Pew Poll: Millennials View Parenting As Super Important, Good Marriage, Less So

Pew Research finds that, among Millennials, 52 percent say being a good parent is "one of the most important things" in life, while only 30 percent said the same of having a good marriage. Here's a helpful graph:

It's worth noting that Millennials seem to have a more positive outlook on good parenting than Gen Xers do, but as I've written before, marriage rates for young people are falling. People are getting married later in life. Getting married young just isn't as important to this generation. Jill Filipovic at Feministe has some good reasons for this (hint: It's not that men are emotional infants).

In fact, this later part of the Pew article is important to look at:

Even though their generation has been slow to marry and have children, most Millennials look forward to doing both. Among 18- to 29-year-olds who are not currently married and have no children, 70% say they want to marry and 74% say they want to have children.

Millennials aren't opposed to marriage and look forward to having kids. They don't, however, think the two go hand-in-hand. I think much of this has to do with the fact that Millennials are of a generation that doesn't find divorce strange. I knew tons of people growing up whose parents were divorced, and though it certainly still drew judgmental whispers, it certainly was a normal part of life.

Perhaps as divorce seems less scary, Millennials are beginning to examine life in a slightly different way: You can -- and should -- still be a good parent even if your marriage doesn't work out. And if it doesn't work out, that's OK. Plenty of people are happier out of their bad marriages. That's not to say that striving for a good relationship isn't a good goal, but fewer Millennials see it so tightly tied with parenthood:

About a third of Millennials (34%) think that more unmarried couples raising children is a bad thing for society, compared with 45% of those ages 30 and older.

Oddly, though, Millennials, like the rest of society, still think that single mothers are bad news. Over 60 percent disapproved of single motherhood. That's less than those in the 30-and-over category, who disapprove at a rate of just over 70 percent.

I'm sure this round of polling will bait lengthly blog posts about how selfish young people these days are -- that they're turning from marriage and making huge mistakes in their lives. But I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing that Millennials view marriage and children as separate endeavors. They are, after all, two very different things.

Modern America Is Overrun With Child-Men Who Will Never Marry You, Conservative Writer Says

(AllMoviePhoto)

Kay Hymowitz and I might share a first name, but there seems to be little else that we share. She's written about dating and marriage in the past, saying, "By the early twentieth century, things had evolved so that in the United States, at any rate, a man knew the following: he was supposed to call for a date; he was supposed to pick up his date; he was supposed to take his date out, say, to a dance, a movie, or an ice-cream joint; if the date went well, he was supposed to call for another one; and at some point, if the relationship seemed charged enough—or if the woman got pregnant—he was supposed to ask her to marry him."

To Hymowitz, this appears to be an enormous problem. I recall refuting her in an essay for Campus Progress.

Now, she's back at it again. This time, in the Wall Street Journal promoting her new book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys, she covers a lot of things—from the changing scientific ideas about early adulthood development, which is now starting to be considered a whole different psychological phase from the rest of adulthood, to the transition to an information-based economy rather than a goods-based manufacturing one—but here's the crux of what's making everyone mad:

Where have the good men gone? Their male peers often come across as aging frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers—a gender gap neatly crystallized by the director Judd Apatow in his hit 2007 movie "Knocked Up." The story's hero is 23-year-old Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), who has a drunken fling with Allison Scott (Katherine Heigl) and gets her pregnant. Ben lives in a Los Angeles crash pad with a group of grubby friends who spend their days playing videogames, smoking pot and unsuccessfully planning to launch a porn website. Allison, by contrast, is on her way up as a television reporter and lives in a neatly kept apartment with what appear to be clean sheets and towels. Once she decides to have the baby, she figures out what needs to be done and does it. Ben can only stumble his way toward being a responsible grownup.

[...]

American men have been struggling with finding an acceptable adult identity since at least the mid-19th century. We often hear about the miseries of women confined to the domestic sphere once men began to work in offices and factories away from home. But it seems that men didn't much like the arrangement either. They balked at the stuffy propriety of the bourgeois parlor, as they did later at the banal activities of the suburban living room. They turned to hobbies and adventures, like hunting and fishing. At midcentury, fathers who at first had refused to put down the money to buy those newfangled televisions changed their minds when the networks began broadcasting boxing matches and baseball games. The arrival of Playboy in the 1950s seemed like the ultimate protest against male domestication; think of the refusal implied by the magazine's title alone.

In his disregard for domestic life, the playboy was prologue for today's pre-adult male. Unlike the playboy with his jazz and art-filled pad, however, our boy rebel is a creature of the animal house. In the 1990s, Maxim, the rude, lewd and hugely popular "lad" magazine arrived from England. Its philosophy and tone were so juvenile, so entirely undomesticated, that it made Playboy look like Camus.

It seems modern American culture has made men into puerile, selfish creatures that only want to look at porn all day, or at least, that's what Hymowitz wants you to believe. Unfortunately, I haven't met too many of these men, since I also know lots of mature, emotionally stable, and considerate men who are excited about marrying the partners their with when they're both emotionally and financially ready for marriage.

But Hymowitz's ideas fit neatly into stereotypes, so she runs with it. These notions of immature child-men is a problem. It is also, presumably, the direct cause of dropping marriage rates for young people and the rising number of folks who are getting married later (or never).

Jill Filipovic, Matt Yglesias, and Monica Potts all have great takedowns of Hymowitz's piece, but I would just add that these concerns about getting married by a certain age are becoming increasingly classist.

As Jessica Grose pointed out when Lori Gottlieb's Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough caused the Internet to explode:

About 80 percent of female college grads ages 30-44 have been married at some point, compared with 71 percent of women who did not graduate from high school, according to the latest Pew research. The marriages of college grads are also increasingly stable. From the 1970s to the '90s, rates of divorce fell by almost half among college-educated women, but they remained high among women with less than a four-year degree. If there's a crisis in marriage, it's because the least educated and poorest women are no longer getting married.

Emphasis mine. The fact that Hymowitz is focusing mostly on middle-class, upwardly mobile, mostly white men and women seems to be something she's vaguely aware of, since she ends her piece with this passage:

Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven—and often does. Women put up with him for a while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the troublesome man. But these rational choices on the part of women only serve to legitimize men's attachment to the sand box. Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. There's nothing they have to do.

They might as well just have another beer.

But in a study of Match.com's users that's consistent with the general population, lots of people are less gung ho on committing (pun intended) to marriage—not just those Playboy-reading nincompoops that Hymowitz described. The survey found that just 62 percent of users definitely wanted to get married and 29 percent just aren't sure. This is likely, as Jill pointed out, that it's because people are less likely to be in a tight economic spot for longer than they used to be:

More people generally — not just more women — are going to college. One’s first job (or one’s second or third or fourth job) is very rarely one’s life-long career. People without higher education face new hurdles now that manufacturing jobs are drying up and well-paying blue-collar work is increasingly difficult to find. That’s a very different economy from the one my grandparents and parents faced. Toss an economic recession into the mix and it’s not hard to see why people aren’t chomping at the bit to make life-long financial commitments to another person when they can barely support themselves — especially in a culture where conservative views on marriage demand that the man is the breadwinner, and that he can support a wife and children.

I'm not convinced that there's a dating or a marriage crisis. Hymowitz is just giving voice to the tired old Sex-and-the-City stereotype of the successful single woman struggling to find a datable man. But just because something rings true to stereotype doesn't make it true.

Report: 'Marriage Is in Real Trouble'

(Flickr/mircea tudorache)

Lately there's a lot of panic about marriage. That panic is reflected in the title of a report released The State of Our Unions: Marriage in America 2010 [PDF] this week titled "When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America." This annual report is co-produced by the National Marriage Project, a research project at the University of Virginia, and the Center for Marriage and Families, a sub-set of the conservative Institute for American Values, which counts among its scholars Prop 8 supporter and National Organization for Marriage spokesperson Maggie Gallagher.

The report notes several facts about marriage, notably something that I blogged about not that long ago, that marriage is remaining popular among the highly educated but falling in popularity among the less educated. The State of Our Unions report calls this group of people the "moderately educated," or those with high school degrees and maybe some college or vocational training. The executive summary notes begins by declaring "In middle America, marriage is in trouble."

And they seem to have the data to back such a statement up: Not only is the difference in those getting hitched in the first place, but it seems that the poorer you are, the more likely you are to get divorced. If you're highly educated, the likelihood of you getting divorced within your first 10 years of marriage is just 11 percent (down 4 percent from 1970). The "moderately educated," on the other hand, face a 37 percent (+1) chance of divorce or separation. The least educated, those without a high school diploma, in other words, have a 36 percent (-10) chance.

For the writers of this report, this is very bad news. They write, "For if marriage is increasingly unachievable for our moderately educated citizens—a group that represents 58 percent of the adult population, (age 25 to 60)—then it is likely that we will witness the emergence of a new society. For a substantial share of the United States, economic mobility will be out of reach, their children's life chances will diminish, and large numbers of young men will live apart from the civilizing power of married life."

That's quite the statement on this trend. Though it seems that marriage is becoming less popular among those who are less educated and the less educated are more likely to divorce within 10 years, I'm having a harder time finding it quite the crisis that the report makes it out to be. Though it's true that there's high correlation between marriage and "successful" children, it's tough to tell if marriage is the thing that's causing that success. The one useful thing Elizabeth Gilbert laid out in Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage, what many called a self-indulgent book, was a chapter on the history of marriage and many of its purported benefits. After analyzing the data, she notes that it stability, not marriage itself, that seems best for children.

That's not to knock marriage itself or those who want to get married. Even the authors of the report note that "being married" is an important value. Roughly three-quarters of every class of education believe marriage is important; 75 percent of the least educated, 76 percent of the moderately educated and 79 percent of the highly educated.

But if we're experiencing a trend where marriage is less important for some subsets of the population, it's hard for me to contemplate how that is a state of crisis. After are, there are lots of things that make the moderately educated unhappy. The crappy economy, for instance. And who's to say that this declining marriage rate among the moderately educated isn't just folks putting marriage off until they have better jobs? (Or jobs at all?) People are known to delay divorce in tough economic times, and it seems these days, they're delaying marriage as well (if not parenthood).

But it's hard to deny that the way we've set up marriage means that by default we've made marriage into a status symbol: a huge party that costs in the tens of thousands of dollars, joint tax filings, diamond engagement ring worth two month's salary, etc. It's no wonder the highly educated are finding marriage more attractive while the lower educated might find it less so. The report notes that there is a growing gap in America today, not just between the rich and the poor, but also a gap between the rich and the middle class. The gap in marriage interest seems easily explainable when you look at social and economic factors.

Instead, we're faced with panic over how marriage is in the decline (sometimes even blaming feminism). Even if marriage is in decline, I'm not convinced that that's the ultimate undoing of America. Surely other things, like rising poverty, poor public education, and serious social injustices hurt Americans far worse.

In the end, it's important not to view larger trends as something that can be blamed on the choices of individuals. And if some people are finding that marriage isn't for them—whether highly educated or not—it's important to respect that choice.

Marriage Among Under-30s Drops, Pew Study Finds

Pew released a study today on marriage, showing that the "gap" that had previously existed between college graduates and non-college graduates getting married by age 30 had practically disappeared. When Pew last did such a study, in 1990, they showed that 75 percent of college graduates were married by age 30 while 69 percent of non-college graduates were married by age 30. Now, it seems both of those numbers have dropped, but are almost the same, with 60 percent of college graduates marrying by 30 versus 62 percent of their non-college peers.

Now, it's worth noting that the 1990 "gap" that Pew is reporting isn't all that big to begin with. A 6 percent difference is statistically significant, sure, but it isn't a wide gap. It's also worth noting that marriage by age 30 is dropping overall since 1990. Pew has several reasons for this: "declining economic fortunes of young men without a college degree and their increasing tendency to cohabit with a partner rather than marry."

This seems reasonable. Marriage -- or rather -- weddings are getting more and more expensive. With an economic recession that has resulted in particularly high unemployment among the under-30 crowd, it's no surprise that couples who are making a serious commitment might put off blowing a lot of cash on a party for their partnership. This was reflected in Amanda Marcotte's analysis of the New York Times' eye-rolling piece on the Millennials and why it takes them so long to "grow up" (i.e. make enough money to live on one's own and get married). Although some studies suggest that co-habitation before marriage is correlated with a higher divorce rate, that fact seems to have done little to deter people from taking the step. It's also important to note other studies have found a historical increase in co-habitation over time (PDF).

Still, I think at a fundamental level, this statistic about marriage is about larger social trends that have separated marriage and sex. Or at least, marriage and one's first sex partner. Much as conservatives huff and puff about how sex before marriage is the devil, even funding ineffective abstinence-until-marriage programs in middle and high schools throughout the country. But the more mainstream point of view is that linking that first sexual experience to marriage is not only uncommon, it's probably a bad idea. Marriage and relationship councilors often preach about sexual compatibility and how essential it is to a good marriage. Not knowing whether a partnership is sexually compatible before locking it into a legally binding agreement, it seems, is often perceived as a mistake.

I can anecdotally support Pew's theory. In my group of late-20s and early-30s friends, most are in serious relationships, but save the few that have recently gotten engaged, no one seems in a rush to the alter. Instead, nearly all are co-habitating. (Note that this is very different among my high school graduating class in the upper Midwest, which I suspect has a high pre-30 marriage rate. Some of these differences might be between urban and rural populations.) Still, this try-it-out trend among 20-somethings (and even 30-somethings and 40-somethings) is probably a good thing. Making commitments is great. But making commitments you're sure about because you've tried it out first is even better.

Wrong Again: Monica Hesse Edition

Apparently Monica Hesse's horrible puff piece on Brian Brown, the director of the National Organization for Marriage, wasn't enough to stop her from publishing more worthless drivel in the pages of the Washington Post. She didn't want to step too far from the topic she knows she can screw up write about: marriage.

See, Hesse is like other unimaginitive journalists. She cannot possibly comprehend that what's going on in her own personal life isn't interesting to the rest of the world. That's why, apparently she decided to write a very annoying article on the fact that she's getting married. Um, is this just some gaint scheme to link to her wedding registry?

Much like the last time the Washington Post tried to address the "When is a good time for people to get married" question, this time is an utter failure. Hesse is baffled that some people think 26 is too old to get married and some people think it is too young an age to get married. She thinks it's determined by how old her friends were when they got married (if they have that option at all; she seems to have fallen for Brian Brown's argument against gay marriage, so I guess she doesn't care if her gay and lesbian friends don't have the option).

She seems to have stumbled on the already prevelant data that the average marriage age tends to be lower in rural areas than it is in metropolitan ones. There's also marital status data by age, socioeconomic class, and size of families over time.

But Hesse couldn't be bothered with data or statistics to inform her piece. Instead, her conclusion is that you should not get married unless you know where "home" is. Well. Gee. Thanks for that.

Honestly, I think we should stop worrying about when people get married. Or if they get married. Rather than trying to figure out what the "best age" for heterosexual couples to get married is, perhaps she could have thought about a real issue for a change.

But I guess that's too much to expect.

Cross posted.

Flickr image by Kables

A Private Affair?

People sure have strong feelings about John and Elizabeth Edwards' marriage, and it's all getting stirred up again with the release of Elizabeth's new memoir, Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life's Adversities, due out May 12. (Does anyone know why the cover looks like a romance novel? That seems in poor taste.)

My general feelings about this are that firstly, it seems clear that John Edwards should not be president of the United States, and probably shouldn't have run in the first place. Secondly, now that he's out of the public sphere, this is all really not anybody's business but their own. I know it's a little different when they're high-profile people like the Edwards. I also know that a lot of people who supported John in the primaries feel betrayed. Those all really understandable reactions, but it still doesn't justify things like some of the comments here.

Cheating is really bad. It can destroy relationships and devastate people. But passing judgment on how Elizabeth Edwards has dealt with her husband's extramarital affair reminds me of the town gossips. Such a thing can only be understood when you're inside the situation. Instead, I'd prefer we focus on the fact that she has mad cool things to say about health care reform.

An Update on That Whole Early Marriage Thing

Mark Regnerus' column on how people should get married earlier caused quite a stir. It looks like today the Washington Post got someone to respond -- someone who, you know, has actual knowledge about the issue of marriage of society today (sadly, it wasn't my favorite marriage historian, Stephanie Coontz). The column by Andrew Cherlin today is a bit shorter but deals with the issues of modern marriage well:

Cut to the 21st century. Children are costly to educate and contribute little to the family economy. I don't know about your children, but I haven't received many checks from mine recently. People still want to have children, but one or two will do. Infant deaths are blessedly rare. So a woman who marries at 26, the average age in 2008, has plenty of time for the two pregnancies that are typically required to produce the size of family that most couples want.

Plain and simple. People get married later in life because they don't need to get married early. Cherlin also actually notes people with a high school education alone, a group that Regnerus seems to have forgotten actually existed.

I'm glad they actually got someone with interesting ideas to respond to the piece, but it's regrettable they didn't just go with someone with interesting things to say in the first place.

Feminst Weddings

There seems to be a lot of talk about weddings and marriage lately. Over the weekend Amanda Marcotte, Jessica Valenti, and Kate Harding all had thoughts about weddings. They all had some interesting things to say, but what I found most interesting was how personal their thoughts were on this subject. None of them said it exactly, but the implication is that precisely because these women spend a great deal of their time thinking about gender inequalities, they're expected to deal with the patriarchy perfectly in their everyday lives. It turns out the at the personal, when it comes to marriage, really is political.

What I find so frustrating about this whole thing is that these women are somehow held to a different standard than other women. Professional feminists, if such a thing exists, are somehow expected to be more "feminist" in their personal relationships than your typical woman. This seems like an absurd standard, especially when we spend a great deal of our days talking about how difficult it is to make feminism translate into everyday life.

I get the battles of Amanda, Jessica, and Kate. Although I'm not really near the age where I'm thinking about getting married, I've seen enough family members and relatives to realize it's really hard. And hortense noted on Jezebel this weekend, "the thing that annoys me even more than traditional wedding culture is the 'offbeat bride' phenomenon, which celebrates couples who choose to avoid your standard wedding fare for something a bit more unique and personal. But does it really? I mean, really?"

On some level, she's right. There are always going to be inequalities in the heterosexual relationships we're in (and probably in the same-sex relationships as well). It's the frustrating part of human life. Sometimes you're giving more than your taking, and sometimes the partnership can be wonderful. These are individual battles. It's up to each of these feminists to deal with their partnerships the way that she feels appropriate; each of these women is dealing with her relationship in a way that feels feminist for her. There isn't one big message for anyone.

I know that that sounds kind off message and the message can get twisted around to say that Bristol Palin's engagement might be feminist for her. But there is not feminist playbook for weddings and marriages just yet. It's something that women and men are experimenting with in their individual lives. By giving women permission to try things -- and to fail -- we're really doing a favor for all of us.

Hitched By 22?

Mark Regnerus notes two things, that the average age of marriage is increasing and that the age gap between couples getting married is decreasing. These things are, apparently, something we should be very worried about. Regnerus seems to think that people are pressured to delay marriage and that they are hamstrung from tying the knot for fear of the label 'Mrs. degree seeker.' Perhaps most interestingly, while he says things like,

But according to social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs, women's "market value" declines steadily as they age, while men's tends to rise in step with their growing resources (that is, money and maturation). Countless studies -- and endless anecdotes -- reinforce their conclusion. Meanwhile, women's fertility is more or less fixed, yet they largely suppress it during their 20s -- their most fertile years -- only to have to beg, pray, borrow and pay to reclaim it in their 30s and 40s.

In other words, women are a commodity to be bought and sold, based solely on their fertility. I love consulting the Washington Post's wingnut columnists for my sense of self worth. Don't you? He continues to maintain that:

This is not just an economic problem. It's also a biological and emotional one. I realize that it's not cool to say that, but my job is to map trends, not to affirm them.

Sure, sure. He seems to think that the only value women bring to a marriage is their fertility, despite the fact that women make up a full half of the workforce and millions of families depend on women's wages as primary means of supporting the family. To say that Regnerus has a distorted sense of gender roles is an understatement.

He also seems to think that while women should hurry up and get hitched, men don't have to stress out about this:

Marriage will be there for men when they're ready.

Although he does note the caviat of recent research that shows men who wait to have children after their 40 put their children at risk for developmental disorders.

Regnerus' solution is a simple one: everyone should get married by 22. Seriously. After all, it worked for him:

My wife and I married at 22 with nothing to our name but a pair of degrees and some dreams. We enjoy recounting those days of austerity, and we're still fiscal conservatives because of it, better poised to weather the current crisis than many, because marriage is an unbelievably efficient arrangement and the best wealth-creating institution there is. Married people earn more, save more and build more wealth compared with people who are single or cohabiting.

Look, it's really fun to mock Regnerus' arguments that everyone would just be happier if everyone paired off by 22, leaving neat little family arrangements. But there's a real problem with his argument -- it is more or less the argument echoed through the years about women's worth equal to her fertility and that men control the game when it comes to marriage. His argument is basically the same one that's been used to make 30-year-old single women feel bad for decades.

Regnerus also doesn't even address gay couples. His notion that everyone should be married by age 22 seems to leave out many same-sex couples that don't live in Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts, or Iowa. By leaving out so many couples, his argument seems even weaker.

Even though getting married early works well for some people, it's important to remember that it's not the thing that works out well for everyone. While Regnerus maintains that, "age-divorce link is most prominent among teenagers (those who marry before age 20). Marriages that begin at age 20, 21 or 22 are not nearly so likely to end in divorce as many presume." But that's a pretty broad statement. Some people may well be mature enough to marry by 22, but I was nowhere near ready to make such a financial, emotional, and legal commitment to someone at that age. I was still trying to figure my own life out.

If all Regnerus were doing were presenting trends, he wouldn't have brought such judgment to it. After all, I actually think it's a good thing that men and women are waiting longer to marry. It's also probably a good thing that the age gap is shrinking (although I know plenty of happy couples where the age gap is greater than two years); you tend to be able to meet challenges together as you age together. There's also something to be said for being young and single, experiencing life on your own and learning to be self-sufficient. In the end, that may make you a better partner in the long run.

Putting Same-Sex Marriage in Historical Perspective

As voters in California consider a ballot initiative that would define marriage as between one man and one woman, I would advise everyone to read this article from Stephanie Coontz. Coontz, who wrote the most definitive history of marriage as an institution to date, which accurately points out that the whole notion of a monogamous marriage between a man and a woman is a historically new phenomenon.

Historically, marriage has tended toward polygamy, and the emphasis hinged more on reproduction so that families could ensure the retention of property more than anything else. A man could take a new wife or concubine if his first wife proved to be infertile. Additionally, she notes that the church’s involvement in marriage is also fairly new, “For the first 16 centuries of its existence, Christianity held that the validity of a match was determined by a couple’s stated intention to be married, rather than by any formal ceremony or licensing process,” Coontz writes.

Recently, the government and religious institutions have increased involvement in what has traditionally been considered a family or private affair, Coontz notes. After freeing individuals from needing parental approval to get married, the courts also struck down regulations that banned marriage with someone of another race, a “drunk,” or someone with a venereal disease. All of those have been systematically struck down by the courts.

Coontz astutely points out:

These two innovations—channeling more benefits through marriage than in the past while also repealing the denial of individual choice to most groups—have given gays and lesbians a strong socioeconomic incentive to demand access to marriage and a strong moral argument to press their case on the basis of equal justice. And contrary to “Conventional Wisdom,” their case is also supported by the Western legal and religious tradition, which has never made ability to procreate a precondition for marriage and which traditionally accorded legal rights to many unions that religious leaders considered illicit or immoral.

In other words, Coontz finds it something of a historical paradox that even as laws have tended to increase the autonomy of the individual when it comes to marriage, there are simultaneous attempts to rob certain groups of that automony. Overall, people tend to be happier with a more or less monogamous relationships and increased autonomy. But it’s important not to be selective about that autonomy and understandable that groups would resent that exclusion.

Cross posted at Pushback.

Protecting Yourself from Economic Hardship

Imagine you are a man. If you're already a man, then this should be easy for you. Someone tells you that it's really better for you to stop working when you get married. Even though this would cut your household income nearly in half, you do. But your wife leaves you after years of marriage, and you've now been out of the workforce for 20 years. You can only get jobs that pay a fraction of what you made years ago because your skills are out of date (granted, men's breaks from the workforce tend to whether better than women's do, but for the sake of this scenario, stick with me). But wait, you say, why would I ever stop working and cut my income?

That's the way Leslie Bennetts wanted women to think about the the male breadwinner model in her book last year, The Feminine Mistake. She posted something today on the HuffPo responding to someone she debated on the Today show that outlined again many of the core pieces of her argument. She interviewed many women who divorced after taking a break from working to raise the kids and found themselves wondering why their incomes are suddenly far less than they used to be. Bennetts' work was certainly controversial -- she even talks about going on endless book tours and speaking engagements. To cut against her argument, many states try to equalize incomes in a divorce through alimony, but if men make enough to afford a good lawyer they my get out of paying as much. But she's right that divorce (or a spouse's death or loss of income) is devastating and emotionally trying. Finding out they are worth a lot less in the workforce is even more devastating for many women.

Logically, of course, it doesn't make any sense, especially if the people we're talking about can afford day care. If you think of every person as a worker, removing some workers for long periods of time that results in vastly diminished earnings isn't a desirable scenario.
Of course, some people find it really valuable to have one parent take time off to spend with their kids in the formative years of childhood. I don't have a problem with this. What I do have a problem with is that it is always the woman that's expected to take time off by default. But the problem with these debates it that all too often they tend to focus on upper class families that can afford not to work.

To really support working families, we need to think about how to keep wage-earners valuable and provide quality child care for all families. Many families don't have the option of keeping one family member home -- they can't afford to. Not to mention single mothers that also can't afford to stay at home with the kids because they're too busy providing the families only income. Leslie Bennetts tries to make the case to women that it's not in their best interest to quit work and fulfill dated ideologies about stay-at-home moms. Especially in the midst of a financial crisis, the male breadwinner scenario may be seen in fewer and fewer families. We should work from the assumption that women will keep working -- either because they want to or because they have to -- and look for ways like quality and affordable child care to support them.

Time Warp Wives: The Way They Never Were

This article in the Daily Mail about a TV show called "Time Warp Wives" that tries to demonstrate that the best marriages were the ones in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. They all live in period homes with the male breadwinner model. What's interesting about something like this after reading Stephanie Coontz's Marriage, a History is that I remember that the male breadwinner model, which really boomed in the late 1940s and '50s, was simply never replicated in any other period of history. And in all practicality, the women that had male breadwinner families were at least middle class. The model emerged from a very unique series of circumstances: post-war economy, the rise of the love marriage, the relatively low cost of basic goods, and the real stagnation of women's wages. Poor women simply couldn't afford the luxury of staying at home.

But probably the weirdest thing about this show is the degree of fetishization of the male breadwinner model. Overall, people were much less happy with such marriages. It's not as if women as a whole just decided they no longer desired careers or a life outside the home -- women still desired these things but didn't have an option for obtaining them. It's true that some women were genuinely happy with these circumstances, but women aren't a monolithic group. Plenty felt deeply depressed thanks to a severe lack of outside goals and social interaction.

The show is nothing more than costuming and acting. It's no different than if someone decided they wanted to live in the Renaissance times on television or really any other given period in history. It doesn't really demonstrate anything about marriage today except that some people really get a kick out of dressing up in period costumes and pretending to live in a different era. If you ask me, it's all a little Truman Show.

The Marriage Game

Jesse wrote a lengthy post attempting to debunk Courtney Martin's piece in TAP today and Dylan Matthews wrote a long post on TAPPED debunking Jesse's post. It seems that when you talk about the legitimacy of marriage, you strike a nerve.

Marriage is entrenched in a lot of stereotypes and bad connotations across the board. Jesse's argument that we're past the bad things in marriage doesn't really do justice to the fact that for a really long time, marriage has been reinforcing patriarchal culture. This of course is less of a problem for men in heterosexual partnerships than it is for women. Couples that co-habitate tend to see a sharp spike in the women's share of domestic duty and a lag in men's share. This affects couples that live together and aren't married as well, but there are a lot of things about making it legal that reinforce the old stereotypes about the happy homemaker housewife in very subtle ways. The bottom line is that the interpersonal sexual politics of relationships are really tricky to navigate.

Coincidentally, I'm actually reading Stephanie Coontz's Marriage, A History, which debunks a lot of the notions about what marriage "should" be. Basically she examines every assumption we have about marriage today and finds one (or many) societies that just never adhered to that notion of marriage. Marriages have a lot of polygamy, racism, sexism, diplomatic, and social structure histories that show the definition of marriage has changed vastly over time. Furthermore, marriage tends to reflect the values we hold in society.

Every time I get into an argument at a bar about how women shouldn't have to take their husband's names when they get married, I realize that the tradition of marriage is a highly personal thing, even if the implications of the definition of marriage have a much broader impact. For whatever reason, marriage in America today tends to be, on the whole, highly sexist and homophobic still, even if a lot of the taboos about inter-racial marriages have been shrugged off. The reason for this is because American society is still largely sexist and homophobic. Just because it's 2008 doesn't mean those things have stopped existing in society.

In short, Martin is right to be wary of an institution with such historically awful implications. But Jesse is also right that we can remake marriage into something that's more egalitarian if we want to. The problem is that we have to make society as a whole more egalitarian. Both of those things are pretty hard to accomplish.

Gag Me, Not "Marry Him!"

I wasn't going to write anything on this piece from The Atlantic because, quite frankly, it didn't seem worth my time. Lori Gottlieb's conclusions about just settling for the man that will marry you were ludicrous. I will however, say that I do agree with a small portion of her argument.

When we’re holding out for deep romantic love, we have the fantasy that this level of passionate intensity will make us happier.

I tend to agree that thanks to a lot of trivial romantic comedies and other social expectations, some people get caught up in finding "perfect love" like they see in movies and on television. I'll give her that point. Some people have expectations for relationships that are just too damn high. But I won't pretend that's just limited to women, either.

But the thought that women should just "settle" seems ridiculous. Why should you feed into stereotypes like this?

The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after.

What's the most silly is that Gottlieb seems to conclude that a relationship is a happy utopia. Even though her married girlfriends seem unhappy they still haven't left their husbands. This is because relationships are actually -- get ready -- a lot of work. Marriage does not necessarily equal happiness. I know it may seem profound to the likes of Gottlieb, but there isn't such a thing as happily ever after, even if you buy into it. She takes evidence from herself, a 40-year-old single mom, and um, Ross and Rachel on Friends to conclude that it's (drumroll, please) the fault of feminists.

To the outside world, of course, we still call ourselves feminists and insist—vehemently, even—that we’re independent and self-sufficient and don’t believe in any of that damsel-in-distress stuff, but in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want a traditional family. And despite growing up in an era when the centuries-old mantra to get married young was finally (and, it seemed, refreshingly) replaced by encouragement to postpone that milestone in pursuit of high ideals (education! career! but also true love!), every woman I know—no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure—feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried.

Gasp! Not unmarried! The horror! Now, granted, I'm only 24 and finding myself unmarried, but I don't seem to be unhappy, and I think a lot of women who are 30, 40, and 50 and totally happy as single human beings. What's more, she seems to be interested more in the institution of marriage than in the idea of a committed relationship. One does not necessarily equal the other. She also leaves out the main reason they legalized divorce in the first place: some women face marriages that are either physically or emotionally abusive. For those women, being single truly is better than a marriage that threatens her emotional or physical health.

Furthermore Gottlieb's proof that an unhappy married woman is more satisfied than a single woman is that when she offers to take over her friends' husbands they don't take her up on her offer.

But then my married friends say things like, “Oh, you’re so lucky, you don’t have to negotiate with your husband about the cost of piano lessons” or “You’re so lucky, you don’t have anyone putting the kid in front of the TV and you can raise your son the way you want.” I’ll even hear things like, “You’re so lucky, you don’t have to have sex with someone you don’t want to.”

The lists go on, and each time, I say, “OK, if you’re so unhappy, and if I’m so lucky, leave your husband! In fact, send him over here!”

Not one person has taken me up on this offer.

Shocking that your friends wouldn't want to um, go through a heart-wrenching divorce with someone that they're in a committed relationship because it would save them negotiating over piano lessons. It seems that Gottlieb should just keep such conclusions to herself and not try to push her own regrets on others.

Cross-posted.

Women Are Sexist, Too

The Boston Globe reports that about a third of women surveyed judge candidates on their marriages. This is always baffling to me. Why the marriage judgment? How does that have anything to do with their, um, job? As always, Stephanie Coontz swoops in with insight:

Stephanie Coontz, a marriage historian and Ladies' Home Journal contributing editor, said ratings for the twice-divorced Giuliani appeared to be a sign "people are willing to give male politicians, at least, a second, or even third, chance at happiness."

Clinton's relatively low score is a sign that women are more harshly judged than men for not having a happy marriage, Coontz said.

She said Hillary Clinton is blamed for "not packing up and leaving her husband" after he had an extramarital affair with a White House intern.