Books and
Cooks West
October 2005
Marriage, a History
by Stephanie Coontz
Marriage, a History:
From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage
Stephanie Coontz
Dawn and Jared's place
Saturday, October 8 at 5:30 PM
Veggie lasagna, salad, dolma, biscuits, brownies
Our rating: 4 cups of tea!
From The Washington Post
Stephanie Coontz's new book, which traces the evolution of marriage
from the Stone Age to the Internet Age, extends into the realm of
matrimony the franchise that Coontz developed in her now-classic work
of American social and economic history, The Way We Never Were:
American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. In that 1992 study,
Coontz took apart many of the received notions and clichés through
which Americans have tended to construct their ideas of what
constitutes "normal" family life, focusing particularly on the occluded
aspects of the "Ozzie and Harriet" 1950s. Now, in Marriage, a
History, she takes a longer and broader view, examining matrimony
over the millennia and across various cultures. In so doing, she
neatly, entertainingly and convincingly deconstructs a number of our
most cherished and least examined beliefs about the bonds that tie men
and women together, for better and for worse.
