In which we take an historical look at the interplay between marriage and democracy, and Hannah and Nick reveal a Civics 101 secret years in the making.
Transcript
Hannah: Do you think people are going to be surprised, or do you think people are going to be like, oh, I knew it.
Nick and Hannah at City Hall: Uh, would you take this for me? I don't think you need. Well, maybe you do. All right. All right, here we go. Here we go.
Nick and Hannah at City Hall: General assistance. I mean, we want the clerk's office.
Nick and Hannah at City Hall: Thank you.
Nick and Hannah at City Hall: Oh, here we go.
Nick and Hannah at City Hall: City clerk. That's where you can get a business license. You can register to vote.
Nick and Hannah at City Hall: I can help you. Hi, there. We're here to get a marriage license.
Nick and Hannah at City Hall: So. So the process is that I then take this over to my little workstation. I go into the database. I put you guys in, and then I make a working copy. And I'll bring it over to you guys, and you get to mark it up as much as you want.
Nick and Hannah at City Hall: See, going into a city hall always. And like, it's like Rebecca was saying, like, it makes you feel better to see people talk to people and be reminded that there is something that's functioning Right. Right. Like people, I think can convince themselves that everything is a mess and everything is too frustrating and nothing is working.
Nick and Hannah at City Hall: There you go. That's it. This is your official license. Like this is. This is.
Nick and Hannah at City Hall: It's good to go.
Nick and Hannah at City Hall: You are? Yeah, I know. All right. I'm very emotional. As you should be. It's a big deal. It is. It's a.
Hannah: Tale as old as time when two people love the principles of democracy and civil rights very, very much. Sometimes they decide to get married.
Nick and Hannah at City Hall: Even if. Even if when they first met.
Hannah: Okay. Yeah. Okay. So can I tell people I feel like I mean.
Hannah: We're just, like, letting it all out.
Nick and Hannah at City Hall: Let it all hang out.
Hannah: So when Nick first joined NBR.
Nick: This was in 2019. This was in 2019. I had just come from New York to work at the station. Yeah. And Hannah and I didn't get along tremendously well.
Hannah: Yeah. I mean, and I kind of think this is part of it, like. And this is the truth. When Nick first joined the station as the education outreach producer for NBR, I was like, who is this steamroller? Mr. ideas man coming in here, gonna join Civics 101 and shake it all up.
Nick: But we did like, we started making episodes that sounded different from Civics 101 as it existed before.
Hannah: Yeah, no, that's true, that's true. But like even even so for a while I was like, I am a professional journalist over here. Like, do you want to see my master's degree?
Nick: But it turned out, it turned out like we got in the studio and it turned out we were pretty good at it. Like we worked well together.
Hannah: We worked really, really well together. And actually, Nick, as I was thinking about how to tell the people that their two favorite Civics 101 hosts are indeed getting married, I actually had to stop myself because what I was thinking to myself I was going to say on the show essentially amounts to my wedding vows.
Nick: Oh well, you don't want to give those away.
Hannah: No, you get to like, save something, something.
Nick: In the tank.
Hannah: A little something to yourself. All right. So suffice it to say, we work together. Everyone knows that. And we work together. Yeah. Right? Right. And that is what it is all about, I think. And as we have been getting ready to enter into this very personal endeavor of marriage, you and I have been thinking about how marriage is also a civic institution. We have it's true. We're civics hosts. It's just what we do. And so we thought this might be a good opportunity to get some historical perspective and maybe even a little advice on the nature of marriage and the nature of of union and working together and democracy. So for this episode, I spoke with someone who has been researching and writing about marriage and family for many years. She is also the director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. And that person is the inimitable Stephanie Coontz.
Nick: I love Stephanie Coontz. I interviewed her for an episode years ago, like eight years ago.
Hannah: Yeah, yeah, I know.
Hannah: Which is why I was so excited when I saw that Stephanie had written a new book.
Nick: Yes. So everyone, Hannah and I have talked about this new book a lot. Like every night. It really did something to us.
Hannah: Yeah, it really did.
Hannah: We have had hours of conversation, right about what I learned while I was reading this book, and I think a lot of that has to do with the power of learning the history behind something. Okay, so this book is called For better and for worse the Complicated Past and Challenging Future of marriage.
Nick: Challenging future. But we got ahead of us. Mccarthy.
Hannah: As I was reading this book repeatedly, I had to put it down. I had to rush downstairs and I had to say to Nick, my coworker and fiance, I just learned this about the history of marriage. I just learned this, I learned this, and we had so many moments wherein one of us would say, that's comforting or, wow, that's really good to know. And the same experience was repeated with family and friends as I would talk about this book, and I would love to know if that is a common reaction that you have, or if I just have the most self-selecting group of people in my life.
Stephanie Coontz: Well, it's the reaction I was going for. So I don't know, but I hope so. I hope to give people stuff that would make them rethink some of their assumptions, and perhaps realize that we have more leeway than we realize to make things better.
Hannah: So that's really interesting to me, the idea that we have more leeway. You present this book as this broad, long history of marriage as an institution, you know, both social and economic and I suppose political. Why present it in that way? To give people that sense of leeway.
Stephanie Coontz: Well, we are going through a kind of crisis that is greatly misunderstood with people thinking that people don't value marriage anymore, which is not at all true. People are beginning to give up on the other sex hetero pessimism. And it strikes me that we do have indeed some huge challenges. But if we can put those challenges in historical and sociological perspective. Maybe we can stop beating up on our partners or ourselves for what we do wrong. If we can recognize that we are all dealing with institutions, with myths, with habits, earworms, I call them in the book that get in the way of our beginning to realize what we need to change in order to get the more egalitarian, satisfying marriages we want. Then I think that it doesn't make it easier to change, but it makes it less stressful and less tension inducing for the partners that are trying to change.
Hannah: So this part that we are all dealing with institutions, myths, habits, and earworms that get in our way. Nick, I think about this all the time when it comes to this country and this democracy. Okay. Because I'm always thinking about the disillusionment, the frustration, the conflict. How much of that is about what is real and actually happening, and how much of that is due to American culture and habits and myths and the stuff that we have been told is real versus what is actually real.
Nick: So are you saying that marriage is America?
Hannah: Essentially, I think.
Hannah: What I am saying is that a union is a union. You got people coming together and engaging in a lifelong project. I mean, ideally, right? Like, yeah, ideally, this country keeps going. Ideally, marriage is forever. You know, in an ideal situation wherein people want egalitarianism, they want equality and partnership and working toward the same goal. And it isn't easy, but it is made a lot harder by the stuff that we believe is true, that just maybe is not. What have you identified over the course of your career as the most common earworms that affect people in a marriage?
Stephanie Coontz: There are so many of them. But let's start with the idea that men find it very difficult to do emotion work that women have always done, the kind of emotional, heavy lifting. They're the ones who recognize when things are going wrong in a relationship and take steps to overcome it. Smooth things over. Um, but you know, this is a myth. Emotion work. If you go back to the 16th century and 17th century used to be organized by class rather than gender, the lower classes did it to the upper classes, and men did it just as much as women. In fact, arguably more because of the social hierarchies.
Hannah: Okay, so looking back into the long history of marriage, we're getting to the origins of a lot of hetero habits here. So just, you know, bear with us. And trust me, Stephanie has a lot to say about gender myths as well. But Nick, she said organized by class rather than gender. Does that make sense to you?
Nick: Kind of. Yes. Kind of no. Because this is an historically sexist world, right? Men at the top rung with no justification, right?
Hannah: You don't have to have done anything or proven anything. You're just above because you're a dude. That is for sure a common theme throughout human history, but also over history. If a woman was of a higher class, like a higher social class than a man, that man was below her full stop also. Oh, this one is so good. Also, Nick, let me ask you this. What does Mrs. mean?
Nick: Mrs..
Hannah: Yeah, like Mrs..
Nick: Like Mrs.. Nick Capodice.
Hannah: Yeah. I'm not changing my name, but that is what I'm talking about.
Nick: Well, as far as I understand it, Mrs. means, you're married and Mrs. or miss usually means you're unmarried.
Hannah: No.
Nick: What?
Hannah: Well, actually, now that. Yes, that is true. But that contraction misses period. That originally just meant that you were a mistress. It designated your rank and your wealth, as Stephanie puts it in her book. Taylor Swift would have been Mrs. Taylor Swift the minute she got rich and famous and for the rest of her life. And it would have had nothing to do with Travis Kelce has nothing to do with marriage, really.
Nick: But like when you say mistress, do you mean someone who, like, runs a house, not mistress like the other the other woman? I just wanted to know what you mean by yes.
Hannah: Yeah, exactly. Or somebody in charge or someone with wealth and power.
Nick: Right. So what happened? How did that change?
Hannah: We are going to get to that. But my point is that Mrs. So and so and. Mr.. So and so. Mr.. By the way, a contraction of master, we are not talking about enslavement, but we are talking about someone who has wealth and power. These were the people higher up than you. And when you were lower down, you had to take care of their emotions and their problems and be diplomatic, regardless of whether you are a man or a woman.
Nick: Right. But in a household and again, sexism, that's a given. But historically is not the woman, the one managing the man's emotions, taking care of his problems, being diplomatic, etc..
Stephanie Coontz: I mean, when you go back to the history of marriage, which was a co provider family from the very beginning, but in a different way than our ours, when people had to work together. And for a lot of history, the woman was under the thumb of the man. She didn't have to kind of make up to him. She obeyed him, but she didn't have to like it necessarily. And so it was a very different emotional kind of relationship than we have today. Getting to know that, I think can help people.
Hannah: Here's the one that really blew my mind. Nick, the co provider family.
Nick: This is something Hannah and I became obsessed with when you were reading the book, right?
Hannah: This is what made me really think hard about what goes into a union, what goes into joining two people together to contribute to a shared life, right?
Nick: Because in the past, your household was also your business. So both people are creating the household economy. So maybe the guys catching the fish, but the woman is out there selling the fish and hanging out with the other fish wives at the pub.
Hannah: And maybe the man is raising the pigs, but the woman is butchering them and making the bacon, right?
Nick: Nobody is bringing home the bacon. The bacon happens at home.
Hannah: And both people are doing these tasks every day that keep them fed and make them money. Both people are working on this business together, both people doing jobs with inherent appreciated value.
Stephanie Coontz: A household economy in which both men and women work. Men were in charge. I don't want to romanticize that and women had to obey. But there was no sense that women did these things because they couldn't do anything else, and that men and women had to had completely different ideas of what needed to be done in the home. In fact, women were often described as yoke mates rather than as the sweet little thing who had to be taken care of. And men and women knew each other's tasks very well.
Nick: Yoke mate, you didn't tell me about this part.
Hannah: Both dragging the plow, right? Uh, so again, not perfect. Yes, there is still sexism. There is still subjugation and everything, but working together. And then something happened. And that something, as it so often is in history, was industrialization.
Stephanie Coontz: So when work moved out of the home, but somebody needed to be at home because there wasn't mass production, you couldn't buy ready made clothes. So there was an idea that some people moved out of the home. And they worked for wages. But those wages had to be translated into things that the family could consume. And you got a much sharper division of labor between men and women. And as women lost what our society considered to be their productive role, they got the emphasis on their reproductive role, both in terms of producing babies, but also in terms of reproducing the things that make everyday life possible. And I think men lost access to that and began to romanticize women's work at home and kind of counterpose it to the increased competition that they were facing in the world of work and commerce. But at the same time, they also began to find new ways of bolstering up their authority, both in the home and out. And that was to see women as as weak, virtuous, but vulnerable. And it's so interesting because what in the actual patriarchy, the idea was that women were just as strong, perhaps more devious and more ambitious than men, and they had to be taken care of and excluded for the protection of men. And then you got this strange idea that women needed to be protected because of their own vulnerability in some ways that softened marriages, but it created a long term difference between men and women's personalities. That has increasingly been a real problem for women as they have moved into the work world.
Hannah: So two things happening here separate spheres for men and women and redefining what makes a man and a woman. And what makes a man and a woman in this redefinition is essentially their being the opposite of each other.
Stephanie Coontz: I think men nowadays feel a lot of pressure to prove that they're not too girly or too feminine. Well, until the late 19th century, the cultural definition of the opposite of manhood was childhood. You were supposed to outgrow childhood in order to prove you were a man. But somewhere in the late 19th century, the opposite of manhood became womanhood. Well, there was a period where that might have been actually productive, because as long as women weren't involved in sports and scouting and war, and they couldn't be heroes, at least publicly, the men could could embrace these really good qualities of, okay, women can't do this. I must do this to prove I'm a man. But now that women do the same things that men do and can prove that they're just as heroic and just as strong. I think that this definition of manhood as the opposite of womanhood is what has led some men to embrace toxicity as a way of saying, well, at least I'm not that kind of girly girl.
Hannah: Stephanie tells this anecdote in the book Nick, wherein she has her students read letters written by men before the 19th century, and the guys in the class get uncomfortable because the stuff they're reading does not compute. With the last hundred plus years of what they have been told. A guy is.
Stephanie Coontz: Because, in fact, you read the letters of men to each other, a heterosexual man saying things like, they sound like letters I wrote when I was 15 to my girlfriends. Oh, I haven't heard from you in so long. Are you mad at me? Why don't you write to me? I read your last letter and I cried. And this sort of thing, this kind of emotion with men. And when cameras were first invented, men took pictures of themselves and their friends sitting on each other's laps, embracing each other, walking arm in arm, hand in hand. And this only disappeared in the late 19th century. So these kinds of things to learn, I think, are really important because they help us realize we have a lot more leeway than we think to do things differently. But at the same time, we need to let ourselves off the hook if it doesn't happen immediately, because there have been all these habits and it's been pounded into our heads that you're you're not masculine enough. If you do this, behave this way and you're not feminine enough if you don't behave that way.
Hannah: Okay, so I called out the fact that we are talking a lot about men and women in marriage here. Very hetero throughout a lot of history in terms of what was actually legally permitted. But Stephanie's book, to be clear, is not about heterosexual marriage, it is about marriage, full stop. And the gender roles that Stephanie calls out are truly this invention of, you know, changing social structure, changing economy, changing means of production. Because when you look across history and across social structures, you cannot find any one definition of what kind of work is expected from what person.
Stephanie Coontz: The earliest thing that we that we learn by the time that a child is 12 to 18 months, they know what a woman is supposed to do, what a man is supposed to do, what tools they use. But here's the trick. Even though every society has used male versus female as a way of assigning different roles and explaining different behaviors, they've explained totally different behaviors and assigned totally different roles so that our notions of gender are very, very fluid, and we need to be able to understand the difference that it used to be that a woman was not supposed to speak out loud. She wasn't supposed to run. Now she is. Men once had, as we've talked about, more freedom to show the soft side of their nature than they're given today. And that should be liberating. Whatever your politics, whatever kind of a marriage you want to end up in, it should be nice to know that you have some choices, and you don't have to adhere to some strict script if you don't want to adhere to it.
Hannah: Okay, so so far, we have been talking about changes over the course of history of marriage and the history of gender roles, and Stephanie is trying her best to remind us that the way so many of us perceive things is something that was invented over the course of history. It's often a myth or an accident, and that doesn't mean that it is the truth about people or about marriage. But here in America, there are more reasons why we get marriage and people maybe a little bit wrong, and we are going to get to that after a quick break.
Nick: We're back. You're listening to Civics 101. We're talking about marriage with Stephanie Coontz. She's the author of For Better and for worse. And he and I are both pretty affected by this book, in no small part because really soon we are getting married.
Hannah: We're getting married. Live on the air.
Nick: Surprise! Where's the groom? That's me. No, that is not happening. But the next time we record an episode, we will be married. I know that is kind of unbelievable.
Speaker 12: It's kind of amazing.
Nick: They're gonna find a way to make us do a bonus episode before.
Hannah: What kind of bonus episode?
Nick: Like the night before we get married, we need something about the Epstein files. We need something about what's going on in Texas.
Hannah: And you know that. I really wish that we could call ourselves America's only married news team. Um, but I looked into it, and a bunch of other news teams beat us to the punch in this country.
Nick: I am still going to call us that. And as America's only engaged news team.
Hannah: Civics 101 could not confirm whether Nick and Hannah are America's only engaged news team.
Nick: I think we should pivot to marriage in America. So there's one thing you told me about in Stephanie's book that explains a lot about why we are where we are in this land. Did you ask her about the democracy thing?
Hannah: Oh, yeah, of course I did.
Hannah: I loved and was a bit chilled by the chapter The Dark Side of Democracy. And I thought to myself, wait a minute, wait a minute. How could egalitarianism, how could democratization have had a negative effect in this space or change the way we talk about women? Could you lay that out for us? The introduction of this notion of political democracy, you know, that we never used to have to sugarcoat the way that we subjugated women, but now everyone's equal, right? So much in the same way that we have to find a a myth that justifies enslavement. Right? Did democracy do the same.
Hannah: Thing to the way that women were perceived and treated in the institution of marriage?
Stephanie Coontz: I think this is one of the big paradoxes of democracy and why all the culture wars about what American Revolution did and what American democracy did gets wrong on both sides. The ideals of the American Revolution were tremendously revolutionary. The idea that all human beings are created equal. I mean, sometimes it was called as men are just, men are created equal. But in fact, it had that dynamic to it. And it really was pretty much rare in all of human history because for most of history, inequality didn't have to be justified because people just thought it was the way of the world. There were people born to be serfs or slaves and born to be lower classes and born to be leaders. And that's the way it was. In fact, if you look at Puritan preachers over and over again, they will preach about how equality would be a terrible thing because it would just unleash chaos in the world. And in fact, it did unleash chaos in the world. Because once you say all men are created equal, then people say, well, how about women? Or how about black men or Native American men? And so one of the tremendous paradoxes of democracy is this incredible radical possibility to see human rights as a real possibility. But the other side of it is, if you're not willing to make the sacrifice to stop exploiting the native populations, to stop enslaving people from Africa, then you now need an excuse that you didn't need before.
Stephanie Coontz: If all men are created equal, but some are slaves. If all human beings have this right to equality, and yet we keep women at home, and we don't let them have the freedom to make their choices about who they can marry, even far less what they can do in the world. How do we explain that? Well, then the temptation is to say, well, these people have some quality that makes them less than human. And of course, for Native Americans and African Americans, it was the excuse was that these people are barbarous. They, you know, they just they're like animals. We have to control them. When it came to women, it was slightly different. It was well, they're just very sweet. And in fact, they just simply don't have the strength of mind or body to do the things that men have to do in the world, and therefore we have to protect them. And that has been a long term heritage of the American Revolution and of democracy. It's one of the reasons we find that in less democratic societies, more authoritarian ones, women are less likely to internalize the idea that they can't do hard work and that they can't be strong and autocratic, even if necessary.
Hannah: I could not stop thinking about the fairly well known exchange between Abigail and John Adams when it came to this. So many people talk about Abigail writing to John as he was helping to draft the Declaration of Independence. Remember the ladies?
Nick: And he did not.
Hannah: He did not. He did not remember the ladies. But the thing about that correspondence that reminds me of Stephanie's work is the fact that John writes back to Abigail, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. He calls women a tribe more numerous and more powerful than all the rest, and that Washington and all their brave heroes would have to fight the despotism of the petticoat. And I know that John is messing with her here, but is he also kind of acknowledging this slowly dying notion of women. Do you remember that? You know, Stephanie told us earlier that in the old patriarchy they considered women maybe more ambitious and devious than men.
Nick: So it's like John Adams has got one foot in the old world and one in the new right.
Hannah: Like he's he's both acknowledging this era wherein, you know, men had to be afraid of women because they were, you know, going to take over. And now there's this new era where we're starting to look at women as like the delicate little flowers back at home who couldn't possibly handle anything. And then there's the fact that John, you know, really is both in the new world and the old, he's crafting this new world and he's breaking from this old world. He's he's crafting a new American democracy and breaking from the British monarchy. But then Adams also does write about women's delicacy. He believes that they were unfit for business, politics and war.
Nick: And he is always longing for home, for the farm and Braintree, but he is also constantly doing business somewhere else.
Hannah: Yeah, John is somewhere else, but we are not yet in an era where that means that all that's left for Abigail is dishes and laundry, right? She is managing and working on the family farm and the family finances. She's making investments that grew the wealth of the Adams family. This I know you can't say it, but this creep into perceiving women as the domestic housework, mothers and men as the less emotional and less caretaking, quote unquote breadwinners was really slow. It took decades and decades.
Nick: Right? So I get that it does make sense. But the thing I am trying to understand, Hannah, there are a lot of people today who think that there is an ideal form of marriage, and there are a lot of people who think marriage is antiquated and sexist and heteronormative. And I think that both groups are thinking of a certain version of marriage and a certain period of time.
Hannah: Like maybe the 1950s.
Nick: Yeah, especially the 1950s.
Hannah: Okay. All right. So let's talk about what the 1950s happened inside of.
Nick: Mhm.
Stephanie Coontz: After the Great Depression and World War Two, people came out of that feeling like something had gone wrong in America in terms of its economic system, but also something had gone right in terms of our ability to get together and have people of all classes, you know, not volunteer army draftees, fighting alongside each other and coming out and thinking we beat fascism. And the result was a tremendous groundswell of support for the New Deal and ideas that we should bring the excesses of Wall Street under control and finance. We should protect workers ability to improve their wages and keep track of their hours. And there was just a tremendous progress that way. You know, it wasn't like perfect, but there was steady progress from the late 1930s through the early 1970s.
Nick: So the 1950s happened in the middle of social programs and support for workers and curbing the excesses of extreme wealth.
Hannah: Yeah. But in terms of marriage, in terms of that antiquated and sexist thing, here's what could go on in a 1950s marriage.
Stephanie Coontz: Well, I've changed my view on nostalgia about families of the 50s quite a bit. I think I, I used to dismiss it, and I had a good reason to dismiss it, because if you look at the actual facts, the 1950s families were very far from. Idyllic rates of child abuse were much higher. We know for a fact that when unilateral divorce was adopted in 1970, every state that adopted it because they did it at different times the first five years saw an upsurge in divorce, but they also saw a 20% decline in wives suicide rates, and somewhere between a quarter and a half decline in domestic violence. So these were not idyllic families. I now think that when people are looking, uh, being nostalgic for the family, they are experiencing what my son, who's a doctor, calls referred pain. That our brains can't tell exactly where a pain in the visceral part the internal organs is coming from. So they will get something on the outside of our body that shares some similar nerve endings. And they'll say that's where the pain is. For example, if you, uh, have a stomach, your esophagus is pushing on. You've eaten way too much. You may feel, uh, pain in your neck or your shoulder. So I think that when people get nostalgic for these families of the 50s that were really, truly not very good, uh, that they're looking for something else. They're feeling the pain in our family and social lives, but what they're really nostalgic for is a period where, in fact, things were better in the sense of the actual way that the society was moving in terms of wages of working people and lowering inequality.
Stephanie Coontz: Uh, two rand economists recently estimated that if the kind of economic trends in wages that had started in 1949 and that went to the early 1970s, had continued by 2018, workers at every level of the income of the wage structure would have been getting almost 70% more than they do. Instead, that's 70% more went to the upper 5% of the population. And the result has been not only tremendous problems thinking about your kids homes and their future and their education, the tremendous inflation in that as rich people have outbid the rest of us for those kinds of consumer goods, but also the tremendous sense of insult as 90% of the companies compete for the top 10% of consumers, they give them dedicated phone lines while the rest of us have to sit on the phone for hours. They give them first boarding, first entrance. And I think we've underestimated how much that kind of sense of social exclusion really causes pain in people's lives. And so they're susceptible to people who say, well, if we would just go back to those family forms, that would solve the problem. But in fact, we need to go forward in our family forms and retrieve those elements of the past that were more egalitarian.
Hannah: Okay. And note the fact that the problem that Stephanie is talking about has a lot to do with money. And the money problem was not created by feminism or women working outside of the home or non-heterosexual marriage, even during that era. Right. The 30s through the 70s, that era of worker stability and financial progress for working Americans. There were people even then working to make those structures stop.
Stephanie Coontz: There were a lot of people, billionaires, for example, and financiers who wanted to be able to go back to the old freedoms. And they allied with those other people who were threatened by the new social freedoms in terms of racism and sexism, to create an alliance that often talked in terms of nostalgia for a more, uh, for for a more family oriented society, but in practical terms, spent most of its energy rolling back the reforms of the New Deal. And we've gotten to the point where nowadays, the anti-monopoly and the pro-worker elements that had been introduced in America over that last 30, 40 years are being steadily reversed.
Nick: And just to say real quick here, because people casually say all the time that the government incentivizes marriage and creating a family. So did you ask Stephanie about that?
Hannah: Of course I didn't. Her answer was really short. Does the federal government in practice incentivize marriage and having children?
Stephanie Coontz: Well, no. Um, but it says it did. Uh, and really what that boils down to is that it blames people who don't or can't get married and who can't afford to have children or fear for their children's future. It blames them for the kind of poverty and economic inequality and insecurity that leads people not to get married and not to have kids. So it's kind of ironic.
Hannah: By the way, if you want to hear more about that, what Stephanie just talked about, read her book, please. There are plenty of numbers to back this up.
Nick: So everything that we just talked about, this feels like a giant catch 22, but like maybe a fake catch 22. Mythic ideas about how men and women and marriage should be, uh, government and cohort of wealthy business people and politicians saying that citizens need to act like it's the 1950s instead of business people and the government acting like they did in the 1950s. And then, Hannah, you're actually inside of a marriage, which we are about to be. Yeah. And whether we know it or not, surely these myths are at the door of that marriage, of every marriage. So Stephanie talked about going forward in our family forms. What does that actually mean?
Stephanie Coontz: Psychologists talk about malevolent versus benevolent attribution. And when people are trying to make their marriages work better or their relationships, they often either say, well, okay, if this, I don't like this, but that's probably an accident. That's called benevolent attribution. And that's a good thing in a relationship. Generally, if your husband is late all the time. You say, well, boy, he has a terrible job. Maybe if we can get out of that job, it's not because he doesn't love me or because he didn't consider it. But the problem with too much benevolent attribution is it doesn't change anything. It doesn't say, let's sit down and say, maybe we have to change that job, or maybe there's something else going on that we should address. On the other hand, malevolent attribution is the idea that, you know, he's just a sexist swine or that she's just a terrible nag. And that's not very helpful either.
Nick: No, Hannah, it would be best if you did not think me a swine. And I did not think you a nag.
Hannah: Yeah, but, Nick, we have actually talked about this, that I have been concerned about being perceived as a nag, that you have been concerned about being perceived as a capital D dude who just does guy stuff. We both hate these stereotypes and find ourselves in a relationship and soon to be marriage. Thousands of years in the historical mythic invention making. And one step toward going forward in our family forms is thinking about that exact history.
Stephanie Coontz: So I think that if you can take historical or sociological attributes, you can say these these are the ways that we've developed and in some ways been channeled into thinking about things that are not helpful. Now that we have more egalitarian values and we really have more possibilities for both men and women to work outside the home and both men and women to take part in child rearing. And so the result is we need to challenge the old habits and the old kind of ways that have come down to us of doing things. And then you can say, okay, it's not their fault, or I don't have to feel guilty about a mistake I made, but I can understand this and we can move forward. I'll give you an example. Okay, so you've got these stereotypes about men and women and about men. The learned helplessness that that they will say, oh, I'd love to help that, but just tell me how to do it, or they'll do part of it, and then they'll come back and say, is there something else that needs to be done? Until the woman says, you know, I'll do it myself. But, you know, we women have these habits too, that we've inherited. In some ways, it's learned too much helpfulness that we, over the course of the last couple hundred years, when we lost our identity as productive coworkers and yoke mates in the family economy and began to be valued for our our reproductive work and our emotion work and our expertise in domestic matters, which women of the past never had. They didn't care about keeping a neat house when it was a center of production. But we've got this now, and we do this sort of what's called sociologists call it gatekeeping. We say that we want the guy to help, but then we insist that we know exactly how to do it. And he has to follow our instructions and we intervene if he's not doing it the way we do now. I've been studying this for more years than I care to admit, but two times I fell into this myself.
Hannah: Now, Nick, Stephanie proceeded to tell me a couple of anecdotes, one about her new grandchild. Her husband was holding the baby. The baby started to cry. Stephanie swooped in and took the baby out of his arms and he was pretty upset.
Stephanie Coontz: Now, that could have been a huge fight between us, but because we both know that this is the habit that I, as a woman, even though I know intellectually better, have been trained to think that I can handle babies better than a guy can, that. That's why I swooped in. It wasn't out of real disrespect and we had to talk about it. So I think that it's important to learn this history just even just at a very basic level, so that you can reconceptualize these problems we have, as in things we've inherited and we can change. Not what either of us is a bad person.
Hannah: The other anecdote was a bit more familiar to me.
Stephanie Coontz: One day my husband walked in and found that I was rearranging the dishwasher and instead of getting mad at me, he said, huh? I thought that you said I should take full responsibility for a job when it's mine. And if you're not going to let me, why would I continue to load the dishwasher? I said fair, fair point, you know.
Hannah: Mhm.
Hannah: Well, just between you and me, when I read those anecdotes in the book, I thought, oh, no. Because I do exactly that, I do exactly. I'm constantly correcting the very tasks I have requested to have done. So I'm very familiar, and it was very helpful to hear that perspective from you.
Stephanie Coontz: You should leave that in the show.
Nick: Oh, yeah. You're not a bad person, Hannah.
Hannah: You're not a bad person, Nick.
Nick: I think we should get married.
Speaker 12: Me too.
Hannah: This episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy, with my co-host and very soon to be husband. We are getting married, guys. Nick Capodice, our interim executive producer is Taylor Quimby. Dana Cataldo is our digital producer and Marina Henke is our producer. Music in this episode comes from Epidemic Sound. Thank you again to Stephanie Coontz. I warmly recommend that you go and pick up her book for better and for worse. If you want more Civics 101, you can find everything we have ever made at our website, civics101podcast.org dot org. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR New Hampshire Public Radio.