I started and finished A Sense of Direction in one evening; I couldn't really stop thinking about it, so I couldn't put it down. I found it...
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This is an exceptional part sociological, part historical and part polemical dissection of the contemporary politics of the family, particularly that circling around the idealized model of the 1950s suburban white nuclear family.
The key point is that the family so often idealized is a product of highly particular social circumstances, in short the post-war/cold war boom, circumstances which had never existed for the majority of folks (anywhere) beforehand and no longer do since the rise of neoliberal forms of globalization and national de/re-regulation.
Furthermore, even in the 1950s, the '50s nuclear family was far less the norm than imagined (poor, rural, immigrant and old-money'd families have never lived this way) and generated far more social, psychological, sexual and gender contradictions (witness, the 1960s and 70s) than could be contained within the ideal.
Followed by The Way We Really Are (1997?) and Marriage, A History (2002?), Coontz's work is fabulous for undergraduate sociology, social work and general education courses -- as well as fascinating for non-students interested in questions of family and marriage.
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The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz
Alan Rudy, March 17, 2007
This is an exceptional part sociological, part historical and part polemical dissection of the contemporary politics of the family, particularly that circling around the idealized model of the 1950s suburban white nuclear family.The key point is that the family so often idealized is a product of highly particular social circumstances, in short the post-war/cold war boom, circumstances which had never existed for the majority of folks (anywhere) beforehand and no longer do since the rise of neoliberal forms of globalization and national de/re-regulation.
Furthermore, even in the 1950s, the '50s nuclear family was far less the norm than imagined (poor, rural, immigrant and old-money'd families have never lived this way) and generated far more social, psychological, sexual and gender contradictions (witness, the 1960s and 70s) than could be contained within the ideal.
Followed by The Way We Really Are (1997?) and Marriage, A History (2002?), Coontz's work is fabulous for undergraduate sociology, social work and general education courses -- as well as fascinating for non-students interested in questions of family and marriage.
(4 of 6 readers found this comment helpful)