In Defense of Stephanie Coontz

[Crossposted from Family Scholars Blog.]

In an earlier post on Family Scholars, David Lapp accuses Stephanie Coontz of determinism in this radio interview. David writes:

Coontz treats it as an incontrovertible reality that high numbers of young women will continue to have lots of sex outside of marriage, bear children outside of marriage, and that couples will choose to cohabit instead of marriage–to hear her talk, you’d think it was a law of human nature that came into effect sometime after 1960. As she said multiple times “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

Our question for Coontz is this: would you say it’s an incontrovertible reality that income inequality will only increase, that the poor will only get poorer and the rich get richer? That poverty will only increase? That unemployment will only continue to rise at alarming rates?

David’s analogy badly misrepresents Coontz’s actual views. Coontz doesn’t argue that divorce will only increase, for example, or that marriage rates can only go down. A more accurate analogy would be that Coontz is like an economist saying that although we can reduce poverty and unemployment, there will always be some poor people and some unemployed people.

According to what Coontz says in the interview, she does think more people could be in healthy, lasting marriages, and she favors policies to bring about that change. But she also thinks there will always be some people who aren’t married — people who are cohabitating, single parents, etc.. — and she favors policies to help those people have better lives, too.

At the conclusion of the radio show, Coontz sums up her views (emphasis added by me):

I don’t think [marriage will ever be something only a minority of Americans do], but I do think that it’s impossible to go back to a situation that we had in the 1950s and 1960s (and that was in fact actually a historical aberration), where 95% of the population was married. I think we can improve people’s changes at entering and staying in good marriages. But I think that unwed couples are going to continue to cohabit, that some people will have kids out of marriage, and that divorce will continue to occur. […]

I’m just in favor of a kind of holistic program that emphasizes commitments and relationships. Marriage is an important part of that program but cannot be the only part of it.

David’s post obscures how much common ground actually exists. Coontz and Wilcox (and those who share their respective views) are not implacable enemies; on the contrary, the two academics spent much of their “debate” agreeing with each other. I suspect that David, if he listened more carefully to what Coontz said, might find that he too agrees with her some of the time.