Nostalgia wouldn't begin to capture your sense of loss, ... The Way We Really Are Coming to Terms With America's Changing Families.
Stephanie CoontzThere is one group of people - social conservatives, religious conservatives - who honestly feel that women's place is in the home and that wives should submit to their husbands.
Stephanie CoontzPutting 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.
Stephanie CoontzExtended families have never been the norm in America; the highest figure for extended-family households ever recorded in Americanhistory is 20 percent. Contrary to the popular myth that industrialization destroyed "traditional" extended families, this high point occurred between 1850 and 1885, during the most intensive period of early industrialization. Many of these extended families, and most "producing" families of the time, depended on the labor of children; they were held together by dire necessity and sometimes by brute force.
Stephanie CoontzWomen are told that we can have the most exciting, glamorous, demanding, rewarding careers ever but we also have to be constantly sexy and sexually interested, and when we have children we have to spend more time with our kids. Of course you can't really do all three of those things at once, so we feel this tremendous stress.
Stephanie CoontzFor every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish ora German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.
Stephanie Coontz