Stephanie Coontz, 2018-08-29

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Staff Only

Stephanie Coontz Oral History Interview Transcript

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Scope and Contents

From the Collection:

The Evergreen Oral History Project collection contains interviews with more than one hundred retired Evergreen faculty, administrators and staff. These conversations were conducted mostly by current and emeritus faculty. From the initial year devoted to designing the College (1970-71) to the present, Evergreen has been a highly innovative academic institution, committed to pedagogy that strongly supports students’ learning. The project’s purpose has been to document a very wide range of experiences and points of view of longtime members of this community. Faculty narrators recall how they developed their practices of team-teaching, interdisciplinary studies, communities of inquiry, and other distinctive features of the curriculum. Nearly all narrators tell stories about their biographical backgrounds, how being at Evergreen affected them, and how their work contributed to students’ education. Narrators also reflect on how they and Evergreen responded to challenges and changes of politics and culture, including issues of class, gender and race, over the College’s first half century.

The Evergreen Oral History Project began in 2016. As of May 2024, 104 retirees had been interviewed by twenty-eight interviewers. Interviewers have chosen whom they wish to interview, which imbues many of these discussions with the tenor of dialogues between friends. Rather than respond to a preset list of questions, narrators discussed whatever was most memorable and interesting to them.

Special thanks go to transcriber Penny Miller, who made draft transcripts of almost all of the recorded interviews; Amanda Walker and Abby Kelso, Vice-Presidents for Advancement, who sponsored and found funding for the project; Pat Barte and Ray Janssen-Timmen, for administrative support; John Sheehy, director of Reed College’s oral history project, for guidance launching ours; Susan Fiksdal, Anthony Zaragoza, Barbara Smith, Nancy Taylor and Nancy Koppelman, each of whom interviewed many retirees; Liza Harrell-Edge and Sadie Aymond, for accessioning and managing the collection in the Library Archives; and the anonymous donor whose generosity made the project possible. Sam Schrager has been director of the project.

Dates

Creation: 2018-08-29

Biographical / Historical

Stephanie Coontz comes from a pioneer family in Tumwater, WA. She attended UC Berkeley, where she participated in the history honors program, the civil rights movement and the 1964 Free Speech Movement. She got her M.A. on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at the U of Washington but then left academia to work as a fulltime activist. For several years she served as one of the National Coordinators of the National Peace Action Coalition, the group that consistently organized the largest mass demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. After coming to Evergreen in 1975, Coontz immersed herself in teaching but also authored several books on the history and sociology of families, including The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap and Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage, which was cited in the US Supreme Court decision on marriage equality. With fellow faculty member Peta Henderson, she edited Women’s Work, Men’s Property: On the Origins of Gender and Class and with two TESC students, Maya Parson and Gabrielle Raley, American Families: A Multicultural Reader. AS of this writing (early 2024) she was just finishing a new book, due out in 2025. As Director of Research at the Council on Contemporary Families, Coontz strives to make serious research accessible to the public. She has testified before the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families in Washington, DC, appeared on The Colbert Report, Today Show, Oprah Winfrey, and almost every NPR talk show, and published dozens of op-eds in the New York Times. Selected articles can be found at www.stephaniecoontz.com.