But there is a critical difference between then and now. To push this insulting analogy a little further, cows need someone to feed them every day, and back then even a low-income husband could provide more food for his wife than she could get on her own. A bad marriage was usually a better option for a woman, especially if she had a child, than no marriage at all.
This isn’t true anymore, especially for low-income women. Cinderella may have been a scrub girl rescued by a prince, but in real life a low-income woman is likely to find her relationships in the pool of men in her own neighborhood, where secure blue-collar jobs have disappeared and been replaced by jobs that pay wages too low to support families. A woman who marries a man with few job prospects may end up having to support him as well as their children. Even if the marriage does improve her economic well-being, its stability may be undermined by chronic economic and neighborhood stress. Low-income women who marry and divorce later have higher poverty rates than women who never marry at all, and their children may suffer more emotionally as well.17 In these circumstances, getting married can be risky.
Impoverished women understand these risks better than many of the marriage promoters trying to convince them of the benefits of marriage. When sociologist Kathy Edin conducted in-depth interviews with nearly three hundred low-income mothers, they consistently told her they couldn’t afford to marry a man with a less than stable job history, or poor job skills. Some women said that they had truly loved a partner but had forced themselves to break off the relationship when it looked as if the man couldn’t pull his own economic weight.18
Sociologists Andrew Cherlin and Linda Burton are studying low-income families in three American cities. They report that most women they interview hold marriage in high regard. But these women see marriage as something you have to work your way up to. A woman who waited to marry her partner until quite a while after having a child with him explained that her most vivid memory of growing up was that the gas and electricity kept getting turned off. “When I got pregnant, we agreed we would marry someday in the future because we loved each other and wanted to raise our child together. But we would not get married until we could afford to get a house and pay all the utility bills on time.” Another explained that she would marry her partner only when he realized that the first priority after getting paid should be taking care of the household bills, “not going out and getting new clothes or doing this and that.”19
In earlier times this woman would probably have married the father of her child anyway, hoping that both she and the social pressures of the day would help him grow up. And right up through the 1960s many wives accepted that marriage was an unequal relationship in which a husband would first treat himself to a few beers and some bets on the horses before turning the rest of his pay over to his wife to feed and clothe the family.
But many women today see no point in marrying unless their prospective husband has both the economic prospects and the emotional dependability to make pooling their resources worthwhile. “I don’t need a husband to help me scrape by,” a welfare recipient told me. “I can scrape by on my own. Find me a man who’s got a steady job and a mortgage and no jail time in his past, and I’ll marry him pretty damn quick.” Another chimed in: “I got two kids, and the last thing I need is a man who’s gonna be a drain on my wallet and my heart.”
Sociologist Frank Furstenberg comments that “it’s as if marriage has become a luxury consumer item, available only to those with the means to bring it off. Living together or single-parenthood has become the budget way to start a family.”20 At the very least, marriage is now a discretionary item that must be weighed against other options for self-protection or economic mobility.
This is true for women and men in higher income brackets as well. Today people from all walks of life often invest in their own individual skills and resources before hooking up with a partner. Most young adults tell pollsters they want “to be economically set” before they get married. In the 1950s and 1960s young men and women thought that marriage was the way people settled down and made relationships work. Today most young people see marriage as something you do only when you’re already sure your partner has settled down and the relationship is working. You enter marriage, they say, only after you have maneuvered past the risks and begun to rake in the rewards of life.21
Some marriage advocates, recognizing these realities, have shifted their attention from marriage promotion to marriage preparation, offering classes to low-income individuals who want to get married, so they can start on a sounder footing. This approach avoids pressuring people into marriage and could potentially offer low-income couples useful counseling. But it is not a panacea. Psychologist Thomas Bradbury, director of the UCLA Marriage and Family Development Project, notes that no marriage education or relationship skills program can permanently immunize couples against the effects of chronic economic and neighborhood stress. Among women without high school degrees, about 60 percent of marriages end in divorce, compared with one-third of the marriages of female college graduates. Poverty, unemployment, and having children by a previous relationship (as almost 40 percent of low-income partners do) all raise the risk of marital failure.22
The corrosive effects of unemployment and poverty in a land of abundance help explain why even though low-income unmarried parents say they want to wed, most of them break up before they actually do. Sociologists Kristin Seefeldt and Pamela Smock found that an unmarried couple in this income bracket who have a child together have only a 9 percent chance of marrying within a year of the child’s birth. If any one of four aspects of the couple’s life improves—their supportive attitude toward each other; their favorable attitude toward marriage; their feelings of trust; the amount of the man’s wages—the chance they will marry increases by just over three percentage points. If all four improve, the probability they will marry goes up by more than ten points, to about 20 percent, meaning that even under optimal circumstances only one in five such couples will marry within a year.23
That kind of jump in marriage rates for low-income parents might well be worth striving for. But historical trends suggest that since marriage is no longer the primary way that all individuals organize their sex lives and child rearing, we ought not to put all our eggs into the basket of promoting marriage. We should be offering resources to promote healthy relationships, whether married or unmarried, and to improve people’s parenting, whatever their marital status. At a conference on marriage education a young African American woman I met told me, “I don’t think classes would have saved our marriage. But classes might have helped us handle the divorce and the coparenting of our kids better.”24
Divorce is another issue on which the pronouncements of policy makers and personal advice gurus generally lag behind the changing dynamics of marriage. Much has been written about how to protect women from being left by their husbands. But one of the ways that the song of courtship is out of sync with the dance of marriage is that although women still tend to be more eager than men to enter marriage, they are also more likely to become discontented once married. A survey conducted in the United States during the mid-1990s found that a majority of divorced wives said they were the ones who wanted out of the marriage. Fewer than one-quarter said their husbands had unilaterally wanted to get out of the marriage. These women weren’t putting up brave faces. Divorced men reported the same pattern. A recent study of divorces that occur after age forty found that two-thirds were initiated by wives.25
Women’s greater dissatisfaction with marriage is not in fact new. But there has been an important shift in the characteristics of women who actually seek divorces. Historically, women with higher levels of education and earnings, the ones better able to support themselves, were much more likely than other women to leave a marriage. But today women at lower socioeconomic levels can better support themselves than in the past and are therefore more willing to divorce, especially if they are married to men who subscribe to “traditional” gender roles
. At the same time, higher-income women have more leverage in marriage than in the past and are more likely to have husbands who at least in principle support gender equality. They can often persuade their husbands to change behaviors that make them unhappy rather than just call it quits.
Here, then, is yet another “rule” that is changing. During the 1980s and 1990s the marriages of college-educated women became more stable compared with the 1970s, while the marriages of women with less education became less stable. By the mid-1990s, among Americans younger than forty-five, men and women who had bachelor’s degrees or higher had considerably lower divorce rates than those in any other educational category.26
Another area where many marriage pundits have been unable to stay current is in the relationship between women’s work and the likelihood of divorce. Studies in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s showed that as wives worked more hours and earned more income, marital quality declined and the risk of divorce rose. But those studies, says sociologist Stacy Rogers, often confused cause and effect. Many women increased their work hours precisely because marital tensions were high, wanting to get out of the house or to protect themselves in case the marriage ended in divorce. If such women did eventually divorce, the breakups were usually a response to the same marital problems that first motivated them to get a job and build up an emotional and economic safety net outside marriage.27
However, a woman who finds increased satisfaction at work may sometimes also find her marriage improves. She may start by working more hours outside the home to escape marital discord and then discover that her work adds enough satisfaction to her life to revive her interest in the marriage rather than simply enable her to leave it. I spoke to a woman last year who told me that her husband thought there was more tension in their marriage now that she was working. But her take on it was that her greater economic independence made her more willing to address tensions that had been there all along. “He doesn’t like that he has to give in more often now,” she said, “but I would have left him if I hadn’t gone out and gotten that job.”
Today working wives report fewer feelings of distress than wives who stay at home, and they are more likely to believe that their marriages are egalitarian. And unlike the past, marital equality is now associated with greater marital satisfaction for men as well as women.28
This isn’t true for every marriage, of course. As old rules and generalizations change, they don’t change in the same way for everyone. A woman who wants to work and has a husband who agrees can have a much happier marriage than she could have had in the past. But a woman who doesn’t want to work but has to may not be happier. And if she wants to work but her husband does not want her to, they have to deal with a conflict that did not exist when a man could simply forbid his wife to take a job.
These kinds of differences make one-size-fits-all social policies or instruction manuals for marriage unhelpful. For example, is getting an education a plus or a minus for marital stability? Highly educated couples usually make more money and have less traditional attitudes toward gender roles. Both these attributes generally increase marital satisfaction. But educated women are more likely to have demanding jobs, which can put additional stress on marriage. More education is also associated with less agreement that lifelong marriage is a moral imperative, increasing the likelihood that highly educated couples may turn to divorce if they become dissatisfied.29
Similarly, in marriages where wives work there is still a higher chance of divorce than in male breadwinner marriages, if only because wives who are self-supporting can leave marriages they find unsatisfying. But when a wife works, the couple tends to share child rearing more equally, which makes wives happier and less likely to leave.
All these changes create trade-offs and tough choices. A woman has a slightly better shot at a stable marriage if she is a full-time homemaker, for example, but she still faces a much higher chance of divorce than she did fifty years ago. And when a male breadwinner marriage does break up, a homemaker is far more likely to be impoverished by the divorce and find it harder to regain her financial footing than a woman who worked prior to the divorce.30
Every man and woman must weigh these pros and cons according to their individual values and options. And contrary to what many marriage promotion activists believe, these dilemmas cannot be sidestepped by making divorce less accessible.
The enactment of no-fault divorce laws reduced the bargaining power of a partner who does not want to end the marriage. This has often worked against women, especially economically vulnerable full-time homemakers. But when a wife can get a divorce over her husband’s objections, that increases a woman’s bargaining power in a marriage the husband wants to maintain.31
The availability of unilateral divorce provides an important escape mechanism in seriously troubled marriages. Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that in states that adopted unilateral divorce, this was followed, on average, by a 20 percent reduction in the number of married women committing suicide, as well as a significant drop in domestic violence for both men and women. Criminologists William Bailey and Ruth Peterson report that higher rates of marital separation lead to lower homicide rates against women. But a woman’s right to leave a marriage can also be a lifesaver for men. The Centers on Disease Control reports that the rate at which husbands were killed by their wives fell by approximately two-thirds between 1981 and 1998, in part because women could more easily leave their partners.32
Thankfully, most unhappy marriages don’t lead to murder or suicide, even where divorce is hard to get. In most cases, divorce is not a lifesaver, but a traumatic process that inflicts painful, sometimes long-lasting wounds on everyone involved. It is especially stressful for children. Although 75 to 80 percent of children recover well and function within normal ranges after divorce, children from divorced families have twice the risk of developing behavioral and emotional problems as children from continuously married families.33
But children in high-conflict marriages are often better off if their parents divorce than if they stay together. Children also suffer when exposed to constant and chronic low-level friction in a marriage, such as parents not talking to each other, being critical or moody, exhibiting jealousy, or being domineering.
A well-functioning, continuous, and happily married two-parent family provides an optimal environment for children. But a well-functioning marriage with two cooperating parents is not always what you get. When it’s not, divorce can be an escape hatch for the children as well as the adults. Sociologist Paul Amato estimates that divorce lowers the well-being of 55 to 60 percent of the children involved. But it actually improves the well-being of 40 to 45 percent.34 It is not very helpful to give people hard-and-fast personal advice, far less to pass sweeping laws, on the basis of the averages obtained from such variable outcomes.
Just as the impact of divorce varies from family to family and even from sibling to sibling in the same family, the differences within male breadwinner marriages, two-earner marriages, cohabiting partners, divorced couples, and unwed parents are now often greater than the differences between those categories.
Consider the experience of living in a male breadwinner family today. Most married couples with children have both partners in the labor force, but male breadwinner families are not about to disappear. Some couples organize their entire married lives in that pattern. Others adopt the male breadwinner form for a few years while the children are young. In 2002 about one-quarter of all children under age fifteen lived in families where the mothers did not work for pay.
Here too, however, the dynamics are shifting. And here too policy makers and pundits have not kept up with the change. In the 1950s two-earner couples were concentrated in lower-income families, scrambling to earn enough to survive. In nearly all middle-class and most working-class families, wives did not have paid jobs, at least until the children left home. Today, by contrast, stay-at-home mothers are concentrated in the poorest and richest rungs of the popu
lation. The only two segments of the population in which male breadwinner families predominate are the bottom 25 percent of the income distribution and the top 5 percent.35
The fact that both groups have large numbers of families in which wives do not work outside the home for pay does not in any way imply that the dynamics of family life are similar for the richest and poorest families. In high-income male breadwinner marriages, couples can reap big advantages from gender specialization. Managers and top executives with stay-at-home wives generally earn more than their counterparts with working wives. The wife’s activities free her husband to focus on his job, and she can cultivate the social networks that enhance his status.36 Wives in such marriages usually have the resources and time to develop skills that earn them respect from their communities and their husbands even though they don’t bring in income.
Once on a flight back from Europe my seat mate was an executive whose wife had never worked outside the home. He was a trove of information about Italian architecture and art. “How did you ever learn so much about art?” I asked. “I’m completely ignorant,” he replied. “I’m just repeating what my wife told me. She gets to learn all about art,” he said, “because I take care of the money. And I get the benefit of her knowledge when we travel.” The man’s wife is a prominent patron of the arts who probably never feels devalued as “just a housewife.”
Marriage, a History Page 39
