970x125
If you read one book this year about the state of marriage today, make it Stephanie Coontz’s new one, For Better and Worse (Viking, 2026).
It is an engaging romp through the history of human mating, from stone age marriage to the contradictory consequences of democracy for heterosexual coupling, to the possibilities of creating satisfying marriages in today’s heteropessimistic world. Rather than provide you with a summary of this monograph, I’m going to suggest you actually read it. Your investment of time will be well rewarded with the delight of enjoying a well-told, important, and historically accurate story.
In this blog, where I write about Gender Questions, I want to highlight just how well Professor Coontz shows us that gender, indeed, has always mattered, and still continues to do so today. Despite having read all of Coontz’s earlier books, there were totally new gems of knowledge in this one that helped me to better understand gender inequality. I want to share one of them with you here.
Gender Segregation in Egalitarian vs. Misogynist Societies
I have always been challenged by a paradox in contemporary research about gender inequality: gender segregation in the labor force is more exaggerated in egalitarian societies than in far more misogynist societies. For example, Coontz writes that the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index shows when societies have more gender equal laws and social programs, women are less likely to enter male-dominated, higher-paying STEM occupations than in less egalitarian societies. Why would Saudi Arabia have more women scientists than Denmark?
The answer often offered by social scientists depends upon biological essentialism, the belief that women and men are just naturally different. In poor societies, women ignore their preferences for economic security. Less gender-egalitarian societies are often lower income, with few safety nets. In such societies, women need to enter the highest-paying jobs possible to attain economic security for themselves and their families. In more egalitarian societies, particularly the Nordic countries, safety nets exist. Women have more free choice of occupations, and so can indulge their passions, their supposedly inherent interests in people rather than things. In societies where their preferences matter, they choose careers that require caretaking and nurturing skills. With fewer severe economic constraints, this argument goes, women ‘s “true” nature can assert itself, and they choose to be teachers, nurses, and social workers, rather than engineers and scientists, money and prestige be damned.
What historian Coontz teaches us is that there is not actually any universal “feminine” set of interests or aptitudes. Men and women in more misogynist societies actually have smaller differences in their self-reported personalities, capabilities, and preferences then those in more egalitarian and democratic societies. How can this be? As always, Coontz turns to a nuanced view of history to help explain this paradox.
The Impact of Industrialization and Separate Spheres on Gender Roles
As Western societies industrialized, and economic work left the household and morphed into paid labor in factories and offices, the ideology of separate spheres reared its very gendered head. The economic world became competitive, heartless, and understood to be masculine. Women were left, as Christopher Lasch wrote, to be the center of the family, which became a “haven in a heartless world.” The public sphere, which required rational and efficient skills, became masculine. The private sphere that was the province of wives and mothers became the site for warmth, caring, and emotional labor. Men came to be defined as the people with the skills required for analytic thinking, including science, technology, and math. Women came to be seen as the people with the skills required for caretaking, nurturing, and managing people. Before this time, men were involved in their families and caretaking, and women shared responsibilities for the household’s economic labor. But with separate spheres came the belief in two different kinds of human beings, men and women. The sexes came to be seen as complementary opposites.
And such beliefs are not external to our own psyches! There is a great deal of experimental research that shows that when you make gender salient, women in Western societies act more feminine, and men more masculine. And when you remove gender stereotypes from the equation, such differences diminish markedly. For example, Coontz presents evidence from an intriguing experiment in which people were randomly assigned a male or female online avatar in a virtual reality game. They then entered a math game competition, with opposite-gender avatars. Participants with male avatars competing against female avatars consistently performed better than those assigned a female avatar. What is even more persuasive is that men who were assigned a female avatar performed worse. They lived down to the feminine, not-good-at-math stereotype.
The Unconscious Bias of Separate Spheres in Modern Life
Those of us who live in more egalitarian societies carry the unconscious bias of the separate sphere ideology with us into every moment of our lives, including our career choices. Those from more misogynist societies may have many more gendered struggles than we have, but not the legacy of the Western separate sphere ideology of the early phases of the industrial revolution.
And why does this all matter for marriage? Because those of us in post-industrial democratic Western societies continue to carry the legacy of the separate spheres in our psyches and therefore into our marriages as well. Even when husbands and wives work for pay full-time, and want to equally share the family labor, those old stereotypes often trip us up.
Should you want some tips for how to move forward, to overcome such unconscious biases in your own marriage, let me recommend the last chapter of For Better and Worse by Stephanie Coontz. But do finish the rest of her book first. It’s a great summer beach read. Enjoy!
