* Introduction * The Way We Wish We Were: Defining the Family Crisis * Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet: American Families in the 1950s * My Mother Was a Saint: Individualism, Gender Myths, and the Problem of Love * We Always Stood on Our Own Two Feet: Self-reliance and the American Family * Strong Families, the Foundation of a Virtuous Society * Family Values and Civic Responsibility * A Mans Home Is His Castle: The Family and Outside Intervention * Bra-Burners and Family Bashers: Feminism, Working Women, Consumerism, and the Family * First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage, Then Comes Mary with a Baby Carriage: Marriage, Sex, and Reproduction * Toxic Parents, Supermoms, and Absent Fathers: Putting Parenting in Perspective * Pregnant Girls, Wilding Boys, Crack Babies, and the Underclass * The Myth of the Black Family Collapse * The Crisis Reconsidered * Epilogue: Inventing a New Tradition
Stephanie Coontz is a member of the faculty of Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, where she is a historian and an expert on American culture.
The golden age of the American family never existed, asserts Coontz ( The Social Origns of Private Life ) in a wonderfully perceptive, myth-debunking report. The ``Leave It to Beaver'' ideal of breadwinner father, full-time homemaker mother and dependent children was a fiction of the 1950s, she shows. Real families of that period were rife with conflict, repression and anxiety, frequently poor and much less idyllic than many assume; teen pregnancy rates in the '50s were higher than today. Further, Coontz contends, the nuclear family was elevated to a central source of personal satisfaction only in the late 19th century, thereby weakening people's community ties and sense of civic obligation. Coontz disputes the idea that children can be raised properly only in traditional families. Viewing modern domestic problems as symptoms of a much larger socioeconomic crisis, she demonstrates that no single type of household has ever protected Americans from social disruption or poverty. An important contribution to the current debate on family values. (Oct.)
Arguing that ``Americans have tended to discover a crisis in family structure and standards whenever they are in the midst of major changes in socioeconomic structure and standards,'' Coontz puts contemporary challenges facing the family into accessible historical perspective. The author of The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600-1900 ( LJ 2/1/89) persuasively dispels the myths and stereotypes of ``traditional'' family values as the product of the postwar era (including 1950s sitcoms). Focusing on gender roles, parenting, self-reliance, privacy, and sexual relations, the historian provocatively explores the effects of changes made by women, blacks, and homosexuals on the institution of the family. For academic and larger public library social science collections.--James E. Van Buskirk, San Francisco P.L.
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