The Way We Really are by Stephanie Coontz

We cannot help contemporary families if we accept a one-dimensional analysis of where their problems originate, insist there is only one blueprint for how all families should look and act, or offer feel-good homilies about cleanliness, chastity, and charity in place of concrete reforms to relieve the stresses on working parents and offer positive alternatives to youth. Stephanie Coontz. The Way We Really Are (p. 7).

Stephanie Coontz, Professor of History and Family Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, is the national co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families and the author of The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap; The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms With America’s Changing Families; and The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families. Coontz has testified about her research before the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families in Washington , D.C. , and addressed audiences all over America and Europe. Her subject Areas of Competence and Interest are American and European social history; expository writing; family studies; gender studies; issues of race, class and gender. Most of Conntz’s work has been on family history and the contemporary debate over family values. She has done a lot of work on the impact of divorce; and the comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of different kinds of family forms. Coontz is now considered one of America’s leading experts on the family.

In three successive books, family historian Stephanie Coontz has gone from prize-winning academic history in The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600 – 1900, to debunking common myths in The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, to providing guidance for families and public policy in her latest book, The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms With America’s Changing Families.

Her book, The Way We Really Are, is subtitled “Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families.” As the back cover of the book suggests, “Every kind of family…has strengths that can be fostered and vulnerabilities to be avoided. Stepfamilies, dual-earner couples, single-parent families, and divorced but cooperative families must operate in different ways, but with the right economic, cultural, and social support systems, all incarnations of the family can succeed.” This book grew out of the discussions, speaking engagements, talk-show gigs and interviews that followed the publication of The Way We Never Were. What do people miss about the ’50s, our favorite decade? “Nostalgia for the 1950s is real and deserves to be taken seriously,” Coontz writes, “but it usually shouldn’t be taken literally.” Families seemed more cohesive then; indeed, family life seemed easier to shape and hold. Coontz reviews the evolution toward this unprecedented ear of privilege that was the ’50s from post-World War II through the end of the “fifties experiment.”

Perhaps not as innovative as The Way We Never Were, this volume is nonetheless thoughtful, somber, and realistic. It’s impossible not to agree that grieving for a misremembered past dulls our wits and incapacitates our imaginations. Coontz asks us to quit kvetching and face the music. “With 50 percent of American children living in something other than a married-couple family with both biological parents present, and with the tremendous variety of male and female responsibilities in today’s different families, the time for abstract pronouncements about good or bad family structures and correct or incorrect parental roles is past.”

The title of the book may mislead a little. With such a title like “The Way We Really Are”, one might expect the book to describe in detail the kinds of families that exist in the USA today. The reader may be interested in learning, for example, how many families consist of adults with their own children, or with step children, or with no children; how these numbers are changing. What about family units that consist of divorced or widowed adults and in-laws, step-parents, or aunts or uncles? etc. But that is not what this book is about. Most of the book deals only with the economic well-being of single- and two-parent heterosexual nuclear families. Homosexual families are mentioned briefly in a few paragraphs towards the end of the book, and extended families receive no mention at all. Even when Coontz discusses two-parent families with a breadwinner and a homemaker, she always assumes that the breadwinner is a male, and does not consider or describe when it is the other way around, or provide statistics about female breadwinner families.

While many of Coontz’s arguments are convincing, she could have gone further by giving a lot more thought to families and economic conditions in other parts of the world rather than confining her research and hypotheses strictly to the USA. For instance, Coontz seems to be suggesting that after the Civil War, women were being kept at home to protect them from market forces, and that that is why they were not given property rights or allowed to open bank accounts on their own, etc. But given what we find in the rest of the world, I think it may have been the case that women were kept on the farm because of the common trend worldwide to try to keep women in seclusion, as can still be found today throughout the Muslim world, or parts of Asia.

On the other hand, Coontz may have found support for her thesis that two parent families arent a panacea in themselves if she had considered modern Japanese families, which very often consist of two parents, two children, male breadwinner ideal, and which are quite often completely dysfunctional when judged by American standards, in which we expect the parents to have healthy emotional ties to each other and the children.

The main thesis of the book seems to be that many American families are in crisis today. The reasons for this are varied, from unrealistic idealization of the 1950s, to government policies that run counter to the needs of families. Coontz argues that right-wing groups that claim to be pro-family by stressing the need for children to be raised in families with two married parents may be unrealistic and actually work against the childrens welfare.

The book describes factors playing for and against the well-being of families in the USA today. It seems to have 3 simultaneous goals: to describe and contrast the economic conditions of single- and two-parent heterosexual families, to provide self-help, support or guidance for two-parent families in crisis, and to suggest government policies to help American families thrive.

Some of the topics covered in the book include: the idealization of the 1950s, working mothers, the future of marriage, divorce, traditions that should be abandoned, whos to blame for families in crisis, societal change and risk for kids, and the strengths and vulnerabilities for todays families.

The Way We Really Are provides readers with an historical and sociological perspective on changes in the American family. It applies the logic of history to the economics of family life, the changing roles of parents, and how government and communities can best support today’s and tomorrow’s families. This perspective on families can help us sort out the truths and fictions about where we come from, live now, and are going. This knowledge is not only enlightening, but it is also empowering. Coontz suggests that Americans live in a country which fails to address the changing family structures taking shape over the past one hundred years. In The Way We Really Are, the reader is asked to keep an historical perspective before jumping to conclusions about the roots of changes in families. She asks the reader to think through the “family values” we hear talked about in the evening news by politicians and our community leaders. The “traditional family” we may remember from the television shows and advertisements of the 1960s probably never existed on our side of the TV screens, and it probably never will.

Families look different than they did years ago. There are many kinds of family configurations. Coontz observes that the statistics we use need to be more fully examined. For instance, we hear that 40 percent of all marriages end in divorce. What we may not have heard before is that this is calculated in reference to the chances of a marriage ending in divorce within 40 years. If you figure that our life spans have been lengthened, this actually means that a marriage today has the potential to last three times longer than one of 200 years ago!

The author also points out that the census statistics which reveal the number of children living with unwed mothers do not take into account households where both parents are living together, but are unmarried. Many times we accept what we hear in a speech or on the news as the truth, without examining it more fully.

Referring to our recent past, the author believes that the change in the American family has more to do with the changing economy than with the breakdown of the social system. The male breadwinner family model is a relatively new creation, she argues, which came about during the change from a farm-based society to an industrial one. Women have had to work to keep a family afloat for at least the last thirty years. With this economic change, there are more stresses put on families to perform all the work of running a household while holding outside employment.

Children, Coontz points out, have a less meaningful role in society than their counterparts earlier in the century. There are not many options for school-age and older children, especially teens, to make meaningful contributions to the family. She calls this lack of a particular place in the functioning of the family “rolelessness.” And this causes the fact that relationships between parents and teenagers have become more troubled, society is failing to prepare young people for the demands of today’s adulthood.

The traditional focus on lifelong marriage encouraged men to think of the family as a “package deal” in which they supported children only because they received the services of a wife. We need a “more inclusive package deal, where obligations to children…are not determined solely by biological relatedness, coresidence, parents’ marital status, or notions of exclusive possession…” (p. 118). Children need to be seen as a public good requiring public responsibility; many African and Native American cultures have such a “child-centered social ethic.”

Coontz strongly suggests that we look at the public policy implications of ignoring changes in families. American government gives little support to divorced families. The school systems act as if there are two parents in each home, with one of them not employed outside. There is less investment in public education than is needed, and little investment in quality child care. She suggests that corporations look long and hard at the way they approach their employees’ work and family issues. Coontz uses the term “coprovider family” to describe a situation where both parents, living in the same home, are employed outside the home. This is a reality in the USA, she concludes, not an aberration. And it is here to stay.

In The Way We Really Are, Coontz turns her attention to the mythology that surrounds today’s family – the demonizing of “untraditional “family forms and marriage and parenting issues. She argues that while its not crazy to miss the more hopeful economic trends of the 1950s and 1960s, few would want to go back to the gender roles and race relations of those years. Mothers are going to remain in the workforce, family diversity is here to stay, and the nuclear family can no longer handle all the responsibilities of elder care and childrearing. Coontz gives a balanced account of how these changes affect families, both positively and negatively, but she rejects the notion that the new diversity is a sentence of doom. Every family has distinctive resources and special vulnerabilities and there are ways to help each build on its strengths and minimize its weaknesses.

A meticulously researched, balanced account, The Way We Really Are shows why a historically-informed perspective on family life can be as much help to people in sorting through family issues as going into therapy – and much more help than listening to today’s political debates.

Pearls, pumps, aprons, fresh cookies after school…you can almost taste those freshly baked delights as the well-dressed, smiling mom takes them out of the oven while her Crest kids get off the bus and come in the fromt door after school. She gives them an invitation to come to the kitchen for this home-baked treat while they carefully hang up their coats and put their shoes on the shoe rack. Sound familliar? Probably only on TV. Americans can no longer cling to the false myth of this type of family; and Ms. Coontz presents arguments why they cannot live this myth any longer. But America as a whole seems to believe it must have existed. It had to. Ms. Coontz suggests that we must work with diversities of our families towards the future; and while we can gain some insight from the past; we need to look forward instead of backward for solutions. In this book, she concentrates on what we have and how to help deal with the good and the bad.

Coontz explains that fundamental social change typically goes through a three-stage process:
First, individual and family stress escalates as old patterns stop working.
Second, “public debate and cultural struggle, as competing definitions of the. problems are raised by different groups.” It’s often “a period when the previous denial of new realities turns into a search for scapegoats.”
Third, restabilization, when people “begin to adapt their institutions, values and cultural norms to the new realities.”

The longer the second period of denial and scapegoating lasts, the higher the social and personal cost of suffering. On the other hand a social-historical perspective can move through the most destructive stage more quickly.

One of the most long-standing American traditions, older than the ideal of the male breadwinner, is the socioeconomic mobility. That’s why many families America in the first place,” Coontz points out.

Stephanie Coontz is on a mission: She wants to make the world safe for divorce. “We are kidding ourselves,” she says, “if we think the solution to the economic difficulties of America’s children lies in getting their parents back together.”

The actual story of the 1950s, according to Coontz, is that blacks lived in tarpaper shacks while men everywhere were beating their wives. “The stability of family and community life during the 1950s rested on pervasive discrimination against women, gays, political dissidents, non-Christians, and racial or ethnic minorities, as well as on a systematic cover-up of the underside of many families. . . . Victims of child abuse, incest, alcoholism, spousal rape, and wife battering had no recourse, no place to go, until well into the 1960s.”

And even if Ozzie and Harriet were real people, they were just living off the government anyway: “The nuclear family has never existed as an autonomous, private unit except where it was the synthetic creation of outside forces. The strong nuclear family is in large measure a creation of the strong state.” Didn’t nuclear families exist sometime before the 1950s-out on the prairie, for example? No, says Coontz: “In reality, prairie farmers and other pioneer families owed their existence to massive federal land grants, government-funded military mobilizations that dispossessed hundreds of Native American societies and confiscated half of Mexico, and state-sponsored economic investments in the new lands. . . . It would be hard to find a Western family today or at any time in the past . . . not dependent on federal funds.”

So why did this era come to an end? It seems that mean people took over around 1973 and stopped subsidizing families and redistributing wealth. Corporations downsized and unions lost their power. While a blue-collar worker could make the down payment on a house with one day’s pay in 1952, he needed 18 weeks’ salary in 1991. Hardly anyone under 30 can earn enough to support a family and most people over 40 have a tough time as well. Women are forced to work.

What’s the solution? First, the government should take over again, creating jobs and raising wages. Beyond that, we should return to that pre-capitalist Eden where everybody took care of everybody else: “We must abandon any illusion that we can or should revive some largely mythical traditional family.”

Many of the upper-income educated women who demanded to be admitted to the work force were pursuing their own illusion-what we might call “the Betty Friedan mystique.” By opening up employment, Friedan and some of her compatriots were hoping to create a system where a woman could divorce her husband and still support herself. The ironic result of their actions was to create an economy in which both parents must work. By flooding the labor market, women drove down everyone’s wages. As Coontz notes, men’s earnings have deteriorated steadily since 1973, while women’s wages have risen (though not enough to equal men’s). Only by adding the two together do you now get a “family wage.”

According to Coontz marriage remains an important social institution, but it “has lost its former monopoly over the organization of people’s major life transitions” (p. 78-9). More people live on their own, cohabit before marriage, change partners, and live alone after the death of a spouse. Marriage is no longer economically essential, since households don’t need a full-time domestic worker; this frees women to take jobs and workers to live alone. Since marriage is more voluntary, it makes sense for women to prolong their education and develop careers. When they do marry (and most educated women do), they are then able to leave a bad marriage or cope economically if their husbands leave them. The revolution in reproductive technology helps married couples with fertility problems, but also makes it easier for unmarried people to have children. Marriage, Bernard Shaw once quipped, “is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.”  Such kidding aside, Americans are obviously serious about marriage.

Once the cornerstone of the American Dream, marriage is now on the front lines of America ’s culture wars. While some Americans want to circle the wagons around a “traditional” view of marriage and family, others consider that view to be as antiquated as the proverbial horse and carriage. We should work to bring families to where they should be, not back to what they used to be. By absolute standards of income, health and education, U.S. children are actually better off than they were in the glorified 1950s, but they are worse off than children in other industrial countries. Instead of emphasizing divisions between “good” and “bad” families, we should “start bringing as many of them as possible into our sphere of social support” (p. 177). We should stop arguing over which family is best and build a better support system for all families. This would include high-quality and affordable child care, better tax breaks for families with children, family-friendly work policies, job training, child support enforcement, national health insurance, high school programs in child development and community service, and a combination of income support and jobs programs for single mothers.

Talking about the writing style of Coontz one must admit that she has a way of turning historical and sociological information into enjoyable reading. You can almost see the individuals about whom she is reporting. She uses anecdotal information from her many contacts with families and students to “people” the book. She explores the “sound bites” of both the liberal and conservative sides of the family values argument.

The Way We Really Are could be recommended for parents as well as students of sociology and contemporary affairs: Stephanie Coontz provides an examination of Americas changing families, from the different systems of cooperative and step-families to studies on changing traditional family methods and structures. An intriguing survey of family relationships is revealed.

All in all, while Coontz has some interesting points, but one would be even more interested in seeing a book with a little less advice and a little more thought about all the various types of American families considered in a world-wide context.

Bibliography:

1. Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families.. New York: BasicBooks, 1997.