Stephanie Coontz - Marriage 2010 Conference Review

Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We Never Were and Marriage: A History, was the opening speaker for the national marriage conference held in Saskatoon on March 19-20. Coontz's address was titled, "Courting Trouble: The World Historical Revolution
In Love and Marriage".

Coontz set the foundation of a conference focused on hope in and for marriage by assuring her audience that she was not going to change history to fit the desired mood of the gathering.

"I certainly don't want to minimize the tensions, the losses, the temptations that make it so hard to sustain commitments in today's world," Coontz began.

Coontz's research and writing is quoted by many historians and sociologists especially pertaining to her message that there was never a period of time in history when marriage was the romantic, altruistic ideal that people associate with a brief period in the mid-20th century.

"For thousands of years, marriage was not about love...throughout most of history, marriage redistributed wealth and services from the weaker members of society to the stronger...from women to husbands and children to fathers," Coontz reminded the audience.

In her research, Coontz found the not-so-paradoxical fact that most violence against women and children happened within their marriage rather than from outside the family.

The earliest historical practice of marriage was mainly a form of social organization. Coontz spoke of prehistoric marriage being less about a relationship between a man and a woman than about forming alliances with other groups in order to create peace between factions divided over a territory or resource or simply to gain political influence or financial increase.

"As strange as it may seem to us today...the main point of marriage throughout history was to get in-laws," stated Coontz.

Illegitimacy, in Coontz's opinion, was the creation of rich families who had married other rich families who did not want their children marrying outside the clan without permission from the authorities that protected the status quo of wealth.

Coontz also addressed what she considered the exceptional role of the Catholic Church as one of the first major institutions, political or religious, that gave a certain amount of personal choice to an individual to decide for themselves whom to marry or even to marry at all.

The Catholic Church raised the respect of being an unmarried and celibate person above that of a married couple and also recognized the legitimacy of a couple who chose to marry through mutual consent.

"For the first sixteen centuries, Christianity defined the legitimacy of a marriage based on the couples' personal intentions...whether given down by the haystack...or through a locked door," Coontz shared to laughter.

Coontz explained that the relatively recent development of marrying for reasons of love challenged the old factors of financial and political stability. People wondered what would keep people in a marriage when the love disappeared.

"Love, they were warned, may be the death of marriage," remarked Coontz. "There was an old European saying, "ËœHe who marries for love has good nights and bad days,'".

There was a very real change that took place during this period that while making marriage more loving and egalitarian also destabilized the institution. Marriage has become more about a personal decision based on the feeling of love than about the greater good of the community and particular families.

Coontz argued that the sexual revolution, civil rights reforms, lessening religious influence, the entering of women into the work force and other factors have ensured that marriage will never again be the primary way that we organize our society.

Beyond Coontz's textbook feminist and market critique of marriage as an institution, she noted that there was good news to be found in contemporary matrimony. This good news comes mainly in the increasing number of people who marry of their own accord, versus that of their parents, the growing equality between the genders and the lowering divorce rates.

"When marriage can be made to work, and it can...has higher emotional expectations, is more fulfilling, more intimate and more beneficial for all its members than any ever before in history".

"Parents spend more time with their children...domestic violence has fallen sharply, standards of fidelity and honesty are higher than ever," she continued.

Coontz highlighted again that the factors that make marriage more about personal choice and fulfilment have made bad marriages more difficult to stay in, especially without the exterior social controls that existed only a few decades before.

"Marriage is no longer the only game in town," she warned. "We are going to have to live with the fact that some people will not marry and some people will not stay married."

Coontz also addressed some of the most recent research about what factors point to the best marriages. These factors included men who had a more egalitarian attitude towards women, including their willingness to participate in basic housework, and the ability of couples to read and positively react to each others bids for attention.

"My husband's bid for attention is to laugh out loud when he reads the paper," Coontz shared. "I used to react about 75% of the time but now I try to do that 90% of the time. When he laughs, he is telling me he has found something that he thinks I could use in one of my books".

Coontz concluded by saying that the Catholic Church needs to remember its earliest concern that marriage could detract energy away from the needs of the extended community and even from their relationship with God. Rather than idealize marriage, Coontz proposed that we need to encourage broader social ties beyond the couple in order to enrich public life and stabilize our private life by reducing the unrealistic expectation off spouses to be all things to each other.

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Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and is Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families. She is the author of Marriage: A History (2005) and The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (1992) and other award winning books. Her work has been translated into French, Spanish, German, Norwegian, and Japanese. Coontz has testified about her research before the House Select Committee on Children,Youth and Families in Washington, DC. Her work has written articles and been featured in the many of the world's largest newspapers and magazines (i.e. New York Times, Newsweek, LIFE). She has appeared on many programs, such as the Today Show and Oprah Winfrey, as well as in several prime-time television documentaries, including ones hosted by Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters. www.stephaniecoontz.com