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A majority of Americans believe our country’s culture and way of life have “mostly changed for the worse” since the 1950s, according to the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2025 American Values Survey. That includes 55% of white people, 53% of Black people and 57% of Latinos.
For many, the problem lies in the collapse of the marriage system of that decade, when the majority of women married before they turned 21, only 6% of men and women reached age 35 without having married, and divorce rates fell to a postwar low of 9.2 divorces per 1,000 married women. The solution, according to the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” blueprint for family policy, is to incentivize early marriage and childbearing (for heterosexual partners only) and abolish no-fault divorce.
Some fear that if children learn about slavery, they will lose respect for the founders. But they can appreciate those who fought for equality.
I’ve spent much of my career as a historian criticizing any idealization of 1950s marriages. Domestic violence and child abuse were much more common then than today. It was perfectly legal for a man to forcibly rape his wife. And depression among homemakers was so widespread that by the end of the decade, physicians had labeled it the “housewife’s syndrome.”
Little wonder, then, that after California passed a “unilateral” divorce bill in 1969, allowing individuals to leave an unhappy marriage even if their partner objected, states that followed suit saw women’s suicide rates decline by 20% over the next five years. Reports of domestic violence fell by somewhere between a quarter and a half.
But I now believe I’ve been too dismissive of such nostalgia. The sense of loss that underlies it is not “all in people’s heads.” Instead, I’ve come to see it as an example of what physicians call “referred pain,” like when a problem in one part of the body is experienced as pain elsewhere.
So too, I think, much of the pain we feel in our social and family relations originates in a deeper part of the economy and the body politic.
The fact is, we’re doing “family” better than we used to. Domestic violence rates have continued to fall since the 1970s. Husbands do much more housework and hands-on child care than they used to, and both parents spend more time interacting with their children.
Few modern women have to settle for the low expectations expressed by a Bay Area mother of five, married around the end of the 1950s, who told an interviewer that “any woman who’s got a man who hardly ever get violent and who doesn’t drink much hasn’t got a lot to complain about.”
Married couples today have much higher expectations of mutual support, sympathy, loving companionship, honesty and egalitarian sharing than in the past. And people who do marry have been getting better at meeting these new expectations. After peaking at 22.8 divorces per 1,000 married women at the end of the 1970s, the divorce rate had fallen to 4.2 per 1,000 in 2024, lower than the 1950s.
But one reason divorce rates have fallen so much is that people who have not yet achieved the economic security and personal stability they believe marriage requires are far less likely to “give marriage a shot” than in the past. And they have good reason for caution. A successful marriage requires more effort, engagement and maintenance skills than ever before, just as many people have lost the economic security, predictability and social support systems that give people the confidence to make such a weighty commitment. While couples may not know the sociological research on how financial challenges, job stress and time pressures increase negativity in marriages, they have seen the effects in practice. And they have far less reason to be optimistic about their future stability than people did in the postwar era.
Between 1949 and 1969, every economic expansion saw at least two-thirds of income growth go to the bottom 90% of the population. If those postwar wage trends had continued, two Rand economists recently estimated, by 2018 the bottom 90% of the population would have been earning 67% more than they actually were. Instead, between 1975 and 2018, it was the top 10% who made big gains, taking in $47 trillion more than they would have if postwar wage trends had continued.
As of 2025, the top 1% of the population held 31.9% of the wealth. We now live in what three Citibank financial analysts have labeled a “plutonomy,” in which the wealthiest 20% of the population account for about half of all consumer spending. Not surprisingly, more and more companies have begun to compete for the ample spending power of those consumers. And you don’t do that by lowering prices, the way you do with mass-produced televisions and ready-made clothes, but by multiplying premium experiences and luxury goods.
One good example of how this results in referred pain can be seen in housing. What underlies a big chunk of today’s nostalgia for 1950s families isn’t so much what went on in the family home but how people got such a home. In 1955, economist John Schmitt reports, a median-priced home cost 2.5 times the median annual earnings of men who worked full time. For women who worked full time, that same house cost almost five times as much as their median annual earnings. Those figures help explain why most men could afford to marry young in that era and why so many women couldn’t afford not to marry.
In 2024, by contrast, the median-priced house cost 5.9 times the median earnings of a full-time male worker and more than seven times the median earnings of a full-time female employee.
The costs of a family’s most important sources of security — homes, college education and medical care — have risen faster than average wages. The same is true for the kind of “treats” that people associate with a satisfying family life — for example, a family outing at the ballpark or an amusement park. Back in 1962, on the opening day of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ new stadium at Chavez Ravine, the cheapest ticket cost $2.50. Had the price risen at the actual rate of inflation, that would be just over $27 in today’s dollars. But on opening day 2026, the cheapest seat was $155, nearly six times as expensive in constant dollars.
Or consider what’s happened at that most iconic of family vacation destinations. Had Disneyland’s admission price risen at the average rate of inflation, the 1962 adult admission of $3.75 would now be $41. As of 2026, however, admission is $104 for adults, or up to $225 on high-demand days.
Meanwhile, the stunning growth in inequality has reorganized daily life to benefit the wealthy in ways that impose increasingly stressful inconveniences on the rest of us. High-worth customers call dedicated phone lines that are quickly answered by a human being while the rest of us wait through seemingly endless loops of recorded music or struggle to make an AI assistant understand a question. Sports arenas and amusement parks increasingly charge fees for special experiences or services that were once either available to everyone or not available at all.
These “premiums” are not just the little perks that have always come with wealth — luxuries that we might envy, but which take nothing away from our own experiences. They come at a cost to the rest of us. It doesn’t hurt my family’s enjoyment of Disneyland if we can afford only one visit a year and other families can go as often as they wish. But when other families can afford to pay between $300 and $499 for Lightning Lane Premier Passes that allow them to bypass lines any time they like, that lengthens everybody else’s wait time.
Contrary to contemporary nostalgia brokers, the main threat to family life and social solidarity today isn’t the fact that couples who can’t get along can obtain a no-fault divorce. It’s not that women and girls have access to birth control and the fallback of abortion when needed. Nor is it that same-sex couples can now formalize their commitments the same way that different-sex couples do and can access alternative ways to have children.
We need to address the underlying sources of pain and resentment: the reversal of the economic equalization of the 1950s and 1960s, the shredding of the social and medical safety net, the assault on hard-won protections for workers and consumers, and the extent to which middle- and lower-income families have been saddled with so many of the stressful inconveniences that are the flip side of the privileges accorded the rich.
Stephanie Coontz, a professor emerita of history at the Evergreen State College in Washington, is the author, most recently, of “For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage.”
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The column argues that contemporary nostalgia for 1950s marriage and family life is widespread across racial groups, but that this longing misidentifies the source of people’s pain: the real driver is deep economic and social change, not shifts in marital norms or gender roles.[2][4]
The piece contends that the 1950s marital ideal was far less benign than many remember, noting that domestic violence and child abuse were more common, marital rape was legal, and widespread depression among homemakers was labeled “housewife’s syndrome” rather than treated as a systemic problem.[1][4]
The article maintains that the expansion of no-fault divorce in the late 1960s and 1970s brought significant benefits, including reduced suicide rates among women and sharp declines in reported domestic violence, reinforcing the author’s long-standing view that easier exit from harmful marriages improved, rather than destroyed, many lives.[1][4]
The column emphasizes that, on many measurable fronts, families are “doing better” today: domestic violence rates have fallen over time, husbands perform more housework and hands-on childcare, and married couples expect and increasingly achieve higher levels of mutual support, emotional intimacy, and egalitarian sharing than in the 1950s.[1][4]
At the same time, the piece argues that modern marriage is more demanding and fragile because it is built on expectations of love, fairness, and personal fulfillment, a shift that previous work by the author has described as a historically new, more egalitarian model that requires sustained emotional and practical work from both partners.[1][3]
The column introduces the idea of “referred pain”: it suggests that people experience distress in their family lives, but the underlying injury lies in the economy and body politic—specifically stagnant wages, rising inequality, and eroded social protections—rather than in the availability of divorce, contraception, or same-sex marriage.[2][4]
The article points to postwar wage trends to argue that from 1949 to 1969 most income gains went to the bottom 90%, whereas since the mid-1970s the top 10% have captured the bulk of growth; it frames this as a reversal of the midcentury “equalizing” economy the nostalgia era actually depended on.[4][5]
The piece highlights housing as a key driver of family insecurity, contrasting the relatively affordable mid-1950s housing market—when a median-priced home cost about 2.5 times a full-time male worker’s annual earnings—with today’s environment, where the same kind of home costs roughly six to seven times annual earnings, making stable family formation far more precarious.
The column further argues that core sources of security for families—housing, higher education, and healthcare—have risen faster than wages, while emblematic “treats” associated with family life, such as baseball games and theme parks, have become dramatically more expensive in real terms, deepening the sense that ordinary families are being priced out of the good life.
The article criticizes what it describes as a “plutonomy,” in which the top 20% of households account for about half of all consumer spending; it argues that businesses increasingly target affluent customers with premium goods and services, reorganizing everyday experiences—customer service, seating, access to special lines—in ways that advantage the wealthy and impose added inconvenience and stress on everyone else.[4]
The piece uses examples such as VIP stadium seating and paid line-skipping at amusement parks to argue that these “premiums” actively worsen experiences for non-wealthy families by lengthening waits and segregating access, rather than functioning as harmless luxuries that do not affect others.
The column disputes claims that contemporary family instability is primarily caused by no-fault divorce, women’s access to birth control and abortion, or the legalization of same-sex marriage, arguing instead that these changes have expanded freedom and safety without being the main source of social dislocation.[1][4]
The article criticizes policy blueprints that propose reviving 1950s-style norms—such as incentivizing early heterosexual marriage and childbearing or abolishing no-fault divorce—as misdirected responses that ignore the economic forces undermining people’s capacity to form and sustain relationships.
The piece ultimately contends that revitalizing family life requires confronting the structural drivers of insecurity: resurgent inequality compared with the mid-20th century, a shredded social and medical safety net, weakened worker and consumer protections, and an everyday landscape in which the privileges of the rich translate directly into extra burdens for middle- and lower-income families.[2][4][5]
Different views on the topic
In contrast, many conservative policy organizations and commentators argue that the central problem is not economic inequality but the erosion of traditional family norms, contending that the decline of marriage, the rise of cohabitation, and the growth of single-parent households have weakened social cohesion and harmed children, especially in working-class communities.
These critics often view the 1950s family model more favorably, emphasizing high marriage rates, relatively low divorce rates, and clearer gender roles as strengths that provided stability and a shared moral framework, even while acknowledging or downplaying the injustices the column highlights.
Some family-policy blueprints from conservative think tanks argue that legal and cultural changes since the 1960s—no-fault divorce, expanded access to contraception and abortion, and the normalization of sex outside marriage—have made relationships more unstable and children more vulnerable, and therefore call for policies that promote early marriage, restrict divorce, and privilege heterosexual unions in law and culture.
Opponents of the article’s approach contend that no-fault divorce, while offering an escape from abusive situations, also made it too easy to exit marriages for less serious reasons, contributing to a culture of relational “disposability” and weakening the norm that adults should strive to resolve conflicts for the sake of their children.
Some scholars and commentators argue that the focus on economic inequality underestimates the role of cultural change, asserting that even when controlling for income, communities with stronger norms around marriage, fidelity, and parental responsibility tend to have better outcomes for children than communities where those norms have weakened.
Economists and policy analysts critical of the column’s economic emphasis may agree that inequality has grown but dispute that it is the primary cause of family distress, pointing instead to factors such as declining religious affiliation, the sexual revolution, and shifting expectations about personal fulfillment as key drivers of delayed marriage and higher relationship turnover.
Market-oriented critics often reject the portrayal of premium services and VIP experiences as socially harmful, arguing that price differentiation and tiered access are normal features of a market economy that expand consumer choice and help finance broader offerings, rather than forms of injustice that meaningfully damage family life.
These analysts may argue that policies limiting premium options, or sharply redistributing income, would reduce overall economic dynamism and innovation, and they often contend that growth and job creation—rather than large-scale redistribution or an expanded welfare state—are the best ways to improve family stability.
Some commentators sympathetic to traditional marriage argue that by framing modern marriage primarily as a vehicle for personal fulfillment and emotional satisfaction, the culture has weakened the sense of duty and sacrifice that once bound spouses together, and they criticize perspectives like the column’s for not giving enough weight to obligations that transcend individual happiness.
Religious leaders and faith-based family advocates frequently object to the neutral or positive framing of same-sex marriage and expanded reproductive rights, arguing that redefining marriage away from a child-centered union of a man and a woman, and separating sex from procreation, has contributed to the broader unraveling of norms that once supported robust family life.
Other critics suggest that the article underplays the ways in which midcentury institutions—churches, civic groups, and extended kin networks—provided forms of social capital and moral guidance that cannot be easily replicated by economic policy, and therefore argue that any serious response to family distress must include cultural and spiritual renewal alongside, or even instead of, structural economic reforms.
Finally, some opponents argue that emphasizing systemic inequality risks diminishing individuals’ sense of agency and responsibility, maintaining that strong families can and do emerge under economic strain, and that policy and cultural efforts should focus on reinforcing marriage, commitment, and parental responsibility, rather than primarily targeting the distribution of wealth and consumer privileges.
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