Early American families had strict rules, yet one third of brides in rural New England during the 1780s and 1790s were pregnant. With short life expectancies, the average marriage lasted only 12 years.
In Victorian times, middle-class families enjoyed many comforts-but their fine clothing and household goods depended on child slave labor in the South. Even in the North, by 1820 more than half the workers in some mills and factories were children younger than 11.
Because of Ozzie and Harriet and other TV families, we think we know the way it was then. But Coontz reminds us that while many families benefited from the increased prosperity of this decade, a quarter of Americans lived in poverty-without food stamps, Medicare or widespread subsidized housing. In two-parent black families, the poverty rate was more than 50 percent. Women’s economic status and independence declined from the preceding war years, and many led lives of “booze, bowling, bridge and boredom.”
All historians use facts selectively, and Coontz chooses hers to buttress her book’s theme: that no one should make the mistake of romanticizing bygone eras. Families are diverse and fragile entities, she says, and always have been. But she pounds away so relentlessly at the misery index of the past, often writing in dense, statistic-laden sociologese, that the effect is numbering rather than enlightening. And quite apart from her style, will anyone be surprised to hear that there were real, many-hued families struggling and suffering out there in America while Wally and the Beav were pranking it up in fictional Mayfield?
By comparison with Coontz’s grim examples from the remote and recent past, her account of today’s family life offers some cheer. For example, although divorce is more common than in days gone by, the increase is almost certainly due in part to our much longer life spans. More Americans have living grandparents-and are close to them-than ever before, and 54 percent of adults see a parent at least weekly (68 percent talk by phone). Only one American child in 25 lives with neither parent, compared with 10 percent of U.S. children in 1940. Still, families remain troubled, Coontz emphasizes, and their complex problems are nothing to sneeze at. But if we do-well, unlike those Victorians, at least we’ve got Kleenex.
