Twenty years ago, Stephanie Coontz asked of traditional marriage, “What tradition?” Now she returns to examine its contemporary state--what threatens its prevalence and what freedoms it can create for all people. Ninety percent of the world’s people live in countries where marriage rates have plummeted since the 1980s, with the Western world experiencing especially steep drops.;Almost everywhere, marriage has declined most among men and women with the lowest levels of education or earnings. And highly-educated and high-earning women are actually -- and typically postpone doing so until later in life. Still, rather than devaluing marriage, people all around the world overwhelmingly describe it as the highest expression of commitment they can imagine. And most people say they eventually In her new book, <For Better and Worse<, Stephanie Coontz unravels the origins of these paradoxical trends. Using the past to illuminate the present, she shows how shifting marital ideologies, gender relations, sexual mores, and emotional mind-sets over time have bequeathed us a welter of contradictory expectations and habits that often sabotage our attempts to build mutually satisfactory relationships. “Traditional” roles and values that once promoted successful marriages are now a recipe for relationship failure. Only by undoing the legacy of marriage’s “problematic past,” Coontz argues, can we help individuals and society at large navigate the “challenging future” of marriage.

Autorentext

Stephanie Coontz is the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. She has authored five books on gender, family, and history, including Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, which was cited in the United States Supreme Court decision on marriage equality. A sought-after radio and podcast guest, she has published extensively in both academic and popular media, from The New York Times, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal to The Chronicle of Higher Education and the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Klappentext

A provocative, authoritative reckoning with the past and future of marriage, explaining why it’s become more rewarding as well as more risky.

Marriage rates have fallen dramatically since the 1970s. Yet far from devaluing marriage, people still overwhelmingly describe marriage as the highest commitment they can imagine. Most Americans say they want to marry eventually, and couples who do marry have a lower chance of divorce than at any time since the 1970s. Increasingly, though, people tell pollsters they “have no idea” if they actually will end up married. And unlike the past, young women are more uncertain than young men.

In For Better and Worse, Stephanie Coontz—author of the “rich, provocative, and entertaining” book Marriage, A History—unravels the roots of such paradoxical trends. Examining five critical periods of historical transformation, she reveals how shifting romantic ideals, gender expectations, sexual mores, and cultural myths have bequeathed us a welter of contradictory beliefs, dysfunctional habits, and emotional “earworms” that make it hard to adjust our family relationships to the social and economic challenges of twenty-first-century life.

Coontz demonstrates that today’s widespread nostalgia for a seemingly more stable past is an understandable reaction to heightened economic insecurity and eroding social solidarities. But trying to reproduce a largely imaginary golden age of marriage from the past simply locks us into a restricted future.

Current public debates about marriage are dominated by two diametrically opposed groups. One argues that marriage is the only sure route to personal happiness and social stability; the other, that marriage is inherently oppressive. Coontz puts forward a radical middle ground, pointing to surprising new research on the personal changes and the policy innovations that can help people create successful relationships, in or out of marriage.