These United Hosts

In which we take an historical look at the interplay between marriage and democracy, and Hannah and Nick reveal a Civics 101 secret years in the making. INCOGNI DEAL: They can't harm you, if they can't find you! To get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to ⁠incogni.com/CIVICS⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hannah McCarthy?

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 0:57Speaker 02

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• 1:27Hannah McCarthy?

  Do you think people are gonna be surprised? Or do you think people are gonna be like, "Oh, I knew it."

• 1:34Nick Capodice?

  How'd you take this?

• 1:37Speaker 04

  I don't think you need to. Well, maybe you do.

• 1:39Nick Capodice?

  All right, here we go.

• 1:40Hannah McCarthy?

  Here we go.

• 1:43Hannah McCarthy?

  General Assistant. I mean, we want the clerk's office.

• 1:48Hannah McCarthy?

  Thank you. Oh, here we go.

• 1:51Nick Capodice?

  City clerk? That's where you can get a business license? You can register to vote.

• 1:57Hannah McCarthy?

  Hi there. We're here to get a marriage license.

• 2:02Speaker 05

  So the process is that I then take this over to my little workstation. I go into the database, I put you guys in, and then I make a working copy. And I'll bring it over to you guys, and you get to mark it up as much as you want.

• 2:15Hannah McCarthy?

  See, going into a city hall, always, and like, it's like Rebecca was saying, like, it makes you feel better to see people, talk to people, and be reminded that there is something that's functioning.

• 2:26Nick Capodice?

  Right.

• 2:27Hannah McCarthy?

  Right? Like, people, I think, can convince themselves that everything is a mess, and everything is too frustrating and nothing is working.

• 2:36Speaker 05

  Is that it? This is your official license. Like, this is, this is, it's good to go. Yours.

• 2:43Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah.

• 2:44Speaker 05

  I know.

• 2:50Nick Capodice?

  All right. I'm very emotional, but...

• 2:53Speaker 05

  As you should be. It's a big deal.

• 2:55Hannah McCarthy?

  It is.

• 3:01Hannah McCarthy?

  Tale as old as time. When two people love the principles of democracy and civil rights very, very much, sometimes they decide to get married.

• 3:13Nick Capodice?

  Even if, even if when they first met.

• 3:15Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay. Yeah. Okay. So, is it, can I tell people? I feel like I, I mean, we're just like, letting it all out.

• 3:22Nick Capodice?

  Let it all hang out.

• 3:24Hannah McCarthy?

  So when Nick first joined NHPR...

• 3:26Nick Capodice?

  This was in 2019? This was in 2019. I had just come from New York to work at the station.

• 3:33Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah.

• 3:34Nick Capodice?

  And Hannah and I didn't get along tremendously well.

• 3:38Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah. I mean, and I kind of think this is part of it, like, and this is the truth. When Nick first joined the station as the education outreach producer for NHPR, I was like, who is this steamroller Mr. Ideas man coming in here, gonna join Civics 101 and shake it all up?

• 3:57Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, but we did. Like, we started making episodes that sounded different from Civics 101 as it existed before.

• 4:03Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah. No, that's true. That's true. But like, even, even so, for a while, I was like, I am a professional journalist over here. Like, do you wanna see my master's degree?

• 4:13Nick Capodice?

  But it turned out, it turned out, like, we got in the studio and it turned out, we were pretty good at it. Like, we worked well together.

• 4:21Hannah McCarthy?

  We worked really, really well together. And actually, Nick, as I was thinking about how to tell the people that their two favorite Civics 101 hosts are indeed getting married, I actually had to stop myself because what I was thinking to myself I was going to say on the show essentially amounts to my wedding vows.

• 4:43Nick Capodice?

  Oh, well, you don't wanna give those away.

• 4:44Hannah McCarthy?

  No, you gotta, you gotta like, save something, right?

• 4:47Nick Capodice?

  Keep something in the tank.

• 4:48Hannah McCarthy?

  Keep a little something to yourself. All right, so suffice it to say, we work together. Everyone knows that. And we work together.

• 4:58Nick Capodice?

  Yeah.

• 4:58Hannah McCarthy?

  Right? Right? And that is what it is all about, I think. And as we have been getting ready to enter into this very personal endeavor of marriage, you and I have been thinking about how marriage is also a civic institution. We have, it's true, we're civics hosts, it's just what we do. And so we thought this might be a good opportunity to get some historical perspective and maybe even a little advice on the nature of marriage and the nature of, of union and working together and democracy. So for this episode, I spoke with someone who has been researching and writing about marriage and family for many years.

• 5:43Hannah McCarthy?

  She is also the Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families, and that person is the inimitable Stephanie Kuntz.

• 5:52Nick Capodice?

  I love Stephanie Kuntz. I interviewed her for an episode years ago, like, eight years ago.

• 5:57Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, yeah, I know. Which is why I was so excited when I saw that Stephanie had written a new book.

• 6:03Nick Capodice?

  Yes. So everyone, Hannah and I have talked about this new book a lot, like, every night. It really did something to us.

• 6:11Hannah McCarthy?

  No, it really did. We have had hours of conversation, right? About what I learned while I was reading this book. And I think a lot of that has to do with the power of learning the history behind something. Okay, so this book is called For Better and For Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage.

• 6:32Nick Capodice?

  Challenging future. Well, we got ahead of us, McCarthy.

• 6:41Hannah McCarthy?

  As I was reading this book, repeatedly, I had to put it down, I had to rush downstairs, and I had to say to Nick, my coworker and fiance, "I just learned this about the history of marriage, I just learned this, I learned this." And we had so many moments wherein one of us would say, "That's comforting," or, "Wow, that's really good to know." And the same experience was repeated with family and friends as I would talk about this book. And I would love to know if that is a common reaction that you have, or if I just have the most self-selecting group of people in my life?

• 7:17Speaker 06

  Well, it's the reaction I was going for. So, I don't know, but I hope so. I hope to give people stuff that would make them rethink some of their assumptions and perhaps realize that we have more leeway than we realize to make things better.

• 7:33Hannah McCarthy?

  So that's really interesting to me, the idea that we have more leeway. You present this book as this broad, long history of marriage as an institution, you know, both social and economic, and I suppose political. Why present it in that way, to give people that sense of leeway?

• 7:52Speaker 06

  Well, we are going through a kind of crisis that is greatly misunderstood, with people thinking that people don't value marriage anymore, which is not at all true. People beginning to give up on the other sex, hetero pessimism. And it strikes me that we do have indeed some huge challenges, but if we can put those challenges in historical and sociological perspective, maybe we can stop beating up on our partners or ourselves for what we do wrong. If we can recognize that we are all dealing with institutions, with myths, with habits, earworms, I call them in the book, that get in the way of our beginning to realize what

• 8:34Speaker 06

  we need to change in order to get the more egalitarian, satisfying marriage as we want, then I think that it doesn't make it easier to change, but it makes it less stressful and less tension-inducing for the partners that are trying to change.

• 8:50Hannah McCarthy?

  So this part, that we are all dealing with institutions, myths, habits, and earworms that get in our way, Nick, I think about this all the time when it comes to this country and this democracy, okay? Because I'm always thinking about the disillusionment, the frustration, the conflict. How much of that is about what is real and actually happening? And how much of that is due to American culture and habits and myths and the stuff that we have been told is real versus what is actually real?

• 9:28Nick Capodice?

  So are you saying that marriage is America, essentially?

• 9:32Hannah McCarthy?

  I think what I am saying is that a union is a union. You got people coming together and engaging in a lifelong project. I mean, ideally, right? Like, ideally, this country keeps going. Ideally, marriage is forever, you know, in an ideal situation, wherein people want egalitarianism, they want equality and partnership and working toward the same goal. And it isn't easy, but it is made a lot harder by the stuff that we believe is true that just maybe is not.

• 10:12Hannah McCarthy?

  What have you identified over the course of your career as the most common earworms that affect people in a marriage?

• 10:20Speaker 06

  There are so many of them, but let's start with the idea that men find it very difficult to do emotion work, that women have always done the kind of emotional heavy lifting, they're the ones who recognize when things are going wrong in a relationship and take steps to overcome it, smooth things over. But you know, this is a myth. Emotion work, if you go back to the 16th century and 17th century, used to be organized by class rather than gender. The lower classes did it to the upper classes and men did it just as much as women, in fact, arguably more because of the social hierarchies.

• 10:54Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, so looking back into the long history of marriage, we're getting to the origins of a lot of hetero habits here, so just, you know, bear with us and trust me, Stephanie has a lot to say about gender myths as well. But Nick, she said organized by class rather than gender, does that make sense to you?

• 11:11Nick Capodice?

  Kinda yes, kinda no, because this is an historically sexist world, right? Men at the top rung with no justification.

• 11:21Hannah McCarthy?

  Right, you don't have to have done anything or proven anything, you're just above because you're a dude. That is for sure a common theme like throughout human history, but also over history. If a woman was of a higher class, like a higher social class than a man, that man was below her, full stop. Also, this one is so good, also Nick, let me ask you this, what does Mrs. mean?

• 11:49Nick Capodice?

  Mrs.

• 11:50Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, like MRS.

• 11:51Nick Capodice?

  Like Mrs. Cappadicee?

• 11:53Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, I'm not changing my name, but that is what I'm talking about.

• 11:56Nick Capodice?

  Well, as far as I understand it, Mrs. means you're married and Ms. or Miss usually means you're unmarried.

• 12:03Hannah McCarthy?

  No.

• 12:04Nick Capodice?

  What?

• 12:05Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, actually now that, yes, that is true, but that contraction, MRS, period, that originally just meant that you were a mistress. It designated your rank and your wealth. As Stephanie puts it in her book, Taylor Swift would have been Mrs. Taylor Swift the minute she got rich and famous and for the rest of her life, and it would have had nothing to do with Travis Kelsey, has nothing to do with marriage.

• 12:30Nick Capodice?

  Really? Well, like, when you say mistress, do you mean someone who like runs a house, not mistress like the other, the other woman? I just wanted to know what you mean by mistress.

• 12:39Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, exactly, you're somebody in charge, you're someone with wealth and power.

• 12:42Nick Capodice?

  Right, so what happened? How did that change?

• 12:44Hannah McCarthy?

  We are gonna get to that, but my point is that Mrs. so-and-so and Mr. so-and-so, Mr., by the way, a contraction of master, we are not talking about enslavement, but we are talking about someone who has wealth and power. These were the people higher up than you, and when you were lower down, you had to take care of their emotions and their problems and be diplomatic regardless of whether you were a man or a woman.

• 13:10Nick Capodice?

  Right, but in a household, and again sexism, that's a given, but historically, is not the woman the one managing the man's emotions, taking care of his problems, being diplomatic, et cetera?

• 13:23Speaker 06

  I mean, when you go back to the history of marriage, which was a co-provider family from the very beginning, but in a different way than ours, when people had to work together, and for a lot of history, the woman was under the thumb of the man, she didn't have to kind of make up to him, she obeyed him, but she didn't have to like it necessarily. And so it was a very different emotional kind of relationship than we have today. Getting to know that, I think, can help people.

• 13:55Hannah McCarthy?

  Here's the one that really blew my mind, Nick, the co-provider family.

• 14:02Nick Capodice?

  This is something Hannah and I became obsessed with when you were reading the book.

• 14:06Hannah McCarthy?

  Right, this is what made me really think hard about what goes into a union, what goes into joining two people together to contribute to a shared life.

• 14:18Nick Capodice?

  Right, because in the past, your household was also your business, so both people are creating the household economy. So maybe the guy's catching the fish, but the woman is out there selling the fish and hanging out with the other fishwives at the pub.

• 14:33Hannah McCarthy?

  And maybe the man is raising the pigs, but the woman is butchering them and making the bacon.

• 14:38Nick Capodice?

  Right, nobody's bringing home the bacon, the bacon happens at home.

• 14:42Hannah McCarthy?

  And both people are doing these tasks every day that keep them fed and make them money. Both people are working on this business together, both people doing jobs with inherent appreciated value.

• 14:56Speaker 06

  Household economy in which both men and women worked, men were in charge, I don't want to romanticize that, and women had to obey, but there was no sense that women did these things because they couldn't do anything else, and that men and women had completely different ideas of what needed to be done in the home. In fact, women were often described as yolk mates rather than as the sweet little thing who had to be taken care of, and men and women knew each other's tasks very well.

• 15:28Nick Capodice?

  Yolk mate? You didn't tell me about this part.

• 15:31Hannah McCarthy?

  Both dragging the plow, right? So again, not perfect, yes, there is still sexism, there is still subjugation and everything, but working together. And then, something happened, and that something, as it so often is in history, was industrialization.

• 15:48Speaker 06

  So when work moved out of the home, but somebody needed to be at home because there wasn't mass production, you couldn't buy ready-made clothes, so there was an idea that some people moved out of the home and they worked for wages, but those wages had to be translated into things that the family could consume, and you got a much sharper division of labor between men and women. And as women lost what our society considered to be their productive role, they got an emphasis on their reproductive role, both in terms of producing babies, but also in terms of reproducing the things that make everyday life possible.

• 16:30Speaker 06

  And I think men lost access to that and began to romanticize women's work at home and kind of counterpose it to the increased competition that they were facing in the world of work and commerce. But at the same time, they also began to find new ways of bolstering up their authority, both in the home and out, and that was to see women as, as weak, virtuous but vulnerable. And it's so interesting because what in the actual patriarchy, the idea was that women

• 17:11Speaker 06

  were just as strong, perhaps more devious and more ambitious than men, and they had to be taken care of and excluded for the protection of men. And then you got this strange idea that women needed to be protected because of their own vulnerability. In some ways, that softened marriages, but it created a long-term difference between men and women's personalities that has increasingly been a real problem for women as they have moved into the work world.

• 17:49Hannah McCarthy?

  So two things happening here, separate spheres for men and women and redefining what makes a man and a woman. And what makes a man and a woman in this redefinition is essentially their being the opposite of each other.

• 18:07Speaker 06

  I think men nowadays feel a lot of pressure to prove that they're not too girly or too feminine. Well, until the late 19th century, the cultural definition of the opposite of manhood was childhood. You were supposed to outgrow childhood in order to prove you were a man, but somewhere in the late 19th century, the opposite of manhood became womanhood. Well, there was a period where that might have been actually productive because as long as women weren't involved in sports and scouting and war, and they couldn't be heroes, at least publicly, the men could, could embrace these really good qualities of, okay, women can't do this, I must do this to prove I'm a man.

• 18:51Speaker 06

  But now that women do the same things that men do and can prove that they're just as heroic and just as strong, I think that this definition of manhood as the opposite of womanhood is what has led some men to embrace toxicity as a way of saying, well, at least I'm not that kind of girly girl.

• 19:12Hannah McCarthy?

  Stephanie tells this anecdote in the book, Nick, wherein she has her students read letters written by men before the 19th century, and the guys in the class get uncomfortable because the stuff they're reading does not compute with the last 100-plus years of what they have been told a guy is.

• 19:31Speaker 06

  Because in fact, you read the letters of men to each other, heterosexual men saying things like, they sound like letters I wrote when I was 15 to my girlfriends. Oh, I haven't heard from you in so long, are you mad at me? Why don't you write to me? I read your last letter and I cried, this sort of thing, this kind of emotion with men. And when cameras were first invented, men took pictures of themselves and their friends sitting on each other's laps, embracing each other, walking arm in arm, hand in hand, and this only disappeared in the late 19th century. So these kinds of things to learn, I think, are really important because they help us

• 20:14Speaker 06

  realize we have a lot more leeway than we think to do things differently. But at the same time, we need to let ourselves off the hook if it doesn't happen immediately because there have been all these habits and it's been pounded into our heads that you're, you're not masculine enough if you do this, behave this way, and you're not feminine enough if you don't behave that way.

• 20:41Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, so I called out the fact that we are talking a lot about men and women in marriage here, very hetero throughout a lot of history in terms of what was actually legally permitted. But Stephanie's book, to be clear, is not about heterosexual marriage. It is about marriage, full stop. And the gender roles that Stephanie calls out are truly this invention of, you know, changing social structure, changing economy, changing means of production. Because when you look across history and across social structures, you cannot find any one definition of what kind of work is expected from what person.

• 21:20Speaker 06

  The earliest thing that we, that we learn, by the time that a child is 12 to 18 months, they know what a woman is supposed to do, what a man is supposed to do, what tools they use. But here's the trigger. Even though every society has used male versus female as a way of assigning different roles and explaining different behaviors, they've explained totally different behaviors and assigned totally different roles. So that our notions of gender are very, very fluid. And we need to be able to understand the difference that it used to be that a woman was not supposed to speak out loud. She wasn't

• 22:03Speaker 06

  supposed to run. Now she is. Men once had, as we've talked about, more freedom to show the soft side of their nature than they're given today. And that should be liberating whatever your politics, whatever kind of a marriage you want to end up in. It should be nice to know that you have some choices and you don't have to adhere to some strict script if you don't want to adhere to it.

• 22:36Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, so so far, we have been talking about changes over the course of history of marriage and the history of gender roles. And Stephanie is trying her best to remind us that the way so many of us perceive things is something that was invented over the course of history. It's often a myth or an accident. And that doesn't mean that it is the truth about people or about marriage. But here in America, there are more reasons why we get marriage and people maybe a little bit wrong. And we are going to get to that after a quick break.

• 23:28Nick Capodice?

  Maybe you're aware of data brokers. Maybe you're not. You should be. And as much as I wish that data brokers was just Brett Spiner managing real estate, it is not. Data brokers are out there, thousands of them. And what they're doing is they are collecting every single thing about you that exists on the internet. And they're taking that huge pile of data and they are selling it to the highest bidder. And unlike commander data on the USS Enterprise, these guys are up to no good. So if you want help removing your data from the internet before it gets brokered out, you should check out Incogni.

• 24:09Nick Capodice?

  Incogni takes care of this massive first step in data protection. They help you remove that personal data from the web, and they handle the entire process. So to take that first step, to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to incogni.com/civics. That's I-N-C-O-G-N-I dot com slash civics, or just click the link in the episode description box. Again, that's incogni.com/civics. Make it so. I know data never said that.

• 24:46Hannah McCarthy?

  The older I get, the more I am looking for truly lovable closet staples that I know I will reach for just as often next year as I do right now. I want a closet that doesn't need constant updates or replacements, just high quality clothes that last, especially the kind with tags that say 100%. As in 100% Mongolian cashmere, 100% mulberry silk, 100% organic cotton, just like the Quince Fisherman Cropped Cardi and I am wearing right this very second. This sweater has kept its shape, color, and softness for years now. I reach for it every single fall, every time I want a warm and elevated look. Quince gives

• 25:26Hannah McCarthy?

  you the quality you expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag. Find the fall pieces you will reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was Civics 101. It's a great way to support the show.

• 25:59Nick Capodice?

  Holiday season is coming, and I don't think I have to tell you this might be a tough one because things are expensive in the fall of 2026. Everyone I know is looking for ways to make a little extra money, prowling around the side hustle subreddits. But I will say, if you're looking to sell something to launch a store fast before the holiday rush, Shopify is the one stop shop platform for making a professional looking store without touching a line of code. You can sell anything, and you can sell it anywhere that people shop online. You can have it done in minutes, and you can launch before Black Friday, that time of year when more people are already shopping and ready to buy. So if you're ready

• 26:43Nick Capodice?

  to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/civics to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/civics. Just go to Shopify.com/civics today to hear your first.

• 27:04Hannah McCarthy?

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• 27:42Nick Capodice?

  We're back. You're listening to Civics 101. We're talking about marriage with Stephanie Kuntz. She's the author of For Better and For Worse. And Hannah and I are both pretty affected by this book in no small part, because really soon, we are getting married.

• 27:58Hannah McCarthy?

  We're getting married, live on the air.

• 27:59Nick Capodice?

  Surprise. Where's the groom? That's me. No, that is not happening. But the next time we record an episode, we will be married.

• 28:08Hannah McCarthy?

  I know.

• 28:08Nick Capodice?

  That is kind of unbelievable.

• 28:10Hannah McCarthy?

  That's kind of amazing.

• 28:11Nick Capodice?

  They're going to find a way to make us do a bonus episode before.

• 28:14Hannah McCarthy?

  What kind of bonus episode?

• 28:15Nick Capodice?

  I don't know, like the night before we get married. We need something about the Epstein files. We need something about what's going on in Texas.

• 28:23Hannah McCarthy?

  And you know that I really wish that we could call ourselves America's only married news team. But I looked into it, and a bunch of other news teams beat us to the punch in this country.

• 28:33Nick Capodice?

  I am still going to call us that. And as America's only engaged news team.

• 28:39Hannah McCarthy?

  Civics 101 could not confirm whether Nick and Hannah are America's only engaged news team.

• 28:43Nick Capodice?

  I think we should pivot to marriage in America. So there's one thing you told me about in Stephanie's book that explains a lot about why we are where we are in this land. Did you ask her about the democracy thing?

• 28:56Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, yeah, of course I did. I loved and was a bit chilled by the chapter, The Dark Side of Democracy. And I thought to myself, wait a minute, wait a minute. How could egalitarianism, how could democratization have had a negative effect in this space, or change the way we talk about women? Could you lay that out for us? The introduction of this notion of political democracy, you know, that we never used to have to sugarcoat the way that we subjugated women, but now everyone's equal, right? So much in the same way that we have to find a myth that justifies

• 29:37Hannah McCarthy?

  enslavement, right? Did democracy do the same thing to the way that women were perceived and treated in the institution of marriage?

• 29:45Speaker 06

  I think this is one of the big paradoxes of democracy and why all the culture wars about what American Revolution did and what American democracy did gets wrong on both sides. The ideals of the American Revolution were tremendously revolutionary. The idea that all human beings are created equal. I mean, sometimes it was called as men, just men are created equal. But in fact, it had that dynamic to it. And it really was pretty much rare in all of human history, because for most of history, inequality didn't have to be justified because people just thought it was the way of the world. There are people

• 30:30Speaker 06

  born to be serfs or slaves, and born to be lower classes, and born to be leaders, and that's the way it was. In fact, if you look at Puritan preachers, over and over again, they will preach about how equality would be a terrible thing, because it would just unleash chaos in the world. And in fact, it did unleash chaos in the world, because once you say all men are created equal, then people say, well, how about women? Or how about black men? Or Native American men? And so one of the tremendous paradoxes of democracy is this incredible radical possibility to see human rights as a real possibility. But the other side of it is, if you're not willing to make the sacrifice to stop exploiting

• 31:15Speaker 06

  the native populations, to stop enslaving people from Africa, then you now need an excuse that you didn't need before.

• 31:27Speaker 06

  If all men are created equal, but some are slaves, if all human beings have this right to equality, and yet we keep women at home and we don't let them have the freedom to make their choices about who they can marry even, but far less what they can do in the world, how do we explain that? Well, then, the temptation is to say, well, these people have some quality that makes them less than human. And of course, for Native Americans and African Americans, it was a, the excuse was that these people are barbarous. They, you know, they're, they're just, they're like animals. We have to control them. When it came to women, it was slightly different. It was, well, they're just very sweet.

• 32:11Speaker 06

  And in fact, they just simply don't have the strength of mind or body to do the things that men have to do in the world, and therefore, we have to protect them. And that has been a long-term heritage of the American Revolution and of democracy. It's one of the reasons we find that in less democratic societies, more authoritarian ones, women are less likely to internalize the idea that they can't do hard work and that they can't be strong and autocratic even if necessary.

• 32:45Hannah McCarthy?

  I could not stop thinking about the like fairly well-known exchange between Abigail and John Adams when it came to this. So many people talk about Abigail writing to John as he was helping to draft the Declaration of Independence, "Remember the ladies."

• 33:01Nick Capodice?

  And he did not.

• 33:03Hannah McCarthy?

  He did not. He did not remember the ladies. But the thing about that correspondence that reminds me of Stephanie's work is the fact that John writes, back to Abigail, "We know better than to repeal our masculine systems." He calls women "a tribe more numerous and more powerful than all the rest," and that Washington and all their brave heroes would have to fight the despotism of the petticoat. And I know that John is messing with her here, but is he also kind of acknowledging this slowly dying notion of women? Do you remember that, you know, Stephanie told us earlier that in the old patriarchy,

• 33:45Hannah McCarthy?

  they considered women maybe more ambitious and devious than men?

• 33:50Nick Capodice?

  So it's like John Adams has got one foot in the old world and one in the new.

• 33:54Hannah McCarthy?

  Right. Like he's, he's both acknowledging this era wherein, you know, men had to be afraid of women because they were, you know, gonna take over. And now there's this new era where we're starting to look at women as like the delicate little flowers back at home who couldn't possibly handle anything. And then there's the fact that John, you know, really is both in the new world and the old. He's crafting this new world and he's breaking from this old world. He's, he's crafting a new American democracy and breaking from the British monarchy. But then Adams also does write about women's delicacy. He believes that they were unfit for business, politics, and war.

• 34:34Nick Capodice?

  And he is always longing for home, for the farm and brain tree. But he is also constantly doing business somewhere else.

• 34:43Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah. John is somewhere else, but we are not yet in an era where that means that all that's left for Abigail is dishes and laundry, right? She is managing and working on the family farm and the family finances. She's making investments that grew the wealth of the Adams family. This, I know. You can't say it. This creep into perceiving women as the domestic housework mothers and men as the less emotional and less caretaking quote unquote breadwinners was really slow. It took decades and decades.

• 35:20Nick Capodice?

  Right. So I get that. It does make sense. But the thing I am trying to understand, Hannah, there are a lot of people today who think that there is an ideal form of marriage. And there are a lot of people who think marriage is antiquated and sexist and heteronormative. And I think that both groups are thinking of a certain version of marriage and a certain period of time.

• 35:43Hannah McCarthy?

  Like maybe the 1950s?

• 35:44Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, especially the 1950s.

• 35:47Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay. All right. So let's talk about what the 1950s happened inside of.

• 35:59Speaker 06

  After the Great Depression and World War II, people came out of that feeling like something had gone wrong in America in terms of its economic system, but also something had gone right in terms of our ability to get together and have people of all classes, you know, not volunteer army, draftees, fighting alongside each other and coming out and thinking, we beat fascism. And the result was a tremendous groundswell of support for the New Deal and ideas that we should bring the excesses of Wall Street under control and finance. We should protect workers' ability to improve their wages and keep track of their hours. And there was just a tremendous progress that way.

• 36:43Speaker 06

  You know, it wasn't like perfect, but there was steady progress from the late 1930s through the early 1970s.

• 36:57Nick Capodice?

  So the 1950s happened in the middle of social programs and support for workers and curbing the excesses of extreme wealth.

• 37:07Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, but in terms of marriage, in terms of that antiquated and sexist thing, here's what could go on in a 1950s marriage.

• 37:16Speaker 06

  Well, I've changed my view on nostalgia about families of the 50s quite a bit. I think I, I used to dismiss it. And I had a good reason to dismiss it because if you look at the actual facts, the 1950s families were very far from idyllic. Rates of child abuse were much higher. We know for a fact that when unilateral divorce was adopted in 1970, every state that adopted it, because they did it at different times, the first five years saw an upsurge in divorce, but they also saw a 20% decline in wives' suicide rates and somewhere between a quarter and a half decline in domestic violence. So these were not idyllic families.

• 38:01Speaker 06

  I now think that when people are looking, being nostalgic for the family, they are experiencing what my son, who's a doctor, calls referred pain.

• 38:15Speaker 06

  That our brains can't tell exactly where a pain in the visceral part, the internal organs is coming from. So they will get something on their outside of our body that shares some similar nerve endings, and they'll say that's where the pain is. For example, if you have a stomach, your esophagus is pushing on, you've eaten way too much, you may feel a pain in your neck or your shoulder. So I think that when people get nostalgic for these families of the 50s that were really, truly not very good, that they're looking for something else. They're feeling the pain in our family and social lives.

• 38:58Speaker 06

  But what they're really nostalgic for is a period where, in fact, things were better in the sense of the actual way that the society was moving in terms of wages of working people and lowering inequality. Two Rand economists recently estimated that if the kind of economic trends in wages that had started in 1949 and that went to the early 1970s had continued, by 2018, workers at every level of the income of the wage structure would have been getting almost 70% more than they do. Instead, that 70% more went to the upper 5% of the population.

• 39:43Speaker 06

  And the result has been not only tremendous problems, thinking about your kids' homes and their future and their education, the tremendous inflation in that, as rich people have outbid the rest of us for those kinds of consumer goods, but also the tremendous sense of insult as 90% of the companies compete for the top 10% of consumers. They give them dedicated phone lines while the rest of us have to sit on the phone for hours. They give them first boarding, first entrance. And I think we've underestimated how much that kind of sense of social exclusion really causes pain in people's lives.

• 40:27Speaker 06

  And so they're susceptible to people who say, well, if we would just go back to those family forms, that would solve the problem. But in fact, we need to go forward in our family forms and retrieve those elements of the past that were more egalitarian.

• 40:43Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay. And note the fact that the problem that Stephanie is talking about has a lot to do with money. And the money problem was not created by feminism or women working outside of the home or non-heterosexual marriage. Even during that era, right, the 30s through the 70s, that era of worker stability and financial progress for working Americans, there were people even then working to make those structures stop.

• 41:12Speaker 06

  There were a lot of people, billionaires, for example, and financiers, who wanted to be able to go back to the old freedoms. And they allied with those other people who were threatened by the new social freedoms in terms of racism and sexism to create an alliance that often talked in terms of nostalgia for a more, for a more family-oriented society, but in practical terms, spent most of its energy rolling back the reforms of the New Deal.

• 41:51Speaker 06

  And we've gotten to the point where nowadays, the anti-monopoly and the pro-worker elements that had been introduced in America over that last 30, 40 years are being steadily reversed.

• 42:09Nick Capodice?

  And just to say real quick here, because people casually say all the time that the government incentivizes marriage and creating a family. So, did you ask Stephanie about that?

• 42:20Hannah McCarthy?

  Of course I didn't. Her answer was really short. Does the federal government, in practice, incentivize marriage and having children?

• 42:32Speaker 06

  Well, no. But it says it did. And really, what that boils down to is that it blames people who don't or can't get married and who can't afford to have children or fear for their children's future. It blames them for the kind of poverty and economic inequality and insecurity that leads people not to get married and not to have kids. So, it's kind of ironic.

• 43:01Hannah McCarthy?

  By the way, if you want to hear more about that, what Stephanie just talked about, read her book, please. There are plenty of numbers to back this up.

• 43:09Nick Capodice?

  So Hannah, everything that we just talked about, this feels like a giant catch-22, but like maybe a fake catch-22? Mythic ideas about how men and women in marriage should be. Government and cohort of wealthy business people and politicians saying that citizens need to act like it's the 1950s instead of business people and the government acting like they did in the 1950s. And then Hannah, you're actually inside of a marriage, which we are about to be. Yeah. And whether we know it or not, surely these myths are at the door of that marriage, of every marriage.

• 43:50Nick Capodice?

  So Stephanie talked about going forward in our family forms. What does that actually mean?

• 44:00Speaker 06

  Psychologists talk about malevolent versus benevolent attribution. And when people are trying to make their marriages work better or their relationships, they often either say, well, okay, if this, I don't like this, but that's probably an accident. That's called benevolent attribution. And that's a good thing in a relationship generally. If your husband is late all the time, you say, well, boy, he has a terrible job. Maybe if we can get out of that job, it's not because he doesn't love me or because he didn't consider it. But the problem with too much benevolent attribution is it doesn't change anything. It doesn't say, let's sit down and say, maybe we have to change that job, or maybe there's something else going on that we should address. On the other hand, malevolent attribution is the idea that, you know,

• 44:45Speaker 06

  he's just a sexist swine, or that she's just a terrible nag. And that's not very helpful either.

• 44:53Nick Capodice?

  No Hannah, it would be best if you did not think me a swine and I did not think you a nag.

• 44:59Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, but Nick, we have actually talked about this, that I have been concerned about being perceived as a nag, that you have been concerned about being perceived as a capital D dude, just as guy stuff. We both hate these stereotypes and find ourselves in a relationship and soon-to-be marriage, thousands of years in the historical mythic invention making. And one step toward going forward in our family forms is thinking about that exact history.

• 45:32Speaker 06

  So I think that if you can take historical or sociological attribution and say, these are the ways that we've developed and in some ways been channeled into thinking about things that are not helpful now that we have more egalitarian values and we really have more possibilities for both men and women to work outside the home and both men and women to take part in child rearing. And so the result is we need to challenge the old habits and the old kind of ways that have come down to us of doing things. And then you can say, okay, it's not their fault, or I don't have to feel guilty about a mistake I made, but I can understand this and we can move forward. I'll give you an example, okay?

• 46:17Speaker 06

  So you've got these stereotypes about men and women and about men, the learned helplessness that they will say, oh, I'd love to help that, but just tell me how to do it. Or they'll do part of it and then they'll come back and say, is there something else that needs to be done until the woman says, you know, I'll do it myself. But you know, we women have these habits too that we've inherited. In some ways, it's learned too much helpfulness that we, over the course of the last couple hundred years, when we lost our identity as productive coworkers and yoke mates in the family economy and began to be valued for our reproductive work and our emotion work and our expertise in domestic matters, which women of the past never had. They didn't care about

• 47:01Speaker 06

  keeping a neat house when it was a center of production. But we've got this now and we do this sort of, what's called, sociologists call it gatekeeping. We say that we want the guy to help, but then we insist that we know exactly how to do it and he has to follow our instructions and we intervene if he's not doing it the way we do. Now, I've been studying this for more years than I care to admit, but two times I fell into this myself.

• 47:30Hannah McCarthy?

  Now Nick, Stephanie proceeded to tell me a couple of anecdotes. One about her new grandchild, her husband withholding the baby, the baby started to cry, Stephanie swooped in and took the baby out of his arms and he was pretty upset.

• 47:43Speaker 06

  Now, that could have been a huge fight between us, but because we both know that this is the habit, that I, as a woman, even though I know intellectually better, have been trained to think that I can handle babies better than a guy can, that that's why I swooped in. It wasn't out of real disrespect and we had to talk about it. So I think that it's important to learn this history, just even just at a very basic level, so that you can reconceptualize these problems we have as in things we've inherited and we can change, not that but either of us is a bad person.

• 48:20Hannah McCarthy?

  The other anecdote was a bit more familiar to me.

• 48:24Speaker 06

  One day, my husband walked in and found that I was rearranging the dishwasher. And instead of getting mad at me, he said, huh, I thought that you said I should take full responsibility for a job when it's mine. And if you're not going to let me, why would I continue to load the dishwasher? I said, fair, fair point, you know?

• 48:46Hannah McCarthy?

  I will just, between you and me, when I read those anecdotes in the book, I thought, oh no. Because I do exactly that. I do exactly, I am constantly correcting the very tasks I have requested to have done. So I'm very familiar and it was very helpful to hear that perspective from you.

• 49:04Speaker 06

  You should leave that in the show.

• 49:06Nick Capodice?

  Oh, yep. You're not a bad person, Hannah.

• 49:12Hannah McCarthy?

  You're not a bad person, Nick.

• 49:15Nick Capodice?

  I think we should get married.

• 49:16Hannah McCarthy?

  Me too. This episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy, with my co-host and very soon-to-be husband, we are getting married, guys, Nick Capodice. Our interim executive producer is Taylor Quimby, Dana Cattaldo is our digital producer and Marina Henke is our producer. Music in this episode comes from Epidemic Sound. Thank you again to Stephanie Koontz. I warmly recommend that you go and pick up her book, For Better and For Worse. If you want more Civics 101, you can find everything we have ever made at our website, civics101podcast.org.

• 50:00Hannah McCarthy?

  Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. What does it really take to start a startup? I'm David Rosenko, entrepreneur, investor, and the host of Leap Forward. In each episode, I go behind the scenes with successful founders and someone who knew them before they were famous, their college roommate, their first employee, or their mom, to hear the sometimes uncomfortable but very real inside stories of how companies actually get built, companies like Reddit, Airbnb, or Twitch. Listen to the new season of Leap Forward for never-before heard stories behind the world's most iconic companies.

• 50:45Hannah McCarthy?

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• 51:27Hannah McCarthy?

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