KITH, KIN, AND KIDS: Kay S. Hymowitz reviews Stephanie Coontz

On the domestic front of the culture wars, Stephanie Coontz has been among the most stalwart of marriage "progressives." A historian whose name can be found in the Rolodex of countless reporters, she is the founder of the Council on Contemporary Families, which describes itself as a "humane and sensitive" alternative to family-values traditionalism. For years Coontz has argued: (1) that the traditional nuclear family is often an oppressive arrangement, especially for women; (2) that the decline of such families, along with the increasing acceptance of divorce, out-of-wedlock child-rearing, cohabitation, and gay unions, has been a liberating force and deserves public support; and (3) that traditionalists who fight these trends are suffering from an illusion, since the family model they prize was a short-lived artifact of the 1950's. Her point of view is neatly summarized by the titles of her best-known books: The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (1992) and The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families (1997).

But now Coontz seems to have had second thoughts about the way we really were. In her new book, Marriage, a History, she acknowledges that marriage has not always been in such flux. Indeed, she observes, it has "changed more in the past 30 years than . . . in the previous 3,000"--a dramatic concession, considering her record. "This is not," she notes with admirable candor, "the book I thought I was going to write." ...

There may be other ways, Coontz writes, "to impose an incest taboo, organize child-rearing, pool resources, care for elders, coordinate household production, or pass on property to the next generation." But marriage is "the only way to get in-laws"-- that is, "to create new ties of kinship." Securing shelter, raising crops, making clothes, and defending against natural and human enemies were demanding tasks for which in-laws and children provided necessary additional labor. ...

To be sure, social conservatives fretted that the new regime of love, with its celebration of individual passion and choice, contained the seeds of its own destruction. And in fact there were early signs that Cupid would be an undependable guard of the matrimonial bed. By the 18th century, Coontz shows, divorce laws had eased in Europe, Canada, and most especially the United States, which by 1900 was the world capital of divorce. Despite efforts to control the passions unleashed by the regime of love--including an "unprecedented emphasis on female purity and chastity" in Victorian Europe and America--the genie of self-fulfillment was out of the bottle. ...

Unfortunately, Coontz is unable to grasp the full truth of this reality. Like most other self-styled progressives, she does not see the social momentousness of the male-female bond. She underplays the ancient theme of marital love, evident in, among other places, the Hebrew Bible and the Odyssey. For much of early human history, Coontz argues, marriage had little to do with romantic love--something scholars have known for a long time--and she goes so far as to suggest that marriage was never primarily about the procreating couple. This vaults right over the obvious: the utter physical dependence of the human infant, perhaps the central problem faced by every society that has looked forward to a future.

If the major purpose of marriage were the creation of kinship groups, as Coontz posits, the institution would have expired in the West by the 17th century, when states and markets took over many of the tasks long provided by clans and extended families. Instead, people continued to marry. Though a decreasing number of them set up shop with their in-laws, the vast majority produced children. The common thread in the history of marriage is thus not the creation of kinship but the care of the young.

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