| In this talk Professor Coontz will
argue that recent changes in marriage and family life should be
understood as resulting from the interaction between two powerful
but very different trends in gender and class relations. One trend
is the uneven, still limited, but undeniably dramatic progress
toward equality in personal life and cultural values. We have seen a
growing repudiation of centuries-old hierarchies and role
assignments based on gender. The other trend is an equally powerful
movement--accelerated by the Great Recession but predating it by
three decades--toward increasing inequality, insecurity, and
unpredictability in economic life. This has resulted in substantial
losses for the most historically vulnerable and least-educated
sections of the workforce and has recreated some older gender
hierarchies in new forms.
The ongoing gender revolution interacts with widening
economic inequality in complex ways, increasing the benefits of
marriage for individuals with higher earnings power while increasing
the risks of marriage for low-income individuals, especially women. Stephanie Coontz teaches History and Family Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and serves as Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families. She has authored seven books on marriage and family life, including A Strange Stirring: ‘The Feminine Mystique’ and American Women at the Down of the 1960s, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (new edition forthcoming in 2016), and Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage, which was cited in the recent US Supreme Court decision on marriage equality. Coontz is a frequent guest columnist for the New York Times and has appeared on The Colbert Report, MSNBC's "The Cycle," The Today Show, PBS News Hour, Oprah Winfrey, Crossfire, 20/20, CBS This Morning, CSPAN, and the O-Reilly Factor, along with numerous NPR shows. A former Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Coontz has also taught at Kobe University in Japan and the University of Hawaii at Hilo. In 2013 she received a Work-Life Legacy Award from the Families and Work Institute. She has also been awarded the Council on Contemporary Families first-ever "Visionary Leadership" Award and the Dale Richmond Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics for her "outstanding contributions to the field of child development." |
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