Review: "The Way We Never Were" by Stephanie Coontz

This is a book debunking everything we believe we know about families, children, parental gender roles, and socioeconomic patterns relating to the family.

Backed by a fearsome battery of statistics, Coontz crafts a cohesive picture of family life in America over much of the past 150 years which does NOT include any of the following things that we all "know":

Teen pregnancy is rampant and abortion is at an all-time high (teen pregnancy peaked in 1957, and abortion sometime in the mid-19th century).
Families in the 1950s were like the Cleavers, happy and stable and supportive for all.
Families in the 1930s were like the Waltons, encompassing many generations harmoniously, scrimping and saving to get through the Depression in a loving and giving way.
Victorian families had strict sexual mores, but otherwise afforded parents greater equality, and children grew up dignified and well-prepared for the real world.
Many problems of the post-1960s era can be blamed on changes in family structure, especially women working outside the home. Families today are "in crisis" because we have lost a lot of the values that used to unite us.
Black and other minority families have special problems that end up limiting their members.

If you think any of the above is true, think again. Coontz systematically tears apart all of our myths about what families are, used to be, and ought to be. It's just amazing how much of what we take for granted from politicians and public policy analysts is complete fantasy.

No one will doubt that Coontz' stance is liberal and feminist in general, but she does not spare the rod in lambasting the Democrats and the Women's Movement for their own inconsistencies and shameless propagation of myths.

She attempts to cut through all the oversimplified bullshit to reveal the underlying complexity of family issues in modern America. Familes cannot be understood without examining both the smaller units of the men and women who make up families and the broader units of the economy, the social atmosphere, and the prevailing laws of the times. With this I wholeheartedly agree!

I noticed only a few inconsistencies in her arguments and statistics, which served to remind me that all of these sociocultural analyses are fundamentally constructions that hang together better or worse than each other, but never perfectly. It's just too big an issue to get the whole thing perfectly balanced and tidy. However, Coontz' logic is well-developed and her facts are numerous, so in the end, I was convinced that she had done her homework and drawn some excellent conclusions.

The last two chapters, which tie up the analysis and point it toward the future, are reasoned and even somewhat inspiring. At times Coontz reveals her age by advocating greater "activism," but her flexible definition of what consitutes action makes this phrase less grating to the Gen X ears. Coontz has a good grip on the changing times, and the ways our families will continue to adapt aidst the shifting gender and social roles.