The Way We Were?
Remember the good old days of traditional family values and commitments? When the Nel sons and the Cleavers lived them in every household? You know, the halcyon era of sexual morality, marital loyalty, and motherhood at home, so often touted today as solutions to drive-by shootings, the crack epidemic, AIDS, and...you name it?
Well, they weren't so wonderful at all, claims social historian Stephanie Coontz. Not only are such memories really myths, families have never lived up to nostalgic notions about the way things used to be.
In her book, The Way We Never Were (Basic), Coontz shows that the number of kids who live in poverty today is the same as earlier in the century. Similarly, high-school dropout rates are shocking, but fewer than half those entering high school in the 1940s managed to finish. But of all the myths, none is more emblematic than beliefs about teen pregnancy, for which the 1950s serve as a model of delayed gratification. "Young people were not taught how to say no," Coontz argues. "They were simply handed wedding rings."
