The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap
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Did you ever marvel about the past accuracy of persons “traditional family tree values” touted in the heated opinion that insist our cultural ills can be remedied by their return? Of course, myth is rooted in fact, and certain phenomena of the 1950s generated the Ozzie and Harriet icon. The decade proved profamily–the birthrate rose dramatically; social problems that nag–gangs, drugs, violence–weren’t even on the horizon. Affluence had become nearly a right; the middle class was growing. “In fact,” writes Coontz, “the ‘traditional’ family tree of the 1950s was a qualitatively new phenomenon. At the end of the 1940s, all the trends characterizing the rest of the twentieth century suddenly reversed themselves.” This clear-eyed, bracing, and very much researched study of American families and the nostalgia trap proves–beyond the shadow of a doubt–that Place It to Beaver was not a documentary.
Gender, too, is permanently on Coontz’s mind. In the third chapter (“My Mother Was a Saint”), she offers an analysis of the contradictions and chasms inherent in the “traditional” division of labor. She reveals, next, how rarely the family tree exhibited economic and emotional self-reliance, suggesting that the shift from community to nuclear family tree was not healthy. Coontz combines a clear prose style with bold assertions, backed up by an astonishing fleet of researched, myth-skewing facts. The 88 pages of endnotes dramatize both her commitment to and deep knowledge of the theme. Brilliant, perfectly organized, iconoclastic, and (relentlessly) informative The Way We Never Were breathes fresh air into a too regularly suffocatingly “hot” and agenda-debased theme. In the penultimate chapter, for example, a crisp reframing of the myth of black-family tree collapse leads to a reinterpretation of the “family tree crisis” in all-purpose, putting it in the larger context of social, economic, and political ills.
The book started in response to the urgent questions about the family tree crisis posed her by nonacademic audiences. Attempting neither to defend “tradition” in the era of family tree collapse, nor to liberate society from its constraints, Coontz as a replacement for cuts through the kind of sentimental, ahistorical thinking that has made unrealistic expectations of the ideal family tree. “I show how these myths distort the diverse experiences of additional groups in America,” Coontz writes, “and argue that they don’t even clarify most white, middle-class families accurately.” The bold truth of history after all is that “there is no one family tree form that has ever protected people from poverty or social disruption, and no traditional arrangement that provides a workable model for how we might organize family tree relations in the modern world.”
Some of America’s most precious myths are not only precarious, but down right perverted, and we would be fools to snub Stephanie Coontz’s clarion call. –Hollis Giammatteo
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The first thing I did when I got this book was to look up what the leader had to say about the Moynihan Report (thinking that based on the theme of the book the leader would have many appealing criticisms). Alas, all that existed was a few sentence dismissal. After that I couldn’t take the book very seriously and just jumped around to various things that I establish appealing. Some things were appealing, others were foolish.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This book rambles and has more references than the Library of Congress which leaves the reader laboring to stay all ears long enough to know the leader’s main thesis-that the idealized 1950’s-Ozzie-and-Harriet-type families never really existed. But the predictable Baby Boomer does indeed remember days when one could walk home from a school where you really learned something and lacking being beaten, kidnapped or raped on the way and then could eat dinner with all family tree members present. Such a reader hungers for point reasons why these families no longer exist and how the leader could aver they never did. The leader doesn’t provide an answer but as a replacement for journeys back to Victorian and Colonial Days to say “see the government permanently subsidized houses and roads so nothing has changed.” Not only is that not significant but it does not make illegitimate persons wonderful 1950’s families that did indeed exist. Also she makes no honor between the government’s spending on a worthy industrious person like a returning veteran to help buy a house and employing the back Darwinism of liberals who throw money at crackheads to pump out more crack babies and worthless schools which produce graduates who can’t read their diplomas etc. Hey professor, its WHAT you fund and thus make that matters!-in persons days nice families, today dysfunctional ones!
Some of her utterances are laughable like the notion that the rise of premarital sex has decreased prostitution. In reality the destruction of the traditional two-parent morally upright family tree has, among additional terrible things led to BOTH an increase in premarital sex AND prostitution. Witness the present-day army of crack whores who roam the streets and the massage parlors on every additional block. Who does she reflect makes up their ranks? Why the valueless, drug-succeptible, no-individual-responsibility-required, latchkey, ritalin-dosed, Columbine-disposed products of today’s predictable liberal-made dysfunctional families. The leader advocates various taxing schemes to solve the problems of these same compromised families not realizing that the present confiscatory taxes which require both parents AND the children to work just to keep a roof are among the primary reasons why strong 1950’s-type middle class families can’t exist anymore. Finally few who remember the 1950’s can deny that despite some of the terrible things that were going on then things really were better in a hundred ways the listing of which is beyond the scope of this review. If the professor thinks things haven’t changed since the 1950’s let her send her’s or a acquaintances 10-year-ancient five blocks away to the grocery store lacking dread.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This book is an attempt, albeit a feeble one, to take a gentler time in America and somehow demonize it by begging the question and nit-alternative. To say life was better in that time is to state an obvious truth and I marvel why Ms. Coontz feels the need to somehow try and show us that today we are “so much better off.” Drug abuse, kids killing and having kids, abortions, teen suicide, are the order of our day today. At least in the 1950’s most folks had some reference to the whole. Now it seems we don’t care who we hurt as long as we get what we want and get it NOW.
There is no use trying to elevate today by tearing down yesterday. The unadorned truth is that the 1950’s were in many ways a better time no matter how this leader wants to twist statistics and facts and I bet that way down deep beyond the pseudo-intellectual, politically right veneer, the leader knows it was too.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This book should come with a warning mark that it is mediocre family tree history wrapped in up politically right sociology. It probably does validate the experience of too many readers who grew up (or have lived)under circumstances of psychic pain, but for the rest of us who immediately admit and appreciate what Coontz says has never existed, the book is a wordy agenda for adaptation to social decline. Hint: I am from the government and here to help you.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I got about middle through this book and I couldn’t take it anymore. I agree with her analysis of private vs. public morality and family tree life. She also experimental that the return to “family tree values” is indirectly targeted toward women. While I reflect she did a honestly excellent job tackling a very challenging topic, I had many problems with her organization. For example, she went into excrutiating detail to support her argument. She also came across as too literary, which is fantastic for a student or teacher, but not for a casual reader. She rambled so much that at times I forgot her initial argument. Also, her time range was too fantastic. I honestly don’t reflect politicians are referring to the Victorian age when talking about “family tree values.” She could have limited her argument to the 20th Century and it would have been just as effective, if not MORE effective. I had to skip parts because I got so sick of reading about beside the point descriptions of Victorian life. This book would have been a lot more appealing if she had added a more qualitative, personalized element to her discussion. Overall, its not a terrible book, it’s just too much like a textbook.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5