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For decades, the historian Stephanie Kuntz has been asking people to reconsider what they think they know about marriage.

And there's a clue to her approach in the title of one of her best-known books, The Way We Never Were.

Again and again, Kuntz has argued our assumptions about the past are often wrong, or at least they're incomplete.

We imagine a time when families were more stable, when men and women knew

their roles, when marriage was simpler. But she says, it's not how it worked. And in her new book,

Kuntz is at it again. This time she's trying to explain how it is that marriage rates have

fallen dramatically over the past half century, but people are still getting

married and still talking about it as deeply important. And to understand it, Kuntz says you have to

look at how marriage has changed over time, not just ideas about love and sex and freedom, but

how economic insecurity and growing inequality have changed what people expect from it.

And the book is full of stories that complicate what we think we know about the past. Here's one of

them. A few years ago, Coons got a call from a reporter at the New York Times. She calls this story

the mystery of the Mrs.

Like many young activists, I grew up in an era of the 1950s and 60s when people would call in and say,

this is Mrs. John Doe.

I always assumed this was a legacy of patriarchy.

But the newspaper called me because they were going through old issues and finding that even people who were really famous on their own were identified as Mrs. Frank Sinatra.

So they said, well, when did this start?

To my surprise, originally, Mrs. did not describe a woman's marital aspect.

It described a woman's social status.

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