Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  45

  Research since the 1960s confirms that Goode was right in noting the spread of the new marriage system to other industrializing countries, such as Japan. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Japan had comparatively high rates of divorce and extramarital births, and women played an important role in both the agricultural and the industrial labor force. But divorce and unwed childbearing decreased as Japan industrialized in the first third of the twentieth century, and after World War II, sociologist Yamada Masahiro argues, the “domestication of women” became national policy, with social welfare legislation, tax policies, and informal hiring practices all giving special advantages to families consisting of a salaried husband and a full-time housewife.

  While less widespread than in the West, the number of Japanese marriages based on love rather than parental arrangement began to increase in the 1950s, as did the value that individuals placed on domesticity, a pattern that came to be called my-home-ism by the Japanese. Almost all women in the postwar era got married between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five and bore two or three children before they reached thirty.

  Important cultural differences remained between male breadwinner marriages in the West and in Japan during the 1950s, however. The Japanese nuclear family ideal was more centered on the children than on the couple. In addition, the social responsibilities of Japanese salaried workers, on top of their long work hours, meant that wives and children often took their “family” meals without the husband present. In addition, ties to parents remained strong, inhibiting free choice of marriage partners and the development of a couple’s privacy after the wedding. Even today, older parents are much more likely to live with one of their married adult children in Japan than in Europe and North America. Furthermore, although the frequency of love matches grew rapidly after 1940, it was not until 1965 that the number of love matches exceeded the number of arranged marriages in Japan. Louise Tilly, Industrialization and Gender Inequality (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1993), p. 38; Noriko Iwai, “Divorce in Japan,” in R. Robin Miller, ed., With This Ring: Divorce, Intimacy, and Cohabitation from a Multicultural Perspective (Stamford, Conn.: JAI Press, 2001); Yamada Masahiro, The Japanese Family in Transition (Tokyo: Foreign Press Center, 1998); Yamada Masahiro, “The Housewife: A Dying Breed?” JapanEcho (April 2001), p. 56; Kathleen Uno, Passages to Modernity: Motherhood, Childhood, and Social Reform in Early Twentieth Century Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999); Peter Stearns, Gender in World History (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 108-10; Susan Mann, East Asia (China, Japan, Korea) (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1999), p. 35; Gail Lee Bernstein, ed., Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Larry Carney and Charlotte O’Kelly, “Women’s Work and Women’s Place in the Japanese Economic Miracle,” in Kathryn Ward, ed., Women Workers and Global Restructuring (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 1990).

  46 Susan de Vos, “Nuptiality in Latin America,” in Miller, ed., With This Ring.

  47 For the quotes in this and the next paragraph, see Goode, World Revolution, pp. 16, 62-65, 372-73.

  Chapter 15. Winds of Change

  1 Frank Furstenberg, Jr., “Family Change and Family Diversity,” in Neil Smelser and Jeffrey Alexander, eds., Diversity and its Discontents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

  2 Nena McNeil and George McNeil, Open Marriage: A New Life Style for Couples (New York: M. Evans, 1972); Shulameth Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: William Morrow, 1970). For an account of the women’s movement, see Sara Evans, Rising Tide: How Women Changed America at Century’s End (New York: Free Press, 2003).

  3 Quoted in Arlene Skolnick, Embattled Paradise (New York: Basic Books, 1991), p. 139.

  4 McLaughlin et al., The Changing Lives of American Women (see chap. 13, n. 9).

  5 Quoted in D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, pp. 346-47 (see chap. 10, n. 6).

  6 McLaughlin et al., The Changing Lives of American Women, p. 169; Cliff Jahr, “Anita Bryant’s Startling Reversal,” Ladies’ Home Journal (December 1980), p. 68.

  7 Generally, the new ideas and behaviors were accepted first by people with other criticisms of the status quo, such as student activists. But they soon lost their early association with radicalism and even with secularism. In the 1960s, Catholics accepted the pill as readily as Protestants; Ronald Reagan, the first president to make family values a central campaign theme, was also the first divorced president in history; by the 1980s, acceptance of casual sex was as widespread among people who supported U.S. foreign policy as those who opposed it; and by the 1990s, evangelical Christians had as high a divorce rate as the population as a whole.

  8 Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1954). On the dress rehearsal of the 1920s in terms of individualistic values and desires for sexual fulfillment, see Francesca Cancian, Love in America: Gender and Self-Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

  9 For an extended argument about how modernization and industrialization raise people’s expectations for personal satisfaction and individual autonomy, see Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

  10 John Clausen, American Lives: Looking Back at the Children of the Great Depression (New York: Free Press, 1993). The quotes in this paragraph and the poll in the next paragraph are from Jessica Weiss, To Have and to Hold, pp. 108, 206, and note 7, p. 278 (see chap. 13, n. 29).

  11 Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor Press, 1983), pp. 12, 30; Keats, quoted in Donald Katz, Home Fires (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 121.

  12 Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, pp. 30, 42, 47.

  13 “ ‘It’s Good to Blow Your Top’: Women’s Magazines and a Discourse of Discontent, 1945-1965,” Journal of Women’s History 8 (1996).

  14 Andrew Cherlin, “Should the Government Promote Marriage?,” Contexts (Fall 2003); Weiss, To Have and to Hold.

  15 Maxine Virtue, Family Cases in Court (1956), quoted in Katherine Caldwell, “Not Ozzie and Harriet: Postwar Divorce and the American Liberal Welfare State,” Law and Social Inquiry 23 (1998).

  16 Mary Ann Glendon, The Transformation of Family Law: State, Law, and Family in the United States and Western Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

  17 For discussion of the complex interaction between women’s employment and women’s rights described in the following paragraphs, see Janet Chafetz, “Chicken or Egg? A Theory of the Relationship between Feminist Movements and Family Change,” in Mason and Jensen, Gender and Family; Robert Jackson, Destined for Equality: The Inevitable Rise of Women’s Status (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Julia Blackwelder, Now Hiring: The Feminization of Work in the United States, 1900-1995 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997); Valerie Oppenheimer, The Female Labor Force in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Population Monograph Series, 1970); Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945-1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); William Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Sara Evans, “The Rebirth of the Women’s Movement in the 1960s,” in Kathryn Sklar and Thomas Dublin, eds., Women and Power in American History, vol. 2: From 1870 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1991). For a recent account of how changes in the 1950s undergirded the expansion of women’s work and the women’s movement after the 1960s, see Nancy MacLean, “Postwar Women’s History: The ‘Second Wave’” or the End of the Family Wage?” in Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., A Companion to Post-1945 America (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2002).

  18 Helen Gurley
Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1962), p. 4.

  19 Hans-Peter Blossfeld, “Changes in the Process of Family Formation and Women’s Growing Economic Independence,” and Jenny de Jong Gierveld and Aat Liefbroer, “The Netherlands,” in Blossfeld, New Role of Women: Family Formation in Modern Societies (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995).

  20 Susan Householder Van Horn, Women, Work, and Fertility, 1900-1986 (New York: New York University Press, 1988); Lynn Weiner, From Working Girl to Working Mother (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1985); Glendon, Transformation of Family Law; Woloch, Women and the American Experience (see chap. 10, n. 13).

  21 Ronald Lesthaeghe, “The Second Demographic Transition,” in Mason and Jensen, eds., Gender and Family Change, p. 17; R. L. Cliquet, “The Second Demographic Transition: Fact or Fiction?,” Population Studies 23 (1992), p. 22; Daniel Scott Smith, “The Dating of the American Sexual Revolution,” in Michael Gordon, ed., The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978); Rothman, Hands and Hearts, pp. 307-08 (see chap. 10, n. 21).

  22 Quoted in Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001), pp. 234-35. See also Angus McLaren, Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), p. 174; Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

  23 Steven Nock, “The Divorce of Marriage and Parenthood,” Journal of Family Therapy 22 (2000). For a history of how the pill spread and became available to single as well as married women, see Beth Bailey, “Prescribing the Pill: Politics, Culture, and the Sexual Revolution in America’s Heartland,” Journal of Social History 30 (1997); Casper and Bianchi, Continuity and Change in the American Family (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2002); Kuijsten, “Changing Family Patterns in Europe,” European Journal of Population 12 (1996).

  24 Mary Ann Mason, Mark Fine, and Sarah Carnochan, “Family Law in the New Millennium,” Journal of Family Issues 22 (2001).

  25 Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, The Mommy Myth (New York: Free Press, 2004), pp. 42-43.

  26 Wallerstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife, pp. 189-219 (see chap. 12, n. 62).

  27 Glendon, Transformation of Family Law, pp. 75-81.

  28 Quoted in Wallerstein, Tell the Court, p. 240.

  29 Rolf Nygren, “Interpreting Legitimacy,” Journal of Family History 28 (2003).

  30 Linda Hantrais and Marie-Therese Letablier, Families and Family Policies in Europe (New York: Longmans, 1996).

  31 Ron Lesthaeghe and Dominique Meekers, “Values Changes and the Dimensions of Familism in the European Community,” European Journal of Population 2 (1988); Ronald Inglehart, “The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies,” American Political Science Review 65 (1971); Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Joseph Veroff, Elizabeth Douvan, and Richard Kulka, The Inner American: A Self-Portrait from 1957 to 1976 (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Daniel Yankelovich, The New Morality (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974).

  32 Veroff, Douvan, and Kulka, Inner American, pp. 191-92; Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down (New York: Random House, 1981).

  33 Inglehart and Norris, Rising Tide.

  34 Andrew Sum, Neal Fogg, and Robert Taggert, “The Economics of Despair,” American Prospect 27 (1996), pp. 83-84. I describe the earnings crisis of 1973-1992 and its effect on family life in more depth in The Way We Never Were (see chap. 10, n. 29) and The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families (New York: Basic Books, 1997). See also R. M. Rubin and B. J. Riney, Working Wives and Dual Earner Families (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994) and Ellman, “Divorce Rates, Marriage Rates.” A recent discussion of the international dimensions of this crisis can be found in Oliver Zunz, Leonard Schoppa, and Nobuhiro Hiwatari, eds., Social Contracts Under Stress: The Middle Classes of America, Europe, and Japan at the Turn of the Century (New York: Russell Sage, 2002). Barbara Risman and Pepper Schwartz, “After the Sexual Revolution: Gender Politics in Teen Dating,” Contexts 1 (2002); Ira Ellman, “Divorce Rates, Marriage Rates, and the Problematic Persistence of Traditional Marital Roles,” Family Law Quarterly 34 (2000), p. 6; Thornton and Young-DeMarco, “Four Decades of Trends,” p. 1028.

  35 Janet Chafetz and Jacqueline Hagan, “The Gender Division of Labor and Family Change in Industrial Societies,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 27 (1996); Peter Li, “Labor Reproduction and the Family Under Advanced Capitalism,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 24 (1993); Susan McCrae, “Introduction,” in McRae, ed., Changing Britain: Families and Households in the 1990s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Chiara Saraceno, “Changing Gender and Family Models,” in Zunz, Schoppa, and Hiwatari, Social Contracts; Ponzetti, International Encyclopedia.

  36 In the United States, for example, one study found that only one-third of women who graduated from high school in 1960 still had full-time jobs five years later. But by 1980, that number had increased to nearly two-thirds. Kristin Smith, “Maternity Leave and Employment Patterns, 1961-1995,” U.S. Census Bureau, Public Information Office, December 5, 2001; Marlis Buchmann, The Script of Life in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

  37 Suzanne Bianchi and Daphne Spain, “Women in the Labor Force, 1950-1980,” in Sklar and Dublin, eds., Women and Power in American History, vol. 2. For similar trends in Europe, see Hantrais and Letablier, Families and Family Policies in Europe.

  38 Yankelovich, New Rules.

  39 Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Reinventing the Family (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002); Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1986); Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim, The Normal Chaos of Love (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 1995).

  40 Norval Glenn, “Marital Quality,” in David Levinson, ed., Encyclopedia of Marriage and the Family (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1995), vol. 2.

  Chapter 16. The Perfect Storm

  1 Amitai Etzioni, “The Family: Is It Obsolete?” Journal of Current Social Issues 14 (1977), p. 4. Measuring divorce rates is very complicated. The crude divorce rate is the number of divorces per thousand married people. But one can also measure the ratio of divorces to marriages in any particular year or track trends over the past decade and project into the past. Because the 50 percent rate was a projection of how many marriages would end before the couple reached their fortieth wedding anniversary, it may have overstated the rate of marital breakdown. Nevertheless, almost 40 percent of first marriages contracted in the 1970s ended in divorce before their fifteenth anniversaries, so the 50 percent estimate was certainly reasonable.

  2 Casper and Bianchi, Continuity and Change (see chap. 15, n. 23); Helen Rumbelow, “Women Less Likely to Remarry,” Washington Post, July 24, 2002.

  3 Christopher Marquis, “Total of Unmarried Couples Surged in U.S. Census,” New York Times, March 13, 2003; Andrew Hacker, “How Are Women Doing?,” New York Review of Books (April 11, 2002); Jane Lewis and Kathleen Kiernan, “The Boundaries Between Marriage, Nonmarriage, and Parenthood,” Journal of Family History 21 (1996); Kathleen Seltzer, “Cohabitation and Family Change,” in Marilyn Coleman and Lawrence Ganong, eds., Handbook of Contemporary Families (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2004).

  4 Pamela Smock and Sanjiv Gupta, “Cohabitation in Contemporary North America,” in Alan Booth and Ann Crouter, eds., Just Living Together: Implications for Children, Families, and Public Policy (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002); Wendy Manning and Pamela Smock, “First Comes Cohabitation and Then Comes Marriage,” Journal of Family Issues 23 (2002); Heath Foster, “More Moms and Dads Aren’t Tying the Knot,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 1, 2003.

  5 Joshua Goldstein,
“The Leveling of Divorce in the United States,” Demography 36 (1999); demographer Steven Nock at the University of Virginia, personal communication, July 23, 2003; BBC News, “UK Divorce Rate Lowest for 22 Years,” August 21, 2001; Lois Brady, “Why Marriage Is Hot Again,” Redbook (September 1996). Unless otherwise noted, the sources for other figures on stabilization in the United States (and the later discussion of similar trends in Europe) come from Casper and Bianchi, Continuity and Change; Linda Hantrais and Marie-Therese Letablier, Families and Family Policies in Europe (New York: Longmans, 1996); Hans-Peter Blossfeld, ed., The New Role of Women: Family Formation in Modern Societies (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995); Karen Mason and An-Magritt Jensen, eds., Gender and Family Change in Industrialized Societies (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1995); Chiara Saraceno, “Changing Gender and Family Models,” in Oliver Zunz, Leonard Schoppa, and Nobuhiro Hiwatari, eds., Social Contracts Under Stress: The Middle Classes of America, Europe, and Japan at the Turn of the Century (New York: Russell Sage, 2002); Karin Brewster and Irene Padavic, “Changes in Gender-Ideology, 1977-1996,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 62 (2000); Tom Smith, “The Emerging 21st Century American Family, General Social Survey Social Change Report,” no. 42, National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago, November 24, 1999; Arland Thornton and Linda Young-Demarco, “Four Decades of Trends in Attitudes Toward Family Issues in the United States: The 1960s Through the 1990s,” Journal of Marriage and Family 63 (2001); James Q. Wilson, The Marriage Problem (New York: HarperCollins, 2002); Mark Gillespie, “Americans Consider Infidelity Wrong,” Gallup News Service, July 10, 2001, SeniorJournal.com; Vern Bengston, Timothy Biblarz, and Robert Roberts, How Families Still Matter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); “Facts at a Glance,” Child Trends (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, November 2003); U.S. Census Bureau, “Living Arrangements of Children Under 18 Years Old: 1960 to Present,” Internet release date, June 29, 2001; Allen Dupree and Wendell Primus, “Declining Share of Children Lived with Single Mothers in the Late 1990s” (Washington, D.C.: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, June 15, 2001); Sharon Vandivere, Kristen Moore, and Martha Zaslow, Children’s Family Environments: Findings from the National Survey of America’s Families (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 2001).