Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  Parents and children may feel real ambivalence about how mothers combine work and family life. But working wives and mothers are here to stay, in large part because of structural changes in the demand for labor and the rewards of work. Demographer Donald Hernandez points out that from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, there were three routes to family economic advancement: The first was to send the children to work, allowing the parents to accumulate enough to buy a house and possibly send a later generation to school; the second was to move from farm to city, to take advantage of higher wage rates in urban areas; and the third was to invest in increased training and education for male members of the family.13

  But child labor was abolished in the early twentieth century, and by the end of the 1950s the move out of agricultural work was largely completed. By the mid-1960s families were also getting diminishing returns from higher education or training for men. As these older strategies for achieving upward mobility faded, women’s employment became central to family economic advancement and could not as easily be postponed or interrupted for full-time child raising.

  Despite the economic recovery of the 1990s, most men’s wages still lagged behind even the low rate of inflation in the first few years of the twenty-first century, while women’s wages continued to grow from their lower starting point. The result was that in most American families, even if the wife’s wages were lower than her husband’s, her wages accounted for any income growth the family achieved.14

  But in another major shift, most women, regardless of class, no longer worked solely for the needs of their families. By the turn of the century a wife’s decision either to take a job or to remain at home depended less on her husband’s wage and more on her own earnings capacity. Even when they continue to pool resources within marriage, women increasingly make cost-benefit decisions about working or staying home on the basis of their own employment opportunities rather than moving in and out of the labor market in response to changes in their husbands’ jobs and earnings.15

  This doesn’t necessarily mean that working mothers are happy with their schedules. In many occupations, particularly in the United States, the demands and hours of work have risen over the past two decades. Today the United States surpasses even Japan in the amount of time workers spend on the job. No wonder workers with families—both men and women—report higher levels of stress balancing work and family life than they did twenty-five years ago. Many mothers would certainly like to cut back on their hours. So would many fathers.16

  For almost thirty years I have asked my students how they expect to balance work and family in their own lives. Until recently most expected both partners to work but said the wife would try to take time off after the birth of a child. In the past five years, however, students have stopped assuming the woman will be the one to stay home. They tend to think it makes sense for the higher earner to keep working, and most are open to having the husband quit work if both partners earn the same wages.

  That kind of financial equality is increasingly common in dual-earner households. In fact, in 2001, the working wife earned more than her husband in more than 30 percent of all households. The percentage of stay-at-home dads is still small, but social acceptance of that arrangement has skyrocketed. And as of 2002, more than two million working fathers were providing the primary child care in their families while their wives were at work.17

  Of course, most wives and mothers who work outside the home now do so for psychological and social as well as financial reasons. Working wives consistently tell interviewers they like the respect, self-esteem, and friendships they get from a job, even though they find it stressful to arrange acceptable child care and negotiate household chores with their husbands. One of my older female students told me she went back to work for financial reasons when her child was nine months old. “I almost cried every time I left him at the babysitter,” she said, “and I couldn’t wait to see him again when I came home. But the truth is that once I was a couple of blocks from the babysitter’s house I’d turn up the radio and sing along all the way to work. I was so excited to be able to talk to adults and to know that I was needed for my mind as well as my mothering.”

  In a 1995 survey by Louis Harris & Associates, fewer than one-third of working women said they would prefer to stay home if money were no object, although many women are reluctant to admit that to their husbands. Psychologist Francine Deutsch found when she interviewed working-class dual-earner couples together that the official family line was usually that the wife worked only for financial reasons. But when she spoke separately with the men and women, they often told different stories. “She would have loved to be home,” said one husband. “I wanted to get out of the house,” his wife said.18

  Women consistently say they get more respect when they are employed, not only from society but from their own husbands. Women who earn incomes have much more decision-making power in their marriages than those who are full-time housewives. Moreover, the higher the proportion of the couple’s joint income a wife earns, the more help she gets from her husband in housework and child care.19

  Male breadwinner families are still a significant form of marriage, especially among couples with young children. Certainly many American women would stay home longer if they had the subsidized family leaves available to workers in much of Europe. But today approval of dual-earner marriages is as widespread as approval of male breadwinner marriages was in the 1950s, and this approval is highest among young women, who will be making decisions about work and marriage in the coming decades.20

  Nor do falling divorce rates, however welcome they may be, herald a return to 1950s norms. As alternatives to marriage have multiplied, fewer people get married, and that means fewer people will get divorced. There does seem to have been a statistically significant increase in a couple’s chance of staying togther during the 1990s, but those who do get married still face daunting odds: Forty-three percent of all first marriages in America end in divorce within fifteen years.21

  We can’t expect divorce rates to drop back to the rates of the 1950s, far less to those of earlier decades. In the century between the 1880s and the 1980s divorce rates rose steadily. If we set aside the short-term spikes in divorce right after World War II and at the end of the 1970s, America’s divorce rate today is right where you would predict from its rate of increase during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first fifty years of the twentieth.

  For better or worse, people decide what they will and won’t put up with in a relationship today on a totally different basis from before. Now that most husbands and wives earn their livings separately, rather than from a jointly run farm or business, it is much easier, though not less painful, for couples to go their separate ways and to survive economically if the union dissolves. Women still generally face a drop in their standard of living after divorce. But never before in history have so many women been capable of supporting themselves and their children without a husband.

  The dramatic extension of adults’ life expectancy since 1970 has also changed the terms of marriage. An American who reaches age sixty today can expect to live another twenty-five years. The average married couple will live for more than three decades after their kids have left home.22

  This extension of life expectancy makes staying together “till death do us part” a much bigger challenge than ever before. What might seem an acceptable relationship when you expect to spend most of your married life raising kids together may seem unbearable when you realize that you will still have thirty years of one-on-one time once the kids are gone. No previous generation has ever been asked to make such a long-term commitment.

  Many dissatisfied couples grit their teeth and try to tough it out until the children leave home. But the stress of raising children puts a strain on even the happiest of marriages and can wreak havoc on an unstable union. An older divorced student of mine wrote in her autobiographical essay: “I really tried to make it last for the sake of the
kids. But then I started thinking, ‘What if I come down with cancer right after they leave? Would it be worth it to be so unhappy for so long and then never even get the pay-off ? Or what if I hit fifty and it was too late to find a decent relationship or build a rewarding life for my next thirty years?’ After a while I was so miserable that I wasn’t even a good parent anymore, which sort of spoiled the point of trying to stick it out.”

  Making divorce laws stricter would have little effect on the number of marriages that break down, and it might actually discourage some people from getting married in the first place. The adoption of no-fault divorce laws in the 1970s certainly made it easier to dissolve marriages that were already in trouble, and everywhere they were enacted, these laws were followed by a brief spike in divorce. But there was a similar long-term rise in divorce rates in the 1970s in states with and without no-fault divorce. Moreover, by 1985, when every state offered some form of no-fault divorce, divorce rates in America had already been falling for five years.23 Yet even as divorce declined, more people were living together outside marriage. Stricter laws would not prevent those households—40 percent of which have children present—from dissolving.

  Divorce and its nonlegal equivalent—the breakup of cohabiting couples—are here to stay. That means that single-parent households and stepfamilies are not going to disappear. Unwed parenting is also here to stay, partly because of the dramatic rise in women’s age at first marriage. Women who marry at an older age are less likely to divorce than women who marry early, and they are more likely to have accumulated economic, emotional, and educational advantages that benefit their children. But because they remain unmarried for more years, they also face a longer period when they are “at risk” for—or might choose—an unmarried birth.

  Ironically, some of the increase in unwed motherhood in the 1980s and 1990s may have been a reaction against the rise in divorce in the 1960s and 1970s. For more than thirty years sociologist Frank Furstenberg has been following a group of economically disadvantaged women in Baltimore, mostly African American, who became pregnant as unwed teenagers in the 1960s. Most of these women married the fathers of their children. But 80 percent of those marriages broke down before the children reached age eighteen. One-third of the daughters also became pregnant and gave birth as teenagers. But in the 1980s few of that generation of young women married the fathers. One reason they did not marry, they told Furstenberg, was that they thought that their boyfriends would not be able to support a family in the tough economic times of the 1980s. Many also said their mothers’ experiences had convinced them that being a single mother was preferable to entering a bad or unstable marriage.24

  In the 1970s and 1980s most babies born out of wedlock were unplanned. But a 1997 study found that more than 40 percent of births to unmarried American women in recent years were intentional pregnancies. We may be able to continue bringing down the rates of childbirth for teenage girls, whose decision to have a baby often reflects their lack of choice over other aspects of their lives. But the choices made by economically independent women over the age of twenty-five are a different matter, and these women account for a growing percentage of nonmarital births.25

  When you combine the fact that married women are having fewer children with the fact that the proportion of unmarried women in the population is rising, simple arithmetic predicts that a large percentage of children will be born out of wedlock, even if rates of childbearing by unmarried women stabilize or fall.26 And in today’s climate of choice, it is hard to imagine that single women will completely forgo having children.

  When I speak on family issues to audiences across the country, single women generally tell me that they plan to marry and then have kids. But they often add that if at a certain point they haven’t found a partner they trust to stay with them for life and share the child rearing, they would consider having a child on their own. “My mom was married, but she was the single mother of two children—me and my dad,” said a twenty-four-year-old I spoke with at a college in Ohio. “I guess she was pretty happy. But I want more than a paper partnership, and if I can’t get that, I’d be willing to go it alone.”

  One-third of the fifty thousand children adopted in the United States in 2001 went to single women. These women are not being irresponsible. Indeed, the Adoption Information Clearinghouse believes that single-parent homes may be especially well suited for “special needs” children who require close, intense relationships. Single women—most of them African American—accounted for 30 percent of adoptions of hard-to-place foster children.27 Yet this trend too contributes to the multiplying ways that people organize their lives—and their children’s lives—outside marriage.

  Population experts predict that 50 percent of children in the United States will spend part of their lives in a household that does not contain both their married, biological parents. Perhaps we can reduce that number. But we cannot return to a world where almost all child rearing and care giving take place in and through marriage.28

  As the age of marriage rises, people are also less and less likely to wait for a wedding to initiate them into sex. Some people see hope for a revival of traditional sexual mores in the declining support for promiscuous sexual behavior and the new popularity of virginity pledges among teenagers in the opening years of the twenty-first century. Certainly, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, especially AIDS, and the emotional turmoil that comes with casual sexual relationships have made promiscuous sex less attractive. With divorce readily available, there are also fewer excuses not to honor existing marital commitments. So more people now expect fidelity within committed relationships than in the 1970s, even as acceptance of premarital sex, cohabitation, and divorce has continued to grow.

  Still, this does not mark a return to conservative sexual mores, especially among young people. There has been a decline in early sexual initiation, but it has been more marked for boys than for girls and more likely reflects the continuing decline of the double standard than a return to “traditional morality.” As was foreshadowed in the racy 1920s, when “respectable” young women began engaging in premarital sex on a larger scale, boys today are more likely to begin their sexual lives in romantic relationships than in exploitative encounters with so-called bad girls. A girlfriend has more influence than a casual partner over the timing of sexual initiation and the use of contraception when sex occurs.29

  Seen in this light, maintaining virginity longer does not necessarily signal a return to traditional sexual mores but may reflect young women’s growing sexual independence and control over their sexual relationships. Moreover, many teenagers who delay the onset of genital intercourse are substituting other behaviors, such as oral sex, which increased significantly among teens in the 1990s.30 I was completely flummoxed a couple of years ago in Minnesota when a group of teenage girls told me that several of them were having oral sex with their boyfriends so they could still be virgins when they graduated from high school.

  Many people who are turned off by casual sex but not yet ready to marry have resorted to cohabitation, which is a more stable and committed relationship than dating but less likely to last than marriage. Even as divorce and unwed pregnancy slowed, cohabitation rates have continued to increase in the new century. For many, living together has become a normal stage in courtship—the majority of marriages now begin as cohabitation—but for others, living together has become an alternative to marriage.

  British demographer Kathleen Kiernan suggests that in Europe and North America, a four-stage process has made cohabitation almost equal in status to marriage. In the first stage, most people marry without having lived together first. Only a small bohemian minority and some of the very poor live together outside marriage. In the second stage, more people from more walks of life live together for a time but usually move on to marriage and almost invariably marry if they become parents.31

  The third stage is achieved when cohabitation becomes a socially acceptable alternative to marria
ge. A woman is comfortable taking her unmarried partner to a party at work or a family gathering. A man can tell his boss about his live-in lover. In this stage, says Kiernan, couples living together no longer feel compelled to marry if the woman becomes pregnant, even if they decide to have the child. Far from hiding their unmarried state, as couples used to do, they proudly send out birth announcements with both parents’ names. However, most couples who have a child and stay together eventually do marry at some point, especially if they plan to have a second child.

  In the fourth stage, however, cohabitation and marriage become virtually indistinguishable legally and socially. Couples may have several children without ever marrying. The number of married couples and cohabiting couples is about the same, and children living with both parents are almost equally distributed between the two categories.

  The United States, it appears, was transitioning from stage two to stage three at the end of the twentieth century. Sweden, however, had by then reached stage four. In fact, more children are now born each year to cohabiting couples in Sweden than to married ones, and the tendency for couples to marry after the second birth has faded. Some observers believe that America is headed in this direction. Personally, I am skeptical. Sweden’s family patterns have very distinctive cultural roots and are supported by an equally distinctive political and economic system. People in the United States still place much more importance on getting married than Swedes do, and demographers calculate that 90 percent of Americans will eventually marry.

  However, there is no question that marriage had lost its privileged legal and cultural position in the United States by the end of the twentieth century. And anyone dreaming of a return to traditional marriage at the beginning of the twenty-first century was in for a shock.