The Traditional Family Coontz Summary

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The book examines the myth and half truth that surround our understanding of the American family both past and present. These myths have huge effects on diverse experience of other groups in America based on distortions that persist from the media and predominant mythmakers who portray the “traditional family” as white, middle-class people that had a working father, a stay at home wife and perfect children playing around. The myths that marriage is a dying institution that black families are always in crisis and those single parent-families produce dysfunctional children. The main argument in the book is that those “myths” about the family exist because we have ahistorical notions of what the family was like before now and they don’t even describe …show more content…

This agenda setting theory of the media however results in discordance that leads to guilt and anger when families try and fail to live up to what the media has put in their thought of the perfect family. In “the way we never were”, there was a strong focus on the difference between the extended family and the nuclear family. Coontz presents the historical facts of the American family life and political and economic movements in hopes of demonstrating that the families of the past were not so idyllic and the families of the present are so dysfunctional as they are often portrayed. It can be inferred that people act a certain way based upon family life and what they are surrounded by and has really made it difficult for a society to define what a family is but “The way we never were” gives the reason as …show more content…

It is evident that music, style, norms, value etc are constantly changing but the man as remained a dominant force in the household while the women’s role of staying at home with the children and be a homemaker is same. The man still holds the dominant role in the family as he has to go out and do the “hard labour” at work. Coontz explains that it was very similar for African American woman as “most women withdrew from the field labor and concentrates on their domestic duties in the home. Husbands took primary responsibility for the fieldwork and for relations with the owners, such as signing contracts on behalf of their family” (Coontz 29). Meanwhile what was believed to be natural and innate when it comes to gender roles is actually socially constructed, and that the notion of men as the bread winner and the women as homemakers is the product of historical

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