For Better and Worse
The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage
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For Better and Worse
Narrated by:
Cynthia Farrell
Buy Now for £14.05
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Narrated by:
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Cynthia Farrell
Marriage rates have fallen dramatically since the 1970s. Yet far from devaluing marriage, people still overwhelmingly describe marriage as the highest commitment they can imagine. Most Americans say they want to marry eventually, and couples who do marry have a lower chance of divorce than at any time since the 1970s. Increasingly, though, people tell pollsters they “have no idea” if they actually will end up married. And unlike in the past, young women are more uncertain than young men.
In For Better and Worse, Stephanie Coontz—author of the “rich, provocative, and entertaining” book Marriage, A History—unravels the roots of such paradoxical trends. Examining five critical periods of historical transformation, she reveals how shifting romantic ideals, gender expectations, sexual mores, and cultural myths have bequeathed us a welter of contradictory beliefs, dysfunctional habits, and emotional earworms that make it hard to adjust our family relationships to the social and economic challenges of twenty-first-century life.
Coontz demonstrates that today’s widespread nostalgia for a seemingly more stable past is an understandable reaction to heightened economic insecurity and eroding social solidarities. But trying to reproduce a largely imaginary golden age of marriage from the past simply locks us into a restricted future.
Current public debates about marriage are dominated by two diametrically opposed groups. One argues that marriage is the only sure route to personal happiness and social stability; the other, that marriage is inherently oppressive. Coontz puts forward a radical middle ground, pointing to surprising new research on the personal changes and the policy innovations that can help people create successful relationships, in or out of marriage.
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Critic reviews
“Coontz’s work reminds us that the past still has the power to surprise us if we approach it honestly. That complexity is not the enemy of understanding but the beginning of it. That readers — including those who disagree with us — deserve seriousness rather than caricature. And that history, practiced with rigor, humility, and imagination, remains one of the best tools we possess for thinking clearly about the world we have inherited and the world we might still create.”
—Steven Mintz, professor of history, The University of Texas at Austin
“[A]n essential breath of fresh air in today’s marriage and family cultural discourse.”
—Phillip N. Cohen, sociologist at the University of Maryland
—Steven Mintz, professor of history, The University of Texas at Austin
“[A]n essential breath of fresh air in today’s marriage and family cultural discourse.”
—Phillip N. Cohen, sociologist at the University of Maryland
No reviews yet