Myth-buster finds old is new again as she explores history of matrimony

As love has become more important in marriage, marriages have become better.
SCRIPPS HOWARD
The good old days? They're long gone, at least when it comes to the subject of matrimony.
"A lot of the things we think are new are very traditional -- and a lot of the things we think are traditional are very new," says Stephanie Coontz, a faculty member at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and a respected writer and researcher on family life.
Coontz is the author of six books on family history and sociology. Her 2005 book, "Marriage: A History," explored the subject thoroughly.
As director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, Coontz is a widely quoted authority on the changing American family who is often cast in the role of myth-buster.
The idea of the male as sole breadwinner, for example, didn't really evolve until the 1920s for most American families, Coontz says.
"In colonial days, wives were referred to as 'yoke mates,'" she says.
During the Industrial Revolution, marriages divided along class lines. Upper-class men engaged in business while their wives tended the home front.
"But in the working classes, more wives, and especially children, went outside the home to work," she adds.
Both during the Great Depression and during World War II, women went to work.
Tradition begins
What we think of as the traditional family form didn't surface again until the "Father Knows Best" years of the 1950s.
"That lasted, at tops, 20 years," Coontz says. Today, only about a quarter of families have wives who serve as full-time homemakers, according to Coontz.
What does this mean for today's families?
While the modern entry of women into the work force might have initially destabilized the institution of marriage, "in many ways, it's been a boon to marriage. It's made marriage more equal."
More about economics
Throughout much of history, Coontz says, marriage was more about economics than love. Modern marriages are the product of what Coontz terms "the love revolution" -- an idea rooted in the 18th-century period known as the Enlightenment.
"As love has become more important in marriage, marriages have become better -- more loving, fairer, more intimate than people in the past would have dared to dream," says Coontz, who married her college sweetheart.