Well-known author and social historian Stephanie Coontz will speak at UMass Amherst on Thursday, February 10, at 7:30 p.m. in Mahar Auditorium. The talk is free and open to the public.
Coontz’s talk, “’Mad Men,’ Working ‘Girls,’ and Depressed Housewives: The 1960s and The Feminine Mystique,” will draw on her new book, “A Strange Stirring”: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.
A Strange Stirring uses personal interviews, cultural and historical analysis, and current scholarship to examine the impact of Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking 1963 best-seller. Coontz reads The Feminine Mystique as a flawed text that nevertheless had mass appeal and mobilized a generation of women to question their roles in the family and workplace.
Coontz applauds Friedan’s indictment of Madison Avenue and its part in defining postwar women primarily as consumers, and admires her keen analysis of how women’s subjugation supported a postwar economy. At the same time, Friedan exaggerated the image of all postwar women as depressed housewives and was especially oblivious to issues of race and class. As Coontz points out, in 1960, 64% of upper middle class black mothers held jobs outside the home.
Reviewers are already offering praise for Coontz’s book, calling it “an engrossing and enlightening tour of the past, with wisdom and meaning for the future” (Nancy Cott, Harvard University) and “a sharp revisiting of the generation that was floored by…The Feminine Mystique” (Kirkus Reviews).
Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and is Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families. Her previous award-winning books include The Way We Never Were (1992) and Marriage, A History (2005).
Coontz has testified about family-related issues before Congress, and her research has been featured on the Today Show, Oprah Winfrey, Crossfire, 20/20, NPR, and in other media outlets. Her articles and op-eds have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Salon.
Coontz’s visit to UMass Amherst has been organized by the UMass Public Engagement Project, which supports and helps to train faculty members who want their research to make a difference in the world, and the Five College Public Policy Initiative. The talk is funded at UMass by the Center for Research on Families, the Center for Public Policy and Administration, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Social and Demographic Research Institute (SADRI), the History Department, the Sociology Department, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
At Amherst College, sponsors include Women’s and Gender Studies and the Anthropology and Sociology Department; at Smith College, the Sociology Department, the Program for the Study of Women and Gender, and the Smith Lecture Fund; and at Mount Holyoke College, the Sociology Department. Five Colleges, Inc. is also a sponsor of the talk.
Updated information about Coontz’s visit and talk will be available at www.masspolicy.org and www.umass.edu/family.