The Way We Never Were
I'm using a chapter of Stephanie Coontz's The Way We Never Were: America's Families and the Nostalgia Trap in the course I'm teaching this summer. It's a chapter that talks about the ways in which American society has distorted and mis-remembered what family life and the status of women was really like in the 1950s.
In it, she notes:
"Family and gender strategies also contained some time bombs. Women who 'played dumb' to catch a man, as 40 percent of Barnard College women admitted to doing, sometimes despised their husbands for not living up to the fiction of male superiority they had worked so hard to promote."
In it, she notes:
"Family and gender strategies also contained some time bombs. Women who 'played dumb' to catch a man, as 40 percent of Barnard College women admitted to doing, sometimes despised their husbands for not living up to the fiction of male superiority they had worked so hard to promote."