Benny Storms

March 1, 2020

Sociology of Family Life

Professor fraker

The way we never were

Stephanie Coontz talk about the golden age of the American family and have it didn’t even

exist in the first place. The type of family that you would see on a show like “leave it to beaver”

or even “Family Guy”. Coontz also dives in and talk about marriage and divorce. She talks about

the death of marriage and how people have been saying that marriage is going to be dead for

years. She also talks about this idea of nostalgia a lot and how it can change peoples view on

certain believes and change there idea of how things should be versus how they actually are. In

this book Coontz argues that the 1950s golden ages family never really existed that marriage is

not going to dieout and that’s nostalgia is coulding peoples minds so they cant see whats actually

going on in the world.

The golden age of the American family never existed, is Coontzs theory. The

ideal 1950s family of breadwinner father, full-time stay at home mother and couple of children

was a fiction of the 1950s, she shows. Real families of that period had a ton of trouble with

conflict, repression and anxiety, they were also mostly poor families and teen pregnancy rates in

the '50s were higher than today. Further, Coontz contends, the nuclear family was elevated to a

central source of personal satisfaction only in the late 19th century, thus weakening people's
sense community and made people less likely to help each other out . Coontz disputes the idea

that children can be raised properly only in traditional families. Viewing modern domestic

problems as symptoms of a much larger socioeconomic crisis, she demonstrates that no single

type of household has ever protected Americans from social disruption or poverty. An important

contribution to the current debate on family values. And I believe that coontz is right about this

theory. The 1950s family is always looked at as being the golden era of family but it really

wasn’t all that good she brings up many claims in her books to support here theory such as “like

most visons from the golden age the traditional family evaporates on closer examination it is an a

historical amalgam of structures , values , and behaviors that never coexisted in the same place

and time”. This is saying that if you were to look at the 1950s family closely that it wouldn’t be

what you though it was going to. You would see a lot of confict and other things that would

contradict what historically the 1950s family was. I think Coontz dose a great job of explaining

what the 195

 Coontz believed that marriage isn’t going to die out. But people have been

predicting the death of marriage for years and years now.” In 1928, John Watson, a famous child

psychologist of that era, predicted that marriage would be dead by 1977. In 1977, sociologist

Amatai Etzioni declared that if current trends continued, by the 1990s “not one American family

will be left.” In 1999, the National Marriage Project announced breathlessly that the marriage

rate had fallen by 43 percent since 1960. And in 2010, a Pew Research Center poll found that 40

percent of Americans said marriage was “becoming obsolete.” But in reality people are just

taking longer to get married . Marrige rate is calculated based on how many single women are

above the age eighteen years old. Now in the 1960s , half of all women at the time were married

before they turned 21. Between 1960 and 1990, the average age at first marriage rose from

20 to 24 for women and from 22 to 26 for men. By 2014, it had climbed further to 27 for women

and 29 for men. Many more people now delay marriage until their thirties or forties, and some

researchers believe that a full quarter of today’s young adults may reach their mid-forties to mid-

fifties without ever having been married. Now take that in comparison of today that the average

age to get married at for women is twenty seven. That is a big difference that is showing that

people are waiting to get married and that marriage isn’t dead its just being pushed back.

Many of the so called rules of marriage have been broken since the writing of this book

such as cohabitation. Cohabitation is when a couple that is not married stays and lives in one

home together. You are seeing this a lot more often tody with newer younger couples. They

don’t want to go through the whole process of getting married. This would almost never

happened back in the day because people would look at the couple funny or spead rumors about

them just because they weren’t married to each other. But all that has changed people are living
together years before they get married if they ever decided to get married. Another thing that has

changed with marriage after this book was realized was the legalization of gay marriage in the

United States. This is a pretty new exception on marriage. In 2004 sixty percent of people were

still oppose to gay and lesbian marriage. 35 states in 2013 still had laws prohibiting or limiting

marriage of theses same sex couples. But on June, 28, 2015 the supreme courts ruled on a bill

five to four that marriage was a right to every single person in the united states and that not

letting gays and lesbians marry was unconstitutional..

Nostalgia is a human trait that can be bad for a person or could be good for them it depends on a

the situation they are in. When friends ask there friends returning from summer vacation to

name good and bad things about their summer, the lists are usually equally long. As the year

goes on, however, if the friend asked repeatedly, the good list grows longer and the bad list gets

shorter, until by the end of the year the one friend are describing not their actual vacations but

their idealized image of vacation. So it is with our collective “memory” of family life. As time

passes, the actual complexity of our history even of our own personal experience gets tossed to

the back and what we see at that time is the nostalgia. That is how nostalgia can change your
mind. It clouds your mind up and makes you forget what actually happens at that point of time.

Usually it will make something that was just alright and make it a lot better then what you

actually remember. It makes you remember the good things and not the bad things that’s what

can be dangerous about this. You could completely forget that something bad happened to you

there and you can just do the same thing over again. Selective memory is not a bad thing when it

leads children to forget the arguments in the back seat of the car and to look forward to their next

vacation. But it’s a serious problem when it leads grown-ups to try to recreate a past that either

never existed at all or whose seemingly attractive features were inextricably linked to injustices

and restrictions on liberty that few Americans would tolerate today.