Salon Des Geeks

So, I bought a bunch of romance books online today.
I know what you’re probably thinking, and let me assure you, they are NOT particularly trashy — instead, they’re erudite and well researched.
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The other day, I was listening to public radio while driving to work from lunch, and heard a lecture on the evolution of public and private roles of marriage by Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history and family studies at Evergreen State in WA. Her central claim is that intertwined social and economic trends (such as those around wage labor, the viability of staying single/ending marriages, and the expectation of love) have led to a deinstitutionalization of marriage in the West, but that the same factors have allowed modern marriages to offer a historically unprecedented degree of intimacy.
The lecture is online at Word For Word’s program archive, and was interesting enough to get me to buy her book on my way to work.
Her website is at http://www.stephaniecoontz.com/