#PopTech2011: Stephanie Coontz

This year’s PopTech conference in Camden, Maine focuses on the theme of “Rebalancing”; it reflects the time of extreme transition we’re in as a global society and the turbulent reevaluation our systems and institutions are undergoing –whether it’s taking place in the environment or education, the economy or the media, healthcare or design.

But using the verb rebalancing almost implies that there was equilibrium in the first place. As speaker and author Stephanie Coontz pointed out at the beginning of her talk, “rebalancing is not something you do once, it’s a way of life.”

Stephanie Coontz, an historian of the family, discusses how globalization has brought more women into the paid work force, giving them some ownership over their productive labor. Coontz urges us to redefine our notions of gender equality within this framework of labor, arguing that every worker has a right to a family life.

Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. She also serves as Co-Chair and Director of Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families, a non-profit, nonpartisan association of family researchers and practitioners based at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has been featured in many newspapers such as The New York Times, as well as scholarly journals such as Journal of Marriage and Family, and she is frequently interviewed on national television and radio.

In addition to her current teaching position at Evergreen, Coontz has also taught at Kobe University in Japan and the University of Hawaii at Hilo. She is a former Woodrow Wilson Fellow. She won the Washington Governor's Writers Award in 1989 for her book The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families. In 1995 she received the Dale Richmond Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics for her "outstanding contributions to the field of child development." She received the 2001-02 "Friend of the Family" award from the Illinois Council on Family Relations. In 2004, she received the first-ever "Visionary Leadership" Award from the Council on Contemporary Families.

Historian Stepanie Coontz talks about rebalancing of genders, the theme of this year’s PopTech Conference.She talks about when and how women not just in this country but worldwide, started to rebalance the power between sexes.

It starts happening between genders when women not just started to work but got paid to work. After they get into the workforce, literacy goes up, they get a choice of who they got to marry, and then labor laws changed among other things.

If you think about it, the countries with the lowest rights for women are the countries where women have the lowest access to the labor force. Sexual harassment didn’t come force in the U.S. until 1993.

Stephanie Coontz discusses the relationship between gender rights and the labor and economic systems. photo by Kris Krüg for PopTech

The theme of this June’s PopTech conference in Iceland, the need for resilience, follows logically from last October’s theme of realignment. I have been doing a lot of thinking about both these issues recently in relation to trends in family life. In my last two presentations at PopTech conferences I described the realignment of marriage norms and male-female relationships as women’s legal rights inside marriage and socioeconomic options outside it have expanded. Both trends have been good news for millions of people around the world.

But undercutting the generally positive direction of these changes has been a disturbing realignment of class relations. Almost everywhere we see a widening gap between rich and poor, and a collapse of traditional working-class routes to economic security. The growing economic and financial stresses facing traditional working-class communities have depleted their reserves of resilience and sources of renewal.

Marriage has never been more fragile. But the same things that have made it so have also made a good marriage more fulfilling than ever before.
In this enlightening and hugely entertaining book, historian and marriage expert Stephanie Coontz takes readers from the marital intrigues of ancient Babylon to the sexual torments of Victorian couples to demonstrate how recent the idea of marrying for love is-and how absurd it would have seemed to most of our ancestors.
It was only 200 years ago that marriage began to be about love and emotional commitment, and since then the very things that have strengthened marriage as a personal relationship have steadily weakened it as a social institution.
Marriage, A History brings intelligence, wit, and some badly needed perspective to today's marital debates and dilemmas.

Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books (February 28, 2006)

Stephanie Coontz (PopTech 2010, PopTech 2011) contributed to the Los Angeles Times this week to address the question, is marriage going the way of the electric typewriter and the VHS tape? "Not exactly," says Coontz.

As of 2010, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, married couples had fallen to barely 51% of U.S. households, with a full 5% drop in new marriages between 2009 and 2010 alone.

In 1963, Betty Friedan unleashed a storm of controversy with her bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique. Hundreds of women wrote to her to say that the book had transformed, even saved, their lives. Nearly half a century later, many women still recall where they were when they first read it.

In A Strange Stirring, historian Stephanie Coontz examines the dawn of the 1960s, when the sexual revolution had barely begun, newspapers advertised for “perky, attractive gal typists,” but married women were told to stay home, and husbands controlled almost every aspect of family life. Based on exhaustive research and interviews, and challenging both conservative and liberal myths about Friedan, A Strange Stirring brilliantly illuminates how a generation of women came to realize that their dissatisfaction with domestic life didn’t reflect their personal weakness but rather a social and political injustice.

You thought feminists had to focus on empowering women? Stephanie Coontz on why, after a sustained assault on families and unions, that just isn’t enough anymore.

Over the last half century America has made much progress toward equality of the sexes. Young women today are more likely than young men to have a college or master’s degree.

Working-age women and men are in the workforce in nearly equal numbers. And overall instances of violence toward women have decreased significantly. “We’ve picked the low-hanging fruit,” says Stephanie Coontz. But now we have to reach higher.