YWCA Leadership Power Breakfast

Love: American Style is the YWCA’s Breakfast topic May 4, 2018. Stephanie Coontz, a noted expert on American families – past and present – will keynote the Bellingham YWCA’s Leadership Power Breakfast from 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. Friday, May 4, at the Four Points by Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Bellingham.

Proceeds from the breakfast support the YWCA emergency and transitional housing program for homeless women. A minimum $50 donation is requested at the event. For reservations call 360-734-4820 or email mary@ywcabellingham.org by April 25 to assure seating.

Coontz will explore “The Changing Landscape of Love” – how the rules for navigating personal relationships have changed in recent decades. She will show “how shifts in work, gender relations, economic trends and family dynamics impact individuals, couples and society at large – for better and for worse.”

Families, marriage and gender relations have changed more in the last 40 years, Coontz claims, than in the previous 4,000, posing new challenges as well as unprecedented new opportunities.

Coontz is a frequent guest on network and cable television, and writes for major U.S. and international newspapers and magazines as well as academic journals. Her work has received many awards and has been translated into 11 languages. Her recent Op Ed article in the New York Times was titled For a Better Marriage Act Like a Single Person.
She is the Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families and an historian at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA.

Her most recent book is a revised edition of The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. Among her many other books are A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s; Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage; and The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families.

Coontz holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California/Berkeley and a master’s degree from the University of Washington where she was a Woodrow Wilson Scholar. For more information about her background see: http://www.stephaniecoontz.com/ .