Stephanie Coontz is a professor of Family History at the Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington. She is a nationally recognized expert on the family and an award winning writer. In her 1997 book “The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families”, Stephanie Coontz wrote an essay entitled “What We Really Miss about the 1950s”. In Stephanie Coontz’s “What We Really Miss about the 1950s”, she argues that we as a country collectively remember the 1950s with a nostalgic tone, but we are not remembering this era in its entirety, nor are we completely accurate. She explains that the family and economic life that we remember and long for does not represent the whole truth of that era by any means.…
“The way we never were,” tells the story of the “decline of the traditional family” as it has evolved from the 1950’s. The story deals with the many political disbeliefs that happen in our generation such as traditional family values and gender relations; and tells how the 1950s was a time of US global political and economic dominance, independence in the commercialization and industrialization, and how it relates to how the US works today. Coontz shows that the ideals of the common family have been changing due to many factors like demographics, political changes, and the economy. Coontz analyzed that the 1950s as a time of social and economic upswing as "The apparently stable families of the 1950s were the result of an economic boom--the gross national product grew by nearly 250% and…
Coontz keeps a semi-formal tone throughout this essay. She begins by acknowledging the nostalgia that America feels toward the 1950s era. She continues by reminding us that there are also things that we do not miss about that time period in America. She elaborates on several points that we do specifically miss about the 1950s, such as the nuclear focus of family life and the profound wage increases. Coontz talks about how in the 1950s, employers and the government did a lot to help families prosper, including offering housing and employment assistance, as well as offering the GI Bill to armed services veterans who wanted to go back to school. Booming economic prosperity and the downturn in the economy that occurred in the 1970s, these were, she states, the real reasons behind the end of the 1950s family experiment.…
*Opposing shifts will be offered to couples employed in the same department to help provide the needs of coverage for the family at home.…
Families Comparison EssayA family is a most precious identity a person can have. An individual from a noble, average or poor family can be distinguished by the character, acts, behavior, and living style. A person spends most of his time in life with the family and thus the family contributes the most in an individuals growth, thinking and behavior. When we think of a western family, the standard nuclear family comes to mind, working father, stay-at-home mom and a flock of children. This is no longer the case, in the past 50 years the family has changed significantly and continues to change. These changes are greatly due to the equalization of women's rights and the massive expansion of available communications technology. In many families nowadays both parents work and when the children are young are put into daycare services that just were not around in the past. It is now worthwhile for both parents to work since many companies provide the aforementioned daycare for free. Women also have greatly increased earning potential since they are just as educated and will now make the same amount of money as men for doing the same job. Women are hired these days to do other jobs than to be secretaries and nurses. The families of 1950s are considered as ideal and are also known as nuclear families. It consists of a working husband, a housewife and their children mostly two in which the elder one is boy and the younger one is girl. The families of 1950s and mine have a lot of differences because of the change of culture in the society. They include the structure, role, values of education and outlook on future.…
Marriage in the American society has had clearly defined gender roles in the past. The husband’s role of the house is to be the breadwinner. The wife’s carries the role of being the caregiver. Three main phases of American economy, how family lived and made money to support the family, have influenced the gender roles of the household.…
There have been many studies about gender roles in a marriage. The wife seems to do a lot. Women feel sometimes they do too much. Married couples should be able to work together. Sometime when the wife does everything it puts a constraint on the marriage. A marriage not only needs to survive, but thrive. In a marriage a husband and wife should be able share the same roles as needed. Society has a perceived notion of this. Everything today in a marriage should be able to be shifted back and forth as needed. This is all evidence that a marriage should be between two people who are willing to share all family responsibilities. It is a married couple’s responsibility to take control of any major problems they may have prior to marriage if possible.…
One of the main differences between the two career family and the one career family is the focus on the roles and the responsibilities of the parents, concerning the many needs of the family. The one career family is what we call the traditional setup, where the male’s major task is to be the financial provider and have great influence over them. Men primarily handles the decision-making process, while the women assumes the responsibility of taking care of the home, caring and raising the kids, managing household chores, cooking, and handling day-to-day errands. Some of the one career families focus on the fact that some men place a lot of heart and attention on their own career, whereas, family time is considered a secondary responsibility. On the other hand, the two career family is considered the product of evolution, and the development of the rights of women in a period of education and status in civilization. In this family career set up, both the husband and wife are working and both are pursuing separate careers of their own. This set up had been driven by different factors and changes in the outside surroundings, such as, the increase in the cost of living, which has caused the wives to go to work along-side their husbands.…
The family is also an ‘economic' unit, with a division of labour along gender lines. Evidence for this is Murdock’s consideration of this division of labour and his seeing it as rewarding for the spouses and as strengthening the bond between them, as they are perceived as doing distinct but complementary work.…
In this paper, the changing role of women was explored. The major focus was positioned on the changing roles of women in the American family. Public opinion was examined and analyzed to see if America was really "one nation" when it came to the subject of women working with children and a husband. It was of particular interest to see if Americans believed that the family suffered due to the women 's new position in society, and just how big this divide between the traditional family of a mother staying at home with her children and the modern family of a women working equally as a hard and as long as her husband.…
•In couples who come from an ethnic/cultural background, the couples/marriage relationship may be negatively affected by the expectations of the role of homemaker.…
In the 1950 's, the ideal family consisted of a hard-working father, homemaker mother, and a couple of children (preferably one daughter and one son) all living together under a roof in the suburbs on the outskirts of a larger city. This view of the all American modern family was portrayed to society through social media, especially, and was widely accepted. I have experienced a similar family structure while growing up, but still had it 's differences compared to the normative American family back then. Today, people realize and see that there is not the same consensus of family dynamics and lifestyles that the 1950 's demonstrated when "the family life and gender roles became much more predictable" (Coontz 36). An analysis of Stephanie Coontz 's, What We Really Miss About the 1950 's, along with the episodes of Leave It To Beaver, have revealed certain roles and structure of a quintessential family that clearly exhibits the definite changes in family dynamics today.…
The roles within the nuclear family used to be the father being the main provider and working long hours to support his family and the mother looked after the children and the home. Because men were the ones with the money they took charge inside the family. This was considered the norm but over time changes came about when the wife began to reject the housewife role and demanded a greater say in decision making in the home. They wanted to be considered equal to their husbands. Women began insisting men carried out tasks around the home. This lead to husbands spending leisure time with family instead of spending time with his male companions down the pub after work, it resulted in close emotional bonds with his wife and children, he began to help with household tasks and childcare.…
When you think of the picture-perfect family, what comes to mind? Is it a mother and father where the father makes an income while the mother is at home? Or is it the realistic family that either both parents work hard for an income or the mother is taking on more the aspects of being the provider and the father is the housewife? Even though times have changed and women are starting to be the breadwinners and responsibilities for men and women are flip-flopping. Then why does the media still portray this perfect housewife image…
The American family has changed dramatically over the past 50 years. During the 1950s, the Cleavers on the television show “Leave it to beaver” epitomized the American family. In 1960, over 70 percent of all American households were like the Cleavers: made up of a breadwinner father, a homemaker mother, and their kids. Today much of the recent research indicates the traditional American family is not a model anymore in the sense that, there is no ideal or normal family. Family is now defined by some sociologists as, “a unit comprising two or more people who share a residence for a substantial period of time and have legal or moral responsibilities for long term care for each other (our social world p287). As time passes we evolve with all the changes in our society and people are living and thinking how they feel instead of keeping up with the values and morals society once followed.…