Why Modern Marriage and Family Feels So Hard: Historian Stephanie Coontz Explains

In this episode of Family Troubles, I sit down with Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families and emeritus faculty of History and Family Studies at The Evergreen State College. Stephanie is one of the most influential historians of marriage, gender, and family life, and her work has helped reshape how we understand the myths and realities of family across history.

Stephanie and I talk about her latest book, For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage, and why modern relationships can feel so difficult despite the fact that many people now have higher hopes for love, equality, and emotional connection than ever before.

We discuss nostalgia, the myth of the “traditional family,” the pressures facing modern marriages, and why so much of today’s family conflict may be tied to larger social and economic forces. Stephanie offers a powerful way of thinking about family estrangement as a kind of “referred pain,” where people may blame parents, partners, or family members for distress that is also being shaped by broader cultural and economic instability.

Listen for more on:

• Why nostalgia for the past can be both comforting and misleading
• What people often get wrong about the 1950s family
• How economic insecurity and inequality affect marriage and family life
• Why modern couples may have higher expectations, but less support
• How social and economic pressure can show up as family conflict
• Why family estrangement may sometimes reflect “referred pain” from larger cultural forces
• What the “trad wife” movement reveals about gender, work, and nostalgia
• How ideas about masculinity, femininity, and emotional expression have changed over time
• Why the history of marriage is more complicated than the myths we inherit
• How understanding family history can help us think more clearly about modern relationships

Tune into this episode of Family Troubles for a fascinating conversation about marriage, family history, gender roles, economic pressure, and why the challenges facing today’s families are rarely as simple as personal failure.

Guest links:
Website: https://www.stephaniecoontz.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stephaniecoontzauthor

Dr. Joshua Coleman’s Links:
Website: http://www.drjoshuacoleman.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.josh.coleman
Substack: https://substack.com/@joshuacolemanphd
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrJoshColeman/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjoshuacoleman/?trk=opento_sprofile_topcard
Twitter X: https://x.com/drjcoleman
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc-olRqS_o2xJlkpxWEEErg

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Welcome everybody to another Family Troubles podcast. It is my extreme pleasure today to have on my friend and colleague, noted historian Stephanie Kuntz. She's the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. She's probably the most widely quoted and known family historian in the nation. She has authored several books on gender, family, and history. I think I've read most, if not all of them, including Marriage of History, which was cited in the United States Supreme Court decision on marriage equality. Her new book, which I highly recommend. I just finished it for better and worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage. So welcome, Stephanie.

SPEAKER_02 0:54

Well, thank you. Nice to talk with you.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Always. Yeah, always good to talk to you as well. So there are so many kind of aha moments for me in your book, as there really are in every book. I first came to your work when I read uh The Way We Never Were. Some gosh, when was that published? How many years ago? 1992. 1992, yeah. I probably read it around then and became an immediate fan of your work and started following you in your work. Um and this book is is interesting because it sort of supports some of those things. And it sounds like um it also revised some of your thinking about that. And one of the things that you talk about is sort of the role and the nature of nostalgia. Um, and that, you know, the way we never were in some ways is a critique of nostalgia, but you also argue that in some ways nostalgia has its utility. And um, so can you speak a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_02 1:45

Well, I I think I've changed my thinking in two different ways. First of all, I've uh really understood much better the difference between healthy nostalgia and unhealthy nostalgia. Uh and they've actually done research on on the difference and and the different effects it has on people. Healthy nostalgia is personal nostalgia. It's when you start thinking about good times with friends or family or wonderful things that you that that you kind of miss, but at at the same time, it's not like you think they're gone forever. It helps you that kind of nostalgia, you're you're thinking, it it actually makes people in a cold room, it makes them feel warmer.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

It actually physically feeling physically warmer. That's fast that's fascinating.

SPEAKER_02 2:27

And it makes them feel socially warmer too. People who indulge in this kind of personal nostalgia about people they knew and and you hung out with and family and good experiences, they're actually more eager to meet new people and uh to have new experiences. But there's another kind of nostalgia. Um, and it's one that that we've seen before in history, uh, and I call it social or political nostalgia. And that's nostalgia for a way of life or a place that is gone and that you think is gone because you were kicked out of it, or you were left there and it no longer has the kind of meaning that it used to have. And that turns into uh the kind of nostalgia for a way of life, often largely imaginary, uh, because it's projected. And it tends to do the opposite of what nostalgia does. It makes you colder toward people you don't know, it makes you less likely to reach out to people. And the the the word nostalgia first was invented back in uh the 1690s because there was this massive um epidemic of nostalgia then. And it was named by a medical student nostalgia, uh hunger for home, home sickness, sickness for home. And at that time, it it tended to uh afflict people who had left their home to find work or who were enslaved or uh who were soldiers in and mercenary armies in foreign lands. And so they were missing, literally missing home. Uh and it it was it could kill people. It was actually a real medical disease.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 4:11

Uh it disappeared uh in the in the early 19th century as people learned that they could move and stay in touch, uh, and that they had more freedom to go uh back, and also that moving didn't necessarily mean losing everything. There were new, you could move into a place and and have the same institutions and meet new people and have progress. So, what we've seen recently, I think, is a kind of revival of the old nostalgia with one big difference. It seems to occur to people who have been left behind, either in regions or in ways of life that don't seem to get the respect that they used to and don't seem to give the benefits they used to.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:59

And that kind of nostalgia is is um really very, very difficult on people, and it tends to lead to the kind of hostile uh responses to strangers and new experiences that social uh nostalgia does. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

You you write in a related way that the erosion of the social safety net caused an erosion of the psychological safety net, which I think is such a profound observation. Can you, and that seems tied to what you're describing here, can you say more about that?

SPEAKER_02 5:30

Well, maybe I should back up a little bit because um the nostalgia issue uh makes me actually, as I've studied this more and what's behind it, uh, it actually has led me to critique the way I did and the way we never were. Uh it I it's it's no wonder as a historian that I was a little uh dismissive of people who thought that we should go back to the 1950s family. That was a period when there were uh marital rape was perfectly legal, uh when child abuse and domestic violence were much higher than they were today and quite acceptable. Um and so I think I had an excuse for saying this is ridiculous, this trad wife stuff or whatever it is. But as I thought about it earlier, and in the context of the kind of social changes that we're seeing now, I began to realize that um there were things that you should miss about the 1950s, uh only different ones than we're told we should miss. Um my son is a uh physician and he helped me actually under understand this as a form of referred pain.

SPEAKER_00 6:36

Interesting.

SPEAKER_02 6:37

He makes the point that your brain really has trouble if you're hurting inside in a visceral organ, the brain has trouble locating exactly what's wrong. So it looks for something on your skin that has similar uh nerves, some connections with nerves. So that if, for example, you've eaten too much and the esophagus is pushing, it says, Oh, you have uh uh you you you have a neckache. Uh or if you've got something in the back of your uh tongue, you've got a that infection in the in the cavities, uh, it may actually express itself as shoulder pain. And that helped me really understand and think about why people are feeling this nostalgia for the families. We feel the losses uh that have occurred since the 50s in the families. Um but that's not where they originate. They originate in the losses of the kind of economic system in which there was a lot of progress for everybody along the line, much less social inequality here. Um two two brand economists recently estimated that if wage trends had been the way, had stayed the way they were from 1947 to 19 uh seventy four, um, every section of the population, you know, low-paid, middle-paid, uh, black, uh uh uh Hispanic, white, all of them would have been making by 2018 67% more than they ended up making. Horrible. Instead, that extra money went to the top 20 percent. And we now live in what three Citibank economists have called a plutonomy, where top 20 percent and increasingly the top 2% control uh account for half of all spending. So they get most of the attention uh uh of people who are producing things. And we are not only undergoing the economic precarity and economic insecurity that many people notice, but I've increasingly noticed that we also are undergoing a sense of exclusion. You know, this is a world where high-worth customers get dedicated phone lines, they get to start go on the plane first, you know, load up the baggage card so you have to send yours down. Uh we struggle with the. Um bid up the price of sports tickets that used to be family occasions. Right, yeah. And one of the things that what we're finding is that this kind of sense of social exclusion and not being respected, you know, that uh hits the same areas of the brain as physical pain.

SPEAKER_03 9:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:24

But it doesn't cause one to ask for help. It causes more aggressive responses. So that's how I've changed my thinking on nostalgia. And um, although I think that it's it really important that we educate people that you do not want to go back to the trad wives of the 1950s, that we be respectful of the kind of economic pain uh that they are having and that elites uh have been very insensitive to.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

Yeah. Well, I think that explains your your statement that the erosion of the social safety net, which was much more developed and extensive during that post-war period until the mid to late 1970s, has gotten completely eviscerated in the neoliberal order that that people could feel much more confident and relaxed and happy in the way that they do, and say that northern European countries and Japan and other countries where there's lower social inequality. Um, and so they don't have so the the deprivation of that has caused so much more anxiety and depression and mental illness. And so that it's understandable that people would long for an earlier time where it seemed like things were at least progressing and they were, right?

SPEAKER_02 10:32

And and it comes at a time and and that I think is really important. People are all the time saying, you know, oh, you know, Americans don't value marriage. Actually, we have much higher standards for what we want out of the marriage relationship than ever before. We really want it to be an egalitarian, mutually supportive relationship. But that those kind of relationships take work, they take patience, they take the time uh and the confidence in your future so that you can negotiate and work on those things. So just at the time that we've established ha actually these higher expectations of marriage, we are experiencing this precariousness that makes us uh much more tense about things, that makes us worry what we can do for our kids, that makes us uh fight with each other over who's doing what and more in the house uh with our egalitarian aspirations and and what I call the earworms of the past that are hard to shed and especially hard to shed when you're under pressure. You know, they may not know they may not know the research that you as a psychologist know or the sociologist know about how lack of time and lack of money erode the quality of people's ability to communicate even effectively. But they've seen it in action.

SPEAKER_00 11:48

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's much harder to be happier to to bring your own sort of patience with your partner or ability to communicate if you're worried about the next paycheck or how you're going to support your kids and fail to go to college or pay for preschool or any of these things. They have enormous weight in ways that I don't think the average American thinks about, and then they get preyed upon by political parties who sort of say, well, the issue is immigrants or the you know your neighbors or other other people. So it's really a misattribution of cause, which is tragic.

SPEAKER_02 12:19

Yeah, and I think it helps explain a really interesting paradox of marriage. Um, divorce rates of people who do marry have been falling since 1980. They're actually lower than they were in the 1950s.

SPEAKER_03 12:31

Really?

SPEAKER_02 12:32

Yes. But but that's the count, the number of people who marry who get divorced. Um the problem is that nowadays uh most marriages begin as cohabitation. And what we're finding is that lower income uh couples, people who are under this kind of economic stress, actually recognizing that they need to uh do something about that, they move in together with the intention of marrying, um, but with the idea that we have to meet an economic and emotional and security bar before we marry. And when they don't meet that, they break up, often because of the kinds of pressures and tensions and behaviors that people take under stress that are not good for relationships, whether that's drinking too much or using drugs to escape it. And so there's very high breakup rates of capital cohabitors who intended to marry when they came. And I think that's a reflection of the economic uh problems.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

So it's marriages become increasingly a luxury good, only available to those who have the resources to do it and succeed in it, right?

SPEAKER_02 13:40

Um, yeah, I've it it it's more than a luxury good, of course, because when it works, it can really um help you. This is again one of those other paradoxes. A good marriage is very, very good both emotionally and economically for people, but a bad one can be worse than it can be as bad as it gets.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

That's true. You wrote in marriage a history. Marriage has changed more in the past 30 years than it did in the prior 3,000 years. And it seems like you explore that more in in this book as as well. And I think about that a lot with estrangement, uh, the families who are estranged, because it seems like in both cases, what has changed has been the institutions that supported family, religion, community, neighborhoods, et cetera. And it's kind of shifted to this much more of a greater emphasis on um personal happiness, identity, mental health, et cetera. And so uh again, it seems like nice work if you can get it. If you have the resources to have a close relationship between parents and children, it requires the parents to be much more psychological and resourced and available, but if they as if they don't, the adult child can feel like, well, it's not meeting my needs, so and I'm not obligated to respect my parents or um, you know, my religion isn't really telling me to. And so do you have thoughts about all of that?

SPEAKER_02 14:59

Well, I think what uh you know, I've read your book and really admire it too. Um and I think really now that I was this is the first time it's occurred to me, you too are dealing with a form of referred pain. That you've got these these people who expect that they will get happiness from the other person instead of from a social system that may be set letting them down. Uh and that, you know, they can't really look forward to the kind of future. Uh and so then they kind of say, Well, this must be my parents' fault.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 15:32

So I d I think it's actually a very similar experience of referred referred pain.

SPEAKER_00 15:37

That uh Yeah, that's a great metaphor. I hadn't I hadn't thought about that as a metaphor, but that that makes a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_03 15:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:45

Yeah, because we we you know we've been we the good side is we do expect so much of relationships. Right. The bad side, we don't expect enough of our social and economic system. And so when people find that they're they're being failed by their social and economic system, it's easy for them to say, well, I must be actually being failed by my parents.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

Right, exactly. Yeah. And so the healthiest thing to do is just to get rid of them. So many are tragically. Well, so you talk about the whole tread traditional the troud wives movement, and what what's that all about? Is that sort of the nostalgia the maladaptive nostalgia? How do you think about the whole maybe define it for those who'd haven't really aren't as familiar with that whole term?

SPEAKER_02 16:29

Well, it's it's the idea that uh we should go that go back to the 1950s when women uh didn't try to be girl bosses and uh that they uh they yeah, new except that they're not really saying new their places. That's the hidden agenda, uh definitely, especially one of the ones who want to even take away their vote. But the but the idea is that well, women have been exploited by this uh economic uh uh system. They're working for low pay, they're working all these hours. Really, they ought to be protected by the men who can take care of them. And in return for being protected, uh they give up the leadership to the man, but they get all sorts of evidently, supposedly, uh uh satisfaction out of pleasing uh him. And and maybe that works well until he's not pleased or find somebody else uh who can please him more.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

A younger, newer model, right?

SPEAKER_02 17:26

But you know, you can overestimate uh how much people believe that. You know, if you I was just looking at the General Social Survey that's been asking for since 1977, um, do you agree with the following statement? Uh that it's much better for everyone that the man earns the living and the woman takes care of the home. Well, you know, vast majority uh thought that that strongly agreed with that back in 1977. Um the vast majority strongly disagree with it even today. There's been a slight dip uh since in the last two years, um, but it's still not something that people agree with. So I think that this tradwife thing is in part a uh a right wing, part of it is a right-wing idea uh that we're going to get rid of the uh kind of egalitarianism that um people have been fighting for, both social and gender. But another part of it is just wishful thinking on the part of some women who who would like to live that way. And another part is out and out um uh what I just lost the word, I guess, because I'm too indignant, uh, is just out and out um selfish uh self-promotion. Because these people really don't live that way. They just make a lot of money uh out of doing it. So so so so I think that that really we have to move beyond that and keep looking at the kind of social and economic changes that are making it so difficult to have family life, whether it whatever kind of family it is that you're having.

SPEAKER_00 19:05

I mean, it's interesting to me that those who advocate for this are not are against you know living wage, they're against unions, they're against all the social infrastructure that actually helped the middle class become the middle class and have a stable life. So it's sort of like on the one hand, they're preaching give let men take over, but we're not necessarily going to support any policy initiatives that are gonna actually allow them to support a family, let alone themselves.

SPEAKER_02 19:28

So it's yeah, I spend I spend one of my chapters really digging into the very, very uh unholy alliance that developed uh in the early 70s between uh billionaire millionaires uh and um uh wealthy families who and corporates uh corporations who were tired of being um pressured to you know take it easy and and kind of share the wealth a little bit. And uh right-wing conservatives who uh were threatened by the rise of the women's movement. And they developed this alliance that, you know, if you actually read what Jesus said about prosperity and money, uh, is a little startling. Um But what's interesting is it was almost like a a a bait and switch job. Uh they push they push the idea that we should go back to traditional families, but they also push the kind of economic recklessness that has undermined traditional families and led to an excess of individualism.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

Right, exactly. Yeah, the the the hypocrisy is is stunning in terms of that. So in your book, you talk about that there's two big challenges to marriage today. What what uh what would you how would you describe those two big challenges?

SPEAKER_02 20:44

Well, we've been talking about one of them. One of them is the uh economic inequality, which has now reached levels a year ago I would have said not seen since the Gilded Age, but as of 1925, they've greatly surpassed the Gilded Age. Um there are 45 families, uh, according to Fortune who are worth more than 45 billion dollars. And I sat down and figured out how long it would take them, complaining about taxes, to run out of money. If they spent a million dollars a week, it would take them 190 years, each of them. Oh my god. So I don't think they're really as hard up as they're pretending to be. But you get this group of people um, you know, spearheading uh and drawing on the really um very socially conservative right-wing people who want to literally send women back into the home. Um as I say, we tried that before, and it takes a hell of a lot of repression, and even then people eventually fight back. So one of the challenges to modern marriage is the difficulty of um finding time and enough economic security to actually build a family life. Um the other Another one though, as even for the people who have the economic security and enter it, is that we do have higher expectations of egalitarian relations, but we also have a lot of old earworms and habits that have been drilled into us about how men are sub men are naturally and how women are naturally. One of the funnest things about doing the research for this was to find out how recent these ideas are. For example, women didn't used to do emotion work. They weren't the emotion work in patriarchal societies, in real patriarchal aristocratic societies, was something the lower class did to the upper class. Males and females, you know, really watched what the feelings were of the upper class and tried to uh assuage them and make and they did know nothing of the same to the lower class. Um it was not, and and men did as much emotion work as women in that way. Uh the other thing that's really interesting is to think how recently we developed this idea that men are stoical and um and that they have all you know, all everything the manosphere tells you. Well, you send a manosphere person back to the early 19th century, and he would think that the basic leap most leading men of the era were total whooshes and wimps, not a get not a be given a tampax, as they as they say, you know? Because if you look at 19th century men and early 20th century men, uh they had no problem talking about their emotions about each other. They would write letters about how deeply they loved the friendship, about lying down together in bed and resting together. No. Um, they would be they would say things to their uh loved women, like where thou art that is a sort of death, you know. I used to have my students sometimes my read these letters aloud, these love letters that we have left over, and the guys would get so antsy, they would shift in their seats and they'd clutch. And the girls would say, Well, you know, what's the problem with you men? Uh so there's an extent of emotionalism in the past that was not incompatible with masculinity. There's a wonderful picture book. Um, when people when when photographs first started taking, men would photograph themselves with their friends sitting together, sitting on one other's lap in chairs. Wow. This went on until the early 20 first 20th century, when we ironically discovered the uh and uh and welcomed the development of heterosexual uh desire, and but again got paranoid about how non-sexual affection could lead to homosexuality. The one the one thing I wanted to add to uh though that I've been thinking about a lot until the late 19th century, uh the opposite of masculinity of manhood was considered childhood. Um and it's only in the late 19th century that masculinity starts to get defined as the opposite of femininity, of womanhood. And I think this has been a really serious problem, um especially as women have gained freedom to do things that men used to do. I mean, it was one thing to say, okay, manhood is the opposite of womanhood. We protect, we serve in the army, we do all these things that women can't do. We work strenuous jobs. But then women start doing strenuous jobs, they start taking risks, they start engaging in sports, uh, and they even become uh military uh heroes. So then how do you prove that you're a man? How do you prove that you're the opposite of a woman? Well, I think a whole uh group of people have decided it's by showing how toxic you can be.

SPEAKER_00 25:52

Right. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I also liked your critique of of sort of the um evolutionary psychology, because um, you know, the the evolutionary psychology view as well, women are attracted to muscular men because they're more likely to you know be in a provision provider role, and men are more attracted to women because of their their youth and beauty and their ability to you know procreate and the like. And and you're saying you're you're saying that that your your study of other cultures and tribal cultures in particular doesn't necessarily support that view, is that right?

SPEAKER_02 26:24

Oh, yeah, that was another really fun part of the book. Um first of all, it's just nonsense that um that that that um we know that that that women were wanted because they had this uh low low waist, the big waist-hip ratio. Uh I spend some time in the book uh explaining that. It's maybe too complicated to go in here, but uh the best illustration of it is the fact that when you show that uh a woman with that kind of curvy body and very slender waist um to men in horticultural or um uh bonding and gathering societies, they assume that the woman is sick, that she must be very ill. One of them says she must have a very bad case of diarrhea. The other thing that I think was delightful was they then took um three a picture of a woman and a man, and they went to different cultures at different levels of subsistence. And they the same person, first they altered they had that the regular picture, then they altered it to become more masculine or or more feminine. And they asked people in these cultures what they preferred. It's only in the very uh advanced industrial uh market economies that they wanted the most masculinized man and the most feminized female face. In other cultures, uh women much preferred the feminized uh version of the man's face, and women preferred the masculinized version. So these sorts of things are very cultural and very class-based too. Because you know you when what what what is a sign of luxury when you can cinch your waist in so much that you probably would fall over uh if you tried to do heavy labor and get a long fingernails, and all of that shows that you're a lady of leisure. And I think these are not built-in hereditary uh beauty standards. They've been imposed on us by a culture that values how much you can show off how how much you own. And increasingly we're seeing women showing off how much they can change their um looks, not necessarily to be uh to be beautiful, but just as to show that they have the money and to look like these artificial mannequins.

SPEAKER_00 28:49

Yeah, no, it's a very troubling development. Well, didn't it used to be the case that portliness was considered a sign of wealth, at least for men, I don't know for women as well, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:00

Yes, and many and in many societies where food is scarce, that's a beauty standard. Right. Not the idea that you can starve yourself. That's a luxury of a rich society. You can diet.

SPEAKER_00 29:12

Right, exactly. So funny. Um well, speaking more about the whole um feminization thing and and masculinity, one of the other things that you talked about was the way that a guy could talk about his mother in these really loving, affectionate tones that we would consider today to be practically incestuous. You know, you you cite letters of men to their mothers when they were in the Civil War, other places, uh, that if you just read it, you would assume that they were writing to a lover and that, you know, how I longed to comb your hair or you know, how much I my darling and lay my head upon your breast, yes.

SPEAKER_02 29:49

Yeah, no, it's it's so interesting because the Victorian reticence about sex and heterosexuality, which incidentally, when heterosexuality first came into dictionaries in the early 20th century, it was called a depraved or abnormal attraction to the opposite sex.

SPEAKER_00 30:08

Oh, interesting.

SPEAKER_02 30:10

This is this is Victorian ideology. So but so what's interesting, and it's an interesting trade-off, it was terrible to talk about sex. I mean, doctors who talked about foreplay to help their married patients, you know, get along better, were often, you know, fined or one sent to jail. Um but it was perfectly fine to talk about like we have letters from men to their fiancés, uh, so it's not hidden homosexuality, talking about how pleasant it was uh to lie down in bed with their roommate last night and fall asleep peacefully on his shoulder. So there was no uh worry about that. And that that's one of the things I talk about. It's one of the trade-offs of the first sexual revolution in the 20th century, is it made sexual touching okay, it made sexual desire okay, but it also sexualized the non-sexual touching that is an important part of human interaction. For sure. And this is a peculiarly American thing, too. They once did a study of teenagers in fast food shops in France and uh in America. And in France, the teenagers were just hanging all over each other, touching each other all the time. But in America, they were only touching themselves. Uh they don't care uh unless they had a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Um, but the that's interesting that we've lost the not the respect for non-sexual touch. And of course, it's very important uh to get rid of unwanted sexual touching. But sometimes you think maybe we've gone a little too far.

SPEAKER_00 31:54

Oh, for sure, yeah. When I when I was in Bali some 40 years ago, I was really struck by seeing the teenage boys walking around holding hands. A group of them would be all be sitting together, kind of with their arms around each other. It was so sweet. And also I thought, God, that would never happen here. It would just be, you know, they'd be humiliated and teased endlessly. And it's it's tragic because affection is really uh such an important way to to bond. So well, yeah. Um well, speaking, thinking more about the issue of motherhood. Um, yeah, I think you're right that that in the early 20th century we began to become to fear motherhood as sort of a pathway to feminizing men and and the like. And you know, and then psychologists jumped in the mix and said that, oh, an overly close relationship can lead to homosexuality or schizophrenia or feminization of men and the like. And what what caused that development? At what point did we become afraid of motherhood?

SPEAKER_02 32:48

Well, I'm I'm not sure that we were afraid of motherhood. It's just that we were, and in fact, we started that's when we started really idealizing it and romanticizing it and telling women, you know, that's the that's the goal of your life. But um, but what we what we did do is we wanted mothers not to raise kids boys who were gentle. Um the the whole thing started as an idea that you know these mothers were being too loving with their sons and letting their sons be too loving with them. Uh and the more that the emphasis was on that uh masculinity is the opposite of womanhood as opposed to boyhood, the more women were chastised for uh allowing affection with their with their sons.

SPEAKER_00 33:36

Uh it's tragic. And it's still still very common. I mean, the current research shows that that both men and women, even in contemporary parenting, are more afraid of they don't talk to their boys as much, they don't use as much emotional language with them. Um there was an interesting study that had um the experimenters switch the clothing of infants for the study. And and so they it looked like the boy was a girl, an infant boy was actually a girl, and vice versa. And then they would show parents pictures or videos of them crying, and then they would ask them, well, what is this kid feeling? And the parents, you know, pretty consistently would say that the girl, that the girl who's actually a boy crying was, you know, sad or upset and needed to be comforted, and the girl who's actually the boy who's actually a girl crying was actually aggressive and angry. And so there's there's still that kind of earworm, to use your term, that that persists in terms of current parenting, which also is sort of sad for boys because boys grow up with a kind of a paucity of learning how to use their emotions and think about their feelings and feel in sympathy with their feelings.

SPEAKER_02 34:44

And so and those these these um things about parenting and boy and girl stuff and what men and women do uh are real problems nowadays in relationships because most men and women do want more egalitarian relationships than in the past. Uh and before they have children, a lot of them are achieving it. But the survival of a child makes it really, really difficult, especially in a country with one of the worst uh child support systems and uh family uh assistance systems in all of the uh industrial world. Uh so then you get women, um somebody has to stay home. That makes and and it certainly makes sense often for it to be the woman. She's recovering from childbirth, she's nursing. But if they don't have paternity leave, and if the couple hasn't thought through about how to make the transition when it's time for her to go back to work, you get into this pattern where uh we draw on all of those stereotypes uh that women are the ones who are really good at this. And uh the better they get at it, uh the more the men feel inadequate at it. Right. Uh that can be used as an excuse by men. So sometimes women often complain that the man will say, Well, I want to do it, but you have to show me how. But the other side is uh women um for a a century have been told that their value lies in the fact that they are experts in this sort of thing. Uh unlike, unlike in the Middle Ages, when women were dominated, yes, but they were considered actually just as competent at uh doing work uh and not someone who would just focus on child rearing. But our our you know, for a hundred years we've been told this is your identity. And so women have developed, even as men have developed uh this learned helplessness, women have developed this learned helpfulness that can be very uh can be very um damaging to the man's uh willingness and ability to take over. Um, you know, it's it's I tell a story in the book because I've I've given lectures on what they call gatekeeping. That is where the women say, Well, we'll let you in, but you have to do it my way, you know, uh, and how that destructive that is for relationships. Now, I've given lectures on this a dozen times. My husband's heard me do it. The very first time that my grandson, little baby, was being held by my uh husband in the other room while I was in the kitchen and started to wail, I swooped in there and wrapped him out of his arms. And I turned around and looked, and he was pissed. Very mad. Fortunately, and this is why I sometimes think that knowing the sociology and history can be as helpful as actual therapy to people. Um, he I was immediately able to say, okay, I fell into that trap that we've talked about. And he could say, Okay, I don't like you to do that, but I understand that you're conditioned and you will sometimes slip back. But here's what I'm gonna do. I'm not gonna put my dishes in the dishwasher for the next few days because I also noticed that you started rearranging them for me. I thought, okay. You know, and I I thought that was fair enough.

SPEAKER_00 38:14

That's hilarious. Um well, speaking of the the gender differences, one of the things that you talk about in your book is that women were never simply dependents in this kind of current model of women needing to be dependent. And then it's it's certainly true, but I think you talk about in the more sort of pre-industrial age that women were really equal participants in terms if they weren't, you know, if they were doing pretty much everything else on the farm. And yeah, do you want to just say a little bit more about that?

SPEAKER_02 38:43

Yeah, and you know, the idea that uh there's such a thing as a male provider or a male breadwinner, that really didn't come into being. You you don't hear the word male breadwinner until the 1820s. And it's it's very rare even then. If you look at at the you know, feudal patriarchy in the Middle Ages or just even colonial America, men and women had to be, they they called each other yoke mates, uh meat helps. Now, I'm not idealizing it. Males were definitely the bosses, and they could come down very hard if a woman uh disobeyed them. But there was no sense that women were delicate flowers who couldn't make these decisions. In fact, a woman who cross-dressed and acted like a man or a deputy husband, as long as she was looking out for the interests of the family, was highly respected. Um so you don't have the same idea that you have nowadays that women should be feminine and retiring. Um in fact, if you if you wanted to have slogans, uh the slogan of patriarchy was women are very capable but conniving, and so we need to protect ourselves from them. And then democracy comes along uh and the market economy, and men move out, and they don't let women move in, but you can no longer say that uh somebody's born to be, you know, we believe in equality. So how do you explain it then? You say, well, it's for the protection of women. And women are communal and they're virtuous, but they're vulnerable, and we're gonna take care of them. So it's a kind of trap that uh in the long run uh is certainly not as brutal as patriarchy, but it's an equal trap that we find even now as women try to advance in the work world. Their communal reputation uh gets them assigned to things like being human resource people, uh, but not people who can take strong action.

SPEAKER_00 40:42

Yeah, it's interesting. Speaking of the earworms, right? Yeah. Well, the other thing that you talk about in your book is that you said that there are striking parallels between the culture wars of the 1920s and the 2020s. What yeah, can you say more about that? What other strategies?

SPEAKER_02 40:58

Well, you know, it's it's it's obviously that um the the one of the parallels is that big changes in gender and sexuality are very threatening to people. And I try to understand that. I mean, I'm I'm not someone who um who says you just have to change your mind overnight on these sort of things. Gender is the very first thing we learn about uh somebody else, about what we can expect from them, what how we should treat them. And it is disorienting people not to do it. And it was very disorienting back in the 20th, uh early 20th century to have women dressing uh in some of the same clothes that men did, going out doing these things, and uh, of course, racial uh racial relations changing and you know, blacks inserting their right to go out in public. And it led to the same sort of fears and paranoid and conspiracies, and they're actually tremendously uh uh tremendous parallels. I mean, you had the same idea that uh other countries were sending rapists and and criminals to to take over, and so you had to get rid of people of other colors. Uh, you had the idea uh they then the idea was that people were crossing state lines uh to do immoral acts and they had to be arrested, even if the woman uh had consented to go across straight line. It was called trafficking. Well, here we have now on abort, we have dozens of bills have been addressed and have been introduced in legislatures to make crossing straight lines to get an abortion a form of fetus trafficking, is what they call it. And some some of these bills they haven't yet passed them, but uh, I think they might be getting close to it, actually suggest the death penalty uh for fee for female for fetus trafficking. So there's all sorts of um, there's also the same sort of uh conspiracy theories about the deep state. Uh and you had an auto magnet, Henry Ford, uh, who believed uh the same sort of thing that our current auto magnate uh Elon Musk does. So the parallels are amusing and scary at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 43:10

Yeah, yeah, very much important.

SPEAKER_02 43:12

We did we we did go out, we did grow out of it though, uh with much um with much resistance. And we're gonna have to have the same resistance to this kind of paranoia today.

SPEAKER_00 43:24

And do you feel helpful at this point, or do you feel discouraged, or how does all of this sit with you as a historian?

SPEAKER_02 43:31

Well, I am encouraged by how much many people, when you really dig down, are interested in uh solving these kinds of problems. Um there I'm discouraged by the uh extent to which the tremendous inequality of wealth has managed to uh let people and the Supreme Court uh going along with it, to let people basically buy elections and just completely deny the will uh of the American people when you take their polls.

SPEAKER_03 44:07

Right.

SPEAKER_02 44:07

Um so so there's mixed stuff uh going on there. People uh I think most people really want to be better parents and better um better partners, but there's all of these kind of pressures on it, and um we're going to have to stand up to them somehow.

SPEAKER_00 44:25

Yeah, right, exactly. Well, this has been great, Stephanie, as I knew that it would. Is there anything that we didn't cover that you wanted to make sure that we we get into the podcast?

SPEAKER_02 44:35

Or well, um I had I tried to I had two I tried to do two different things with this. Um uh one to bust a lot of myths. And there's really even uh among feminist myths like the idea that misses is a heritage of patriarchy, it's actually an invention of democracy. Those were kind of fun. But the challenge is to really acknowledge the pain and the grievances that people are feeling, but to try and explain them in ways that say you've been misdirected as to what your enemy is and to why you are feeling this way. That took a lot of research. It was very trying, and um, I have to leave it to readers to decide whether I I uh I I explained it, but I wanted to model for people who agree with me how not to talk about it, how not to blame people for having these, but to actually empathize with the pain they feel and try to find ways to explain that the it's coming, the problems are coming from a different source than they think.

SPEAKER_00 45:41

Yeah, no, I think it's really useful. And it's an excellent book. I highly recommend it to everybody for better and worse, um, the complicated past and challenging future of marriage. So thank you so much, Stephanie, for coming on my podcast. And I hope we get to talk soon.

SPEAKER_02 45:56

Well, thank you, Josh, for all the work you do.

SPEAKER_00 45:58

I appreciate it. If you found this helpful, please follow the podcast and leave a review. It helps other people find the show who could benefit from it. If you want to learn more about my work, you can visit me at www.drjoshuacoleman.com. That is D-R-J-O-S-H-U-A-C-O-L-E-M-E-N dot com, or subscribe to my Substack Family Troubles. Hope to see you in one of those places soon. Take care.