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Critical Response #1
Mimi Jimmy
What We Really Miss About the 1950s
Stephanie Coontz

Stephanie Coontz (1997) guides and addresses the reader’s questions about her thoughts

and usually followed through with the answers. Some of my questions were not fully

addressed or I didn’t find a connection relating back to her claim.

In the introduction she states, “I don’t think it’s crazy for people to feel nostalgic about

the period,” while talking about the family structure in the 1950s (p. 32). If she doesn’t

think it is a crazy idea than who are the people who do think it is crazy? She says that

most African Americans would not pick the 1950s as the years as a golden age but does

not say they think it is a crazy idea. Coontz acknowledges that when the people who do

reminisce in the 1950s that when they actually put full thought into it they wouldn’t want

to return to the mothers and fathers of that time.

Politicians are the ones saying that the modern family structure should reflect the family

structure of the 1950s. Coontz does say that they are in kind being hypocritical by not

offering the social support families had in the 1950s. What are their thoughts and why do

they think that we should all return back to the idealistic image of a home with a white

picket fence with children playing outside in the yard with dad at work and mother in the

kitchen? Coontz does not bring the audience to an understanding of the reasoning behind

the politicians wish for today’s families.

Throughout her writing, Coontz reaffirms her claim that the most popular idealistic

family was of the 1950s but not realistic. It was a great time to raise children with the

father as the breadwinner giving the support to the mother to stay at home with the

children. She brings her readers back again and again as if to hammer her idea into the

readers and if she says it many times the readers might being to believe. The 1950s
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Critical Response #1
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families had hope of security and stability and this created the recollection of harmonious

families and according to Coontz, “This confidence that almost everyone could look

forward to a better future stands in sharp contrast to how most contemporary Americans

feel, and it explains why a period which many people were much worse off than today

sometimes still looks like a better period for families than our own” (p. 40). It was not the

clear roles with set boundaries that the families had but the hope for the future that

brought about the nostalgia of the 1950s. Another example of her reaffirmation is when

she talks about how the optimism did affect people’s experience and memory of family

life which is a comparison to most Americans dreary struggle and outlook on the future

today.

Although she does explain thoroughly why it is an unrealistic dream, I noticed she makes

an unsupported claim of, “We now know that 1950s family culture was not only

nontraditional; it was also not idyllic” (p. 44). She thoroughly explains how families had

shared experiences of sacrifice from the 1900s up to the 1950s and that the 1950s era had

brought hope, confidence and opportunities for advancement for families. She says that

the breadwinner-homemaker roles were introduced for the first time in American history

in 1920s and reintroduced in the 1950s with the added security. So if these family roles

were already introduced 30 years earlier then how can they be nontraditional? It seems to

me that because the economy had had hard times and that the families and women

suffered and made sacrifices.

Coontz also does not talk about the traditional family structure before the 1900s. It makes

me question on how the family structure was at the arrival of settlers to North America.

What were the family values and roles that were carried over from other countries and
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Critical Response #1
Mimi Jimmy
how had colonization affected family culture up to the 1950s? I feel that her brief

statement of America having two centuries of child labor and income insecurity is too

hasty. When I think of times of the first settlers a different image comes to mind. I think

of all the newly claimed and harvested land and houses built, difficult winters and hot

summers with the foundation of the newly acquired American dream of hope and

freedom. I have a “Little House on the Prairie” image of families all doing their share

with the men out in the field or barn and the women in the garden and kitchen in each of

their “traditional roles” and at the end of the day they all sit down to a home cooked

meal. While my idea of family, pre-1920s, may not be true she does not inform the reader

on the actuality of child labor and income insecurity pre-1920s. Though the United States

is a young country, Coontz’s claim that the 1950s families were not traditional should not

be based on only a few decades of family culture.

She talks about government, media and family specialist influenced family structure

during the 1950s but I think a big factor would include religion and its influence. She

does not take into account religion at all. Religion specifically tells you how to behave in

marriage and love. Religion teaches to morals and values of family roles, sex and

procreation yet she doesn’t touch on the subject at all.

The writing of Coontz I read is only a selection from one of her books. All of these

answers may be given in other sections or even in some of her other books she had

written. If my questions are not answered throughout her full book then there is a big part

of supporting evidence missing from her writing.