House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.

Once people came to believe that families should nurture children rather than exploit their labor, many began to feel that the legal consequences of illegitimacy for children were inhumane.

What about traditional Chinese and Sudanese ghost or spirit marriages, in which one of the partners is actually dead? In these societies a youth might be given in marriage to the dead son or daughter of another family, in order to forge closer ties between the two sets of relatives.

Legitimate brothers were all too likely to go to war over an inheritance. Bastards had to hitch their fortunes to the king and his designated heir, and many kings produced them with abandon.

the entire notion of the state undermining some primordial family privacy is a myth, because the nuclear family has never existed as an autonomous, private unit except where it was the synthetic creation of outside forces. The strong nuclear family is in large measure a creation of the strong state.

The hybrid idea that a woman can be fully absorbed with her youngsters while simultaneously maintaining passionate sexual excitement with her husband was a 1950s invention that drove thousands of women to therapists, tranquilizers, or alcohol when they actually tried to live up to it.

But love in marriage was seen as a bonus, not as a necessity. The great Roman statesman Cicero exchanged many loving letters with his wife, Terentia, during their thirty-year marriage. But that didn’t stop him from divorcing her when she was no longer able to support him in the style to which he had become accustomed.16

Stephanie Coontz

Quotes by Stephanie Coontz

Written By Stephanie Coontz

Written By Stephanie Coontz

Written By Stephanie Coontz

Written By Stephanie Coontz

Written By Stephanie Coontz

Written By Stephanie Coontz

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