When the historian Stephanie Coontz published The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap in 1992, it landed like a gasoline-soaked rag in the middle of that era’s burning culture wars. That was the year Vice President Dan Quayle chided the fictional news anchor Murphy Brown for having a child “out of wedlock,” and Pat Buchanan, speaking at the Republican National Convention, denounced Hillary Clinton for comparing “marriage and the family” to “slavery and life on an Indian reservation.” Coontz, at the time a professor at the Evergreen State College, popped up on daytime television, appearing on Oprah and Leeza to explain to millions of viewers that the nuclear family venerated by conservatives was not only a historical anomaly, but an institution that, in its time, had obscured a great deal of suffering.
In subsequent decades, Coontz has become perhaps the country’s most prominent voice debunking rose-tinted myths about the “traditional family” and the “golden age” of marriage. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy cited her in his majority opinion legalizing same-sex marriage (although he appears to have misunderstood her rather profoundly, attributing to her the idea that matrimony “promised nobility and dignity to all persons,” when she had actually written that marriage had conferred those qualities, for millennia, largely on the husband). In books such as The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families 1600–1900, The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms With America’s Changing Families, and Marriage, a History, she has documented the diverse ways that human societies organize pair and kin bonds, interrogated the very definition of family, and shown how our intimate arrangements reflect and respond to broader economic, social, and cultural changes.
In her new book, For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage, she once again turns to the past to make sense of our current marriage crisis—namely that, for many, the appeal of marriage is rapidly dimming. While the divorce rate has stabilized since its peak in 1980, married couples now make up less than half of American households, down from 66 percent half a century ago. Fewer young people even aspire to marriage than in the past: A 2023 poll showed that two-thirds of twelfth graders said they wanted to get married, down from 80 percent in 1993, a drop driven almost entirely by young women changing their minds. Another recent survey showed that Gen Z men ranked marriage as their seventh most important marker of personal success, while Gen Z women put it a dismal eleventh out of a possible 13. In the past few years, publishers have unleashed a spate of divorce memoirs, nearly all of them by women, nearly all of them jubilant about life after marriage.
At the same time, marriage advocates have been frantically attempting to revive the exact fictions about the midcentury nuclear family that Coontz has spent much of her career trying to dispel. The University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox’s histrionically titled Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization looks at demographic groups with notably high marriage rates (the religious, the highly educated, Asians) and argues readers should become more like them to increase their likelihood of getting married. The economist Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind purports to be a data-driven argument for marrying for the children’s sake. With pro-marriage, pronatalist allies in the White House, conservatives now feel the wind at their back. In January, the Heritage Foundation published a 168-page plan for reviving its version of the American family, calling for measures such as marriage “bootcamps,” paying couples to stay married, and evaluating every federal policy, grant, and contract for its effect on marriage and families.
Coontz recognizes the importance of marriage without making a case for or against it, at least in this book. The most she offers here is that most Americans (and Europeans) consider it “the highest commitment a couple can make,” one that garners extra societal respect and support. Even at a time when many people have become ambivalent about actually getting married, marriage tells us something about ourselves, and, in examining its changing role from Paleolithic times through the present, Coontz shows that marriage has always been the terrain on which “formerly dominant ideas about gender, sexuality, love, and marriage” were “challenged, reworked, or repudiated in favor of new arrangements and ideals.” If it is to endure, she suggests, we will need a deep rethinking of how the institution can accommodate recent and rapid social and economic changes.
What is marriage for? The fact that marriage customs are near universal throughout history is itself evidence that it serves some sort of purpose—social recognition, binding together families, embedding a couple more deeply within a community—that informal coupling up does not. As Coontz observes, “groups denied the right to marry have frequently invented their own marriage rules and rituals,” as did enslaved African Americans who performed a “jumping the broom” marriage ceremony in defiance of their enslavers.
But marriage’s evolution underscores the fallacy that there exists one enduring, and thus optimal, version of it. Changes in marriage have tracked changing expectations for women and men more broadly: how they should behave before, during, and after a union; their place as workers, friends, parents. And in the wake of all this change, cultural residues from each historical ideal have lingered in our psyches, instilling in modern marriage-seekers unhelpful thought patterns and behaviors that can undermine “the mutualistic relationships most of us now want,” she writes. Whether we are conscious of them or not, old-fashioned beliefs and habits such as the expectation that men provide and don’t show their emotions, or that women who engage in premarital sex are of loose character, still color our courtship behaviors. She calls these holdovers “earworms.”
The book begins by taking us back to the Stone Age, a period onto which commentators have projected some of the most persistent and tedious myths about gender roles. Coontz notes that for the first two million years of human existence, people lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers whose lives were governed by the search for food. But this era did not, contrary to manosphere caveman theories of gender relations, establish a time-honored template of women staying at home nursing babies while men went out to club woolly mammoths in order to feed their (and only their) young. These early hunter-gatherer societies probably resembled a commune more than Ballerina Farm: Women both foraged and participated in hunts, meat from successful hunts was distributed to everyone, and childcare was shared among the group. Marriage, usually to someone from a different band, was not intended to put a woman under the protection of a specific man, but to knit kin groups together in webs of reciprocity and obligation. This function was so essential to group survival that marriages were a collective decision, often overseen and arranged by group elders. Marriage, she writes, “was invented to turn strangers into relatives.”
As the establishment of agriculture generated surpluses, patriarchy took root. Whereas hunter-gatherers typically married outside their tribes, people in farming societies married with an eye toward consolidating their wealth. When wealth was passed down the male line, “fathers and husbands carefully monitored women’s sexual behavior in order to safeguard the patrilineal inheritance of property,” she writes. The existence of such wealth also sparked the concept of “illegitimacy,” a status that could exclude children from inheritance when elites did not approve of a relationship. Wealth accumulation also justified kin marriage, to ensure resources remained within the family.
Industrialization changed work, which in turn changed marriage. Before industrialization, couples tended to jointly run their households, each engaging in domestic labor (farming, say, or churning butter) and market work (selling butchered meat, or spinning wool) as necessity dictated. While family life was “far from egalitarian,” Coontz notes, these economic arrangements gave women and men “similar rhythms of labor and leisure.” As work increasingly moved outside the home, the notion that men and women belonged in “separate spheres” arose. Men occupied themselves with the rough, unpleasant, productive world, while women tended the domestic and spiritual realms.
In this same period, social movements calling for greater equality had the paradoxical effect of generating novel explanations for gender hierarchy. In an earlier era, when social hierarchies went largely unquestioned, “there was no need to construct elaborate justifications for the subordination of women,” writes Coontz. God intended for women to obey their husbands, just as he intended a working-class man to obey his social superiors. But following two revolutions in England and France, the adage that women should submit to their husbands “as the husband submits to the Crown” seemed a dicier prospect. Meanwhile, those demanding equal rights for men had to explain why women, enslaved people, and the unpropertied were undeserving of those same rights. The convenient answer was that women were simply very different in temperament and constitution. Democracy, then, had the unfortunate side effect of inventing a new female archetype: no longer the competent and industrious wife of yore, but instead a figure “delightful but delicate, virtuous but vulnerable.” This depiction had major implications for marriage.
Assigning different qualities to men and women placed them on Mars and Venus respectively. Yet they still sought a partner who was like them in spirit, and increasingly sought them on their own accord, rather than at the direction of parents or community elders. This is an era in which the “soulmate” trope takes on new primacy: “The new middle-class love script insisted that ‘manly’ men and ‘true’ women shared a class similarity of soul and character that differentiated them from their upper- and lower-class counterparts,” Coontz writes. Throughout the nineteenth century, the hunt for a top-shelf soul inspired women and men to bare said souls in florid correspondence. (“To love with all one’s soul,” one suitor wrote, is to blend “all things that are high, ardent and pure.”) But Coontz detects an important practical function underneath all the gushing: If a woman was no longer a co-provider alongside her husband, her financial security depended solely on his devotion, making her “especially anxious to make sure a suitor had sufficient funds in his emotional bank account.”
(Although the custom of professing one’s love in heightened language is hardly dead, Coontz does find that this romantic sensibility feels awkward to more recent generations. When she taught undergrads, she asked her students to read these letters aloud in class. Male students tended to adopt “a sarcastic tone,” and Coontz had to urge them to read the words as if they meant them. “Almost invariably, some woman would demand to know why today’s supposedly enlightened men were so freaked out by such emotionalism.”)
In the later nineteenth century and early twentieth century, women and men began to mix in new settings, living in close quarters in working-class urban neighborhoods, and sometimes working together. They also started “dating,” a term that dates to the 1880s, when the arrival of amusement parks and dance halls offered young people public places to mingle. This posed a now familiar problem for women: how to navigate dating strangers (rather than known quantities from one’s social circle) and getting to know men emotionally while remaining chaste enough for a “respectable” marriage.
The increasing public presence of women also put new pressures on men. Coontz sees a new model of manhood emerging around this time, linked to men’s need to “shore up their sense of identity and entitlement as women began to enter formerly all-male enclaves” such as clerical work and higher education. She also speculates that this budding machismo was a way of withstanding the harsh realities of a world ordered by “robber barons” and “imperialist rivalries.” Without naming it as such, Coontz pinpoints the emergence of toxic masculinity around the end of the nineteenth century, when “psychologists and physical education advocates … declared that mothers stunted the development of boys when they emphasized being ‘good’ and acting ‘nice.’” Boys started taunting each other with the term “sissy,” formerly slang for little sister. Masculinity was defined not as maturity, but in opposition to femininity.
“The resultant pressure on males to demonstrate their manhood instead of their adulthood has been good for neither sex,” Coontz concludes. She cites research by the social psychologist Alice Eagly finding that, over the past several decades, people increasingly rank women as more ethical, compassionate, and altruistic than men. These “feminine” qualities, from which men take such enormous pains to distinguish themselves, may explain what Coontz describes as “the antisocial features of today’s so-called ‘manosphere.’”
When today’s conservatives talk about restoring the importance of marriage, the type of marriage they have in mind closely resembles the saccharine domesticity and stark division of labor that defined marriage in the 1950s. As in earlier books, Coontz is unsparing in her assessment of that era, when marital rape was legal, child abuse “was not recognized as a social problem,” and incest was in some cases explained away as “female ‘sex delinquency’ rather than adult predation” in respected medical journals. So-called family experts of the day agreed that most domestic violence victims “had it coming.”
But Coontz, who before entering academia ran for Congress on the Socialist Workers Party ticket, also spends several pages ticking off the things we “should really miss about postwar America”: progressive taxation, high rates of unionization, job opportunities at all education levels, affordable housing, government infrastructure projects, income growth that benefited the majority of Americans. She calls this period of economic growth one of the “two pillars” supporting that era’s anomalously high marriage rates, and one that ordinary people, nostalgic for what seems in hindsight like a golden age of marriage, are not wrong to miss. The other pillar, though, was women’s exclusion from most of the exciting or lucrative professional and educational opportunities available to men. Women still couldn’t get loans or open businesses on their own. Marriage often resulted from an unplanned pregnancy. This pillar was coercive, herding or locking women into marriages they may not have wanted.
Free-market conservatives toppled one pillar, and feminism toppled the other, bringing us to our current era of record high inequality and singlehood. The conservatives trying to revive midcentury marriage patterns place the blame squarely on feminists, even though the regressive economic agenda enacted by conservatives themselves made it all but inevitable that marriage would become what Coontz and other social scientists call “a luxury good.”
Today, marriage is increasingly concentrated among those with a college degree or higher, who have the time, resources, and skills to negotiate disagreement and stressors, or to address potential sources of conflict, such as who does the laundry, by outsourcing it to paid help. Meanwhile, low-income people are less likely to be married, in part, perhaps, because their ideal marriage looks nothing like the one available to them. The less education someone has, the more likely they are to say it’s important that a good husband provide financially—and the less likely they are to find or be such a husband, given the scarcity of decent jobs for people with less than a college education. That mismatch between ideal and reality is unfortunate, because low-income people appear to benefit meaningfully from marriage: One analysis by sociologists Daniel L. Carlson and Ben Lennox Kail showed marriage is associated with greater well-being for low-income couples than for their wealthier peers, perhaps because in stressful, resource-scarce settings, marriage provides both emotional support and the financial security that comes with pooling resources.
If a marriage is no longer enjoyable, what reason is there to remain committed, especially when unmarried life can be pretty fun, too?
Coontz is cognizant of the economic obstacles that put marriage out of reach. Like the card-carrying socialist she once was, she calls for affordable childcare, paid leave, and other programs that would relieve the enormous burdens that America places on families. But her conclusion reads a bit like a marriage counseling pamphlet, albeit one peppered with academic citations. She encourages couples to socialize with other people, share chores by doing them together rather than just divvying them up, and add mystery or tension to a long-term relationship by taking risks. Relationships today, she writes, “require more time and effort, better negotiating skills, more give-and-take, and more willingness to step outside traditional gendered comfort zones than in the past.” But the very quality that makes companionate marriages so desirable and often beneficial when they work, Coontz notes, also makes them fragile: If a marriage is no longer enjoyable, what reason is there to remain committed, especially when unmarried life can be pretty fun, too?
Coontz’s relationship advice may work for the already married who just need to iron out a few kinks in the chore chart; then again, it might not, because stepping outside one’s traditional gendered comfort zone is hard, especially for men. Research from economists Kyle Hancock, Jeanne Lafortune, and Corinne Low in their paper “Winning the Bread and Baking It Too” has shown that even when men earn far less than their wives, including when they’re unemployed and not earning at all, their contribution to housework is negligible. For many financially independent women, such an unequal union may bring more burdens than benefits.
If millennials had to deal with “earworms” subtly overlaying their romantic relationships with outdated gender roles, Gen Z is finding its way through the rituals of coupling up in an age of what I might call “blowhorns,” contending with messages blasted out by professional misogynists such as Andrew Tate, the increasingly influential right-wing troll Nick Fuentes, or even the current president of the United States, who famously bragged about never having once changed a diaper (he has five kids). Young women, who report a growing identification with feminism, encounter a torrent of misogyny on social media; in a recent essay in The Guardian, the author, a 15-year-old girl writing anonymously, describes how within minutes of opening up an app, she’s confronted with “comment sections on a girl’s post filled with remarks about her body, videos made by men or boys captioned with a degrading joke, and even topics such as domestic violence or rape, trivialised and laughed about.”
Poll after poll shows Gen Z women and men diverging not just on partisan affiliation but on important measures of values that might predict compatibility and a shared worldview. Among Gen Z, more men than women oppose abortion, report a religious affiliation, and believe that a wife should obey her husband. Men who nod along to manfluencers’ calls for women to lose their bodily autonomy and the right to vote are unlikely to shoulder their fair share of the laundry. Women have responded with understandable mistrust: Over half (55 percent) of women who are currently single believe that single women are by and large happier than their married peers, according to research by the Survey Center on American Life. Their online rhetoric dovetails with this belief, with women going #boysober, celebrating celibacy, and describing “protecting my peace” by avoiding men altogether. Even the marriage-minded express some reservations about their future spouses: One U.K. poll found that more than half of those under the age of 45 said that they want their future partner to sign a prenup. If these developments are any indication—and I hope they’re not—this generation is rife with suspicion toward the other sex. Small wonder they are losing enthusiasm for marriage.
Coontz is a marvelous writer of histories, engaging and wide-ranging, rigorous and nuanced. But by neglecting to more thoroughly reckon with technology at a time when over 50 percent of American teenagers spend four or more hours per day on their screens, and when algorithms direct users to extreme content based on presumed gender, or neglecting to address the worrying divergence between Gen Z women and men, this book will remain just that: a work of history. While she does not consider the possibility that marriage might one day not exist at all, I wonder whether the growing skepticism among the young, bolstered by economic changes, could lead to marriage’s eventual obsolescence. If that is the case, we will need to find new ways to extend respect and support to those who have not had the opportunity, or have no desire, to make the commitment that marriage entails.
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