The breakdown of the wall separating marriage from nonmarriage has been described by some legal historians and sociologists as the deinstitutionalization or delegalization of marriage or even, with a French twist, as demariage. I like historian Nancy Cott’s observation that it is akin to what happened in Europe and America when legislators disestablished their state religion.49
With disestablishment, the state no longer conferred a whole set of special rights and privileges on one particular denomination while denying those rights to others. When this happened, religion itself did not disappear. But many different churches and new religious groups proliferated. Similarly, once the state stopped insisting that everyone needed a government-sanctioned marriage license to enjoy the privileges and duties of parenthood or other long-term commitments, other forms of intimate relationships and childrearing arrangements came out from underground. And just as people’s motives for joining a church changed when there was no longer one official religion, so people began deciding whether or not to marry on a new basis.
We may personally like or dislike all these changes. But there is a certain inevitability about most of them. For better or worse, marriage has been displaced from its pivotal position in personal and social life. No matter how much society values marriage, it cannot afford to ignore the fact that many children are being raised and many obligations are being incurred in alternative settings. A perfect storm has reshaped the landscape of married life, and few things about marriage will ever be the same.
Chapter 17
Uncharted Territory: How the Transformation of Marriage Is Changing Our Lives
In the 1950s the rules for “making marriage work” were clear-cut. Psychologist Clifford Adams wrote that “the bride who wants to do her full job will plan from the start to create the kind of home her husband wants, and to do it with no more assistance from him than he willingly offers.” Adams, whose “Making Marriage Work” columns appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal, believed with most marital counselors of the day that the husband’s job came first, “not only because of its importance but also because it occupies most of his waking hours, leaving only a narrow margin for other duties and pleasures.” Therefore, he warned wives, don’t treat your husband “as a kitchen helper, errand boy or handy man.”And if hubby “offers to dry the dishes, thank him for the favor, rather than regard it as your right.”1
The rules for catching and keeping a mate were equally simple—and all directed at women. Advice books told teenage girls to keep a list of a boy’s likes and dislikes in food, movies, and recreation. As a pop song put it in the early 1960s, “wear your hair just for him; do the things he likes to do.” Wives were urged to get up early enough to do their hair and makeup before serving breakfast. “Indulge his whims when possible, even when they strike you as foolish,” said Adams.
In one of his columns in the Journal, Adams recounted how one wife was able to save her marriage. “She encouraged him to try a new card game, then played poorly herself so his score would look good.” She also “pretended ineptitude” at such household tasks as balancing the checkbook. “Occasionally she even invented troubles for him to cope with (replacing a good fuse with a dud, fraying a lamp cord to produce a short) so he would feel needed.”2
Not many women today have the time, energy, or inclination to engage in such elaborate manipulation of their boyfriends or husbands. Nor do most men find female helplessness charming. As the roles of men and women become more equal, people have grown impatient with such games.
But couples today do have to work to keep their marriages healthy and mutually fulfilling. The fact that individuals can now lead productive lives outside marriage means that partners need to be more “intentional” than in the past about finding reasons and rituals to help them stay together.3 A marriage that survives and thrives in today’s climate of choice is likely to be far more satisfying, fair, and effective for the partners and their children than in the past. However, couples have to think carefully about what it takes to build, deepen, and sustain commitments that are now almost completely voluntary. Modern marriages cannot just glide down the well-worn paths of the past.
Figuring out what makes for a good partner and sustains a marriage is particularly hard today because the revolution in family life that began in the 1970s forces us to rethink nearly everything we used to think we knew about how marriage works—or doesn’t work. In chapter 16 I pointed out that pressures flowing from many different directions converged in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to create a perfect storm in marriage and family life. But the havoc wreaked by storms is usually temporary. Even uprooted trees eventually grow back. Perhaps an earthquake better describes the stunning transformation of marriage we have to deal with in the new millennium.
Over a period of two centuries, subtle shifts in economics, politics, and reproductive patterns gradually detached the married couple from the bedrock of institutions, laws, and customs that had encased them in rigid roles. Beneath the seeming continuities of marriage and family life, new fault lines opened up. In the late 1960s these changes began triggering a series of tremors that toppled familiar landmarks of family life and permanently altered the social landscape on which we build our lives. We are still feeling the aftershocks today.
Like it or not, today we are all pioneers, picking our way through uncharted and unstable territory. The old rules are no longer reliable guides to work out modern gender roles and build a secure foundation for marriage. Wherever it is that people want to end up in their family relations today, even if they are totally committed to creating a so-called traditional marriage, they have to get there by a different route from the past.
There are many people who claim they can provide you with a road map. But in fact, on virtually every issue concerning marriage today, most personal advice gurus and policy makers lag behind the real changes transforming marriage. My local bookstore has shelf after shelf of marital advice books. The titles range from The Surrendered Wife to The Fifty-Fifty Marriage to Remaining Single and Loving It. In 1995 The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right became an international bestseller. So did its 2002 follow-up, The Rules for Marriage: Time-Tested Secrets for Making Your Marriage Work—despite the fact that one of the two authors filed for divorce on the eve of its publication.
Unlike scholarly journals, mass-market advice books are rarely reviewed by experts in the field. Instead of getting tested research findings, most of the time you get what some author claims worked for him or her, or what someone thinks might work for you, or what some publisher’s marketing department hopes you will think might work for you, all mixed in with “time-tested rules” that might have worked in the past but no longer hold true.4
I am not a psychologist, and I won’t play one in this book. But for the last several years, I have served first as cochair and now as director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, a group of respected family scholars and practitioners from various fields who compare their research results and clinical experience. So I’ve had the privilege of seeing the cutting-edge work that my colleagues in sociology and psychology are doing on contemporary family dynamics.
When I look at their research through the lens of my historical studies, I am struck by how many of the things researchers used to be able to say about marriages are no longer true. For example, it truly used to be good advice for a woman to “play dumb” to catch a man. Not anymore. Women used to be attracted to older, powerful men who earned more money than they did. That is no longer the case. In the past, marriages in which both spouses worked were less stable than male breadwinner marriages. That’s changing too. Yet many people still plan their personal lives and policy makers still draw up social policies on the basis of these and other outmoded assumptions.
Take the question that torments many single women who have postponed marriage to pursue higher education or careers: “Will all the good men already be taken by the time I’m
ready to marry?” In 1986 a Newsweek cover story titled “Too Late for Prince Charming” claimed that a woman’s marriage prospects plummeted after age thirty, so that a single woman of forty had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than of finding a husband. In a 2002 book, economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett wrote that “nowadays the rule of thumb seems to be that the more successful a woman, the less likely it is that she will find a husband or bear a child.” Hardly a month goes by that I don’t receive a call from a reporter wanting my views about the “crisis” facing educated career women in their thirties who haven’t found husbands and for whom time is running out.5
But the Newsweek claim was wrong even back in 1986. And by 2002 Hewlett’s “nowadays” was already three decades out-of-date. More women than ever before are marrying for the first time at age thirty, forty, fifty, and even sixty. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem married for the first time at the age of sixty-six. It is simply not true that high-achieving women are especially at risk for a lonely old age.6
So why do people assume that highly educated women or women with professional careers are less likely than other women to find a man? Because it used to be true, and there was a very elegant theory to explain it. For years many family researchers subscribed to economist Gary Becker’s idea that marriage decisions were made on the basis of the advantages of specialization and exchange. Becker noted that men had greater earning power and women greater expertise in homemaking and child rearing. Therefore, he argued, a male breadwinner/female homemaker marriage produced an “efficient” team. According to Becker, a man maximized his earning power by focusing his energies on paid work, while a woman maximized her well-being by handling all the domestic matters that otherwise would distract her husband from earning the biggest possible family income.7
This updated version of the male hunter theory of marriage postulates that men want to marry partners who will take over home front activities that divert attention away from making money. So they look for women who are good homemakers. Women, the theory goes, search for mates who are good providers. But what if a woman has good earning possibilities of her own? A related theory, called the independence effect, predicts that she will have less incentive to marry, and men will also find her a less attractive mate. Moreover, if such a woman does marry, she will be more likely to divorce than other women.
For centuries, the independence effect did have considerable predictive power in Western Europe and North America. Until the 1950s highly educated women were less likely to marry than less educated women.8
But for women born since 1960, things are different. College graduates and women with higher earnings are now more likely to marry than women with less education and lower wages, although they generally marry at an older age. The legal profession is one big exception to this generalization. Female attorneys are less likely to ever marry, to have children, or to remarry after divorce than women in other professions. But an even higher proportion of male attorneys are childless, suggesting there might be something about this career that is unfriendly to everyone’s family life, not just women’s. For career women in other fields the independence effect has evaporated.9
Despite these general trends, many women tell me they feel “desperate” to find a man. Running into potential partners gets harder once you’re out of school and no longer spend most of your waking hours in a concentrated pool of singles in your own age-group. Also, when women work in predominantly female work settings, as many still do, they have few opportunities to meet potential partners at work.
So it’s understandable that many women are anxious about the prospect of finding a good husband. But few modern women are actually desperate to marry. Historically, desperate is agreeing to marry a much older man whom you find physically repulsive. Desperate is closing your eyes to prostitutes and mistresses and praying you don’t get a venereal disease. Desperate is having child after child because your husband won’t let you use birth control or covering the bruises you got last night when you hurry to the market to shop for his evening meal. Women today may be anxious about finding a mate, but most could not even imagine being that desperate.
Some observers worry that as women get better educated, men are the ones who will have a harder time finding mates. Traditionally women looked for men who were older and more successful than they. So some think that men may soon face a marriage crisis, as educated women turn up their noses at suitors who are less successful than they, or even only equally successful.
Women in the past did tend to prefer older men with greater wealth or earning power. But this preference was based on social and economic necessity, not on genetic programming. And this “rule” of marriage formation is also changing. Recently two researchers compared women’s views on the ideal mate in a number of societies with differing levels of equality between men and women. In societies where women were approaching equality with men in economic and political affairs, females were much less likely to seek older, high-earning men as husbands than were women in societies that offered females fewer options for independence.10
In the United States the difference in the ages of men and women at first marriage has been narrowing for the past eighty years and has now reached a historic low. In fact, by the late 1990s more than one-third of women aged thirty-five to forty-four were living with younger men. High male earnings have also become less important to women. A 2001 poll in the United States found that 80 percent of women in their twenties believed that having a husband who can talk about his feelings was more important than having one who makes a good living.11
If women today are less likely to choose husbands on the basis of “success appeal,” men are shedding older ideas about what makes for sex appeal. Men still rate youth and good looks higher than women do when looking for mates, but those criteria no longer outweigh others. Modern men tend to want mates who are on a similar level in terms of education or earnings potential. “I don’t want someone I have to help with her homework,” a male friend of mine said when a mutual acquaintance offered to fix him up with a woman fifteen years his junior. Being a smart, achieving woman used to be perceived as a liability in the marriage market, says sociologist Pepper Schwartz, but is now a big asset. As they grow up, young men today are used to seeing women in many different roles. “She’s your doctor, your teacher, your professor. These models can be quite erotic.”12
But what about the chance of high-achieving women having children? The conventional wisdom is humorously summed up in the poster depicting a sophisticated career woman slapping her forehead and exclaiming “Oh, no, I forgot to have kids!” Stories about women who wait too long and then discover they cannot have children are a staple in the media. Some people even attribute America’s high out-of-wedlock childbearing to career women who suddenly realize they have priced themselves out of the marriage market but decide to have children anyway.
Here again conventional wisdom lags behind the changes in reality. High-achieving women are actually much less likely to have children out of wedlock than any other group of women. And once they marry, they are as likely as all other married working women to have children, although they tend to have their kids at an older age.13
At this point—and this trend is more pronounced in the United States than in most other industrial countries—low-income women are more likely to have children out of wedlock than other groups and less likely ever to marry. This leads some people to argue that America’s high poverty levels, especially among African Americans, are due to falling marriage rates and that encouraging low-income individuals to marry would be an effective anti-poverty program.
In 1996 the federal government officially threw its weight behind the marriage promotion movement, adopting a welfare reform bill that made getting poor people married one of its central goals. Some states have implemented their own programs to boost marriage rates. Oklahoma paid a married couple to go around the state organizing “marriage rallies.” The West Virginia welfare department offered
single mothers an extra $100 a month if they got married. By 2003 nearly every state was funding programs to promote marriage, and President George W. Bush had promised to earmark $1.5 billion in federal funds to promote marriage.14
Here again, ignorance of actual trends in marriage has produced many misconceptions. Marriage promoters began with the assumption that low-income people were not marrying because they did not value marriage. But the relationship between people’s attitudes toward marriage and their actual behavior turned out to be much more complicated. In this, as in many other aspects of family life, the connection between what people believe in the abstract and what they do in real life is often tenuous at best.
In the United States, for example, highly educated people are much more likely than any other group to think that remaining single or having a child out of wedlock is an acceptable choice. Yet they are also more likely to marry than their less educated counterparts and are much less likely to have children out of wedlock.
By contrast, men and women with lower incomes and less education, whatever their racial background, are much more likely to view marriage as the preferred state, but they are also less likely to get married. African Americans are more disapproving of cohabitation than white Americans but are nonetheless more likely to cohabit. Born-again Christians are as likely to divorce as Christians who are not born again, and the divorce rate of both is only 2 percentage points below the divorce rate of atheists and agnostics. Similarly, in America’s Bible Belt, the low-income areas of the South, out-of-wedlock births and divorce rates are higher than anywhere else in the country, even though polls indicate that the region has the highest disapproval of “nontraditional” family behaviors.15
So why are low-income, less educated Americans less likely to marry? Some researchers argue that gender mistrust leads to lower marriage rates. Such mistrust is in fact widespread in low-income communities and, for a complex mix of reasons, is especially evident in low-income African American communities. 16 But in the past, under different historical conditions, gender mistrust actually encouraged marriage formation. In the 1950s a woman’s distrust of men stopped her from having sex with her boyfriend or living with him before marriage because everyone knew that “no man is going to buy the cow if he can get the milk for free.” Sure enough, the girls who “held out” were most likely to get their boyfriends to propose.
Marriage, a History Page 38
