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The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, by Stephanie Coontz
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Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary, a man’s home has never been his castle, the ‘male breadwinner marriage’ is the least traditional family in history, and rape and sexual assault were far higher in the 1970s than they are today. In The Way We Never Were, acclaimed historian Stephanie Coontz provides a myth-shattering examination of two centuries of the American family, sweeping away misconceptions about the past that cloud current debates about domestic life. The 1950s do not present a workable model of how to conduct our personal lives today, Coontz argues, and neither does any other era from our cultural past. This revised edition includes a new introduction and epilogue, looking at what has and has not changed since the original publication in 1992, and exploring how the clash between growing gender equality and growing economic inequality is reshaping family life, marriage, and male-female relationships in our modern era. Now more relevant than ever, The Way We Never Were continues to be a potent corrective to dangerous nostalgia for an American tradition that never really existed.
- Sales Rank: #27483 in Books
- Published on: 2016-03-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x 1.44" w x 5.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 576 pages
Review
Los Angeles Times
“A treasure.... Coontz’s ample evidence exposes the falseness, sentimentality and self-righteousness of most public statements about the family.”
New York Times Book Review
“Often brilliant and invariably provocative.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
“[The Way We Never Were is] one of the few books I’ve carried with me through years and moves – because it’s a welcome and hopeful reminder that families always have faced, and overcome, transitions and challenges. In the revised book, Coontz offers an equally honest and upbeat review of the way things really are, despite dire predictions of a culture in crisis.”
Entertainment Weekly
“Coontz reminds us that the ‘good old days’ were never quite that in her excellent history of the American family.”
The Oklahoman
“David West is getting close to finishing another book. That’s not some sort of metaphor. The NBA veteran is a voracious reader, almost always carrying his latest book on a team plane or his electronic tablet into the locker room. For the past few weeks, he’s been immersed in a book by social historian Stephanie Coontz. It’s called The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. The book is about shattering myths. So is David West.”
Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
“[Coontz] approaches the subject of what we now insist up on calling ‘family values’ with what is, in the current atmosphere, a refreshing lack of partisan cant.”
The National Memo
“Stephanie Coontz’s 1992 book was a work of first-rate history, and it undermined a slew of common misperceptions of family life in America, but it was also a plea to take off the rose-colored glasses that cause us to get so many political issues wrong. Fittingly, Coontz’s publisher, Basic Books, has released a revised edition just as the moralizing we’ve come to expect from presidential campaigns kicks into overdrive.”
The Society Pages
“The latest edition of Stephanie Coontz’s The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap is an essential read for policymakers… Coontz’s book makes for an absorbing, sometimes shocking, often wryly funny read. Both comprehensive and comprehensible, it’s a veritable one-stop shop for reliable research on how public policy and culture affect families.”
Romper
“If you’ve ever questioned whether the ‘Good Old Days’ were really all that good, The Way We Never Were is worth a read. [Coontz] puts ‘traditional family values’ in a historical context and examines whether or not the idea was realistic. It will make you glad we don’t have to vacuum in heels anymore.”
Spiked Review of Books (UK)
“The Way We Never Were was such a great achievement and an important step forward. It provided a much-needed corrective to the romanticised view of the 1950s family, and began to defuse some of the more hysterical and fatalistic discussions about teen pregnancy and the underclass….A new epilogue takes a stab at addressing some of today’s mistaken assumptions about the family. It all makes for a work that continues to provide plenty of food for thought.”
Ellen Galinsky, President, Families and Work Institute
“Stephanie Coontz is a national treasure. Her work, always solidly grounded in the best and most comprehensive research, is consistently groundbreaking. She changes the way we understand the past, present, and the future. What’s more, her new paradigms change the way we live and work!”
Paula England, 2015-15 President, American Sociological Association
"Stephanie Coontz has her finger on the pulse of contemporary families like no one else in America. In this book, she busts numerous myths about families in the past and clearly explains what is going on in today’s families."
William H. Chafe, Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History, Duke University, the former president, Organization of American Historians
"More than twenty years ago, in The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Coontz cut through all the bizarre stereotypes we carry with us about marriage and the family in America. Now, in a brilliant revision, she jolts us once again by bringing us up to date on when people marry, how income inequality affects family life, and why we have made so much progress on issues of gay marriage, and so little on issues of poverty and women’s reproductive rights. A terrific read with amazing new information!"
Newsday
“Coontz presents fascinating facts and figures that explode the cherished myths about self-sufficient, happy, moral families.”
The Nation
“Historically rich, and loaded with anecdotal evidence, The Way We Never Were effectively demolishes the normal, traditional nuclear family as neither normal nor traditional, and not even nuclear.”
Publishers Weekly
“A wonderfully perceptive, myth-debunking report.... An important contribution to the current debate on family values.”
Kirkus
“Clear, incisive, and distinguished by Coontz’s personal conviction and by its vast range of cogent examples, including capsule histories of women in the labor force and of black families. Fascinating, persuasive, politically relevant.”
Frank Furstenberg, Zellerbach Family Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania
“This small book has had an outsized influence on the way social scientists think about the recent history of the American family. It remains the starting point for anyone who hopes to understand how contemporary family life came about and where we may be headed in the future.”
Linda Burton, Dean of Social Sciences and James B. Duke Professor of Sociology, Duke University
“There is no better commentary on the status and processes of American families than The Way We Never Were. Stephanie Coontz writes about the realities of family life in an uncompromising way that integrates evidence-based research with the souls and everyday lives of kin within and across generations and across time and space. In my family sociology courses a spontaneous awakening occurs for students who read this book for the first time. They never look at families the same way, which is a game changer as they consider family life in their futures and question the meaning of families in their present lives. Stephanie Coontz has given the field a true gift that guides us in a journey of understanding the evolution of family life in real time and under real circumstances. Illuminating, provocative, and a must read for all!”
Steven Mintz, Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin
"A powerful antidote to the misleading myths and misplaced nostalgia that too often dominate discussions of family life, this essential book tells the true history of today’s extraordinarily diverse families. Drawing upon the most recent research, the nation’s foremost historian of marriage explains why family life changed so radically in the course of a single generation, presenting a remarkably balanced perspective on the losses and gains that have accompanied this revolution."
San Francisco Chronicle
“Coontz’s strength is in the way she shows that families of every era have been blamed for conditions beyond their control.”
Library Journal
“[Coontz] persuasively dispels the myths and stereotypes of ‘traditional’ family values as the product of the postwar era.”
About the Author
Stephanie Coontz is a member of the faculty of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where she is a historian and an expert on American culture.
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Not Exactly Updated
By D. Paige
I was disappointed because I expected a lot of new content; however, from what I can tell, only a revised intro and conclusion have been added, which means most (or all) of the essay-content contains references that are somewhat outdated for readers under the age of 40.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Advertised For the Amateur Historian, But Reads Like A Scholarly Text Most Of The Time
By Zachary Koenig
I was drawn to this book because it seemed like a really interesting topic. The concept of "family" (at least in the nuclear sense) seems to have peaked in the 1950s, a notion that is often referenced in terms of the supposed "loss of family values" in America. But is that really the case? Has "family life" really dropped off in the past few decades? Or was "family" a rather nebulous concept to begin with? Those are the types of topics that author Stephanie Coontz covers in "The Way We Never Were".
This books looks at a number of different topics/themes to try and understand the evolution of the American value. It first looks at the history of family structure in America, including key gender stereotypes/myths, and then tackles such issues as welfare, marriage, sex/reproduction, African-American families, and other family-related topics.
There is no doubt that the material in "Way We Never Were" is fascinating and offers some very important information in understanding the concept of "family". For example, I found the information on welfare to be supremely interesting (maybe the best topic of the whole book) for how it makes the case that welfare likely isn't being abused as much as we might think and really that it is just taking the place of familial help that once came from small communities. Other avenues that Coontz explores are interesting as well.
The problem, however, is that the book reads as much like a college textbook as it does a regular work of nonfiction. There are reams and reams of statistics quoted at the reader, and Coontz is very careful about making any inferences from the data (like a good researcher should be, in all honesty). What it comes down to then is that I was looking for a book that would editorialize a bit and "fill in the gaps" for me. I wanted the author to make a few inferences or adopt a more conversational tone, but that was never the point of this work. It almost feels a bit dishonest to market the book with a flashy cover and engaging promotional material, only to dive in and have it be so dry (in spots) and obviously written for more scholarly purposes.
Overall, then, "Way We Never Were" was a middling experience for me. The topics covered were indeed interesting, but I wasn't expecting such a deep, dense read that could have been studied in many of my undergraduate courses. If you are thinking of picking up this book, just be prepared for that.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Life was better for some than others
By Erik
The title should be "The Way we Were." She describes (albeit with a rather left wing perspective) the first half of the 20th century much in accord with my Grandfather's diaries, and the second half much as I remember it growing up in a middle class environment. Life was better for some than others, better for the working class in the first part of the 20th century than today, in some important ways (access to college, safety in the streets, cost of houses). Strange that she leaves out the Vietnam War and the 1960s riots and their causes, management and mismanagement.
Her perspective gets in the way of noting that "government," (an undefined entity) got the money that it "used to subsidize the middle class families of the 1950s" mostly from those families.
Except for the excursions into liberal semi-outrage, the book is a fair exposition of the changes in family, working classes, and conditions for women and men, over the past century (the diaries don't go back much further). Those who haven't lived much of it may find it semi-informative, but they would be well advised to counter the bias by reviewing the Oakland Tribune and Time Magazine Archives.
After reading it, my assessment is "meh."
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