Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage QUOTES

1 " The idea that in prehistoric times a man would spend his life hunting only for the benefit of his own wife and children, who were dependent solely upon his hunting prowess for survival, is simply a projection of 1950s marital norms onto the past. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

2 " Never before in history had societies thought that such a set of high expectations about marriage was either realistic or desirable. Although many Europeans and Americans found tremendous joy in building their relationships around these values, the adoption of these unprecedented goals for marriage had unanticipated and revolutionary consequences that have since come to threaten the stability of the entire institution. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

3 " [S]ince the dawn of civilization, getting in-laws has been one of marriage's most important functions. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

4 " College graduates and women with higher earnings are now more likely to marry than women with less education and lower wages, although they generally marry at an older age. The legal profession is one big exception to this generalization. Female attorneys are less likely to ever marry, to have children, or to remarry after divorce than women in other professions. But an even higher proportion of male attorneys are childless, suggesting there might be something about this career that is unfriendly to everyone’s family life, not just women’s. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

5 " Like it or not, today we are all pioneers, picking our way through uncharted and unstable territory. The old rules are no longer reliable guides to work out modern gender roles and build a secure foundation for marriage. Wherever it is that people want to end up in their family relations today, even if they are totally committed to creating a so-called traditional marrige, they have to get there by a different route from the past. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

6 " The Victorians did not have some secret formula, since lost, about how to expect the best of marriage and still put up with the worst. Rather, they were much more accepting than we are today of a huge gap between rhetoric and reality, expectation and actual experience. In large part, this was because they had no other choice. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

7 " Another limit on intimate marriage in the nineteenth century was that many people still held the Enlightenment view that love developed slowly out of admiration, respect, and appreciation of someone’s good character. Coupled with the taboos on expressions of sexual desire, these values meant that the love one felt for a sweetheart often was not seen as qualitatively different from the feeling one might have for a sister, a friend, or even an idea. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

8 " Men repeatedly noted how much easier it was to talk to other males than to women, and their journals often expressed the worry that being married to an angel might not be as easy as it sounded. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

9 " People have always loved a love story. But for most of the past our ancestors did not try to live in one. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

10 " But the biggest single obstacle to making personal happiness the foremost goal of marriage was that women needed to marry in order to survive. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

11 " I do not believe, then, that marriage was invented to oppress women any more than it was invented to protect them. In most cases, marriage probably originated as an informal way of organizing sexual companionship, child rearing, and the daily tasks of life. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

12 " That process culminated in the 1950s in the short-lived pattern that people have since come to think of as traditional marriage. So in the 1970s, when the inherent instability of the love-based marriage reasserted itself, millions of people were taken completely by surprise. Having lost any collective memory of the convulsions that occurred when the love match was first introduced and the crisis that followed its modernization in the 1920s, they could not understand why this kind of marriage, which they thought had prevailed for thousands of years, was being abandoned by the younger generation. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

13 " High male earnings have also become less important to women. A 2001 poll in the United States found that 80 percent of women in their twenties believed that having a husband who can talk about his feelings was more important than having one who makes a good living.11 "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

14 " In Austria in the eighteenth century, lower-class married couples commonly lived apart for many years as servants in other people’s houses, taking their meals with their employers rather than their spouses. All these people would be puzzled by our periodic panics about how rarely contemporary families sit down to dinner together. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

15 " But a woman’s right to leave a marriage can also be a lifesaver for men. The Centers on Disease Control reports that the rate at which husbands were killed by their wives fell by approximately two-thirds between 1981 and 1998, in part because women could more easily leave their partners.32 "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

16 " Moving lockstep through a series of predictable transitions is no longer a route to personal security. Each man and woman must put together a highly individualized sequence of transitions in and out of school, work, and marriage in order to take advantage of shifting opportunities and respond to unexpected setbacks--a "do-it-yourself biolography. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

17 " Until fifty years ago, men typically under-reported how much household work or child care they did because they did not want to admit to doing “women’s work.” It is a huge step forward that men think they should say they do more than they actually do. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

18 " The big problem is how hard it is to achieve equal relationships in a society whose work policies, school schedules, and social programs were constructed on the assumption that male breadwinner families would always be the norm. Tensions between men and women today stem less from different aspirations than from the difficulties they face translating their ideals into practice. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

19 " In the late 1960s a woman in the poorer countries of the world typically had six children. Today the average is fewer than three. In fact, demographers now project that the world’s population will begin to decline before 2050.47 "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

20 " And many attorneys and judges have come to support legal recognition for same-sex unions because they are already having to deal with the division of assets and similar issues in de facto gay and lesbian divorces. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage