Book Reviews
In this interpretive synthesis of secondary
sources, Stephanie Coontz argues persuasively
against those conservative moralists who blame
social problems on the decline of the "traditional family." Marshaling historical, anthropological, and sociological evidence, she dispels myths of a "golden age" when "traditional
family life" allegedly prevented social ills.
Coontz effectively documents that American families of the past did not conform to any
one traditional model and that many families
then, like many families now, suffered from dis-
of children, physical and sexual abuse, harsh
child labor, and gender, class, and race inequities. Furthermore, contrary to stereotype,
middle-class families were neither self-reliant
nor private: through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they have relied on a range of
government subsidies and have failed to escape
the reach of state and community intervention. With these and other myths demolished,
Coontz asks her readers to "reject attempts to
'recapture' family traditions that either never
existed or existed in a totally different context."
Contemporary social problems, Coontz argues sensibly, do not result from declining
family values, feminism, working mothers, or
an urban underclass, but from broader economic and political forces. The growth of a
service economy and of part-time work has
eroded higher-paying, unionized jobs for the
urban working class, and inflation has placed
families with single breadwinners in increasingly dire economic straits. Racial discrimination has boosted unemployment among African Americans, and gender discrimination has
left working mothers with wages inadequate
for the care of their children. Coontz blames
advertisers and the consumerism they promote
for an individualist, me-first ethos she deplores. She faults policy makers who have cut
expenditures on social programs, and she laments a "collapse of social interdependence
and community obligation" among the middle class.
In an extended historical comparison,
Coontz contends that in the 1870s and 1880s
and again in the 1970s and 1980s, the middle
class retreated from civic service, replacing
public commitment with a rhetoric of private
morality and family loyalty. Public commitment, though, is a slippery concept, difficult
to define and measure, especially in the past.
Some historians will dispute Coontz's claims
about when and where it rose and fell, and
some will question the "striking resemblance"
she posits between the late nineteenth and late
twentieth centuries.
But Coontz is not writing primarily for
professional historians. In the best tradition of
public history, she addresses a broader reader-
ruption, dissolution, and poverty. The putative
ship. She packs her book with an array of useful
past, when stable families supposedly protected their own, did not preclude abandonment
insights, findings, and figures, and she makes
a compelling case for expanding "education,
East Carolina University
Greenvzile, North Carolina
The way we Never were: American Famziies
and the Nostalgia Trap. By Stephanie Coontz.
(New York: BasicBooks, 1992. viii, 391 pp.
$27.00, ISBN 0-465-00135-1.)
Downloaded from http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ at Central Michigan University on September 19, 2015
political considerations, politics constantly generated disharmony among groups. In the modern parliamentary state, successful and lasting
advances emerge from grass-roots movements,
not from paternalistic enclaves of middle-class
reformers. The tide of agrarian discontent that
built in the 1870s and carried reforms into
Woodrow Wilson's administration generated a
political energy that also boosted, nationally
and in the South, the humane proposals that
Link describes. Urban reform leaders continually invited opposition because of their in-state
political alliances and out-of-state relationships with agencies and philanthropies. By unavoidably accepting racial segregation to gain
reform legislation, the urban middle-class advocates played a signifi-cant role in institutionalizing the racial caste system and weakening
the impact of their own reforms. Their promises to effect a purer society also resembled
those made earlier by the rural elite white disfranchisers.
Link invites "fuller treatment of the nature
and creation of the new administrative state."
The Paradox of Southern Progressivism will
certainly serve as a durable and primary benchmark for those future studies.
Henry C. Ferrell, Jr.
1109
1110
The Journal of American History
Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of
Victorian Culture. By Kenneth 1. Ames. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. xiv,
265 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-87722-891-4.)
Death in the Dining Room is a collection of
five essays on Victorian material culture in the
United States. Two of the essays, on hallstands
and parlor organs, are revisions of previously
published articles. While their arguments remain the same, the notes and the text have
been substantially altered. The other three
chapters, on ornamental sideboards, needlework mottoes, and chairs and postures, reflect
the concern for understanding culture through
close analysis of objects. In each chapter, Kenneth 1. Ames weaves a careful description of
the object and its history with speculations
about its explicit and implicit functions in the
Victorian era. Through the objects, Ames explores a variety of significant social and cultural issues: gendered behavior, consumerism,
the domestication of violence, social control,
progress. He also introduces us to the roles that
now-forgotten objects (for example, calling
cards or perforated cardboard mottoes) played
in the lives of the Victorians. Through subtle
interpretations of ornamentation, placement,
ceremonial function, and specialization, Ames
demonstrates that objects play critical symbolic functions.
Students of material culture who valiantly
worked with poor copies of Ames's journal articles will welcome this lavishly illustrated book.
Every page contains examples of furniture,
photographs of people using the objects, advertisements, or reproductions of Victorian
pamungs. The vividness of the illustrations
helps the reader concur with Ames's conviction
that material culture is different from "word"
culture and that it is time that scholars pay attention to this source of evidence. While his
intention is to understand culture, he provides
readers with insights into the history of technology at the same time. Death in the Dining
Room would be an excellent book to use in
undergraduate American history courses.
Ames makes persuasive arguments in a conversational and nontechnical style that draws the
readers into the everyday life of Victorian
Americans.
My reservation with Death in the Dining
Room is that Ames's admittedly ambivalent
feelings toward the Victorians sometimes reflect too vividly his own personal convictions.
Let me select an example of this tendency from
my own area of expertise: While the technology that produces the perforated cardboard
mottoes is "modern:' the religious sentiments
displayed are "premodern" or display "childlike credulity." Without being more specific,
he accuses the "mentality that embraced these
mottoes" as inhibiting American intellectual
life in both the nineteenth and the twentieth
centuries. The reader is led to equate (incorrectly, I believe) a Victorian Congregationalist
who places "God Bless Our Home" needlework
up in her parlor with a twentieth-century Fundamentalist who rejects evolutionary biology.
Here the limitation of the method that Ames
employs becomes evident. Needlework mottoes are only one part of a complicated religious landscape. To reduce religion, or even
evangelical Protestantism, to this one expression is to do the Victorians a great disservice.
It is, however, the opinionated nature of
Ames's interpretations that makes Death in
the Dining Room more than just one more
book on Victorian culture. This is a superb addition to the growing body of literature on
American material culture.
Colleen McDannell
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah
Downloaded from http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ at Central Michigan University on September 19, 2015
health services, and social support networks."
She calls on Americans not to retreat to
familism or individualism, but to engage as
social beings in a larger political culture.
Nonetheless, her call for "reviving older community" traditions seems to embrace the same
nostalgic longing she rejects when writing of
the family. If we need "to invent new family
traditions:' then we also need to construct new
democratic forms of community.
Joanne Meyerowitz
University of Cincinnati
Cincinnatt; Ohio
December 1993