Marriage, a History
Amazon.com Review
Politics, economics, greed, sex, cars—without them, matrimony wouldn’t have caused the historical revolution ensuing today, concludes social historian Stephanie Coontz, in Marriage, a History. Modern marriage is in crisis; but don’t pine for a return to "the good old days," when men earned money and women kept house. Don’t even assume the crisis is all bad. For as Coontz reveals in this ambitious, multi-century trek through wedlock, marriage has morphed into the highest expression of commitment in Western Europe and North America; and though assumptions no longer exist regarding which partner may say "I do" to work, childcare, or other shared responsibilities, a clear set of rules about saying "I don’t" (to infidelity and irresponsibility) rings loud as church bells.
"This is not the book I thought I was going to write," Coontz admits. She intended to show that marriage was not in crisis; merely changing in expected ways. But her exhaustive research suggested the opposite was true. Tracing matrimony’s path from ancient times (when some cultures lacked a word for "love" and the majority of pairings were attempts to seize land or family names) through present day, she closely examines the many external forces at play in shaping modern marriage. Coontz details how society’s attempts to toughen this institution, have actually made it more fragile. Her rich talent for analyzing events, statistics, and theories from a myriad of sources—and enabling the reader to put them all in perspective—make this provocative history book an essential resource.--Liane Thomas
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. When considered in the light of history, "traditional marriage"—the purportedly time-honored institution some argue is in crisis thanks to rising rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births, not to mention gay marriage—is not so traditional at all. Indeed, Coontz (The Way We Never Were) argues, marriage has always been in flux, and "almost every marital and sexual arrangement we have seen in recent years, however startling it may appear, has been tried somewhere before." Based on extensive research (hers and others'), Coontz's fascinating study places current concepts of marriage in broad historical context, revealing that there is much more to "I do" than meets the eye. In ancient Rome, no distinction was made between cohabitation and marriage; during the Middle Ages, marriage was regarded less as a bond of love than as a " 'career' decision"; in the Victorian era, the increasingly important idea of true love "undermined the gender hierarchy of the home" (in the past, men—rulers of the household—were encouraged to punish insufficiently obedient wives). Coontz explains marriage as a way of ensuring a domestic labor force, as a political tool and as a flexible reflection of changing social standards and desires. She presents her arguments clearly, offering an excellent balance between the scholarly and the readable in this timely, important book. Agent, Susan Rabiner. (May)
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The Midwife's Confession
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Noelle
Wilmington, North Carolina September 20I0
She sat on the top step of the front porch of her Sunset Park bungalow, leaning against the post, her eyes on the full moon. She would miss all this. The night sky. Spanish moss hanging from the live oaks. September air that felt like satin against her skin. She resisted the pull of her bedroom. The pills. Not yet. She had time. She could sit here all night if she wanted.
Lifting her arm, she outlined the circle of the moon with her fingertip. Felt her eyes burn. "I love you, world," she whispered.
The weight of the secret pressed down on her suddenly, and she dropped her hand to her lap, heavy as a stone. When she'd awakened this morning, she'd had no idea that this would be the day she could no longer carry that weight. As recently as this evening, she'd hummed as she chopped celery and cucumbers and tomatoes for her salad, thinking of the fair-haired preemie born the day before—a fragile little life who needed her help. But when she sat down with her salad in front of the computer, it was as though two beefy, muscular arms reached out from her monitor and pressed their hands down hard on her head, her shoulders, compressing her lungs so that she couldn't pull in a full breath.
The very shape of the letters on her screen clawed at her brain and she knew it was time. She felt no fear—certainly no panic—as she turned off the computer. She left the salad, barely touched, on her desk. No need for it now. No desire for it. She got everything ready; it wasn't difficult. She'd been preparing for this night for a long time. Once all was in order, she came out to the porch to watch the moon and feel the satin air and fill her eyes and lungs and ears with the world one last time. She had no expectation of a change of heart. The relief in her decision was too great, so great that by the time she finally got to her feet, just as the moon slipped behind the trees across the street, she was very nearly smiling.
Tara Going upstairs to call Grace for dinner was becoming a habit. I knew I'd find her sitting at her computer, earbuds in her ears so she couldn't hear me when I tried to call her from the kitchen. Did she do that on purpose? I knocked on her door, then pushed it open a few inches when she didn't answer. She was typing, her attention glued to her monitor. "Dinner's almost ready, Grace," I said. "Please come set the table."
Twitter, our goldendoodle, had been stretched out beneath Grace's bare feet, but at the mention of "dinner" he was instantly at my side. Not so my daughter.
"In a minute," she said. "I have to finish this."
I couldn't see the screen from where I stood, but I was quite sure she was typing an email rather than doing her homework. I knew she was still behind. That was what happened when you taught at your child's high school; you always knew what was going on academically. Grace had been an excellent student and one of the best writers at Hunter High, but that all changed when Sam died in March. Everyone cut her slack during the spring and I was hoping she'd pull it together this fall, but then Cleve broke up with her before he left for college, sending her into a tailspin. At least, I assumed it was the breakup that had pulled her deeper into her shell. How could I really know what was going on with her? She wouldn't talk to me. My daughter had become a mystery. A closed book. I was starting to think of her as the stranger who lived upstairs.
I leaned against the doorjamb and studied my daughter. We had the same light brown hair dusted with the same salon-manufactured blond highlights, but her long, thick mane had the smooth shiny glow that came with being sixteen years old. Somewhere along the way, my chin-length hair had lost its luster.
"I'm making pasta with pesto," I said. "It'll be done in two minutes."
"Is Ian still here?" She kept typing but glanced quickly out the window, where I supposed she could see Ian's Lexus parked on the street.
"He's staying for dinner," I said.
"He might as well move in," she said. "He's here all the time, anyway."
I was shocked. She'd never said a word about Ian's visits before, and he only came over once or twice a week now that Sam's estate was settled. "No, he's not," I said. "And he's been a huge help with all the paperwork, honey. Plus, he has to take over all Daddy's cases and some of his records are here in his home office, so—"
"Whatever." Grace hunched her shoulders up to her ears as she typed as if she could block out my voice that way. She stopped typing for a second, wrinkling her nose at her screen. Then she glanced up at me. "Can you tell Noelle to leave me alone?" she asked.
"Noelle? What do you mean?"
"She's always emailing me. She wants me and Jenny to—"
"Jenny and me."
She rolled her eyes and I cringed. Stupid, stupid. I wanted her to talk to me and then I critiqued what she said. "Never mind," I said. "What does she want you and Jenny to do?"
"Make things for her babies-in-need program." She waved her hand toward her monitor. "Now she's on this 'community work will look great on your college applications' kick."
"Well, it will."
"She's such a total whack job." She started typing again, fingers flying. "If you could compare her brain with a normal brain on an MRI, I'm sure they'd look completely different."
I had to smile. Grace might be right. "Well, she brought you into the world and I'll always be grateful for that," I said.
"She never lets me forget it, either."
I heard the timer ringing downstairs. "Dinner's ready," I said. "Come on."
"Two seconds." She got to her feet, bending over the desk, still typing furiously. Suddenly she let out a yelp, hands to her face. She took a step back from the keyboard. "Oh, no," she said. "Oh, no!"
"What's the matter?"
"Oh, no," she said again, whispering the words this time as she dropped back into her chair, eyes closed.
"What is it, sweetie?" I started toward her as if I might somehow be able to fix whatever was wrong, but she waved me away.
"It's nothing." She stared at her monitor. "And I'm not hungry."
"You have to eat," I said. "You hardly ever eat dinner with me anymore."
"I'll get some cereal later," she said. "Just…right now, I have to fix something. Okay?" She gave me a look that said our conversation was over, and I backed away, nodding.
"Okay," I said, then added helplessly, "Let me know if there's anything I can do."
"She's having a meltdown," I said to Ian as I walked into the kitchen. "And she's not hungry."
Ian was chopping tomatoes for the salad but he turned to look at me. "Maybe I should go," he said.
"No way." I spooned the pesto-coated rigatoni into my big white pasta bowls. "Someone needs to help me eat all this food. Anyway, it's not you that's keeping her away. It's me. She avoids me all she can." I didn't want Ian to leave. There was comfort in his company. He'd been Sam's law partner and close friend for more than fifteen years and I wanted to be with someone who'd known my husband well and had loved him. Ian had been my rock since Sam's death, handling everything from the cremation to the living trust to managing our investments. How did people survive a devastating loss without an Ian in their lives?
Ian set the bowls of pasta on the kitchen table, then poured himself a glass of wine. "I think she worries I'm trying to take Sam's place," he said. He ran a hand over his thinning blond hair. He was one of those men who would look good bald, but I knew he wasn't happy about that prospect.
"Oh, I don't think so," I said, but I remembered Grace mentioning that he might as well move in. Should I have asked her why she said that? Not that she would have answered me.
I sat down across the table from Ian and slipped the tines of my fork into a tube of rigatoni I didn't really feel like eating. I'd lost twenty pounds since Sam died. "I miss my little Gracie." I bit my lip, looking into Ian's dark eyes behind his glasses. "When she was younger, she'd follow me everywhere around the house. She'd crawl into my lap to cuddle and I'd sing to her and read to her and…" I shrugged. I'd known how to be a good mother to that little girl, but she was long gone.
"I imagine everyone feels that way when their kids become teenagers," Ian said. He had no kids of his own. Forty-five and he'd never even been married, which would be suspect in another man but we'd all just accepted it in Ian. He'd come close long ago—with Noelle—and I didn't think he'd ever quite recovered from the sudden ending of that relationship.
"Sam would have known what to say to her." I heard the frustration in my voice. "I love her so much, but she was Sam's daughter. He was our…our translator. Our intermediary." It was true. Sam and Grace had been two quiet souls with no need to speak to each other to communicate. "You could feel the connection between them when you'd walk into a room where they were sitting, even if one of them was on the computer and the other reading. You could feel it."
"You're such a perfectionist, Tara," Ian said. "You have this expectation of yourself that you can be a perfect parent, but there's no such thing."
"You know what they loved to do?" I smiled to myself, stuck in my memory, which was where I was spending a lot of my time lately. "Sometimes I'd have a late meeting and I'd come home and find them sitting in the family room, watching a movie together, drinking some coffee concoction they'd invented."
"Sam and his coffee." Ian laughed. "All day long. He had a cast-iron gut."
"He turned Grace into a caffeine...
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