage on February 14, 2023

Awards and Recognition

The Stanley Cohen Distinguished Research Award from the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts
The Work-Life Legacy Award from the Families and Work Institute
Honorary doctorate from Muhlenberg College
Council on Contemporary Families’ Visionary Leadership Award
Dale Richmond Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics
Stephanie Coontz named one of the 25 most influential women historians in the past 10 years.

Women have come a long way, but still have far to go

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 22:07:05 +0000

Women have come a long way, but still have far to go Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/07/2018 - 22:07

By Stephanie Coontz

courier-journal.com

March 31, 2014

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, which initially outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin - but not on the basis of gender. The word "sex" was added to the act as a last-minute amendment by a senator who opposed racial integration and may have hoped to thereby kill the bill entirely. Even after the law passed, few people expected the prohibition of gender discrimination to be enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the group charged with implementing the act.

Sure enough, the EEOC immediately outlawed race-segregated employment ads, but refused to do the same for gender-segregated ads. The head of the EEOC announced that the amendment banning sex discrimination was "a fluke," not to be taken seriously. The National Organization for Women and other groups spent the next 20 years struggling to get the anti-discrimination provisions of the act applied to women.

Not until 1973 did the Supreme Court rule that it was illegal to divide employment ads into "Help Wanted: Female" and "Help Wanted: Male." Only in 1974, a full decade after the Civil Rights Act was enacted, did Congress outlaw discrimination in housing and credit on the basis of sex. Until 1981, many states still designated the husband as the legal "head and master" of the household. And it took until 1984 for the court to compel previously all-male organizations such as the Rotary and Lions clubs to admit women. (That same year, the state of Mississippi finally ratified the 19th Amendment, granting women the vote.)

Despite this uphill battle, women have come a long way, according to a report issued last month by the Council on Contemporary Families. In 1964, fewer than 3 percent of all attorneys and just three of the country’s 422 federal judges were women. Today half of law graduates and a full third of the Supreme Court justices are female. The number of female senators has increased tenfold.

In 1980, not a single woman occupied a corner office in a Fortune 100 company. According to this month’s Harvard Business Review, women now hold nearly 18 percent of the top jobs in those companies.

More women than men graduate from college today, and unlike 40 years ago, the average female college graduate now earns more than the average male high school graduate.

But we’re not "there" yet. At every educational level, women still earn less than men with comparable credentials, even when they work the same number of hours a week in the same kind of job. While women are now half of law school graduates and one-third of attorneys, they are only 15 percent of equity partners and 5 percent of managing partners in law firms. And at current hiring rates, it would take 278 years for men and women to fill equal numbers of CEO slots.

Some women, having broken into exclusive careers, are still trying to crack the glass ceiling. Many more women are still stuck in the basement, looking for an up escalator. Women constitute 62 percent of all minimum-wage workers, and working-class jobs are as sex-segregated today as they were in 1964. In all racial groups and at every age, women are more likely to live in poverty than men, although minority women are especially disadvantaged. African-American women earn just 64 cents, and Hispanic women just 55 cents, for every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men.

Many of these inequities still result from discrimination. While few Americans would now openly claim that women are less capable than men, implicit bias tests consistently reveal that women are perceived as less competent, decisive or assertive than men. Studies also show that applications bearing female names are rated less qualified than identical applications bearing male names.

Additionally, wage rates reflect the historical legacy of gender segregation. Occupations traditionally associated with women pay less than men’s jobs even when they require the same or greater levels of skill and stamina. In 2010, the people who cared for the grounds surrounding our offices and homes (95 percent male) earned a median annual wage of $23,400. Those who cared for our children (94 percent female) earned just $19,300.

In 2010, the median annual wage for light delivery drivers, 94 percent of whom are male, was $27,500. Home health aides, 88 percent of whom are female, earned $7,000 less per year, even though they have higher average levels of education than the delivery drivers, do as much heavy lifting and spend more time on their feet. Among young childless individuals working exactly the same hours, health aides still earn 13 percent less than delivery drivers.

When couples have children, women fall even further behind, because policymakers have not caught up with new family realities. Dual-earner families are now the norm, but work policies are still designed for a labor force composed of full-time male workers with wives at home to take care of family obligations. The lack of family-friendly work policies and affordable quality child care, combined with men’s higher wages, encourages many women to cut back when work conflicts with family obligations.

But this reinforces gender inequality over the long run. On average, when a woman leaves the workforce for a year to care for a child, she loses almost 20 percent of her lifetime earnings power. If she spends three to four years away, this reduces her potential lifetime earnings by a full 40 percent. Mothers who do not quit work are also penalized. Studies show that employers are less likely to hire or promote mothers than childless women (or fathers) on the assumption that they are less committed to work.

So the bad news is that we have a way to go to reach equality. But the good news is that we have come far enough in the past 50 years that men now have as much of a stake as women in reaching that goal.

As late as 1977, two-thirds of Americans thought men should earn the money and women should stay home with the family. Today, only 30 percent of Americans favor such arrangements. Almost two-thirds now say it is best for husbands and wives to share paid work and family obligations. Ninety-seven percent support equal rights.

Since 1965, husbands have doubled their share of housework and tripled their share of child care. Interestingly, men now report higher levels of work–family conflict than women, largely because of these increased family commitments. But increasingly, men face the same discriminatory treatment as women if they ask for work-family accommodation.

If we paid women the same wages as men for comparable work, that would halve the poverty rate in American families. It would also raise the standard of living for males in two-earner working- and middle-class households. And if the United States adopted job-protected, subsidized family leave, as more than 180 other countries in the world already have done, men, women and children would all benefit. Pay equity, comparable worth policies and family-friendly work reforms are not just "women’s issues" any more. They are our next civil rights challenge - perhaps our next human rights challenge.

Stephanie Coontz teaches family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and co-chairs the Council on Contemporary Families. Her most recent book is A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (BasicBooks).

Who still can't sit at America's table

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 22:07:05 +0000

Who still can't sit at America's table Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/07/2018 - 22:07

By Stephanie Coontz

CNN Opinion

February 28, 2014

Fifty years ago today, the House of Representatives passed the Civil Rights Act, which made it illegal to discriminate against individuals on the basis of race, national origin, religion or gender. We've come a long way since then, according to a report issued last week by the Council on Contemporary Families. Yet troubling inequalities persist.

Gone are the days when segregationists in Congress proudly declared they would resist "social equality" and racial "intermingling" to "the bitter end," and when the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission flatly refused to enforce the act's provisions against gender discrimination.

In 1964, fewer than 5% of Americans approved of interracial marriage. Today, 77% do, according to a Gallup poll. In 1970, a majority of Americans still opposed efforts to end gender inequality. By 2010, 97% of Americans supported equal rights for women, according to the Pew Research Center.

The number of elected black officials in the country has soared, growing from 103 in 1964 to more than 10,000 today. Since 1990, there have been two African-American secretaries of state, and an African-American president is now in his second term.

Before passage of the Civil Rights Act, fewer than 3% of all lawyers and fewer than 1% of all federal judges were female. Today, women account for almost one-third of attorneys and three of the nine Supreme Court justices. Fifty years ago, women working full-time earned just 59 cents for every dollar their male counterparts made. Today, women workers, as a group, earn 77% of what men earn, as a group. Women run 23 of the Fortune 500 companies, and a woman heads the most powerful financial institution in the country, the Federal Reserve Bank.

Despite these huge improvements, the historical legacy of racial and gender discrimination has not gone away. Although one in 10 black households now earns more than $100,000 a year, the median net worth of black households is 14 times lower than that of white households. The black unemployment rate remains twice that of whites. Black poverty rates are almost three times as high. These ratios have hardly budged over the past 50 years.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer for The Atlantic, recently called attention to a disturbing graph showing that almost one-third of African-Americans born between 1985 and 2000 live in neighborhoods where 30% of the residents are poor, compared with only 1% of whites. Living in areas of such concentrated poverty multiplies the barriers to getting a decent education or job.

And after declining in the 1970s, racial segregation in schools has increased again over the past 30 years, especially in districts that were released from court-ordered desegregation plans. This trend underscores the need for continuing federal oversight and enforcement of equal rights laws.

Women also face ongoing barriers to reaching full equality. Despite the high-profile positions of female executives such as Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg and Yahoo's Melissa Mayer, working-class jobs are as gender-segregated today as they were in 1964. Most women continue to work in traditionally female occupations, which typically pay less than traditionally male jobs requiring comparable skills. Sixty-two percent of minimum-wage workers -- and the majority of poor Americans -- are female.

In the decades since the Civil Rights Act outlawed barefaced discrimination on the basis of race and gender, many particularly talented or fortunate women, blacks, and Hispanics have acquired a degree of wealth, power and social admiration that would have been unimaginable in 1964. But the majority are still handicapped by their historic disadvantages, as well as by racial and gender prejudices that controlled experiments reveal to be stubbornly persistent.

Such prejudices are especially virulent when they interact with the growing income polarization occurring in America today. Commentators continue to blame poverty on the irresponsibility of single mothers and to impugn the sexual mores of women who want insurance coverage for birth control. According to an experiment published in American Sociological Review, white applicants in low-income communities are twice as likely to get a job offer as equally qualified blacks. White applicants just out of prison have as good a chance of being hired as black or Latino applicants with no criminal record!

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once imagined a world where "the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood." Had he given the speech a few years later, he would certainly have added daughters to the mix. But as author Ellis Cose has observed, it would be a tragedy if we arrived at that point only to discover that while the wealthiest black, Latino, Asian and white men and women are welcome at the head table, the poor of all races are relegated to eating leftovers in the kitchen.

The recent recession has demoted many Americans of all races to the poverty table. Yet blacks, Latinos and women remain over-represented in that group. The civil rights challenge for the next 50 years will be to find ways to work simultaneously for socioeconomic justice along with racial and gender equity.

How Can We Help Men? By Helping Women

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 22:07:05 +0000

How Can We Help Men? By Helping Women Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/07/2018 - 22:07

By Stephanie Coontz

The New York Times

January 31, 2014

THIS week Maria Shriver brings together a star-studded cast of celebrities, from Hillary Rodham Clinton to Beyoncé, to call attention to the economic plight of American women and demand that women’s needs be put "at the center of policy making."

But is this really the time to focus on women? For nearly four decades, feminists have decried "the feminization of poverty." However, since the 1980s there has been a defeminization of poverty, as a growing proportion of men have fallen on hard times. In recent years men have experienced especially significant losses in income and job security.

Although women are still more likely to be poor than men, on average women’s income and labor-force participation have been rising since the 1970s. By contrast, between 1970 and 2010 the median earnings of men fell by 19 percent, and those of men with just a high school diploma by a stunning 41 percent. And while women have regained all the jobs they lost during the recession, men have regained just 75 percent.

Since about 1980 the percentage of men and women in middle-skill jobs has declined. But for women, nearly all of that decline was because of increased representation in higher-skill jobs. Women’s employment in low-skill jobs increased by just 1 percent. By contrast, for men, half the decline in middle-skill jobs was a result of increases in low-skill jobs.

The most urgent issue facing working Americans today is not the glass ceiling. It is the sinking floor. So wouldn’t it make more sense to focus on gender-neutral economic policies?

Actually, it wouldn’t, because "gender-neutral" work practices and social policies were traditionally based on a masculine model. Employers assumed that there was no need to accommodate caregiving obligations because the "normal" worker had a wife to do that. Policy makers assumed there was no need for universal programs such as family allowances and public child care because the "normal" woman had a husband to support her and her children. Accordingly, most social benefits, such as Social Security and unemployment insurance, were tied to prior participation in the labor market. Welfare was a stigmatized and stingy backup for misfits who were not in a male-breadwinner family.

Social and economic policies constructed around the male breadwinner model have always disadvantaged women. But today they are dragging down millions of men as well. Paradoxically, putting gender equity issues at the center of social planning would now be in the interests of most men.

This was not so evident 40 or 50 years ago, when the struggle for gender equity threatened many male entitlements. In those days, men of every skill and income level had preferential access to jobs that provided security, benefits and rising wages. As the sociologist Erin Hatton shows, when employers needed cheap temporary workers, they turned to companies like Kelly Girl, whose ads bragged that unlike the gimme-gimme male worker, the Kelly Girl was a "Never-Never" employee: "Never costs you a dime for slack time. (When the workload drops, you drop her.) Never has a cold, slipped disk or loose tooth. (Not on your time anyway!)"

Today, however, becoming a "never-never" employee is increasingly a gender-neutral fate. Millions of men face working conditions that traditionally characterized women’s lives: low wages, minimal benefits, part-time or temporary jobs, and periods of joblessness. Poverty is becoming defeminized because the working conditions of many men are becoming more feminized.

Whether they realize it or not, men now have a direct stake in policies that advance gender equity. Most of the wage gap between women and men is no longer a result of blatant male favoritism in pay and promotion. Much of it stems from general wage inequality in society at large.

IN most countries, women tend to be concentrated in lower-wage jobs. The United States actually has a higher proportion of skilled and highly paid female workers than countries like Sweden and Norway. Yet as a whole, Swedish and Norwegian women earn a higher proportion of the average male wage than American women because the gap between high and low wages is much smaller in those countries.

Establishing a "livable wage" floor would immediately reduce the gap in average pay between American women and men. But it would also boost the wages of millions of low-income male workers, who earn a much lower percentage of the average male wage than their counterparts in other wealthy countries. In 2009, one in every four American workers earned less than two-thirds of the national median hourly wage, the highest proportion of low-wage work in 19 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, according to the economist John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Another source of the gender pay gap is the lack of reliable, affordable child care, which forces many mothers to stay home or work part time even when they need and want full-time work.

Prioritizing child care would not just be a boon for mothers but for millions of fathers as well. The highest proportion of stay-at-home moms is found among women married to men in the bottom 25 percent of the country’s income distribution. Most of these women cannot afford to work because of the high cost of child care, even though their partners and children would benefit from the increased income.

Putting women first would mean strengthening America’s social safety net, because a higher proportion of single-mother families live in poverty here than in any other wealthy country. But a stronger safety net would help single-father families and two-parent families, too, because these families also have higher poverty rates than their counterparts in other wealthy countries.

Putting women first would also mean changing unemployment insurance rules that leave many part-time workers ineligible for benefits and disqualify people who leave a job due to a family member’s medical emergency. Women are especially affected by such rules, but the expansion of part-time and temporary jobs since the 1970s has left a growing number of male workers vulnerable as well. And a recent Pew poll found that almost 30 percent of fathers had reduced their work hours and 10 percent quit a job to care for a family member.

Putting women’s traditional needs at the center of social planning is not reverse sexism. It’s the best way to reverse the increasing economic vulnerability of men and women alike.

Given the increasing insecurity of many American men, they have good reason to back feminist policies. And if those policies alienate some women in the upper echelons, then maybe feminism isn’t for every woman, and doesn’t need to be.

Why 'war on poverty' not over

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 22:07:05 +0000

Why 'war on poverty' not over Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/07/2018 - 22:07

By Stephanie Coontz

CNN Opinion

January 31, 2014

In a State of the Union address 50 years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared "unconditional war on poverty." Over the next year and a half, anti-poverty warriors developed new health insurance programs for the elderly and the poor, increased Social Security benefits and introduced food stamps and nutritional supplements for low-income pregnant women and infants. They established Head Start programs for young children, Upward Bound and Job Corps programs for teenagers, and work-study opportunities for college students.

It is often forgotten that this was a bipartisan campaign. A Republican president, Richard Nixon, and legislators from both sides of the aisle expanded the War on Poverty in the early 1970s. Nixon extended the reach of the food stamp program, added an automatic cost-of-living increase to Social Security and instituted the Supplemental Security Income system to benefit disabled adults and children. He even proposed a guaranteed national income though that died in the Senate after passing in the House.

Yet in 1988, President Ronald Reagan declared that the war was over, and that "poverty won." His claim that "government is not a solution to our problem; government is the problem" still serves as the mantra for politicians seeking to dismantle America's social safety net.

The truth is that the war on poverty produced some stunning successes, many of which are still felt today. And it likely could have produced more if politicians hadn't abandoned it in the 1980s, at the very moment that America's working families were facing heightened assaults on their living standards.

In 1963, despite more than 15 years of prior economic expansion, the child poverty rate was almost 25%. By the early 1970s it had been lowered to 15%. Between 1967 and 1975, poverty among elders was cut in half.

As of 1963, 20% of Americans living below the poverty line had never been examined by a physician; by 1970 this was true of only 8%. Between 1965 and 1980, infant mortality was halved, thanks to Medicaid and other government-subsidized health programs. The nutritional level of poor Americans improved substantially between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, thanks to food stamp and school lunch programs. Children who received food stamps in the 1970s were less likely than children from similarly low-income families to develop diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure -- or to rely on welfare programs -- as adults.

But since the late 1970s, economic insecurity has risen again, except during the brief economic boom of the late 1990s. The resurgence of poverty is not because government programs have "gotten in the way" but because they have not done enough to get in the way of market forces going in the wrong direction.

Historically, it has required a combination of favorable employment trends and active government intervention to lower the percentage of people in poverty and raise living standards for the working middle class. During the 1960s, rising real wages for low-income and high-income workers, due in part to rapid economic growth and the spread of unionization, worked in tandem with expanding government support systems to improve Americans' well-being.

After the mid-1970s, however, the free market moved in the opposite direction. Between 1973 and 1986, the real median income of families headed by a person under 30 dropped by about 27%. The rise of single-parent families contributed to this decline, but the poverty rate for young married couples with children also doubled between 1973 and 1988. Unemployment spells became more common and lengthier.

Between 1979 and 1987, the real wages of high school graduates fell by 18%, while those of high school dropouts plummeted by 42%. By the 1980s, income inequality had begun its long rise to the record-setting levels we have seen in recent years.

Yet during this period of falling real wages, politicians began winding down the war on poverty. In the 1980s, they shifted the tax burden from income taxes to more regressive payroll taxes, slashed investments in urban renewal, housing and transportation, and cut back on services to the poor. Between 1970 and 1991, the purchasing power of the typical welfare benefit decreased by more than 40%.

For three decades, aside from a brief respite in the 1990s, the market forces heightening financial insecurity and poverty have become even stronger, but our political leaders have failed to strengthen the social safety net enough to counteract their ill effects. In 1968, the minimum wage was 55% of the median full-time wage. Today, a minimum-wage worker earns just 37% of the median wage. The median benefit for a family of three under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families programs amounts to only about one-third the poverty level, and many families are now reaching the lifetime limits imposed on eligibility.

Still, as sociologist Philip Cohen shows in a study released Monday by the Council on Contemporary Families, government anti-poverty programs are all that stand in the way of an even worse scenario for American families. Tax credits for low-wage jobs and dependent children -- which bring cash refunds to many poor families -- reduce child poverty by almost 7%. Food stamps (now threatened with substantial cuts) decrease poverty by an additional 3%.

As of 2011, the major means-tested aid programs in the United States were rescuing almost 2.4 million children from extreme poverty every month, even though they were leaving behind more than 1 million more. Without government programs, Cohen reports, about 15 million more people would have fallen into poverty between 2007 and 2012.

It is a myth that government is the problem rather than part of the solution. In 1999, Great Britain had an even higher child poverty rate than we do today. The British government responded with an ambitious anti-poverty campaign, raising the minimum wage, increasing subsidized maternity leaves and providing free preschool for all 3- and 4-year olds. Within a decade, Britain reduced child poverty by somewhere between one-quarter and one half. Surely America can do as well.

Coontz on Salon.com: Marriage Tips

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 22:07:05 +0000

Coontz on Salon.com: Marriage Tips Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/07/2018 - 22:07

By Tracy Clark-Flory

Salon

October 31, 2013

The 9 smartest marriage tips ever

Next to my desk there is a fallen pile of relationship-advice books. It looks like a miniature city of ruins, a very pink Parthenon. I can't even begin to fathom picking up all the rubble - mostly because I'm not sure if there's anything worth saving in there. It's a shame. The sheer volume tells you just how much demand there is for advice on sustaining relationships.

Ahead of my approaching nuptials I've been wondering about our collective wisdom on marriage and how to find advice that escapes the usual traps of cliche, triviality and overgeneralization. (Not to mention Pepto-Bismol book covers.) Something smarter than, Never go to bed angry. Something that doesn't read like the latest diet fad. Maybe even something that has, I don't know, any evidence or research behind it? I decided to go to the people I trust most on the topic - from respected sex researchers to ... my grandma. The result? A messy collection of marriage tips that you will only find here.

Compliments complement

For nearly three decades, relationship expert Terri Orbuch has conducted a research project following 373 married couples. She's found that couples who regularly give each other affective affirmation - meaning compliments, help and support, encouragement and subtle nonsexual rewards, such as hand holding - are the happiest. Orbuch, host of the upcoming public television special, Secrets From The Love Doctor, says a key finding is that men crave affective affirmation more than women, because women typically get it from people other than their husbands.

Forget about the dirty dishes

Orbuch has found that the happy couples in her study talked to each other frequently - not about their relationship, but about other things. Orbuch recommends setting aside ten minutes every day to talk about anything other than work, family, the household or the relationship. Pretend the cable bill has already been paid, the inlaws already called - just for ten minutes. Ask her what her favorite movie is, and why, she suggests. Ask him to recall a happy memory from childhood. Ask her what she'd like to be remembered for. This small change infuses relationships with new life, she says.

Stay on your toes

In my study, when couples said they were in a relationship rut or felt bored, they were less happy over time, says Orbuch. So escape the rut by mixing things up. The changes can be small, but they have to upset the routine enough to make him or her sit up and take notice.

Similarly, anthropologist Helen Fisher suggests that couples keep doing novel things together, she says. Novelty drives up the dopamine system in the brain and can help to sustain feelings of romantic love.

Marriage is like a credit card

Helen Fisher, author of Why Him? Why Her?: How to Find and Keep Lasting Love, recommends sustaining your ‘positive illusions' about your significant other. When you begin to feel irritated at your partner, instead of reviewing everything you don't like, turn your thoughts to all the good things about him or her.

Psychologist Harriet Lerner agrees. Newlyweds automatically know how to speak to the positive and make each other feel special and valued, says Lerner, author of Marriage Rules, A Manual for the Married and the Coupled Up. But the more enduring the marriage, the more you'll find yourself noticing and speaking to what you don't like. Lerner offers this maxim: No one can survive in a marriage, at least not happily, if they feel more judged than admired.

Relatedly, Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History, says that relationships, like the economy, run on credit. By that she means both giving credit, or expressing gratitude, for the things your partner does that make your life easier, things we often take for granted and advancing credit by assuming that your partner has good intentions and would like to step up to the plate, rather than assuming that you need to ride herd on him or her in order to get what you need.

Look for the soft emotion

One of my favorite pieces of advice come from an observation I once heard from two fellow Council on Contemporary Families board members, psychologist Philip and Carolyn Cowan, Coontz tells me. They said to always look for the soft emotion that lies beneath the hard one. She explains, Since then I've tried to respond to the soft emotion - the fear, anxiety or embarrassment that is hiding behind the anger or accusation - rather than to the hard one. It helps in all sorts of relationships, not just marriage.

Live your own damn life

Lerner emphasizes the importance of independence. Connect with friends and family, pursue your own interests and be of service to others, she says. If your primary energy isn't directed to living your own life as well as possible, you'll be over-focused on your partner in a worried or critical way.

Don't wait for the mood to strike

Have sex regularly, even if you don't feel like it, advises Fisher. Now, this does not mean: Have sex with a person who doesn't want to have sex with you. Nor does it mean: Tell your partner that it doesn't matter that they aren't in the mood. Instead, it means: Don't always expect to be overcome by desire before deciding to have sex.

Sexual stimulation of the genitals stimulates the dopamine system to sustain feelings of romantic love, she says. And with orgasm, one gets a flood of oxytocin and vasopressin, neurochemicals that give you feelings of attachment for your partner. That's not to mention that seminal fluid is a good antidepressant, full of chemicals that lift optimism. (Which reminds me of that Liz Phair song.)

But first, pick a good lover

As my grandma once told my aunt, The best I can wish for you is a lover as good, as well as kind and considerate, as your grandfather. (Oversharing runs in the family.) This bit of advice is only useful pre-vows - and it's important to note that a good lover is not necessarily someone who has the entire Kama Sutra memorized, but someone who brings the right attitude to sex (good, giving and game, as Dan Savage puts it).

Let go of the fantasy

For his book You Can Be Right (or You Can Be Married): Looking for Love in the Age of Divorce, Dana Adam Shapiro traveled across the country asking divorcees for marriage advice. After all, who better to offer insight into why relationships fail? There were so many little tidbits, like how to fight fairly and productively, he says, but his favorite piece of advice came from an interviewee who went by the pseudonym Jim. He said:

There is something absolutely divine - I mean, literally, the breath of God - in the ability to put someone else in your heart, to think of them first. But from the time of the greatest pornographer who ever lived, Shakespeare, we've demanded that love be something more. ... And what happens is, the utter grandeur and magnificence of what love actually is gets overshadowed by this disappointment that it's not the way we fantasized it should be.

Jim, who is now 55 and happily married to his third wife, added, The very best you can hope for is that you've got somebody who's gonna respect you enough to go through the day-to-day bullshit and be honest with you, he said. That's the most romantic thing in the world.

Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter and Facebook.

There Is No Such Thing as the 'Traditional Male Breadwinner'

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 22:07:05 +0000

There Is No Such Thing as the 'Traditional Male Breadwinner' Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/07/2018 - 22:07

By Stephanie Coontz

Time Ideas

September 30, 2013

If we're ever going to fix our problems accommodating both work and family in our lives, we have to stop thinking that the dilemmas we face today stem from the collapse of the traditional male-breadwinner family. There is no such thing as the traditional male-breadwinner family. It was a late-arriving, short-lived aberration in the history of the world, and it's over. We need to move on.

(MORE: Stay-at-Home Dads Will Never Become the Norm)

For thousands of years, any family that needed to work understood that everyone in that family needed to work. There was no such term as "male breadwinner." Throughout the colonial America era, wives were called "yokemates" or "deputy husbands." When men married, they didn't do it because they had fallen helplessly in love. They did it because they needed to expand their labor force or their land holdings, or they needed to make a political or military or business alliance, or they needed a good infusion of cash, which was why they were often more interested in the dowry than the daughter. Male breadwinner was a contradiction in terms — there was no such thing. Males were the bosses of the family workforce, and women and children were the unpaid employees.

(MORE: Let's Drink to Phasing Out the First Lady)

It wasn't until the 1920s that a bare majority of American children came to live in a family where the husband earned the income, the wife was not working beside him in a small business or on a farm or earning income herself, and the children were either at home or in school and not working in a factory or in the fields. That family form then grew less common during the Great Depression and World War II, but it reappeared in the 1950s thanks to an unusual economic and political situation in which real wages were rising steadily and a government flush with cash was paying veterans benefits to 44% of young men starting families. This was a period when your average 30-year-old man could buy a home on 15% to 18% of his own salary, not needing his wife's. That era is gone — for good. And yet the U.S. formulated its work policies, school hours and social-support programs on the assumption that this kind of family would last forever, that there would always be someone at home to take care of the children and manage the household.

(MORE: The Female Labor Market Is Actually Stagnating)

Today in a sense we've gone back to the future. We've gone back to the two-earner family but forward to a world where men and women now earn separate incomes and have equal legal rights. Increasingly, they want equal access to the rewards and challenges of both paid work and family. Yet many policymakers and business leaders are still stuck in that blip in time when women were only marginal members of the workforce and men were only marginal members of the family. The only major change we've made since the 1950s is passing the Work Family Leave Act, which offers unpaid leave that lasts only 12 weeks and is available to only half the workers who need it. Our policies are so inadequate and so far behind the rest of the world that the best claim we can make is that we're 181st in the world; 180 other countries have better work-family policies than we do.

We have to get rid of the embarrassing disconnect between our outdated policies and the realities of our family lives, where 70% of American children grow up in homes where all the adults work outside the home. We are now 13 years into the 21st century. Isn't it time to stop acting like it's still the 1950s?

Brad Harrington, work-life visionary, speaks about the role of working men and the family today.

Yes, I've folded up my masculine mystique, honey

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 22:07:05 +0000

Yes, I've folded up my masculine mystique, honey Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/07/2018 - 22:07

By Stephanie Coontz

The Sunday Times of London

February 28, 2013

Males are in trouble at school and at work: not because women are on the rise but because they cling to a myth of manhood.

Fifty years ago last week, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, igniting an impassioned debate over her claim that millions of housewives were desperately unhappy, suffering from "the problem that has no name".

Women did seem to be floundering in the 1950s and early 1960s. Doctors puzzled over an epidemic of "housewife's fatigue" and numerous American women dropped out of university. Newsweek magazine reported that US women were gripped with a malaise that was "deep, pervasive and impervious" to any known remedy — although many psychiatrists were sure that tranquillisers could help. In Europe, too, observers worried whether women could settle back into domesticity after the Second World War.

According to conventional wisdom, women were suffering because they were being "masculinised" by the pressures of the postwar world. Female students, as one prominent educator put it, were being forced to study a male curriculum rather than topics that would be of interest and use to them, such as "the theory and preparation of a Basque paella". An expanding economy was pulling women into the world of work and eroding their traditional feminine roles. The cure, most psychiatrists agreed, was for women to reject masculine activities and values and embrace their "feminine destiny".

Friedan had a different analysis. She argued that the problems facing women in the postwar world were caused by too much adherence to the norms of femininity and too little recognition that "women are people too". Women, Friedan claimed, had been ensnared by an insidious "feminine mystique" that promised them security, comfort and indulgence in return for accepting their "womanly" dependence and abandoning any aspirations beyond the home.

In Friedan's view, the feminine mystique offered short-term and superficial privileges at a high cost. In the long run it damaged women's health and wellbeing, prevented them from adapting to a changing world and ultimately made them less successful as wives and mothers. She urged women to develop an identity based on their individual talents and desires rather than on stereotypes about what it meant to be a "real" woman.

In the half century since publication of The Feminine Mystique, women have expanded tremendously the range of options and self-images available to them, successfully moving into new roles in public and private life. Today it is males who are floundering.

In America and Britain there is talk of a "boy crisis" in schools. Real wages have fallen more for men than for women. Traditional masculine occupations are eroding but men hesitate to enter many of the fastest-growing occupations in today's economy. Males are now less likely than females to apply to university and, if they enter, less likely to graduate.

Attempts to explain these contemporary problems are often the mirror image of 1960s claims about women. Many experts today blame men's troubles on the weakening of their traditional gender identity. Boys, they complain, are being forced to "act like girls" in school. Adult males have been stripped of their role as family providers and protectors. Society must find new ways to validate masculinity.

In fact, most of the problems men are experiencing today stem from the flip side of the 20th-century feminine mystique — a pervasive masculine mystique that pressures boys and men to conform to a gender stereotype and prevents them from exploring the full range of their individual capabilities.

The masculine mystique promises men success, power and admiration from others if they embrace their supposedly natural competitive drives and reject all forms of dependence. Just as the feminine mystique made women ashamed when they harboured feelings or desires that were supposedly "masculine", the masculine mystique makes men ashamed to admit to any feelings or desires that are thought to be "feminine".

Trying to live up to the precepts of the masculine mystique has always exacted a heavy price on males, especially in childhood. For girls, the feminine mystique was not rigorously enforced until puberty. A girl who enjoyed "boy things" such as sports and climbing trees was affectionately called a "tomboy". At the same time she was allowed to cry and was excused for failing ("that's way too hard for a little girl"; "I'll do it for you, honey").

Girls had such leeway precisely because they were never expected to compete for public success or to wield power over others.

By contrast, the masculine mystique demands an early and complete rejection of all activities and values traditionally associated with females. Boys who cross gender boundaries are derided as wusses, sissies, metrosexuals, called "wet" or written off as "mummy's boys". Training people to exercise power can be a brutal business, as many upper-class British men can testify from their own family and boarding school experiences.

Boys are held to higher standards of stoicism than girls and receive harsher treatment when they do not compete successfully. Throughout their lives men face constant pressure to demonstrate their masculinity to others.

Mad Men's Betty Draper epitomises the surrendered housewife driven to despair Despite the personal costs exacted by adherence to the masculine mystique, for most of the 20th century "acting like a man" was a good recipe for success because it conferred what RW Connell, the sociologist, has called a "patriarchal dividend", giving males preference over females in almost every area.

Boys did not need to abide by "girlie" rules, such as obeying teachers and studying hard, because discriminatory wages ensured that the average male who got through school — or even those who dropped out — earned more than the average female university graduate working comparable hours.
Nor did men have much need for negotiating skills. In most countries husbands had the final say in household and financial decisions. The television series Mad Men depicts how men's bad behaviour towards wives, mistresses, secretaries and female co-workers carried few penalties and many rewards. Everyone assumed that women would put up with such behaviour.

Today, however, conforming to the masculine mystique bestows fewer rewards and more penalties. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook, notes in her forthcoming book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, that while the compliance and docility fostered by remnants of the feminine mystique still hold women back from top leadership positions in business and politics, those same traits do get rewarded in school. And in a world where educational achievement increasingly outweighs gender in the job market, that at least gets women in the door.

By contrast, adhering to the masculine mystique increasingly closes doors for boys and men. In a book to be published next month, the sociologists Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann demonstrate that most of the academic disadvantages of boys in education flow not from a "feminised" learning environment, as is often claimed, but from a masculinised peer culture that encourages disruptive behaviour and disengagement from school.

As Debbie Epstein, the British researcher, puts it, "real boys" are not supposed to study. "The work you do here is girls' work," one boy told an educational ethnographer. "It's not real work."

Reviewing studies from Europe and America, DiPrete and Buchmann report that trying to cater to the masculine mystique does not improve the academic performance of boys. In fact, the more the traditional gender distinctions are blurred, the better boys and girls do. Those boys who participate in music, art, drama and foreign languages have a higher attachment to school than the boys who reject such activities as "girlie".
The masculine mystique also contributes to the gender gap in university entry and completion rates. Just as the feminine mystique once encouraged women to neglect self-development in the hope that "some day my prince will come", the masculine mystique encourages men to pin their hopes on the return of that "patriarchal dividend".

One study of seven European countries, including Britain, found that although parents still favour sons in inheritance, they are more likely to fund education for daughters, largely, I suspect, because they reckon their sons will make it under their own steam.

Many of the short-term privileges that still exist for men come with serious long-term costs. A study of gender differences in American university drop-out rates, published this month in Gender & Society, found that one reason why men have higher drop-out rates than women is they are less willing to take on the high levels of debt that are increasingly needed to graduate.

In part this may be due to the pressure men feel to become breadwinners. But it is also partly because the average male university drop- out earns as much in his entry-level salary as the newly minted male graduate. By midlife, however, male university graduates can earn on average £13,100 more a year.

The costs that the masculine mystique imposes are not just monetary. Kristen Springer, a medical sociologist, found that the greater a man's investment in his male-provider image, the more his health and wellbeing are threatened if his wife earns more than he does. This is a serious health risk, given that today almost 38% of UK wives outearn their husbands.

While the masculine mystique may seem sexy in the movies, men who subscribe to it at home have less successful relationships than those who have moved beyond it. Wendy Sigle-Rushton, a researcher at the London School of Economics, examined 3,500 married couples in Britain and found that the higher a husband's participation in housework and childcare, the lower the incidence of divorce.

Research in America indicates that marriages where men and women are flexible in their gender roles tend to have the highest marital quality. Over the course of a marriage, husbands who become less invested in their masculine identity also report becoming happier.

As women did in the 1960s, men today are finding their traditional gender roles and values are becoming obstacles to their personal success and that they need to forge a new set of self-images and skills. It was not easy for women to defy the long-standing internal and external pressures demanding that we constantly prove our femininity. But our biggest gains came once we stopped feeling compelled to "act like a lady".

Now it is men's turn. They need to liberate themselves from the personal and societal pressure constantly to prove their masculinity. Men's lives will improve greatly when they assimilate the lesson that Friedan drove home to women half a century ago: act like a person, not a gender stereotype.

The Disestablishment of Marriage

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 22:07:05 +0000

The Disestablishment of Marriage Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/07/2018 - 22:07

By Stephanie Coontz

The New York Times

June 30, 2013

AT first glance, the prognosis for marriage looks grim. Between 1950 and 2011, according to calculations by the University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen, the marriage rate fell from 90 marriages a year per 1,000 unmarried women to just 31, a stunning 66 percent decline. If such a decline continued, there would be no women getting married by 2043!

But rumors of the death of marriage are greatly exaggerated. People are not giving up on marriage. They are simply waiting longer to tie the knot. Because the rate of marriage is calculated by the percentage of adult women (over 15) who get married each year, the marriage rate automatically falls as the average age of marriage goes up. In 1960, the majority of women were already married before they could legally have a glass of Champagne at their own wedding. A woman who was still unwed at 25 had some reason to fear that she would turn into what the Japanese call "Christmas cake," left on the shelf.

Today the average age of first marriage is almost 27 for women and 29 for men, and the range of ages at first marriage is much more spread out. In 1960, Professor Cohen calculates, fewer than 8 percent of women and only 13 percent of men married for the first time at age 30 or older, compared with almost a third of all women and more than 40 percent of all men today. Most Americans still marry eventually, and they continue to hold marriage in high regard. Indeed, as a voluntary relationship between two individuals, marriage comes with higher expectations of fairness, fidelity and intimacy than ever.

But marriage is no longer the central institution that organizes people's lives. Marriage is no longer the only place where people make major life transitions and decisions, enter into commitments or incur obligations. The rising age of marriage, combined with the increase in divorce and cohabitation since the 1960s, means that Americans spend a longer period of their adult lives outside marriage than ever before.

The historian Nancy F. Cott suggests that recent changes in marriage could produce shifts similar to those that accompanied the disestablishment of religion. Most American colonies, following the British model, had an official church that bestowed special privileges on its members and penalized those who did not join it. Residents were sometimes fined or whipped if they failed to attend the established church. After the American Revolution, states repealed laws requiring people to belong to a particular church or religion to qualify for public rights. When the official churches were disestablished, new religions and sects were able to function openly and compete for followers. And the old church had to recruit members in new ways.

An analogous process is taking place with marriage. Many alternatives to traditional marriage have emerged. People feel free to shop around, experimenting with several living arrangements in succession. And when people do marry, they have different expectations and goals. In consequence, many of the "rules" we used to take for granted - about who marries, who doesn't, what makes for a satisfactory marriage and what raises the risk of divorce - are changing.

Until the 1970s, highly educated and high-earning women were less likely to marry than their less-educated sisters. But among women born since 1960, college graduates are now as likely to marry as women with less education and much less likely to divorce.

And it's time to call a halt to the hysteria about whether high-earning women are pricing themselves out of the marriage market. New research by the sociologist Leslie McCall reveals that while marriage rates have fallen for most women since 1980, those for the highest earning women have increased, to 64 percent in 2010 from 58 percent in 1980. Women in the top 15 percent of earners are now more likely to be married than their lower-earning counterparts.

Similar changes are occurring across the developed world, even in countries with more traditional views of marriage and gender roles. The demographer Yen-Hsin Alice Cheng reports that in Taiwan, educated women are now more likely to marry than less educated women, reversing trends that were in force in the 1990s. High earnings used to reduce a Japanese woman's chance of marrying. Today, however, such a woman is more likely to marry than her lower-income counterpart.

Until recently, women who married later than average had higher rates of divorce. Today, with every year a woman delays marriage, up to her early 30s, her chance of divorce decreases, and it does not rise again thereafter. If an American woman wanted a lasting marriage in the 1950s, she was well advised to choose a man who believed firmly in traditional values and male breadwinning. Unconventional men - think beatniks - were a bad risk. Today, however, traditionally minded men are actually more likely to divorce - or to be divorced - than their counterparts with more egalitarian ideas about gender roles.

Over the past 30 years, egalitarian values have become increasingly important to relationship success. So has sharing housework. As late as 1990, fewer than half of Americans ranked sharing chores as very important to marital success. Today 62 percent hold that view, more than the 53 percent who think an adequate income is very important or the 49 percent who cite shared religious beliefs.

Two-thirds of couples who marry today are already living together. For most of the 20th century, couples who lived together before marriage had a greater chance of divorce than those who entered directly into marriage. But when the demographer Wendy Manning and her colleagues looked at couples married since 1996, they found that this older association no longer prevailed. For couples married since the mid-1990s, cohabitation before marriage is not associated with an elevated risk of marital dissolution.

In fact, among the subgroups of women facing the greatest risk of divorce - poor minority women, women who have had a premarital birth or were raised in single-parent families, and women with a history of numerous sex partners - cohabitation with definite plans to marry at the outset is tied to lower levels of marital instability than direct entry into marriage. America may soon experience the transition that has already occurred in several countries, like Australia, where living together before marriage has become a protective factor against divorce for most couples.

All these changes make it an exciting time to research marriage - and a challenging time to enter it. But it's not that we're doing a worse job at marriage than our ancestors did. It's that we demand different things from marriage than in the past. And marriage demands different things from us.