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" Valentine's Day is a perfect time to reject the idea that the ideal man is taller, richer, more knowledgeable, more renowned, or more powerful. "

Stephanie Coontz

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" There's nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain. "

Stephanie Coontz

" Inequality was written into the creation of the American Republic when our Founding Fathers denied voting rights to women. "

Stephanie Coontz

" Educated parents find more time to spend with their children by reducing time dedicated to home-based activities that involve little interaction with children. "

Stephanie Coontz

" Unemployment, low wages, and poverty discourage family formation and erode family stability, making it less likely that individuals will marry in the first place and more likely that their marriages will dissolve. "

Stephanie Coontz

" The real gender inequality in marriage stems from the tendency to regard women as the default parent, the one who, in the absence of family-friendly work policies, is expected to adjust her paid work to shoulder the brunt of domestic responsibilities. "

Stephanie Coontz

" You can't judge a family's health by the form it's in at a given moment. "

Stephanie Coontz

" Especially around Valentine's Day, it's easy to find advice about sustaining a successful marriage, with suggestions for 'date nights' and romantic dinners for two. But as we spend more and more of our lives outside marriage, it's equally important to cultivate the skills of successful singlehood. "

Stephanie Coontz

" Feminism insists on women's right to make choices - about whether to marry, whether to have children, whether to combine work and family or to focus on one over the other. It also urges men and women to share the joys and burdens of family life and calls on society to place a higher priority on supporting caregiving work. "

Stephanie Coontz

" Historically, mass demonstrations have worked best at shifting public opinion and pressuring the powers-that-be when organizers highlighted one concrete demand: 'Bring Our Boys Home from Vietnam'; 'End Segregation Now'; 'Support Women's Right to Choose.' "

Stephanie Coontz

" Social changes always involve trade-offs. "

Stephanie Coontz

" Donald Trump has tapped into a deep vein of racism, nativism, and misogyny. "

Stephanie Coontz

" If the ascent of women has been much exaggerated, so has the descent of men. "

Stephanie Coontz

" Establishing a 'livable wage' floor would immediately reduce the gap in average pay between American women and men. "

Stephanie Coontz

" The notion that marriage is an impediment to commitments to the larger community is a long-standing one - and one reason early Christians did not place the institution at the top of their moral hierarchy, complaining that married couples cared more about pleasing each other than doing the Lord's work. "

Stephanie Coontz

" In personal life, the warm glow of nostalgia amplifies good memories and minimizes bad ones about experiences and relationships, encouraging us to revisit and renew our ties with friends and family. It always involves a little harmless self-deception, like forgetting the pain of childbirth. "

Stephanie Coontz

" It no longer makes sense to see singlehood and marriage as two distinct and stable social categories that should be accorded different legal rights and social esteem. "

Stephanie Coontz

" Turning back the inequality revolution may be difficult. But that would certainly help more families - at almost all income levels - than turning back the gender revolution. "

Stephanie Coontz

" The place where we keep our clothes isn't always the only place where we keep our commitments. "

Stephanie Coontz

" As time passes, the actual complexity of our history - even of our own personal experience - gets buried under the weight of the ideal image. "

Stephanie Coontz

" Using the existence of a marriage license to determine when the state should protect interpersonal relationships is increasingly impractical. "

Stephanie Coontz

" Trump made his fortune manipulating tax laws and stiffing small businessmen, creating a few well-paying jobs along the way. Vulnerable people looking to master 'the art of the deal' learned the hard way that Trump held all the cards. "

Stephanie Coontz

" In 1975, which was the height of the women's movement, I thought I'd write a book on women's history. But in searching for a topic, I realized that there were few places in history where men and women interacted. Finally, it hit me: 'Oh, look at the family. That's the one place.' "

Stephanie Coontz

" Historically, it has required a combination of favorable employment trends and active government intervention to lower the percentage of people in poverty and raise living standards for the working middle class. "

Stephanie Coontz

" During the 1960s, rising real wages for low-income and high-income workers, due in part to rapid economic growth and the spread of unionization, worked in tandem with expanding government support systems to improve Americans' well-being. "

Stephanie Coontz

" Sometimes, having a mom stay home is a big help. On the other hand, when a mother works outside the home, her husband generally does more child care and has higher parental knowledge about his childrens' friends, routines, and needs, cutting across the tendency for fathers to be second-string parents at home. "

Stephanie Coontz

" Feminism needs a political program because gender inequality has been fostered by political decisions. "

Stephanie Coontz

" In the 1970s, family history wasn't yet thought of a serious field for study. I was terrified of being laughed at by other historians. I called my book 'The Social Origins of Private Life.' It should have been 'As Pompous as You Want to Be.' Every sentence was academic jargon, and if I said X, I qualified it with Y. "

Stephanie Coontz

" Our goal should be to develop work-life policies that enable people to put their gender values into practice. So let's stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices. "

Stephanie Coontz

" In my work as a historian and in my relationships as a friend, teacher, wife, and mother, I have come to think that the most useful way to understand the past and make it work for you is to look at the trade-offs and contradictions that, however deeply buried, can be uncovered in every memory, good or bad. "

Stephanie Coontz

" Putting women first would mean strengthening America's social safety net, because a higher proportion of single-mother families live in poverty here than in any other wealthy country. "

Stephanie Coontz