The Search for Domestic Bliss
：Marriage and Family Counseling in 20th-Century America
Publication subTitle ：Marriage and Family Counseling in 20th-Century America
Author： Dowbiggin > Ian
Publisher： University Press of Kansas
Publication year： 2014
E-ISBN: 9780700620326
P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780700619474
Subject： C913.13 marriage;K1 World History;R74 Neurology and Psychiatry
Keyword： 神经病学与精神病学,社会学,世界史
Language： ENG
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Description
Why are Americans so bad at marriage? It's certainly not for lack of trying. By the early 21st century Americans were spending billions on marriage and family counseling, seeking advice and guidance from some 50,000 experts. And yet, the divorce rate suggests that all of this therapeutic intervention isn't making couples happier or marriages more durable. Quite the contrary, Ian Dowbiggin tells us in this thought-provoking book: the "caring industry" is part of the problem.
Under the influence of therapeutic reformers, marital and familial dynamics in this country have shifted from mores and commitment to love and companionship. This movement toward a "me marriage," as the New York Times has termed it, with its attendant soaring expectations and acute dissatisfactions, is rooted as much in the twists and turns of 20th-century history as it is in the realities in the hearts and minds of modern Americans, Dowbiggin argues; and his book reveals how effectively those changes have been encouraged and orchestrated by a small but resourceful group of social reformers with ties to eugenics, birth control, population control, and sex education.
In The Search for Domestic Bliss, Dowbiggin delves into the stories of the usual suspects in the founding of the therapeutic gospel, exposing little known aspects of their influence and misunderstood features of their work. Here we learn, for instance, that Betty Friedan did not after all discover "the probl
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