Marriage in America

Alan Booth, Paul R. Amato, David Johnson and Stacy J. Rogers
ALONE TOGETHER
How marriage in America is changing
336pp. Harvard University Press. £29.95 (US$45).
978 0 674 02281 2
 
Kay. S. Hymowitz
MARRIAGE AND CASTE IN AMERICA
Separate and unequal families in a post-marital age
192pp. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee. US $22.50.
978 1 566 637091
 
David Blankenhorn
THE FUTURE OF MARRIAGE
260pp. Encounter Books. £22.50 (US $25.95).
978 1 5940 3081 9
 
Marriage has served a crucial function in human society: it has been the means by which the male half of the species has been hooked into providing substantial amounts of goods and services to the offspring they engender, a duty from which their close relatives, the male chimps and gorillas, have been exempt. Human males have been burdened with this duty as a result of human cleverness. As we started wearing clothing, building shelters, using difficult-to-manufacture tools, herding animals, and moving into colder climates, human children needed more than they could get from just their mothers. The institution of marriage responded to this need with a pledge by a man to make contributions on a long-term basis to a woman and her children. In return he got her domestic services, plus a promise of exclusive sexual access, which gave him assurance that he had sired her children.

There has always been more to marriage than material provision to offspring. There’s nurturance, companionship, stability, passing down of property, family alliances, home cooking. And, of course, there’s love. Ay, there’s the rub – love is notoriously changeable. The increased freedom in the modern world to follow one’s heart wherever it leads has led some to an avoidance of new commitments and many to exits from previous ones.

In the developed West this societal institution, so central to human functioning throughout history, has been steadily weakening for decades and could possibly disappear. In the United States, the post-war baby boom ended in about 1960, and almost every year since has seen a decline in the proportion of women who are currently married. About half of marriages eventually end in divorce. As the currently married share of the population has dwindled, cohabitation by the un-married, a considerably less stable form of alliance, has grown rapidly. In 1960, there were ninety-seven married couples for every cohabiting heterosexual couple counted by the US Census Bureau, while in 2005 there were twelve. A third of American children are now born to unmarried mothers, and most of those mothers, together with the many divorced mothers, are struggling to bring up their children by themselves.

It is not difficult to see why this is happening. A lifelong commitment means wretched misery for a lifetime if you make a stupid mistake. So an escape hatch was needed and has been duly provided by a sensible society, in the form of divorce at will.

Abstinence from sex by unmarried girls and women, which made sex hard to get for unmarried men, was previously bolstered by fear of life-ruining pregnancy. That scarcity of easily available sex provided a powerful motive for marriage. Now the practice of abstinence is largely gone, thanks to legalized abortion and the scientific advances that have brought us reliable contraception. Despite better contraception, however, the rise in the proportion of the population that is unmarried has meant more out-of-wedlock births, not fewer. And contraception has reduced fertility within marriage, reducing the period in which a woman’s children need intense care, during which male help is most crucial. The increasing participation in paid work by mothers, and the still-incomplete movement to get women access to better-paying jobs, has made lone motherhood economically possible, although, for most, just barely.

Social scientists have been and remain divided as to the seriousness of these developments. In the 1970s and 80s, some of the leading sociologists specializing in domestic relations told us not to worry, because divorce was merely replacing death as a way to end marriages. Besides, most divorcees went on to remarry. Today, many scholars in this field tell us that lone parents, gay and lesbian couples, and cohabiting couples are not only worthy of respect, but are capable of performing well the functions traditionally performed by the married. Unfortunately, ample research shows that children brought up in such situations tend to do less well on average.

Alone Together: How marriage in America is changing gives us a reading on how married couples are faring, based on surveys taken in 1980 and 2000. Respondents’ ratings of the happiness of their marriage changed little over this period. Reports of problem behaviours, such as anger, jealousy, money troubles, drinking and drug use, declined modestly. People reporting that domestic violence had ever occurred in the course of their marriage declined from 21 per cent in 1980 to 12 per cent in 2000, perhaps because of a higher rate of exit from violent relationships. As the book’s title indicates, there was a considerable decrease, between the two dates, in the sharing by spouses of activities such as eating dinner, visiting friends, or going out together for recreation. This is largely the result of the increased participation of wives in the paid-labour market, which in these samples went from 58 per cent in 1980 to 75 per cent in 2000. However, the higher family income that results tends to raise marital happiness.

The researchers chronicle a noteworthy increase in participation in housework and child care on the part of husbands in two-earner couples, and a growth in attitudes favouring gender equality. In 2000, fully 95 per cent of husbands said they agreed with the statement that spouses should share housework equally, if both are employed, although actual performance was not up to the expressed ideology. People with views favouring gender equality reported better-quality marriages. Paul R. Amato and his co-authors apparently asked few questions about children. They do report, however, that the highest level of marital quality was reported by childless couples. Relatively poor marital quality was reported by people who had cohabited before marriage, and they appeared to be more divorce-prone.

These results are moderately encouraging – the marriages that do take place and that don’t break up (or haven’t yet) are on average about as happy as ever. The bearing of these findings on the future of marriage, however, is modest, since the main problem resides in the attitudes and behaviour of the people who were excluded from these sociologists’ samples, namely those who had exited from marriage or who had never married.

In Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and unequal families in a post-marital age, Kay S. Hymowitz attributes most of the problems with marriage to “underclass” people with low education, who have a far higher rate of lone parenthood than do the better-educated. In the USA they are, disproportionately, black people, who have suffered and still suffer from job discrimination, poor-quality schools, high unemployment, and the incarceration of many of their males in furtherance of the “war on drugs”. But it is not their disadvantaged status that has pushed them into this reproductive behaviour, Hymowitz says, but that they “decided that marriage and children were two entirely unconnected life experiences”. What she is peddling is that virtually all of the bad behaviour is concentrated in the black community, which has simply decided, for no particular reason, to behave irresponsibly. For the better-behaving part of the population, she senses, without adducing any evidence worth the name, a “matrimonial revival”, the death of feminism, and a movement of professional women out of jobs and back to tending babies full-time. Kay Hymowitz’s book is not social science, or even responsible journalism; it is right-wing wish fulfilment.

David Blankenhorn, whose Fatherless America: Confronting our most urgent social problem was published in 1995, is a stalwart of the “fatherhood movement”. Unlike some of the Christian fundamentalists who advocate a return to old-fashioned “family values”, he does not appear to be trying to revive father-as-family-boss. The model of the father that he advocates is the husband who is nurturing and unfailingly committed to the family, even when personal happiness might be served by decamping. He sees that the decline of marriage is causing harm to many children, and this, rather than “sin”, or feminist inroads on male advantages, is his primary concern.

Despite its title, his new book says very little about the future of marriage, aside from devoting a few pages to a listing of modest measures that might nudge things in a better direction. Rather, The Future of Marriage is devoted to an argument against allowing gays and lesbians to marry. Blankenhorn tells us that, unlike most opponents, he does not have an objection to homosexuals on religious or moral grounds, and that he wishes them well. He’d be glad to allow them to marry if it didn’t hurt children – all children. Even if we take him at his word as to his motivation, it is difficult to credit the rationale he supplies for taking that position.

Allowing homosexuals to marry, he says, would change the definition of marriage from a societal institution that unites a man and a woman, and which is centred on the nurture of children, “into a post-institutional private relationship”. Its “institutional authority or public meaning” would be weakened. He quotes a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, who wrote in a decision that brought gay marriage to Canada, “[I]t eludes me how according same-sex couples the benefits flowing to opposite-sex couples in any way inhibits, dissuades or impedes the formation of heterosexual unions. Where is the threat?”. David Blankenhorn responds that same-sex marriage would have the effect of withdrawing society’s “promise” that every child, in so far as possible, will be raised by his or her own mother and father. But, of course, it is the heterosexuals whose behaviour has already trashed whatever promise there was, and has put many children out into the cold. Any impetus given to the trend towards lone parenthood by the advent of gay marriage will surely be minor by comparison.

These books don’t shed much light on what might be done, but the Bush Administration, under the influence of the religious Right, has a programme it hopes will reverse the decline of marriage. Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on preaching abstinence until marriage to schoolchildren, and on marriage counselling, mostly by religious organizations. The initial evaluations are not promising. Fundamentalists and Roman Catholic churchmen want to repeal the right to abortion, and they fight the availability of contraception. A few states allow couples the option of a “covenant marriage”, from which it is more time-consuming to get a divorce, but very few couples have been selecting that option. Perhaps a move in a more permissive direction might be tried: open marriage à la française.

It is unlikely that marriage will be rescued by such measures. Probably the best we can do is to help the children disadvantaged by its decline. Better enforcement of child-support payments from non-resident parents, and more generous government help with child care and university expenses are among the measures that would make a significant difference for them. It can be argued that any programme making it easier for lone parents to bring up children will increase lone parenthood, and that is probably true. Yet there are already so many children in a deprived situation that the benefit of helping them to lead a less disadvantaged life would arguably outweigh the bad effects of speeding up the seemingly inevitable increase in their numbers.
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 Barbara R. Bergmann is Professor Emerita at the University of Maryland. Her books include The Economic Emergence of Women, second edition 2002, and In Defense of Affirmative Action, 1996.