Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  10 Alice Eagly and Wendy Wolf, “The Origins of Sex Differences in Human Behavior,” American Psychologist 54 (1999).

  11 Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers, Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs (New York: Basic Books, 2004); Barbara Whitehead and David Popenoe, The State of Our Unions, 2001 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University National Marriage Project, 2001). In 1967, by contrast, three-quarters of college women said they would marry a man they didn’t love if he met their other criteria, many of which were connected to his ability to support a family.

  12 Scott South, “Sociodemographic Differentials in Mate Selection Processes,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 53 (1991); Robert Mare, “Five Decades of Educational Assortative Mating,” American Sociological Review 56 (1991); Pepper Schwartz quoted by Deborah Siegel, “The New Trophy Wife,” Psychology Today (January 7, 2004).

  13 There are even hints that several industrial societies might be experiencing the same kind of reversal in patterns of childbearing that we have already seen in marriage rates: More highly educated women may soon be more likely to have children than their less educated counterparts. Steven Martin, “Women’s Education and Family Timing,” Department of Sociology and Maryland Population Research Center, June 2003; Franke-Ruta, “Creating a Lie”; N. Ahn and P. Mira, “A Note on the Changing Relationship Between Fertility and Female Employment Rates in Developed Countries,” Journal of Population Economics 15 (2002); M. L. Dewitt and Z. R. Ravanera, “The Changing Impact of Women’s Employment and Educational Attainment on the Timing of Births in Canada,” Canadian Studies in Population 25 (1998); Brigit Hoem, “Entry into Motherhood in Sweden,” Demographic Research 2 (2000).

  14 I discuss this movement and quote its main proponents in The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families (New York: Basic Books, 1997). See also Kristin Moore et al., “What Is ‘Healthy Marriage’? Defining the Concept,” Child Trends Research Brief, publication #2004-16, www.childtrends.org.

  15 Wendy Carter, “Attitudes Toward Premarital Sex, Non-Marital Childbearing, Cohabitation, and Marriage Among Blacks and Whites,” in Robin Miller, ed., With This Ring: Divorce, Intimacy and Cohabitation from a Multicultural Perspective (Stamford, Conn.: JAI Press, 2001); Dan Vergano, “Here Comes the Bride—After College,” USA Today, August 20, 2002; Megan Sweeney, “Two Decades of Family Change: The Shifting Economic Foundations of Marriage,” American Sociological Review 67 (2002); Mason and Jensen, “Introduction,” in Mason and Jensen, Gender and Family Change; “Born Again Christians Just As Likely to Divorce,” www.barma.org/Flexpage.aspx?Page=BarmaUpdate&BarmaUpdate10=170, accessed Oct. 6, 2004; Blaine Harden, “Bible Belt Couples ‘Put Asunder’ More,” New York Times, May 21, 2001. This doesn’t mean religion is irrelevant to marital stability. Couples who are share religious convictions and are active in church and community associations with like-minded people have more stable marriages than average. But the daily behaviors count much more than the abstract beliefs.

  16 Rebekah Coley, “What Mothers Teach, What Daughters Learn: Gender Mistrust and Self-Sufficiency Among Low-Income Women,” in Booth and Crouter, Just Living Together (see chap. 16, n. 4); Donna Franklin, What’s Love Got to Do with It: Understanding and Healing the Rift Between Black Men and Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

  17 Stephanie Coontz and Nancy Folbre, “Marriage, Poverty, and Public Policy,” a discussion paper from the Council on Contemporary Families prepared for the Fifth Annual CCF Conference, April 26-28, 2002; Kristin Seefeldt and Pamela Smock, “Marriage on the Public Policy Agenda: What Do Policy Makers Need to Know from Research?,” National Poverty Center Working Paper No. 04-2, February 17, 2004, Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan; Daniel Lichter et al., “Is Marriage a Panacea?,” Social Problems 50 (2003); “Assessing the Importance of Family Structure in Understanding Birth Outcomes,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 56 (1994); E. Cooksey, “Consequences of Young Mothers’ Marital Histories for Children’s Cognitive Development,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 59 (1997).

  18 Kathryn Edin, “What Do Low-Income Single Mothers Say About Marriage?,” Social Problems 47 (2000); Edin, “A Few Good Men: Why Poor Mothers Don’t Marry or Remarry,” American Prospect (January 3, 2000); Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage, 1998); Wendy Single-Rushton and Sara McLanahan, “For Richer or Poorer?,” manuscript, Center for Research on Child Well-Being, Princeton University, July 2001; Michelle Budig and Paula England, “The Wage Penalty for Motherhood,” American Sociological Review 66 (2001); Heather Joshi, Pierella Paci, and Jane Waldfogel, “The Wages of Motherhood: Better or Worse,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 23 (1999); Jane Waldfogel, “The Effect of Children on Women’s Wages,” American Sociological Review 62 (1997); Shelly Lundberg, “Nonmarital Fertility: Lessons for Family Economics,” in Lawrence Wu and Barbara Wolfe, eds., Out of Wedlock: Causes and Consequences of Nonmarital Fertility (New York: Russell Sage, 2001).

  19 Andrew Cherlin, “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage,” Journal of Marriage and Family 66 (2004). See also Kathryn Edin, Maria Kefalas, and Joanna Reed, “A Peek Inside the Black Box,” Journal of Marriage and Family 66 (2004). The reluctance of low-income women to marry is reinforced by government policies that penalize poor people for marrying by sharply reducing their eligibility for welfare or tax credits when their income rises even by a very small amount. Repealing such policies would be a sensible way to make it easier for low-income couples to wed, but it would not reinstate marriage as the normative behavior for all.

  20 Frank Furstenberg, Jr., “The Future of Marriage,” American Demographics 18 (1996).

  21 Pamela Smock, “The Wax and Wane of Marriage,” Journal of Marriage and Family, 66 (2004) and personal communication, May 3, 2004. For poll on being “set,” see Whitehead and Popenoe, State of Our Unions, 2002.

  22 Seefeldt and Smock, “Marriage on the Public Policy Agenda”; Thomas Bradbury and Benjamin Karney, “Understanding and Altering the Longitudinal Course of Marriage,” Journal of Marriage and Family, 66 (2004).

  23 Seefeldt and Smock, “Marriage on the Public Policy Agenda.” For more on why these couples don’t wed—and there are often very good reasons for one or the other partner to back away—see Single-Rushton and McLanahan, “For Richer or Poorer?,” p. 4; Edin, “What Do Low-Income Single Mothers Say About Marriage?,” pp. 112-33. For more information on the Fragile Families study, see http://crcw.princeton.edu/fragilefamilies/national report.pdf.

  24 The importance of promoting healthy conflict-solving skills for unmarried and divorced couples, not just couples about to marry, has been shown by Robert Emery’s twelve-year follow-up study of high-conflict, low-income couples randomly assigned to mediation and litigation. He found that an average of five hours in mediation resulted in dramatic improvements in nonresidential parent-child relationships twelve years into the future. Emery, The Truth About Children and Divorce (New York: Viking, 2004).

  25 Andrew Hacker, Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Woman and Men (New York: Scribner, 2003), p. 29; Elizabeth Enright, “House Divided,” AARP Magazine, (July/August 2004).

  26 Edin, Kefalas, and Reed, “A Peek Inside the Black Box”; Liana Sayer and Suzanne Bianchi, “Women’s Economic Independence and the Probability of Divorce,” Journal of Family Issues 21 (2000); Krieder and Fields, “Number, Timing, and Duration of Marriages,” Table 9, p. 14. For international comparisons of the changing relationship between divorce and education, see Hans-Peter Blossfeld et al., “Education, Modernization, and the Risk of Marriage Disruption in Sweden, West Germany, and Italy,” in Mason and Jensen, eds., Gender and Family Change.

  27 Stacy Rogers, “Wives’ Income and Marital Quality,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 61 (1999).

  28 Stacy Rogers and Danielle DeBoer, “Changes in Wives’ Income: Effects on Marital Happiness, Psy
chological Well-Being, and the Risk of Divorce,” Journal of Marriage and Family 63 (2001); Hiromi Ono, “Husbands’ and Wives’ Resources and Marital Dissolution,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 60 (1998); Janice Stiehl, Marital Equality: Its Relationship to the Well-Being of Husbands and Wives (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997); Mary Hicks and Marilyn Platt, “Marital Happiness and Stability: A Review of the Research in the Sixties,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 32 (1970); Jane Wilkie, Myra Ferree, and Kathryn Ratcliff, “Gender and Fairness: Marital Satisfaction in Two-Earner Couples,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 60 (1998); Maureen Perry-Jenkins and Elizabeth Turner, “Jobs, Marriage, and Parenting: Working It Out in Dual-Earner Families,” in Marilyn Coleman and Larry Ganong, eds., Handbook of Contemporary Families: Considering the Past, Contemplating the Future (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2003); Scott Coltrane, Family Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Paul Amato, David Johnson, Alan Booth, and Stacy Rogers, “Continuity and Change in Marital Quality Between 1980 and 2000,” Journal of Marriage and Family 65 (2003).

  29 For this and the next paragraph, see Amato, Johnson, Booth, and Rogers, “Continuity and Change in Marital Quality Between 1980 and 2000”; Matthus Kalmijn, “Father Involvement in Childrearing and the Perceived Stability of Marriage,” Journal of Marriage and Family Life 16 (1999); Coltrane, Family Man.

  30 Julie Brines and Kara Joyner, “The Ties that Bind: Principles of Cohesion in Cohabitation and Marriage,” American Sociological Review 64 (1999); Terry Arendell, “Women and the Economics of Divorce in the Contemporary United States,” Signs 13 (1987). Interestingly, Brines and Joiner found that some of the things that destabilize marriage work in reverse for cohabiting couples. Unlike married couples, cohabitors whose employment and earnings grew more similar over time had much less chance of breaking up than those whose earnings and work diverged.

  31 Karla Hackstaff, Marriage in a Culture of Divorce (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), pp. 177-79.

  32 Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “ ’Til Death Do Us Part: Effects of Divorce Laws on Suicide, Domestic Violence and Spousal Murder” and “Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: Divorce Laws and Family Distress,” NBER Working Paper 10175 (2003), available at http://faculty-gsb.Stanford.edu/Wolfers/Papers/DivorcewebPDF; William Bailey and Ruth Peterson, “Gender Inequality and Violence Against Women,” in John Hagan and Ruth Peterson, eds., Crime and Inequality (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995); Leonard Paulozzi et al., “Surveillance for Homicide Among Intimate Partners—United States, 1981-1998,” Centers for Disease Control, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 50 (October 12, 2001); Laura Guan, Daniel Nagin, and Richard Rosenfeld, “Explaining the Decline in Intimate Partner Violence,” Homicide Studies 3 (1999).

  33 For this and the next two paragraphs, see Mavis Hetherington, For Better or for Worse: Divorce Reconsidered (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); Constance Ahrons, We’re Still Family: What Grown Children Have to Say About their Parents’ Divorce (New York: HarperCollins, 2004); Joan Kelly, “Changing Perspectives on Children’s Adjustment Following Divorce,” Childhood 10 (2003); Yongmin Sun and Yuanzhang Li, “Children’s WellBeing During Parents’ Marital Disruption Process,” Journal of Marriage and Family 64 (2002); Paul Amato and Alan Booth, “The Legacy of Parents’ Marital Discord,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2001); Abigail Stewart et al., Separating Together: How Divorce Transforms Families (New York: Guilford Press, 1997); Ronald Simons and Associates, Understanding Differences Between Divorced and Intact Families: Stress, Interaction, and Child Outcome (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996); Christy Buchanan, Eleanor Maccoby, and Sanford Dornbusch, Adolescents After Divorce (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); E. M. Hetherington, M. Bridges, and G. M. Isabella, “What Matters? What Does Not? Five Perspectives on the Associations Between Marital Transitions and Children’s Adjustment,” American Psychologist 58 (1998); Elizabeth Vandewater and Jennifer Lansford, “Influences of Family Structure and Parental Conflict on Children’s Well-Being,” Family Relations 47 (1998); E. M. Hetherington, S. Henderson, and D. Reiss, Adolescent Siblings in Stepfamilies: Family Functioning and Adolescent Adjustment, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Series 259, vol. 64, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, “Back to School 1999—National Survey of American Attitudes on Substance Abuse,” August 1999. Practically the lone dissenter to this scholarly consensus is Judith Wallerstein, whose work has been critically reviewed in depth in a recent issue of Family Relations 52 (2003).

  34 Paul Amato, “Reconciling Divergent Perspectives: Judith Wallerstein, Quantitative Family Research, and Children of Divorce,” Family Relations 52 (2003); personal communication, August 20, 2003.

  35 These data were generously calculated for me by Paula England of Stanford University. See also Janet C. Gornick, and Marcia K. Meyers, Families that Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment (New York: Russell Sage, 2003). Another reversal from the 1950s is that white wives are as likely to work as married black women. Paula England, Carmen Garcia-Beaulieu, and Mary Rose, “Women’s Employment Among Blacks, Whites, and Three Groups of Latinas: Do Privileged Women Have Higher Employment?,” Gender & Society 18 (2004).

  36 L. K. Stroh and J. M. Brett, “The Dual Earner Daddy Penalty in Salary Progression,” Human Resource Management Journal 35 (1996); Gene Koretz, “Why Married Men Earn More,” BusinessWeek (September 17, 2001).

  37 Margaret Nelson and Joan Smith, Working Hard and Making Do: Surviving in Small Town America (Berkeley: University of California, 1999).

  38 Philip Cowan and Carolyn Pape Cowan, “New Families: Modern Couples as New Pioneers,” in Mary Ann Mason, Arlene Skolnick, and Stephen Sugarman, eds., All Our Families: New Policies for a New Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

  39 John Leland, “For Better or for Worse: He’s Retired, She Works,” New York Times, March 23, 2004.

  40 For this and the following paragraphs, see Kathleen Kiernan, “Cohabitation in Western Europe,” Population Trends (1990); “The State of the European Unions,” in M. Macura and G. Beets, eds., Dynamics of Fertility and Partnership in Europe, vol. 1 (Geneva: United Nations, 2002); Judith Seltzer, “Cohabitation and Family Change,” in Coleman and Ganong, eds., Handbook of Contemporary Families; William Axinn and Arland Thornton, “The Relationship Between Cohabitation and Divorce,” Demography 29 (1992); Casper and Bianchi, Continuity and Change; Booth and Crouter, Just Living Together; John Haskey, “Demographic Aspects of Cohabitation in Great Britain,” International Journal of Law, Policy, and the Family 15 (2001); Pamela Smock, “Cohabitation in the United States,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000). For a spirited defense of cohabiting relationships formed by choice, see Dorion Solot and Marshall Miller, Unmarried to Each Other (New York: Marlowe and Co., 2002).

  41 Catherine Kenney and Sara McLanahan, “Are Cohabiting Relationships More Violent than Marriages?,” Princeton University Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, Working Paper 01-22, June 1, 2001.

  42 Judith Seltzer, “Families Formed Outside of Marriage,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 62 (2000); Jeanne Batalova and Philip Cohen, “Premarital Cohabitation and Housework: Couples in Cross-National Perspective,” Journal of Marriage and Family 64 (2002); Patricia Wren, “A Couple’s Work,” Boston Globe, November 9, 2002.

  43 Cherlin, “Deinstitutionalization”; Emily Visher, John Visher, and Kay Pasley, “Remarriage, Families and Stepparenting,” in Froma Walsh, ed., Normal Family Processes (New York: Guilford, 2003).

  44 For this and the next paragraph, see Sharon Sassler and Robert Schoen, “The Effect of Attitudes and Economic Activity on Marriage,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 61 (1999); Laura Sanchez and Constance Gager, “Hard Living, Perceived Entitlement to a Great Marriage, and Marital Dissolution,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 62 (2000); Tim Heaton and Ashley Blake, “
Gender Differences in Determinants of Marital Disruption,” Journal of Family Issues 20 (1999); Wilkie, Ferree, and Ratcliff, “Gender and Fairness”; Paul Amato and Alan Booth, “Changes in Gender Role Attitudes and Perceived Marital Quality,” American Sociological Review 60 (1995); Gayle Kaufman, “Do Gender Role Attitudes Matter?,” Journal of Family Issues 21 (2000).

  45 Hacker, Mismatch.

  46 Quoted in Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 35. For more on inequities of family life in the past, see Coontz, The Way We Never Were (chap. 10, n. 29).

  47 New York Times, June 10, 1998.

  48 Jennifer Flowers, “Mail-Order Brides Give Some Men the ‘Traditional’ Wife They’re Looking For, but There Are Concerns,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, March 27, 2004.

  49 Jonathan Gershuny, Michael Godwin, and Sally Jones, “The Domestic Labour Revolution: A Process of Lagged Adaptation?,” in Michael Anderson, Frank Bechhofer, and Jonathan Gershuny, eds., The Social and Political Economy of the Household (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1994); “U.S. Husbands Are Doing More Housework,” U.S. Census Bureau, Public Information Office, April 12, 2001; Coltrane, Family Man; Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams, “Men’s Family Work,” in Rosanna Hertz and Nancy Marshall, eds., Working Families: The Transformation of the American Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Scott Coltrane, “Fathering: Paradoxes, Contradictions, and Dilemma,” in Coleman and Ganong, eds., Handbook of Contemporary Families; Paul Amato, David Johnson, Alan Booth, and Stacy Rogers, “Continuity and Change in Marital Quality between 1980 and 2000,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 65 (2003); Scott Coltrane, “Research on Household Labor,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 62 (2000). The likelihood is that men and women will continue to converge, as sons of employed mothers are especially likely to believe that couples should share child care and housework equally. Marilyn Elias, “Working Moms Shape Kids’ Family Roles,” USA Today, August 9, 2004.