A Real History of Lead Dads

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Paul Sullivan

I’m Paul Sullivan, your host on the Company of Dads podcast, where we explore the sweet, sublime, strange and silly aspects of being a dad in a world where men often feel they have to hide, or at least not talk about their parenting well. Today my guest is Stephanie Coontz, the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families.

 

00;00;25;08 – 00;00;45;26

Paul Sullivan

She’s the author of several books, including The Way We Never Were, American Families and The Nostalgia Trap The Way We Really Are, coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families and Marriage a history with the provocative subtitle How Love Conquered Marriage. I don’t know what beating up marriage before, but I’m glad that love won out. Or maybe I’m not going to find out.

 

00;00;45;29 – 00;00;52;04

Paul Sullivan

And I’m really grateful that she’s joined me today. So, Stephanie, welcome to the Company of Dads podcast.

 

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Stephanie Coontz

Yeah. Thank you.

 

00;00;53;11 – 00;01;00;17

Paul Sullivan

I have to start out when it comes to marriage. Are you a romantic or a realist?

 

00;01;00;19 – 00;01;29;00

Stephanie Coontz

Oh. I think I’m a realist, but I’m not a realist in the sense that most people are a realist throughout most of history because as the title of my book suggests, love was like the title of a marriage book for a thousand years could have been What’s Love Got to Do with It? I love was considered to stick to, unreasonable and emotion to organize the most important business of your life around, and that is making your living in the household economy.

 

00;01;29;05 – 00;02;03;06

Stephanie Coontz

Or if you were in the upper classes, making the kind of alliances you needed to make other people make your living for you and fight your wars for you. So, so I’m a realist about, how marriage has changed and what the challenges are. But yes, I think that, one of the wonderful things, although it’s also a challenge, is that for the first time in history, we really are trying to build marriages free of coercion from coercion by parents, by the state, by your gender, by your biology.

 

00;02;03;08 – 00;02;26;13

Stephanie Coontz

And to do it in an equal way, it’s never been tried before. So we’re in uncharted territory. And I think that’s one of the reasons that we have so much conflict is that we expect it to work. And we think, what’s wrong with me or my partner that it’s not worth? And instead of saying, hey, we’re just making we’re having to there’s no guidebooks for this.

 

00;02;26;16 – 00;02;27;10

Stephanie Coontz

Yeah.

 

00;02;27;13 – 00;02;54;12

Paul Sullivan

And now you’ve been, you’re an historian. You’ve been an academic, since the 1970s. So, you know, 50 plus years when you look at how people viewed marriage, when you began your, your academic career and how they view it today, you know, what’s changed the most or what really stands out to you when you think about what’s changed in those, five decades?

 

00;02;54;14 – 00;03;13;16

Stephanie Coontz

Well, it actually, I would I would want to go back a little bit further than that, because when I first started teaching, I’d been out of college for a while, and I’d gone through the usual 1960s thing where you thought, first of all, you thought marriage was something that, the anthropologist taught you that was invented to protect women and children.

 

00;03;13;18 – 00;03;37;09

Stephanie Coontz

And then some feminist anthropologist came along and said, that’s funny. While the men were out hunting, how were the women protecting themselves and feeding them kids? And it turns out that women were actually, contributing 60 to 90% of the calories in many, foraging societies. And then, some women decided that, okay, when marriage was not invented to protect women and children, but to oppress them.

 

00;03;37;11 – 00;03;52;16

Stephanie Coontz

And by the time I got to where I was ready to start teaching, about families myself, I had begun to realize that that’s really not why marriage was invented. It was invented to get in laws. And who would.

 

00;03;52;16 – 00;03;57;03

Paul Sullivan

Want in laws? Who’d want in laws? That sounds like the worst idea in the world to get married.

 

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Stephanie Coontz

Best idea in the world was the social cooperation. Marriage in early band level societies was the way that you reached out and made connections with people and developed new, invented new relatives with whom you could share information, resources. And in many of these societies, their ideas of in-laws are much larger than lives. Not just my brother’s sister, but her, wife, her cousin.

 

00;04;21;29 – 00;04;41;20

Stephanie Coontz

And so having in-laws meant that you had this whole group of people, some of whom you would only meet once a year because they were small bands that could cooperate and could share information and could good trade and, and could exchange marriage mates. So for thousands of years, that’s what marriage was about.

 

00;04;41;21 – 00;04;47;20

Paul Sullivan

And then what? And then mother in law jokes came about. And that was the end of, it being a cooperative.

 

00;04;47;27 – 00;05;15;23

Stephanie Coontz

Well, mother in law jokes, probably developed even later than the first big change in marriage, which was when marriage became ceased to be a way anthropologists call it a marriage. You marry out of your kin group in your band, so you’re getting new people. But as people develop defensible portable research resources and you got inequality in society, people no longer wanted to share outside their lineage and their family.

 

00;05;15;23 – 00;05;32;03

Stephanie Coontz

And they developed and dogmas, marriage systems. You know, you want to marry people who are close to you, or you want to ally with people who are equally wealthy and have a good claim to status and that’s when marriage begins to be exclusionary and parents take huge charge over who gets married.

 

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Paul Sullivan

When you’re talking about this in historical terms, when about as this happens.

 

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Stephanie Coontz

As the ancient states develop, you know, Egypt. Soumare Anthony and Cleopatra. So not a love story. It was a big political alliance, you know, bid for power for the two biggest, imperial nations in the world. If they’d been able to make that marriage work, nobody could have stopped them.

 

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Paul Sullivan

Right? Right. All right. And it seems like a very, you know, contemporary idea. I mean, where I live is, you know, very competitive with, with, with child rearing. And, you know, what a dream. Your kid goes to an Ivy League school and your kid marry somebody else has gone to an Ivy League school. And this sounds you know, it’s not it’s.

 

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Stephanie Coontz

Not as we want him to fall in love with that person. So we do a lot of manipulations that parents to make sure they’re going to love the right kind of person. But we don’t dictate who they love. Okay. So to answer you just go back. I don’t want to, you know, take you down a historical rabbit hole, which I’m prone to, to fall down to every once in a while.

 

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Stephanie Coontz

But mother in law jokes are even lighter than this. Because you wouldn’t have dared joke about your mother in law. Back in the days of, patriarchy. And women were honorary patriarchs often if they were upper class in those days. So they often arrange these marriages. And you don’t joke about that, where you really get the mother in law jokes is in the 20th century, when we begin to develop this idea that marriage is not about not about kin, it’s not about community, it is about a nuclear family.

 

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Stephanie Coontz

And the nuclear family should break, with the older generation, you know, people who look back nostalgically at the 50s and they say, oh, family ties were, bigger than the forget that it was this huge campaign against extended family ties. And the idea was that, you know, any boy or girl or man or woman who was to attach to their mother or father was, was attached by a silver cord that needed to be broken.

 

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Stephanie Coontz

And you tended to commit entirely to the private nuclear family. That’s where the mother in law jokes can come in.

 

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Paul Sullivan

All right. But you talk about the 50s you referenced in some of your books. I mean, there is just this nostalgia. Nostalgia is, you know, often bad, some sometimes it’s harmless. But when you think about how that created our very contemporary mindset, you know, the lifespan of most of the people who are going to be listening to this.

 

00;07;54;28 – 00;08;18;19

Paul Sullivan

We come out of the 50s, plenty to rebel against, in the 50s. That happened in the 60s. But then you think about how, economic growth, education, greater mobility, whether or not to you, better telecommunications, how it’s you you’re not just moving across the country, you can move across the the world, for your job, for love, what have you.

 

00;08;18;25 – 00;08;26;02

Paul Sullivan

What does that done to this sort of institution of marriage over the past, you know, 50 years or so?

 

00;08;26;04 – 00;08;52;09

Stephanie Coontz

What you say about nostalgia is really important, when you actually research nostalgia, one of the things we find is that personal nostalgia, which generally revolves around memories of particular favorite family members and friends, it’s a very healthy thing. It makes you feel warmer toward other people, you know? Oh boy, I’d like to recapture that feeling social or political nostalgia, which is an idea that somehow everything was better for everybody.

 

00;08;52;09 – 00;09;26;25

Stephanie Coontz

And we want to go back to the way that whole time was that, as we have learned to, our cost over the last few years is a very pathological thing. And what you have to know about the 50s is that this stability of families then, was based on two really different things. One was a much better economic and political situation for young men just entering the labor force, young men in the 40s, 50s and 60s, each, one earned more in real wages, 3 to 4 times as much as their fathers had at the same age.

 

00;09;26;29 – 00;09;48;25

Stephanie Coontz

They could support a family on one income. That led to a lot of willingness to get married, and the ability to force to support a family without having everybody go out to work. So that was one good part of it. One bad part of it is, first of all, there were tremendous racial discriminations. But secondly, just in terms of marriage, women had no such opportunity at all.

 

00;09;48;28 – 00;10;07;14

Stephanie Coontz

So a man, she had to in order to partake in this prosperity, she had to get married. And basically she had to do whatever it was necessary to make that marriage work. And when we look back, we know that many women were desperately unhappy. There were much higher rates of domestic violence and much higher rates of child abuse.

 

00;10;07;16 – 00;10;28;16

Stephanie Coontz

Fathers were hardly involved with their children at all. And that had, in the long run, bad, bad effects not only on the kids, but also on the fathers themselves as they aged as well as mothers. So we don’t want to look back at that. We have made some really important changes in our terms of our values about families.

 

00;10;28;18 – 00;10;55;00

Stephanie Coontz

But they interact with and clash with some of the losses we have had in terms of our economic and political situation and the rising inequality and the kind of tensions that develops. And we all have to struggle with those in our families. And one of my passions as I when I write about these and I study well, what works for families and doesn’t, and we can get into some, I’ve had that this job, it would be the greatest job in the world if it were paid.

 

00;10;55;00 – 00;11;18;00

Stephanie Coontz

But I added other people’s academics in addition to doing my writing to say to to say, okay, this is important research. Let’s get it down to 1 or 2 pages and see what, if people would like to know about it. So there’s all sorts of interesting new stuff coming out of the council on a number of families about what helps parents raise kids better, how male female relationships are going.

 

00;11;18;03 – 00;11;43;00

Stephanie Coontz

But the most important thing I think that we understand is that we’re still dealing with all the leftovers of the bad gender system of the 1950s, and they clash with that with some of the losses that we’ve achieved in our political and economic situation. And the result is all of these tensions that we have such high aspirations that we wonder what we’re doing wrong or what our partner is doing wrong.

 

00;11;43;07 – 00;11;56;24

Stephanie Coontz

And maybe it’s not their fault, maybe it’s because of these larger things and we have to figure out a how to handle it in our families in the most humane way and be maybe what we should change in society to make it easier for all families to handle it.

 

00;11;57;02 – 00;12;26;12

Paul Sullivan

Yeah. Well, what do you think about, you know, major shifts that that have occurred again, contemporary times, that have, you know, forced men to be, you know, more involved, perhaps not as much as they they should be something we talk about at the company dads a lot, but also allowing, you know, you know, who’s to say that that that the husband in the relationship is destined to be the higher and or the the wife could have a, you know, a much better set of, of, of skills and want to be fulfilled in a different way.

 

00;12;26;17 – 00;12;42;03

Paul Sullivan

And you think about, you know, moments that have been sort of seismic in, you know, sort of how they’ve shifted, how we look at at marriage, what what really stand out to you? What are some of the things that you noticed, you know, as you went through your career?

 

00;12;42;06 – 00;13;05;28

Stephanie Coontz

Well, I think the biggest thing in terms of the questions that you’re concerned with and acting about are, is the the kind of dual nature of, the increased role of dual earner families, which, by the way, I think it’s important that people know there was no such thing as a male breadwinner. In the past, when a man complained that he was the family’s sole provider, he was complaining.

 

00;13;06;00 – 00;13;31;23

Stephanie Coontz

He was saying that his wife should be called his yoke maid, not his soul mate. Couldn’t or wouldn’t contribute. So for most of history, there was this expectation that both parents would contribute, to the production and to the material support of the family. And that changed in the 1940s and 50s. And the result is that has, turned out that women were not totally happy with this.

 

00;13;31;26 – 00;13;55;10

Stephanie Coontz

And they began to join the workforce, partly voluntarily. And then from the 1970s on, partly in voluntarily as men’s real wages, stagnated and as women began to you combine that with, birth control, so that women could get more education and improved their earnings power and not have to marry the first guy they had sex with.

 

00;13;55;13 – 00;14;22;09

Stephanie Coontz

So the result was that you have, women developing the ability. Not they’re still not the main breadwinners in most families. However, a new study that I was just had the honor of editing by Jennifer Glass and some other, researchers shows that that 70% of women will be the primary earner, for a number of years, in their family and married women, not just unmarried women.

 

00;14;22;16 – 00;14;47;15

Stephanie Coontz

So the result is that women have developed more self-confidence. Men have been large numbers of them have been very grateful for their participation in taking this off there. And the result of the, the going back and forth, both women’s anger when men said, okay, well, I’m glad that you’re doing more. Breadwinning. But you keep doing the child rearing and Ryan’s, own sense.

 

00;14;47;15 – 00;15;18;20

Stephanie Coontz

Many men were beginning to understand that this could be a very rewarding thing. The result is that we now have these changing values about what a life should be like at home, and yet they interact with the kind of social expectations of men as breadwinners, the social expectations when you when you show, people a room that is messy and you tell them it belongs to a man, they’re sort of like, oh, well, hey, hey, hey, you know, men are slobs, but when you’re them, that belongs to a woman.

 

00;15;18;22 – 00;15;40;25

Stephanie Coontz

She is really morally suspect even now, because it’s not messy. So you have all these expectations coming down on you. You have, you know, business people at work. We know that that all employers assume that when women become mothers, they will be less committed to the job and therefore they they’re more reluctant to hire and promote them.

 

00;15;40;27 – 00;15;57;13

Stephanie Coontz

They assume that men will become more committed to the job. And the man who then wants to take parental leave will spend more. Time is considered to be not a really good man. So we’ve got all these pressures coming down on us and we’re trying to say, but but that’s not the way we want it to be. Yeah.

 

00;15;57;13 – 00;16;01;26

Stephanie Coontz

And yep. And what we have the habit. So we struggle over that. And it’s it’s natural.

 

00;16;02;01 – 00;16;16;08

Paul Sullivan

There’s a lot to unpack and a lot of interesting things. You said you know, and I agree with you totally. But go back to the glass paper about that. You know, women are so important and, 70% of them are going to out is they’re going to earn their husband. Are they going to be the primary breadwinner?

 

00;16;16;13 – 00;16;22;28

Paul Sullivan

What is really what is that dynamic look like in the family, system when.

 

00;16;22;28 – 00;16;48;24

Stephanie Coontz

Yes. Well, let’s, you know, a lot of them will be single, breadwinners, you know, because of divorce or unwed motherhood, which is actually declining, now, but, partnered mother hood is declining. But in other cases, it is because, men will lose a job or they’ll have cutbacks. And you’re talking I think I think they found that the average length of time for, would be 65 to 6 years.

 

00;16;48;26 – 00;17;11;07

Stephanie Coontz

So it’s not like, you know, she’s going to become the the. I don’t think we have many female equivalents of the guys who outearn their wife by thousands of dollars, a year, tens of thousands of dollars a year and can keep them home all the time. But you have situations where, men and women are increasingly equal breadwinners.

 

00;17;11;09 – 00;17;25;19

Stephanie Coontz

And they’ll be 4 or 5 years. Six years where the woman will earn more than the men. And that calls into question a lot of our assumptions about how we who we think is going to be doing all the childcare. Who is that is going to have her defense.

 

00;17;25;20 – 00;17;42;08

Paul Sullivan

Yeah. Let’s go on to that, because that’s, you know, the so-called second shift, which is the idea that, no matter what the woman does, the wife does for, for work, she often comes home and, you know, doesn’t have a choice or feels like she has to be the one to do all the the parenting, all the household stuff.

 

00;17;42;08 – 00;18;07;16

Paul Sullivan

And and of course, when you look at it on the face of it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why why can’t, you know, people pitching equally? Why can’t you know somebody who’s better at doing X, do X and somebody better? Why do why? I mean, are we getting to this point in 2022 that there are sort of socio economic forces at work or, or at least expectations, you know, weighing on couples where this might be something where it has to be, you know, come more equal.

 

00;18;07;17 – 00;18;26;17

Paul Sullivan

I mean, the whole concept of dad is out there, we’re taking charge of this stuff. And, but there are lots of other men who can learn from. From what lead that do. I mean, you know, I just think of it, I ask this question because, you know, I look at, you know, grandparents, my grandparents, and yeah, I love my grandfather, but I don’t know if you ever change a diaper in his life.

 

00;18;26;17 – 00;18;48;20

Paul Sullivan

And I look at myself, I have three kids. I’ve changed a lot of diapers. You know, I I’m great at it. But you know what? You know, with these dueling couples and the glass paper, what is going to cause, couples to to talk more openly and, you know, divide up those. The parenting and household responsibilities, you know, more equal.

 

00;18;48;22 – 00;19;12;04

Stephanie Coontz

I wrote an op ed that that, you know, and yes, and because of your background in journalism, you know, that you don’t get to write the headlines. But I actually left behind the what headline they wrote for it, which was How to Make Your Marriage Gay or and the point of the point of the research I was quoting in it is that men and women bring to the table 150 years, only 150 years.

 

00;19;12;04 – 00;19;37;08

Stephanie Coontz

By the way, it wasn’t traditional. As I was saying at the beginning. We were talking, but they said 150 years of social advising that women are better at, childbearing, that men are more, you know, focused on the outside world, and they’re better at the quick decision making and that women do this, these housekeeping things. So you you each bring you bring this to this and it affects both of us.

 

00;19;37;08 – 00;20;01;15

Stephanie Coontz

And I think this is worth noting, especially when you’re talking to that. On the one hand, it’s absolutely clear that a lot of men just kind of this work is invisible to them. They say they want to help, but as women often complain, then they have to be told so much about what they need to do, that it’s more work getting them to help than it is for them to pitch in on themselves.

 

00;20;01;17 – 00;20;02;12

Stephanie Coontz

And there is a certain.

 

00;20;02;18 – 00;20;07;22

Paul Sullivan

But that’s not biology. That’s sort of, communication as communication within, a macro.

 

00;20;07;22 – 00;20;08;22

Stephanie Coontz

Habits or habits.

 

00;20;08;23 – 00;20;09;26

Paul Sullivan

Habits. Yeah.

 

00;20;09;28 – 00;20;32;14

Stephanie Coontz

But, you know, just like when my husband, who knows a lot more about mechanics than I says that I should help, you know, change the pump or something. I need him to tell me it 4 or 5 times before I can do it on my own, because I didn’t grow up doing it. And a lot of men need that kind of help and instruction, when they first begin doing equal childcare and housework.

 

00;20;32;16 – 00;20;55;17

Stephanie Coontz

On the other hand, the other side of it is just as men were socialized to see that work as invisible, to expect women to do it, to feel that they had more important things to do. Women were socialized to think that they could get an awful, that this was a mark, one area in which they really had social status and knowledge that outranked their husbands.

 

00;20;55;24 – 00;21;06;02

Stephanie Coontz

So, you know, we talk a lot about mansplaining when, men try to explain certain things to, to women, but women do. Moms planning.

 

00;21;06;04 – 00;21;06;11

Paul Sullivan

Where.

 

00;21;06;11 – 00;21;24;12

Stephanie Coontz

They go around. And and it’s important to our self-image sociologists, I call it moms planning. Sociologists call it gatekeeping where we say, yeah, go, go help with the baby. But we we’re not quite doing that right, you know, or they step in too soon. So both of us have to step back and say, we have to talk honestly.

 

00;21;24;14 – 00;21;47;03

Stephanie Coontz

What do we really want? And then what are the barriers to this? What are the things I do as a man or a woman that stand in the way of doing what you want me to do and what we want to do? And one of the things that my partner does that, that inhibit me from doing that, and I think so that kind of communication is absolutely vital.

 

00;21;47;06 – 00;21;59;08

Paul Sullivan

What are some examples that that, that come to mind, you know, within the, within the, the of of mansplaining and mansplaining that would be easy to easy to fix if we’re more aware of them.

 

00;21;59;11 – 00;22;21;16

Stephanie Coontz

Well, I think the, the one that you get at home a lot is the, the mom’s planning where, you know, you go in and, and the woman will move in very quickly to say, no, that’s not quite how you diaper him or, or, you know, he really likes this or, the, the guy is with the baby and the baby is crying and she can’t stand the crying, so she’ll come in.

 

00;22;21;18 – 00;22;43;09

Stephanie Coontz

So that’s the sort of thing that we call gatekeeping or, you know, I call mom’s planning, or not, my husband, you know, I’ve. I’ve been studying this for 50 years. Yeah, yeah, but I think it was only a few years ago that he walked in and noticed me rearranging the way that he’d loaded the dishwasher and said to me, don’t you call?

 

00;22;43;09 – 00;22;48;25

Stephanie Coontz

Don’t you have a name for that, honey? And why the hell should I keep loading the dishwasher if you’re going to redo it for me?

 

00;22;48;25 – 00;23;05;28

Paul Sullivan

Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. You know, I’ve always had this thing where, like, if I was, you know, we, you know, in charge, I would just sort of, you know, do it how I was going to do it. And my feeling was if I wasn’t there, well, you know, my wife’s perfectly capable of doing it. However, she’s going to do it.

 

00;23;05;28 – 00;23;16;12

Paul Sullivan

And I kind of left it at that because, again, who wants to be micromanaged? Nobody. You don’t want to be micromanaged. In the office and you don’t want to be micromanaged at at home. Is that sort of, you know, part of how it goes?

 

00;23;16;19 – 00;23;33;24

Stephanie Coontz

I think that’s a very important part of it. The other thing is, though, that that people have to be trained to know what’s involved in the other. There’s just a study that we just put out that, by, Dan Carlson that I had the privilege of editing into a smaller paper with him. And I really struck me.

 

00;23;34;00 – 00;23;41;11

Stephanie Coontz

He was looking at what, said, what makes men and women most satisfied with the division of chores?

 

00;23;41;14 – 00;23;42;14

Paul Sullivan

And what’s the answer?

 

00;23;42;21 – 00;23;53;01

Stephanie Coontz

Yeah, well, I mean, that is a very interesting answer. First of all, there is some evidence that men are very happy when they don’t have to do any chores at all, you know, which is not, you know, who.

 

00;23;53;01 – 00;23;57;10

Paul Sullivan

Would be who would be very happy if you didn’t have to do any tours at all. I mean, yeah.

 

00;23;57;12 – 00;23;59;02

Stephanie Coontz

But it turns out.

 

00;23;59;04 – 00;24;03;09

Paul Sullivan

I don’t wake up and say, I can’t wait to take out the trash tonight, man, that’s going to be awesome.

 

00;24;03;11 – 00;24;27;25

Stephanie Coontz

Exactly, exactly. So I don’t have any problem with that. I don’t think that’s a I don’t that’s a masculine flaw. But here’s the exciting part of the research. They’re equally happy when the, the, the the chores are shared, but they have to be shared in a different way, he found. And I think this was very interesting. I mean, these are all averages and different people will have individual ways to do it.

 

00;24;27;25 – 00;24;46;28

Stephanie Coontz

Our household doesn’t do it quite the way that on average it works out for him. But I think the principle, is very important. He found that the happiest the people who are most satisfied with the division of chores, we’re the ones where they didn’t, like, divide them. You do this set and I’ll do this set. But they shared or alternate.

 

00;24;47;00 – 00;24;51;07

Stephanie Coontz

Oh, really? Yes. And so we were talking about it.

 

00;24;51;12 – 00;24;54;01

Paul Sullivan

So, like one night you take out the trash, the next night I take.

 

00;24;54;01 – 00;25;00;05

Stephanie Coontz

Out the trash. Yeah. Or maybe you do it for a week, you know, or you do it for a week, or, you know, that.

 

00;25;00;05 – 00;25;13;16

Paul Sullivan

Kind of I don’t I mean, that’s funny to me because like you said, your husband has this mechanical background, so why would he say, hey, it’s your turn to change the filter in this? If that’s something he knew how to do. Where at? Yeah. Like in our house. My my wife does a lot of the stuff with the dogs because she likes it more.

 

00;25;13;16 – 00;25;18;15

Paul Sullivan

And I’m happy to, you know, she doesn’t like to wash dishes. So I do that.

 

00;25;18;17 – 00;25;37;13

Stephanie Coontz

Yeah. In my house I do the cooking. But because I chose the cooking because I like the cooking, it’s a pleasure more than a chore. And as a result, I say to myself, well, then you don’t. You cannot make him do the hard part of it. I have to do the dishes. If I’ve chosen to do the cooking, I chose to do the dishes.

 

00;25;37;15 – 00;25;58;12

Stephanie Coontz

So that’s so everybody has individual ways, but let me just say what I think was a principle that was emerging in these averages. And, you know, you can’t give people personal advice based on averages. But there is a principle on this average that I think is important. We discussed it with Melissa mulkey, who’s one the head of the Work Family Research Network.

 

00;25;58;15 – 00;26;17;08

Stephanie Coontz

And one of the things she pointed out to is that when people alternate, or share, chores, they learn just how much is involved. Okay, what’s the planning part of it? And when you don’t, it’s very easy to think that your chores are harder than the other ones. All right.

 

00;26;17;15 – 00;26;22;16

Paul Sullivan

So kind of teaches some sort of like marital empathy in, in a where empathy chore. Empathy, I guess is better. Yeah.

 

00;26;22;20 – 00;26;45;10

Stephanie Coontz

Yeah. Okay. So so I think that’s very, that’s that that was a very interesting piece of research to read. And even though my husband and I divide the chores up a little differently than that, it made me realize that both of us absolutely understand how much the other is doing when they do their chores.

 

00;26;45;13 – 00;27;07;26

Paul Sullivan

It’s funny. It’s funny when my wife. You have three dogs. When I have to take the dogs to the groomer, I’m like, I would never do this. It’s like a real pain. Like, can’t we just shave the dog’s clothes and not do it as often? And she loves it. She gets, you know, joy out of it. And, you know, in some weird way, doing the dishes at night, I just kind of zone out and listen to a podcast or something like that, and that doesn’t bother me.

 

00;27;08;02 – 00;27;17;03

Paul Sullivan

But again, if I had no dishes to do, if I’ve using paper plates every night wasn’t environmentally hostile, I would probably go that route. So I don’t love dishes that much.

 

00;27;17;03 – 00;27;42;03

Stephanie Coontz

But I think the principle that that people might take from this is that if if you don’t really appreciate how much you would not like to do that job, right. But the other part is okay, and how much work and thought goes into it, like, you know, for for women who don’t like to cook, they don’t like to do what I do, and get up and make all those lists about things and what has to be used.

 

00;27;42;07 – 00;27;50;14

Stephanie Coontz

So if you don’t know what goes into it, you don’t appreciate how hard it is. It’s very easy to think that you’re doing more than she is or he is.

 

00;27;50;18 – 00;28;07;29

Paul Sullivan

Well, that’s yeah, that’s always a problem. Yeah, but this kind of dovetails nicely where I want to go, you know, for our last couple questions. And that is, you know, how Covid changed the the domestic space has changed so many things in the world. But in the 2019 cruise, along we have our roles. Those are our roles, you know, work, expect something of us home.

 

00;28;07;29 – 00;28;25;16

Paul Sullivan

Expect some as we go along. And, you know, we come about March 2020 and the brakes are hit and now, everyone’s home. And that’s good in some way. Good for health, safety. If you, if you, if you can, if you have a job where you can work from home. Okay. But you get your kids there.

 

00;28;25;18 – 00;28;41;22

Paul Sullivan

And if you have young kids, as I did at times and not, there’s no childcare, there’s no pre-K. You know, the, you know, try putting a two year old on a zoom school. That doesn’t work. And now you’re juggling your careers and you’re juggling the stuff at home. And, you know, in some ways, there’s no hiding anymore.

 

00;28;41;22 – 00;28;55;20

Paul Sullivan

You can’t sort of sneak out and do whatever the thing is that you do to, to settle your day because your spouse is going to be there, say, hey, wait a second. I want to do that. How come I don’t get to do that? And then, you know, there’s some great research. One of, is University of Georgia professor.

 

00;28;55;20 – 00;29;28;12

Paul Sullivan

I did that so the first podcast we talked about, you know, how, you know, happiness really, shifted depending on how people decided to divide up the charts. And she only looked at couples where where both people worked and both people work at home. So you’re not going anywhere. There’s no reason not to sort of pitch in. When you look at, from the historian’s point of view, what, a seismic shift when a crisis like Covid 19, you know, did to the, the family, what really stands out.

 

00;29;28;13 – 00;29;53;05

Stephanie Coontz

To you will again, you know, the research is just coming in on this. When it first started, it appears that from the studies that I’ve seen that, men, really men who had been doing any housework and childcare before stepped up, stepped up to the plate quite a bit. They increased their share, but not always. Not always up to women’s, but on average, they did increase.

 

00;29;53;05 – 00;30;13;15

Stephanie Coontz

The ones who had not done any before did not do it. But then on top of the the housework and childcare where men had had some experience with that began to see how much more there was to do, and they stepped up to the plate. They began to really, you know, think, okay, that your side need to do more.

 

00;30;13;18 – 00;30;40;10

Stephanie Coontz

What threw that into crisis for many families with young children was the home schooling. And I think and women took the vast bulk, of that on to themselves. And I think, again, this is part of, of the historical heritage that just as I don’t feel free to go and, you know, change all the, the, the garden things that, that I hadn’t done with before.

 

00;30;40;12 – 00;30;57;16

Stephanie Coontz

There is a tendency to expect, well, if this is a new job and this is a new challenge out there in the garden with the mechanics, the guy who has more experience with the mechanics should take it on, not me. Even though even if I’ve been doing some of the stuff that he’s been taught me, the same thing I think happened to men and women with homeschooling.

 

00;30;57;19 – 00;31;16;06

Stephanie Coontz

Well, women are the experts in the kids. No idea. None of us has any idea. But she’s going to have a better idea than me. And so women tended to get stuck with that or to take it on. The other thing that happened, though, is we got some insight into the dynamics of, what men and women see and do.

 

00;31;16;13 – 00;31;42;11

Stephanie Coontz

There was a very interesting study that compared what happened when men, stay home. And work from home and versus women work from home. When men work from home, they step up the child care a lot, in fact, to practically equal with the wives. But when when women stay home, they step up the housework as well as the childcare.

 

00;31;42;14 – 00;31;55;00

Stephanie Coontz

And when men stay home, they do not step up for the housework. So the childcare gets. So my my response to reading it as well. We should send women out to work where they don’t, where they don’t have to notice the dirty floors.

 

00;31;55;03 – 00;31;56;01

Paul Sullivan

Yeah, right. Who cares?

 

00;31;56;02 – 00;31;58;03

Stephanie Coontz

Once stay home.

 

00;31;58;05 – 00;32;02;19

Paul Sullivan

You clean them tonight, they’re going to be dirty tomorrow. I mean.

 

00;32;02;22 – 00;32;24;14

Stephanie Coontz

But so so I think that that, you know, if you look historically at how much men have changed since the 1960s, they’ve tripled their amount of childcare. And they’re not just doing the fun stuff, they’re doing the diaper changing and the mechanics, they’ve increased their cleaning, but that’s kind of leveled off. And, and, stalled out a little bit.

 

00;32;24;16 – 00;32;53;09

Stephanie Coontz

But there have been really substantial changes. And I think that, there will be more, but that we have to provide these social, supports for that. And part of the things we need, of course, are better parental leaves and caregiving, possibilities. And when we look at places like Norway or Quebec where men have these leaves, we find that even after they go back to work, there was a decrease in, by 50%.

 

00;32;53;09 – 00;32;59;13

Stephanie Coontz

And the number of argument men and women reported over housework after men had taken parental leave.

 

00;32;59;16 – 00;33;16;16

Paul Sullivan

Yeah. So that I talked to a Swedish guy who’s a dad, and he said, you know, growing up in Sweden, it was never a question like both of his parents, just the culture. They would they would kind of divide stuff up. I know it’s you’re an historian. You’re you’re not a futurist. You’re not going to predict what’s going to going to happen.

 

00;33;16;16 – 00;33;43;03

Paul Sullivan

But when you look, you know, using history as a guide to sort of pad without being anachronistic, but using history as a guide to past crises, past, you know, seismic shifts that have changed the direction of marriage and family life. What do you think Covid, you know, is going to to do when you take into account, you know, big employers are now, for the first time trying to understand what their, employees want.

 

00;33;43;03 – 00;34;02;07

Paul Sullivan

You know, the sort of myth of the model, employees kind of out the window because now you’ve seen everybody’s, you know, zoom backdrop and, you know, it really goes on in, in their house. So I don’t want to put you on the spot here, but what do you think, you know, of these changes that have happened? Using history as a guy, what do you think is likely to to stick going forward?

 

00;34;02;10 – 00;34;27;06

Stephanie Coontz

Well, I think that what you need now is not a historian or a futurist. You need activists because there’s different ways that it could go. And we’ve seen these crises before. The last pandemic, helped produce fascism in Germany because, it led to so much, hostility toward alienates. But it produced universal health care in Western Europe.

 

00;34;27;09 – 00;34;55;11

Stephanie Coontz

So these things can go either way. And right now, yes, employers are talking big about, helping out, their employees. But you, you know, and you followed probably better than I the tremendous increase in profit taking, CEOs, I’m seeing, returns going up. What happened to the frontline workers? The continued increase in the gig economy.

 

00;34;55;16 – 00;35;19;20

Stephanie Coontz

So, I think that we need to decide whether we want to just have some privileged workers get these kinds of, these rewards, or whether we think that it is important to ourselves as a society and to the future of the children who will be producing our Social Security, paying our Social Security if they decide to invest in the a generation that maybe didn’t invest in them.

 

00;35;19;22 – 00;35;26;16

Stephanie Coontz

We need to decide whether it’s worth making some social changes in the way we organize and reward work in America.

 

00;35;26;18 – 00;35;44;08

Paul Sullivan

This has been great. Thank you very much for your time. One last question. You said, you know, we look at what we’re talking about as marriage as we think about it is about a 150 year old construct. And you said, since, you know, the 1960s, men have either used tripled, their, their output of sort of, you know, doing parental duties.

 

00;35;44;10 – 00;35;58;19

Paul Sullivan

Where do you sit, on, you know, sort of the optimism, pessimism scale as to, you know, the, the future of, of marriage, seeing what it’s, it’s gone through over the past decade or so.

 

00;35;58;21 – 00;36;29;05

Stephanie Coontz

Well, when a marriage works today, it works better than people of the past would ever have dared to imagine. But on the other hand, there are more pressures, and constraints on people, in terms of whether they can even get married, in the first place, so that we’re beginning to see increased selectivity and who can, who feels that they can marry and can afford to marry and can afford to take what can be a big investment but can also be a big risk?

 

00;36;29;07 – 00;37;04;19

Stephanie Coontz

So again, you know, again, America is a peculiar this way, in most in America. But when you have to marry the right person with the right job to get health insurance, you know, adequate health insurance and other society, this is a marriage privilege here. Other societies, it’s a citizen entitlement. So we need to make sure that people don’t have to marry for the wrong reasons or don’t get excluded from marriage because their job doesn’t require health, doesn’t have health benefits, and allow people.

 

00;37;04;19 – 00;37;31;09

Stephanie Coontz

And here’s where I’m optimistic to build on their best instincts. And most people do have have begun to really recognize that kids need attention, that, relationships heterosexual, same sex, whatever the need to be more even than they were in the past. That’s where I’m optimistic. But we’ve got to create the structural supports for that. Or they will keep breaking down.

 

00;37;31;09 – 00;37;39;07

Stephanie Coontz

And then you feeling betrayed by your partner when in fact you’ve been betrayed by, larger forces.

 

00;37;39;10 – 00;37;45;10

Paul Sullivan

That’s great. It’s a good way to end Stephanie Coontz with the Council on Contemporary Families. Thank you again for being my guest.

 

00;37;45;12 – 00;37;46;03

Stephanie Coontz

My pleasure.