Laura Kipnis on marriage

The occasionally droll Laura Kipinis — author of Against Love: A Polemic — puts on her serious hat for today’s New York Times op-ed on the state of marriage. The highlights:

More and more people — heterosexuals, that is — don’t want to get or stay married these days, no matter their income level. Yes, cohabitation is particularly prevalent in less economically stable groups, including the women counted as unmarried mothers. But only 56 percent of all adults are married, compared with 75 percent 30 years ago. The proportion of traditional married-couple-with-children American households has dropped to 26 percent of all households, from 45 percent in the early 1970’s. The demographics say Americans are voting no on marriage. The fact is that marriage is a social institution in transition, whether conservatives like it or not. This is not simply a matter of individual malfeasance; in fact, it may not be individual at all. The rise of the new economy has gutted all sorts of traditional values and ties, including traditions like the family wage, job security and economic safety nets. Women have been propelled into the work force in huge numbers, and not necessarily for personal fulfillment: with middle-class wages stagnant from the early 70’s to the mid-90’s, it now takes (at least) two incomes to support the traditional household. But as the political theorist Francis Fukuyama has pointed out, the changing nature of capitalism since the 1960’s also required a different kind of work force; it was postindustrialism, perhaps even more than feminism, that transformed gender roles, contributing to what he calls the “great disruption” of the present. The increasing economic self-sufficiency of women has certainly been a factor in declining marriage rates: there’s nothing like a checking account to decrease someone’s willingness to be pushed into marriage or stay in a bad one. And interestingly, welfare reform has played the same role for lower-income groups: studies have shown a steep decline in marriages among women in welfare-to-work programs, for many of the same reasons. So how about a little more honesty and fewer platitudes on the marriage question.

Honesty would be good. Kipnis knows a lot more about this subject than I do, but some of her facts seem shaded. For example, Fukuyama did posit in The Great Disruption that the post-industrial society had a deleterious effect on marital status. However, he also argued that the effect was temporary and reversible: “Social order, once disrupted, tends to get remade again.” Fukuyama argued that the institution of marriage was rebounding — not that there was an inexorable erosion of the institution. This jibes with data suggesting a modest turnaround in marriage rates starting in the mid-1990’s. John Leo noted back in 2001 that:

The liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analyzed 1995 to 2000 data and concluded that the move away from marriage “really seems to have come to a halt,” in the words of Wendell Primus, a poverty expert at the center. The proportion of children under 18 living with a single mother declined by 8 percent in five years, according to a report written by Primus and Allen Dupree. Working with an early copy of the report, Jonathan Peterson of the Los Angeles Times wrote that “some of the newest evidence suggests that the tidal flow away from two-parent families peaked years ago and may even be starting to change course.”

Mickey Kaus also commented on this phenomenon at the time. Finally, as to whether marriage is worth defending, go read this excellent summary of University of Chicago sociologist Linda Waite’s research on the benefits of marriage. It explodes more than a few myths on the subject:

While pundits, politicians, and moralists weigh the pros and cons of gay marriage, Linda Waite is still focused on traditional American couples, countering messages from the “antimarriage” culture and championing marriage’s benefits: specifically, that marriage itself is good for your physical and mental health, good for your financial stability, good for your sex life, good for your kids—good for almost every aspect of what many Americans consider a happy life…. [M]arried men, rather than trading their libidos for lawn mowers, have more sex than single men. And married women are less depressed than single women, contrary to feminist sociologist Jessie Bernard’s explosive 1972 book arguing that wives were more phobic, depressed, dependent, and passive—findings that have shaped cultural conceptions ever since. More recently Waite has shown that divorce does not make unhappily married people any happier. In a study released in July 2002 she and five colleagues analyzed data from the University of Wisconsin’s National Survey of Family and Households. When the adults who said they were unhappily married in the late 1980s were interviewed again five years later, those who had divorced were on average still unhappy or even less happy, while those who stayed in their marriages on average had moved past the bad times and were at a happier stage. After controlling for race, age, gender, and income, Waite’s group found that divorce usually did not reduce symptoms of depression, raise self esteem, or increase a sense of mastery over one’s life.

UPDATE: More venting by Laura at at Apt. 11D.