Stephanie Coontz - Marriage Expert
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, which she chaired from 2001-04. I've referenced her before and I've used some of her research to write my History Of NonMonogamy page on my website. For my own archival purposes and for the education of those who have not yet heard of her, I am listing some links to my favorite articles of hers, along with some key phrases in those articles:
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article34.htm - People who marry and stay married are slightly happier, on average, than people who never marry, and significantly happier than most people who marry and then divorce. But such individuals already reported higher-than-average happiness before they married. They didn't depend on marriage to make them happy - and that's one reason why they didn't become discontented once the honeymoon wore off. Couples who expect to find the greatest happiness from marriage are prone to the greatest disappointments. ... Through most of history, it was considered dangerously antisocial to be too emotionally attached to one's spouse, because that diluted loyalties to family, neighbours, and society at large. Until the mid-19th- century, the word "love" was used more frequently to describe feelings for neighbours, relatives and fellow church members than spouses.
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article33.htm - Until 100 years ago, most societies agreed that it was dangerously antisocial, even pathologically self-absorbed, to elevate marital affection and nuclear-family ties above commitments to neighbors, extended kin, civic duty and religion. ... From medieval days until the early 19th century, diaries and letters more often used the word love to refer to neighbors, cousins and fellow church members than to spouses. When honeymoons first gained favor in the 19th century, couples often took along relatives or friends for company. ... Researchers soon found that men and women with confidants beyond the nuclear family were mentally and physically healthier than people who relied on just one other individual for emotional intimacy and support.
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article31.htm - For the first time in 150 years, households headed by single adults and unmarried couples now outnumber married-couple families ... But there are some things that this news means and others that it doesn't. It doesn't mean marriage is doomed. It does mean we have to start thinking differently about the way we design our social policies. They are founded on 60-year-old assumptions about marriage that are now definitively outdated. ... Furthermore, people who postpone or forgo marriage do so not because they don't value that commitment. In fact, contrary to the assumptions of the early policy-makers who designed programs to promote marriage, many young couples postpone marriage precisely because they value it so highly. ... Recently Americans have been involved in a loud, acrimonious debate over whether to grant gays and lesbians access to the privileges and responsibilities of marriage. But there's an even deeper question: whether it still makes sense to use the institution of marriage as a channel for so many interpersonal rights and responsibilities.
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article30.htm - Marriage has changed more in the last 30 years than in the previous 300. ... although the average college grad marries almost two years later than the average woman-and the average women who gets an advanced degree marries almost five years later-they are more likely to marry than women with low levels of education.
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article25.htm - Not until 1215 did the Catholic Church make marriage a sacrament, and not until 1563 did it begin to enforce rules mandating that certain ceremonies had to be performed to make a marriage legitimate. ... It is also not "traditional" to insist that the state should have the final say over what constitutes a valid marriage. ... In 1833, Pennsylvania's chief justice warned that a strict legal interpretation of rules governing marriage validity would render "the vast majority" of births in that state illegitimate. ... Not until 1993 did marital rape become a crime in every state, overturning the millennia-old tradition that a wife was obligated to have sex with her husband whenever he demanded it. (So much for "traditional marriage")
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article23.htm - It was only 200 years ago that Western Europeans and Americans began to believe that marriage should be based on love and mutual satisfaction. ... It is naive and irresponsible to design social policy, distribute social rewards or even dispense personal advice on the assumption that everyone will marry and that all children will be raised for their entire lives by two married parents living in the same household.
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article21.htm - Traditional marriage, with its 5,000-year history, has already been upended. Gays and lesbians, however, didn't spearhead that revolution: heterosexuals did.
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article15.htm - A recent study of teenagers who pledged in the '90s to remain virgins until marriage found that 88 percent of them had since violated their pledge. The study also found that their behavior, both before and after losing their virginity, was more risky than that of teens who had not committed to such an absolute value. While they were still virgins, pledgers were six times more likely than non-pledgers to engage in oral and anal sex, probably out of concern for preserving their "technical virginity." Teens who took the pledge did start having sexual intercourse a little later, on average, than teens who didn't, and they had fewer sexual partners. But they were much less likely than the other teens to use contraception and ended up with the same rates of sexually transmitted diseases.
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article12.htm - 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.
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article11.htm - Valentine's Day was originally envisioned by the Roman Catholic Church as a check on sexual passion. ... For the church, the message of Valentine's Day was that while marriage had a place in society, although not the highest place, romance had no place in marriage. ... A wedding was not the happy ending to a passionate romance. It was often the unhappy ending to one partner's romance with someone else.
A Pop Quiz on marriage thanks to Stephanie Coontz http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article24.htm
Poll How Much Do You Know About Marriage?
The results (don't cheat and look at these first!):
1) FALSE. From 1970 to the late 1990s, men's attitudes towards marriage became more favorable, while women's became less so. By the end of the century, more men than women said that marriage was their ideal lifestyle. And, on average, men become more content with their marriages over time while women grow less so. A majority of divorced men and women report that the wife was the one who wanted out of the marriage. A recent study of divorces that occurred after age 40 found that wives initiated 2/3 of them.
2) FALSE. The differences in ages of men and women at first marriage has been narrowing for the past 80 years and is now at a historic low. By the end of the 1990s, 39% of women age 35 to 44 lived with younger men. Men still rate youth and good looks higher than women do when looking for a mate, but those criteria no longer outweigh all others. Men are much more likely now to seek a mate who has the same level of education and similar earning potential. College-educated women are more likely to marry and less likely to divorce than women with less education.
3) TRUE. Although divorce rates have risen, death rates have fallen even more steely, so that more couples will celebrate their 40th wedding anniversaries now more than at any time in the past. Furthermore, the divorce rate reached its height more than 25 years ago. It has fallen by more than 25% since 1981.
4) FALSE. Americans are now more tolerant of consenting sexual relations between unmarried adults than in the past. But surveys show that disapproval of adultery, sexual coercion, rape and sex with minors has increased over the past 30 years and is now at a historic high. In 1889, a girl could legally consent to sex at 10, 11, 0r 12 in half the states, and in Delaware the age of consent was 7. There were many more prostitutes per capita in the late 19th century America than there are today - resulting in a high incidence of venereal disease among respectably married women infected by their husbands.
5) FALSE. For the first thousands of years of its existence, the church held that a marriage was valid if a couple claimed they had exchanged words of consent - even if there were no witnesses and no priest to officiate. Not until 1754 did England require issuance of a license for marriage to be valid. Informal marriage and cohabitation were so common in the early 19th century America that one judge estimated that 1/3 of all children were born to couples who were not legally married.
6) FALSE. The liklihood that college-educated women will drop out of the labor force because of having children declined by half from 1984 to 2004. And among all mothers with children under 6, the most highly educated are the least likely to leave their jobs, with that likelihood declining with each level of educational attainment.
7) TRICK QUESTION. Women with non-traditional values are indeed more likely to divorce than women wiht traditional views, but they are also more likely to get married in the first place. As for men, those with traditional values about gender are more likely to marry than nontraditional men, but they are also more likely to divorce. We don't precisely know why this discrepancy exists, but it probably has something to do with the fact that women's views on gender are changing more rapidly then men's.
8) FALSE. Aside from a huge spike in divorce immediately after World War II, divorce rates in the 1950s were higher than in any previous decade aside from the Depression, and almost one in three marriages formed in the 1950s eventually ended in divorce. Divorce rates rose steadily from the 1890s through the 1960s (with a dip in the Depression and a spike after WWII), soared in the 1970s, and have fallen since 1981. Marriage rates, however, have also fallen significantly in the past 25 years.
9) FALSE. Ancient Roman phiolosphers and medieval theologians thought that loving your spouse too much was a form of "adultery", a betrayal of one's obligations to country or God. The ancient Greeks held that the purest form of love was between two men. In China, Confucian philosophers ranked the relationship between husband and wife as second from the bottom on their list of the most important family ties, with the father-eldest son relationship topping the list. Early Christians thought marriage was inescapably tained by the presence of sex. According to the medieval church, virgins ranked highest in godliness, widoes were second and wives a distant third.
10) TRUE. In 2001, schoolgirls around the world were asked whether they agreed with the statement that everyone needed to marry. Three-quarters of American schoolgirls agreed. But in Japan, 88 percent of schoolgirls disagreed.
11) FALSE. Divorce in modern America often does cause a sharp drop in the economic standard of living for women and children. But states that legalized no-fault divorce experienced an average 20% decline in suicide rates among married women over the following 5 years. And a recent study suggests that while divorce worsens the emotional well-being of 55% to 60% of children, it improves the well-being of 40% to 45%.
12) FALSE. The form of marriage that has been approved by more societies than any other through the ages has been polygyny - one man, many women. That family form is the one mentioned most often in the first five books of the Bible. In some societies, one woman could marry several men. In others, two families could forge an alliance by marrying off a son or daughter to the "ghost" of the other family's dead child. For most of history, the main impetus for marriage was getting in-laws and managing property, not love or sex.
13) TRUE. 35% of born-again Christians in this country have divorced, almost the same as the 37% of athiests and agnostics who have divorced - and 23% of born-again Christians have divorced twice! Among Pentecostals, the divorce rate is more than 40%. The region with the highest divorce rate is the Bible Belt.
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article34.htm - People who marry and stay married are slightly happier, on average, than people who never marry, and significantly happier than most people who marry and then divorce. But such individuals already reported higher-than-average happiness before they married. They didn't depend on marriage to make them happy - and that's one reason why they didn't become discontented once the honeymoon wore off. Couples who expect to find the greatest happiness from marriage are prone to the greatest disappointments. ... Through most of history, it was considered dangerously antisocial to be too emotionally attached to one's spouse, because that diluted loyalties to family, neighbours, and society at large. Until the mid-19th- century, the word "love" was used more frequently to describe feelings for neighbours, relatives and fellow church members than spouses.
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article33.htm - Until 100 years ago, most societies agreed that it was dangerously antisocial, even pathologically self-absorbed, to elevate marital affection and nuclear-family ties above commitments to neighbors, extended kin, civic duty and religion. ... From medieval days until the early 19th century, diaries and letters more often used the word love to refer to neighbors, cousins and fellow church members than to spouses. When honeymoons first gained favor in the 19th century, couples often took along relatives or friends for company. ... Researchers soon found that men and women with confidants beyond the nuclear family were mentally and physically healthier than people who relied on just one other individual for emotional intimacy and support.
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article31.htm - For the first time in 150 years, households headed by single adults and unmarried couples now outnumber married-couple families ... But there are some things that this news means and others that it doesn't. It doesn't mean marriage is doomed. It does mean we have to start thinking differently about the way we design our social policies. They are founded on 60-year-old assumptions about marriage that are now definitively outdated. ... Furthermore, people who postpone or forgo marriage do so not because they don't value that commitment. In fact, contrary to the assumptions of the early policy-makers who designed programs to promote marriage, many young couples postpone marriage precisely because they value it so highly. ... Recently Americans have been involved in a loud, acrimonious debate over whether to grant gays and lesbians access to the privileges and responsibilities of marriage. But there's an even deeper question: whether it still makes sense to use the institution of marriage as a channel for so many interpersonal rights and responsibilities.
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article30.htm - Marriage has changed more in the last 30 years than in the previous 300. ... although the average college grad marries almost two years later than the average woman-and the average women who gets an advanced degree marries almost five years later-they are more likely to marry than women with low levels of education.
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article25.htm - Not until 1215 did the Catholic Church make marriage a sacrament, and not until 1563 did it begin to enforce rules mandating that certain ceremonies had to be performed to make a marriage legitimate. ... It is also not "traditional" to insist that the state should have the final say over what constitutes a valid marriage. ... In 1833, Pennsylvania's chief justice warned that a strict legal interpretation of rules governing marriage validity would render "the vast majority" of births in that state illegitimate. ... Not until 1993 did marital rape become a crime in every state, overturning the millennia-old tradition that a wife was obligated to have sex with her husband whenever he demanded it. (So much for "traditional marriage")
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article23.htm - It was only 200 years ago that Western Europeans and Americans began to believe that marriage should be based on love and mutual satisfaction. ... It is naive and irresponsible to design social policy, distribute social rewards or even dispense personal advice on the assumption that everyone will marry and that all children will be raised for their entire lives by two married parents living in the same household.
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article21.htm - Traditional marriage, with its 5,000-year history, has already been upended. Gays and lesbians, however, didn't spearhead that revolution: heterosexuals did.
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article15.htm - A recent study of teenagers who pledged in the '90s to remain virgins until marriage found that 88 percent of them had since violated their pledge. The study also found that their behavior, both before and after losing their virginity, was more risky than that of teens who had not committed to such an absolute value. While they were still virgins, pledgers were six times more likely than non-pledgers to engage in oral and anal sex, probably out of concern for preserving their "technical virginity." Teens who took the pledge did start having sexual intercourse a little later, on average, than teens who didn't, and they had fewer sexual partners. But they were much less likely than the other teens to use contraception and ended up with the same rates of sexually transmitted diseases.
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article12.htm - 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.
~ http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article11.htm - Valentine's Day was originally envisioned by the Roman Catholic Church as a check on sexual passion. ... For the church, the message of Valentine's Day was that while marriage had a place in society, although not the highest place, romance had no place in marriage. ... A wedding was not the happy ending to a passionate romance. It was often the unhappy ending to one partner's romance with someone else.
A Pop Quiz on marriage thanks to Stephanie Coontz http://stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article24.htm
Poll How Much Do You Know About Marriage?
The results (don't cheat and look at these first!):
1) FALSE. From 1970 to the late 1990s, men's attitudes towards marriage became more favorable, while women's became less so. By the end of the century, more men than women said that marriage was their ideal lifestyle. And, on average, men become more content with their marriages over time while women grow less so. A majority of divorced men and women report that the wife was the one who wanted out of the marriage. A recent study of divorces that occurred after age 40 found that wives initiated 2/3 of them.
2) FALSE. The differences in ages of men and women at first marriage has been narrowing for the past 80 years and is now at a historic low. By the end of the 1990s, 39% of women age 35 to 44 lived with younger men. Men still rate youth and good looks higher than women do when looking for a mate, but those criteria no longer outweigh all others. Men are much more likely now to seek a mate who has the same level of education and similar earning potential. College-educated women are more likely to marry and less likely to divorce than women with less education.
3) TRUE. Although divorce rates have risen, death rates have fallen even more steely, so that more couples will celebrate their 40th wedding anniversaries now more than at any time in the past. Furthermore, the divorce rate reached its height more than 25 years ago. It has fallen by more than 25% since 1981.
4) FALSE. Americans are now more tolerant of consenting sexual relations between unmarried adults than in the past. But surveys show that disapproval of adultery, sexual coercion, rape and sex with minors has increased over the past 30 years and is now at a historic high. In 1889, a girl could legally consent to sex at 10, 11, 0r 12 in half the states, and in Delaware the age of consent was 7. There were many more prostitutes per capita in the late 19th century America than there are today - resulting in a high incidence of venereal disease among respectably married women infected by their husbands.
5) FALSE. For the first thousands of years of its existence, the church held that a marriage was valid if a couple claimed they had exchanged words of consent - even if there were no witnesses and no priest to officiate. Not until 1754 did England require issuance of a license for marriage to be valid. Informal marriage and cohabitation were so common in the early 19th century America that one judge estimated that 1/3 of all children were born to couples who were not legally married.
6) FALSE. The liklihood that college-educated women will drop out of the labor force because of having children declined by half from 1984 to 2004. And among all mothers with children under 6, the most highly educated are the least likely to leave their jobs, with that likelihood declining with each level of educational attainment.
7) TRICK QUESTION. Women with non-traditional values are indeed more likely to divorce than women wiht traditional views, but they are also more likely to get married in the first place. As for men, those with traditional values about gender are more likely to marry than nontraditional men, but they are also more likely to divorce. We don't precisely know why this discrepancy exists, but it probably has something to do with the fact that women's views on gender are changing more rapidly then men's.
8) FALSE. Aside from a huge spike in divorce immediately after World War II, divorce rates in the 1950s were higher than in any previous decade aside from the Depression, and almost one in three marriages formed in the 1950s eventually ended in divorce. Divorce rates rose steadily from the 1890s through the 1960s (with a dip in the Depression and a spike after WWII), soared in the 1970s, and have fallen since 1981. Marriage rates, however, have also fallen significantly in the past 25 years.
9) FALSE. Ancient Roman phiolosphers and medieval theologians thought that loving your spouse too much was a form of "adultery", a betrayal of one's obligations to country or God. The ancient Greeks held that the purest form of love was between two men. In China, Confucian philosophers ranked the relationship between husband and wife as second from the bottom on their list of the most important family ties, with the father-eldest son relationship topping the list. Early Christians thought marriage was inescapably tained by the presence of sex. According to the medieval church, virgins ranked highest in godliness, widoes were second and wives a distant third.
10) TRUE. In 2001, schoolgirls around the world were asked whether they agreed with the statement that everyone needed to marry. Three-quarters of American schoolgirls agreed. But in Japan, 88 percent of schoolgirls disagreed.
11) FALSE. Divorce in modern America often does cause a sharp drop in the economic standard of living for women and children. But states that legalized no-fault divorce experienced an average 20% decline in suicide rates among married women over the following 5 years. And a recent study suggests that while divorce worsens the emotional well-being of 55% to 60% of children, it improves the well-being of 40% to 45%.
12) FALSE. The form of marriage that has been approved by more societies than any other through the ages has been polygyny - one man, many women. That family form is the one mentioned most often in the first five books of the Bible. In some societies, one woman could marry several men. In others, two families could forge an alliance by marrying off a son or daughter to the "ghost" of the other family's dead child. For most of history, the main impetus for marriage was getting in-laws and managing property, not love or sex.
13) TRUE. 35% of born-again Christians in this country have divorced, almost the same as the 37% of athiests and agnostics who have divorced - and 23% of born-again Christians have divorced twice! Among Pentecostals, the divorce rate is more than 40%. The region with the highest divorce rate is the Bible Belt.