Sometimes, having a mom stay home is a big help. On the other hand, when a mother works outside the home, her husband generally does more child care and has higher parental knowledge about his childrens' friends, routines, and needs, cutting across the tendency for fathers to be second-string parents at home.
— Stephanie Coontz
Having more education is one of the biggest predictors of women having careers.
Graduating from high school is certainly a good idea, but it's no longer much protection against poverty.
We need to push for work-family practices and policies that allow individuals to customize their work lives according to their changing individual preferences and family obligations, not just their traditional gender roles.
Trump made his fortune manipulating tax laws and stiffing small businessmen, creating a few well-paying jobs along the way. Vulnerable people looking to master 'the art of the deal' learned the hard way that Trump held all the cards.
In 1992, I critiqued the panic over growing family diversity. My skepticism about the doomsayers has since been proven correct.
Whatever their relative valuation of the single and married states, most societies in history made sharp distinctions between those who married and those who remained single: They were seen as mutually exclusive ways of life, with different legal rights and social obligations.
When I speak on work-family issues to audiences around the country, some of the biggest complaints I hear come from individuals who are described by the census as living in 'non-family households.' They resent the fact that their family responsibilities literally don't 'count,' either for society or for their employers.
Economically as well as emotionally, modern marriage has become like an affluent gated community. It has become harder for low-income Americans to enter and sustain.
As soon as love became the driving force behind marriage, people began to demand the right to remain single if they had not found love or to divorce if they fell out of love.
Cooking ought to be, quite literally, child's play. And every child ought to have access to the game. Just don't tell them it's healthy.
Parents who obsess about every detail of child-rearing and orchestrate their children's 'resumes' may run themselves ragged while their own personal identities and adult relationships wither for lack of care.
When liberals dismiss all Trump supporters as racists, this only fuels their anger.
Donald Trump has tapped into a deep vein of racism, nativism, and misogyny.
I've had the kind of complex life I write about. I was a single mother for 12 years. I'd been engaged. The wedding fell through. I then discovered I was pregnant and opted to have the child on my own. I was a professor. I was in my mid-30s. I could manage it financially.
Americans are right to believe the American Dream is fading. But that dream only became a possibility for white men as a result of the labor struggles and reforms of the New Deal, and it began to extend to minorities and women only after the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Being a feminist is not about how successful, talented, and assertive you are in your own life. It's about whether you support the struggle to overcome the limiting gendered stereotypes and barriers that force so many women to restrict their aspirations as workers, to fulfill their aspirations as parents, and force so many men to do the opposite.
No single choice about how to organize work and family life is right or possible - for every family. And every choice has tradeoffs.
Investing in living-wage jobs and reducing the inequities between local school districts would give young people more, not less, incentive to postpone childbearing and more possibilities for independence.
During the 1960s, rising real wages for low-income and high-income workers, due in part to rapid economic growth and the spread of unionization, worked in tandem with expanding government support systems to improve Americans' well-being.
Feminism insists on women's right to make choices - about whether to marry, whether to have children, whether to combine work and family or to focus on one over the other. It also urges men and women to share the joys and burdens of family life and calls on society to place a higher priority on supporting caregiving work.
As time passes, the actual complexity of our history - even of our own personal experience - gets buried under the weight of the ideal image.
Because we live so much of our adult lives as singles, it no longer makes sense to assume that marriage is the only way people will organize their obligations and commitments.
Over the ages, some societies have accorded far less value and respect to singles than to married individuals.
The place where we keep our clothes isn't always the only place where we keep our commitments.
The real gender inequality in marriage stems from the tendency to regard women as the default parent, the one who, in the absence of family-friendly work policies, is expected to adjust her paid work to shoulder the brunt of domestic responsibilities.
The origins of modern marital instability lie largely in the triumph of what many people believe to be marriage's traditional role - providing love, intimacy, fidelity, and mutual fulfillment. The truth is that for centuries, marriage was stable precisely because it was not expected to provide such benefits.
As a child, I was lucky enough to spend each summer with my grandmother.
It is ironic that so many politicians claim to defend traditional Christian values of 'faith and family.' In fact, a radical antifamily ideology permeates Christ's teaching, and the early Christian tradition often set faith and family against each other.
Presidents Reagan and the first George Bush never used the vile language of some Trump supporters, but both blamed scarce resources and decaying communities on 'welfare queens' and black criminals like Willie Horton.
In the 1970s, family history wasn't yet thought of a serious field for study. I was terrified of being laughed at by other historians. I called my book 'The Social Origins of Private Life.' It should have been 'As Pompous as You Want to Be.' Every sentence was academic jargon, and if I said X, I qualified it with Y.
You can't judge a family's health by the form it's in at a given moment.
For most of America's history, people typically aspired to acquire 'a competency' rather than great riches. A competency meant the ability to comfortably sustain a household without depending on others. 'Competence' also meant being capable and reliable. The American Dream was that people who worked hard and capably could support their families.
Inequality was written into the creation of the American Republic when our Founding Fathers denied voting rights to women.
Educated parents find more time to spend with their children by reducing time dedicated to home-based activities that involve little interaction with children.
Unemployment, low wages, and poverty discourage family formation and erode family stability, making it less likely that individuals will marry in the first place and more likely that their marriages will dissolve.
Historically, it has required a combination of favorable employment trends and active government intervention to lower the percentage of people in poverty and raise living standards for the working middle class.
Throughout history, people with few educational or economic resources and little bargaining power have often looked to authoritarian, ruthless people to stand up for them.
Nostalgia is a very human trait.
It no longer makes sense to see singlehood and marriage as two distinct and stable social categories that should be accorded different legal rights and social esteem.
Labeling people single parents, for example, when they may in fact be co-parenting - either with an unmarried other parent in the home or with an ex-spouse in a joint custody situation - stigmatizes their children as the products of 'single parenthood' and makes the uncounted parent invisible to society.
The notion that marriage is an impediment to commitments to the larger community is a long-standing one - and one reason early Christians did not place the institution at the top of their moral hierarchy, complaining that married couples cared more about pleasing each other than doing the Lord's work.
We must recognize that there are healthy as well as unhealthy ways to be single or to be divorced, just as there are healthy and unhealthy ways to be married.
Marriage is no longer the main way in which societies regulate sexuality and parenting or organize the division of labor between men and women.
Too often, tributes to the home-cooked meal assume every family has a schedule that gets everyone home by 5:30 P.M. And too many recipes treat cooking as a solitary pursuit that requires the cook - still most often Mom - to take time away from other family interactions and chores.
Cohabitation itself doesn't cause ineffective parenting.
Liberal politicians, in celebrating the benefits of modernization, free trade, diverse families, and the rise of more women and minorities into political and economic prominence, have often glossed over the pain of white blue-collar communities.
In 1975, which was the height of the women's movement, I thought I'd write a book on women's history. But in searching for a topic, I realized that there were few places in history where men and women interacted. Finally, it hit me: 'Oh, look at the family. That's the one place.'
If we want to revive and achieve the American Dream, we need to change a situation in which the people whose hard work makes this country run cannot earn a living wage, while bankers, speculators, and corporate elites - the real 'takers' in today's society - skim off far more than their fair share.
Second marriages can and do create 'real' families.
