Stephanie Coontz
Stephanie Coontz
Historian Stephanie Coontz has chiseled a niche as one of the country's go-to experts on family and marriage. Her writing about matrimony's evolution has swayed top legal minds. The U.S. Supreme Court cited Coontz's work twice in its landmark 2015 ruling on same-sex marriage.
It wasn't the first time the limelight reached the longtime Evergreen State College faculty member. She was called "perhaps the best-known radical woman in the Northwest" in the early 1970s. Journalists stressed, though, that the "petite co-ed" didn't look radical or slip into revolutionary jargon. She thought a practical, nonthreatening style would reach a wider audience. Her myth-busting 1992 book about American nostalgia, The Way We Never Were, had her basking in national attention from Oprah Winfrey and CNN.
She's kept her optimistic debunking style while she's been drawn back into the "nostalgia trap" in recent years. Her view of persuasion has been "that you start to reach people where they are, not where you want them to be."
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In her look at American nostalgia for the good old 1950s, Coontz brought a basket of hardboiled reality to the picnic of soft-focus memories. PopTech
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Coontz poked at Hollywood's fictive "misty water-colored memories of the way we were."
Coontz's mother, a professor at Eastern Washington State College, encouraged her to apply for a job teaching history at The Evergreen State College.
Top right: Coontz poked at Hollywood's fictive "misty water-colored memories of the way we were."
Top left: Coontz's mother, a professor at Eastern Washington State College, encouraged her to apply for a job teaching history at The Evergreen State College.
Bottom: As an undergraduate at University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s, Coontz was involved in the free speech movement. Stephanie Coontz
As an undergraduate at University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s, Coontz was involved in the free speech movement. Stephanie Coontz