Latest Stephanie Coontz Quotes from Interviews

• I think that divorce is a vital escape hatch for people stuck in marriage and it is not a sentence of doom either for adults or children. The community should develop better support systems for saving or restoring potentially healthy marriages.But we should also help people who decide to divorce have healthier partings.

  Stephanie Coontz

  Children, Divorce, Thinking

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• When parents are educated about how not to involve children in their conflicts and co-parent amicably, a lot of the ill effects of divorce can be alleviated. Divorce is always painful. But kids in a high-conflict marriage or low-conflict but contemptuous ones are often better off in the long run when the parent can disengage.

  Stephanie Coontz

  Running, Children, Kids

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• Increasingly, men are realizing exactly that - that having an educated, economically independent partner reduces the pressure on them to be the sole provider. Many men are also beginning to understand that participating in housework and childcare can be rewarding. Women with higher education and/or earnings are so much less likely than other women to divorce, that by age 40, they are more likely to be married than any other group of women.

  Stephanie Coontz

  Independent, Divorce, Men

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• Hollywood overstates both the romance of marriage and the prevalence of divorce. Celebrities have divorce rates that are atypical and higher than most couples. I suspect that in celebrity marriages, there are huge egos on both sides and they do seem to encourage unrealistic expectations about falling in love. The problem with our romantic culture is that you can love someone you don't respect and the marriage can run out of gas with that formula. Respect is essential - not just respecting your partner but being sure your partner equally respects you.

  Stephanie Coontz

  Running, Falling In Love, Couple

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• There is no going back to a time when most women will feel compelled to enter or stay in a bad marriage just for economic security or social respectability. So today, the best way to get women once more interested in getting married and having children is for men to accept women's new insistence on equality. This is, I think, why educated women in America, are now more pro - marriage and more disapproving of divorce than other groups of women who have less experience with egalitarian partners or less clout in getting their needs met in relationships.

  Stephanie Coontz

  Children, Divorce, Men

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• In industrial countries where male privilege is still firmly entrenched - in Spain, Italy, Japan, and South Korea, for example - women are delaying marriage longer than in America, and often resisting childbearing as well. They are less likely than American women to say that marriage is a good deal.

  Stephanie Coontz

  Country

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• The historical weight of gender inequality has tended to concentrate women in lower-paid jobs with fewer benefits, at the same time made them primarily responsible for care giving.

  Stephanie Coontz

  Giving, Historical, Care

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• There is one group of people - social conservatives, religious conservatives - who honestly feel that women's place is in the home and that wives should submit to their husbands.

  Stephanie Coontz

  Religious, Husband, Home

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• There is a lack of collective support or social support for working people in America. We're told, "You can be, as an individual, anything you want to be, but it must be at something else's - or somebody else's - expense."

  Stephanie Coontz

  America, People, Support

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Women are told that we can have the most exciting, glamorous, demanding, rewarding careers ever but we also have to be constantly sexy and sexually interested, and when we have children we have to spend more time with our kids. Of course you can't really do all three of those things at once, so we feel this tremendous stress.

  Stephanie Coontz

  Sexy, Children, Stress

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The benefits of feminism have been unequally distributed, because the move toward gender equality and gender neutrality has been countered to a large extent by the increase in economic inequality.

  Stephanie Coontz

  Moving, Economic Inequality, Feminism

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The historical weight of gender inequality has tended to concentrate women in lower-paid jobs with fewer benefits and at the same time made them primarily responsible for care giving.

  Stephanie Coontz

  Jobs, Giving, Historical

  Source: www.guernicamag.com