Can Marriage Survive the Manosphere?

When the historian Stephanie Coontz published The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap in 1992, it landed like a gasoline-soaked rag in the middle of that era’s burning culture wars. That was the year Vice President Dan Quayle chided the fictional news anchor Murphy Brown for having a child “out of wedlock,” and Pat Buchanan, speaking at the Republican National Convention, denounced Hillary Clinton for comparing “marriage and the family” to “slavery and life on an Indian reservation.” Coontz, at the time a professor at the Evergreen State College, popped up on daytime television, appearing on Oprah and Leeza to explain to millions of viewers that the nuclear family venerated by conservatives was not only a historical anomaly, but an institution that, in its time, had obscured a great deal of suffering.