Customer Reviews

Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage

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Stephanie Coontz has once again written a thoughful, informative and thoroughly readable book. After devouring her THE WAY WE NEVER WERE, I didn't think it could get any better. Oh, was I wrong. Marriage, A History, is so interesting, so captivating, that you will not want to put it down, you will be telling all your friends about it. And, if you are smart, you'll get a book club together to discuss this important piece of work.
As an author and academic myself, I know how much work goes into writing a book. Coontz has done one difficult piece of investigative research--and she makes it interesting, even compelling. Coontz documents the changes marriage has gone through from times past when women were socialized to obey the man, when no one even expected to marry for love. Back then, marriage was for economic and social reasons and the web or family and society kept a couple together. Now we expect to marry for love, but as Coontz shows, love is the most fragile part of the equation. Thus, it has meant a change in how we see marriage, a change in behaviors. Not only do we expect emotional intimacy, but women (in Western societies, anyway) are more equal than before. And so marriage continues to evolve. Coontz also shows how robust the institution of marriage is: try to think of many other institutions that have survived for thousands of years. She also gives honest--and personal--insights into the difficulties of sustaining a happy marriage, as well as the rewards. Consider that married couples in Western countries are generally better off emotionally, economically and are healthier than couples living in other types of arrangements.
So, click on the button and buy this book. You will be thankful you did.
Dr. Dorothy Marcic
Vanderbilt University

Once again Coontz (The way we never were, The way we really are) delves beyond simplistic pop culture/political sound bites to deliver an infinitely more complex portrait of American family life. This time she tackles marriage.

Because marriage has traditionally been about possession of property (the woman and her family's ownings) today's pop culture promotion of marriage as a partnership of equals is VERY new. It is not at all traditional in the actual historical sense.

People who are eager to restrict same sex marriage might want to reconsider after they learn what had previously been restricted throughout American history. Interracial, inter-religious, and the unions of people with disabilities were all once barred under 'protection' guises of their day.

We endorse a very selective and unrealistic history of marriage whenever we avoid recognition of these histories. It is easy to support marriage restrictions until we have to concede that we might ourselves be discriminated by a genuinely 'traditional' institution. Today's attempts to ban same sex marriage only carry on the tradition of fear and division rather than affirming the institution itself.

Coontz delves into disturbing histories, but this book is completely readable. Like her previous works, this book is accessible; the scholar, community activist, and general audiences all will find this title a very informative work.

We cannot discuss the tradition of marriage without first actually conceding that this institution has previously changed and then what adherence to tradition really would mean for the country.

I was excited when i heard that Coontz was coming out with another book because I found her books The Way We Never Were and The Way We Really Are to be incredibly informative and eye-opening.

I really enjoyed this particular book because she looks at the phenomenon of marriage from an objective, historical point of view. People who are interested in history, interested in the social development of relationships and interested in womens studies would really enjoy this book.

However I found that some of the information that was displayed in this book was done in more depth in previous books on the subject. Coontz pulls together a very basic history of marriage and pieces it together from her sociological historical perspective. Other books that go into more depth on the details of the history of such things would definitely be: Hands and Hearts, Public Vows, The History of the Wife, All Dressed In White, From Front Porch to Backseat. Also, getting in touch with old etiquette books as well as getting a hold of the books Pink Think and Feminine Mystique would be very useful as well in terms of understanding the development of romantic relationships the way that they are. She uses her previous books as a springing point for some of the stuff displayed in this book as well. However a lot of the books that I previously mentioned are appropietely used in the bibliography for this particular book. As a result, i think that her work is well researched. Its probably not the most definitive book in the field, however people who are interested in the history of marriage and family will probably this resource. Fans of Coontz will more than likely enjoy being exposed to another aspect of family studies as well.

What Coontz does best is finding ways to address these issues in a way that both the casual and academic reader would be interested in. It is easy enough for people who may not have been to college to understand and substantial enough for the more academic reader to find further areas of research.

This book traces the history of marriage from pre-modern society through the ages and until today. As such, it will probably contain a lot of interesting and informative information to the reader. It will possibly dispel quite a few myths the reader may have (almost everyone will have some kind of myth as part of their view of the past). The book is excellent in describing marriage in the ancient world, the middle ages, the rennaisance and the pre-modern era. The institution has been changed many times beyond recognition and some of the practices and ideologies require a very open mind, especially if you consider yourself traditional.

I think the author is less successful in dealing with the more modern era. It is probable that she has a political agenda, which is fine except the entire book seems to be a red carpet to this agenda. The book excludes most "extraneous" material like non-western marriage because it culminates in the current situation in the USA. It is probably short-sighted to ignore other major cultures this much - even if dealing with the US, the nation's multiculturalism requires this to be explored at least somewhat.

Makes for an interesting and informative read however there must be better general histories of marriage out there.

Fans of Coontz will remember the superb job she did in exploding many of the "Ozzie and Harriet" myths surrounding American life in the 50's. Here she greatly expands her focus in a work that is as strong in terms of its educational value if not quite as readable due to its much more epic subject.
Here, rather than stick to a single decade, Coontz looks at marriage from its history-fogged origins (covering a range of speculations of how marriage evolved) to its present day incarnations. She covers both time and space, crossing from continent to continent, culture to culture.
Along the way, Coontz in clear and entertaining fashion shows how marriage has been in a state of constant flux, whether with regard to the role of economics, choice, love, or gender power. She turns the abstract/scholarly more concrete by always coming back to an actual marriage--detailing the marriages of nobles and commoners through historical texts, letters, diaries, etc. If there are more of the aristocracy, she at least acknowledges the problems with trying to extrapolate from such a small non-representative population.
At times one wonders if the topic is too big; it suffers somewhat for that reason in comparison to The Way We Never Were mostly because it can't have that same laser focus. Sometimes one feels she could do with fewer references to nobles/celebrities, could narrow the number of cultures discussed, but by the end the sheer preponderance of information, so nicely detailed, so well-organized, so clearly explained and placed in larger societal, chronological, and even personal contexts, outweighs any minor complaints. A book well worth reading, especially nowadays as people toss around references to marriage's 2000 years of history, as if marriage had stayed the same for all 2000 years. Highly recommended.

Stephanie Coontz's newest book (you can always count on her to address a critical current issue from the vantage point of well researched fact) is a lively read, filled with stories about marriages of ordinary and celebrated couples throughout history. This is an historical look at a socially constructed institution, not a book of faith. While Coontz does not advocate staying married at any cost, she is not anti-marriage. In fact, she talks about her own relationship as a happily married woman. Although she warns that lifelong marriage will never again be universal, she proposes that good marriages can be better than ever before. Her explanations of the ways that rules for such marriages are changing provide the most potent criticism of what is so wrong about so many contemporary advice books on the subject.
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A good, very readable history on an interesting topic (especially for a newly-wed!). I read it for pleasure, and I will leave it to others more informed than I to judge its scholarly merits. Coontz does have a political bent in her prose, and often chooses to focus more on gender relationships than marriage, but then given that marriage and gender relationships are so intertwined, it would be hard not to. The politics are never over-bearing. She does spend some time discussing the recent initiatives concerning same-sex marriage and states that "traditional" marriage (i.e., the male-breadwinner/wife-homemaker marriage) was itself something of a historical aberration. She discusses divorce as a natural by-product of contemporary societal beliefs about marriage that one would be loathe to give up. Indeed, she states that the primary function of marriage that holds across cultures and time is the acquisition of in-laws!

You might agree with her. You might disagree with her. (I did a little bit of both.) However, she does back her views up with a considerable amount of well-reasoned argument and does it in a civilized manner, unlike some of the invective that currently passes for social commentary on both sides.

Her intended audience appears to be general rather than scholarly, and to that end, her use of case examples is well-done. (I can imagine a scholar of the topic becoming bored.) If I can make one critique, it is that too many of her case examples were royal examples. I would have loved to have seen more material, on marriage among common people throughout history. This isn't to say that there wasn't any, just that I wish there had been more.

Stephanie Coontz has devoted her career to waging war on ahistorical understandings of the family. She first came to national notice with her now classic book THE WAY WE NEVER WERE: AMERICAN FAMILIES AND THE NOSTALGIA TRAP, which attacked naive attempts to make what she termed the Ozzie and Harriett marriage as somehow normative, a family in which the father worked, the mother stayed at home, both stayed married for a lifetime, and their two lovely children completed an ideal, caring unit. Though massive sifting of historical and statistical materials she was able to show that this picture of the family--a picture that determines even today a vast amount of political debate about "family values"--was even in the fifties largely a myth. Nostalgia, a phenomenon that has long driven right-wing movements, is by its very nature ahistorical, referring to a past that never existed and would be undesirable today even if possible.

In MARRIAGE, A HISTORY: FROM OBEDIENCE TO INTIMACY OR HOW LOVE CONQUERED MARRIAGE Coontz fights nostalgia further by a fascinating and far-ranging study of the history of marriage in Western civilization. What is shocking is learning that so far from being a static, traditional relationship with a fundamental shape and form, marriage is instead a constantly evolving institution that has altered numerous times in the past thousand or so years in response to various social needs or pressures. Changing societal values, alterations in the material conditions at a particular point in time, or even changing ideas about romance have all exerted enormous influence on the understanding and practice of marriage at any particular time. Her discussion essentially renders virtually all right wing rhetoric about the need to protect "family values" or "marriage" utter nonsense. One almost needs to ask, "Of what decade?" The changes wrought in our understanding of marriage over the course of the past two hundred years alone are simply stunning. And the Ozzie and Harriett or male breadwinner marriage alluded to above really only thrived during the economic boom following WW II until its demise in the 1960s. Unless one is willing to ignore completely the lessons of history, any rational, sane individual is going to have to concede that any narrow understanding of what form marriage "must" take is inevitably going to be mistaken.

An enumeration of the interesting bits and pieces found in this book could fill several reviews the length of this one. The book always radiates a mastery of a vast range of facts but never ceases to be thoroughly insightful and even entertaining. This book isn't merely informative: it is fun.

The book also raises some disturbing questions. The book largely refutes the passion for nostalgia and a misguided frenzy to defend "traditional" marriage, but neither does the book revel in the alternatives. In fact, frequently Coontz notes features of modern marriage that makes one wonder if we aren't putting pressure on the institution that it should never have been asked to support. As she points out, while people in recent centuries married for reasons other than love, a marriage was a practical arrangement that met certain very specific needs for people. One discerns a certain reasonableness in their expectations. One sought a coworker, a person to help make a household successful economically, a companion, and a sexual partner for producing children. But today a marriage partner is expected to meet virtually impossible expectations. A wife or husband is supposed to be gorgeous, a best friend, a superb financial contributor to the relationship, sexy, and a marvelous parent. The marriage partnership is viewed as the single most important relationship a modern individual can experience. At no other point in history, as Coontz points out, has a marriage been expected to meet such extraordinary expectations. In the end, one is left wondering if the intense pressures of modern marriage might not lead to some new variant more realistic than the Disney version currently in place.

I'd place this in a short list of the "must read" books of 2005. Because marriage is at the heart of almost every human institution, this book is relevant to virtually every subject. And though it should prove relevant in future decades as well, it is especially important reading in the present, where all kind of cant is being spewed about what marriage "really means." No one should attempt to say what marriage really is or has been without reading this exceptional book.

Historian Stephanie Coontz has widely researched the historical and anthropological record to create a picture of past marriages as they compare to the modern variety. In the process she has reached some conclusions that surprised even her. Past works by this author have challenged accepted myths about families and their place in society. This time, her research has led her to at least partially agree with social conservatives that the institution of marriage is undergoing its most dramatic changes in the history of mankind. Where she differs with those who want a return to "traditional" marriage is in her contention that those changes have created a more meaningful, if more fragile institution. Coontz has taken on a thorny topic and produced a work that goes to the heart of our changing society. In the process she has created a work that is a touchstone for anyone interested in understanding our rapidly changing world. I would highly recommend this book to those who wish to make sense of modern marriage.

As the title says this book explores the long history of marriage. Even though it's quite a thick book it is very easy to read. Every time I picked it up I was drawn in and found it hard to put it back down. Each chapter deals with a different time period and the marriage customs thereof. The author has a wonderful way with words and makes her historical observations very accessible and lively. She also dispels some common marriage myths such as the notion that marriage first developed because women needed a provider and protection.
Definitely a worthwhile read!