Monday, February 20, 2012

Marriage in Trouble. Pay Attention To The Framing.



A few days ago the New York Times published an article on the demise of marriage. It was to be expected, given Charles Murray's recent book, never mind that Murray is the go-to-guy on the inherent stupidity of the minorities, women and now all poor people.

The NYT article uses Murray's framing albeit in a nicer dress and with a better makeup. This is how it begins:
It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.
Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.
Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.
One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.

Careful reading pays here. The title of the piece is "For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage." What have we altogether eradicated?

Men and fatherhood. Poof! It's gone! And every person interviewed in the piece is a woman. To write about heterosexual marriage without interviewing one single man should come across as weird. That's leaving out half the people all this should concern.

Once men are left out this way we cannot ask what they think of the issue. They have been erased. They have no say in the question of marriage and their behavior has nothing to do with the rate at which people get married, stay married or have children outside marriage.

I understand that the piece is explicitly written about women. But one should not leap from women to marriage and that is what the piece does. It also implies that the reasons for the increase in births outside marriage are only women's reasons and that ultimately the "blame" for the apparent demise of marriage also belongs to women.

Writing about "marriage in trouble" is not something I can do in a short blog post. What do we mean by "marriage?" What are the expected roles of the partners? When someone writes about "marriage" does that person really mean a traditional patriarchal hierarchical marriage with a male breadwinner-boss and a female helpmeet at home? If "marriage" is the best environment for children to grow up in, what kind of "marriage?" An unhappy one? The traditional arrangement? An egalitarian marriage?

If the partners live together for decades and have children together without getting formally married, is this not marriage in the relevant sense? After all, the article states:
Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.
Would formal marriage stop those couples from separating? In other words, in what direction does the causality run in the United States?

Such difficulties crop up when we try to analyze the reasons why the contractual arrangement "marriage" might be in trouble. What is it that makes it less common than in the past? The article hints at the idea that women in the past "had to" get married because of few alternatives to surviving without it. Is this what we should bring back? What is the role of men in "marriage?" Just a source of income? The manager of the whole enterprise? An active participant in child-rearing?

As I said, all this requires many more pages than a blog allows. But certain hints can be dug out from that NYT piece:
Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.
One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.
“Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

...

Money helps explain why well-educated Americans still marry at high rates: they can offer each other more financial support, and hire others to do chores that prompt conflict. But some researchers argue that educated men have also been quicker than their blue-collar peers to give women equal authority. “They are more willing to play the partner role,” said Sara McLanahan, a Princeton sociologist.

Yes, money does help. It protects people against external shocks and greases the wheels of life. I once read that the top two reasons given for divorce are arguments about money and arguments about the division of household chores, both of which make me think about the patriarchal marriage arrangement and so on.

But if money was the only difference between marriage rates and the prevalence of unhappy marriages across social classes, then wouldn't we expect to see single parenthood higher among the more educated people? This is the group which can more easily afford to have a child without a partner, the group which can afford to hire help if needed, the group which can afford high child maintenance payments.

Something else must be going on.

McLanahan's theory might be worth pursuing. My own guess is that it is the traditional patriarchal marriage which is in particular trouble when combined with reduced real incomes for men, after years of outsourcing of jobs and the increased income inequality in this country.

In my more optimistic moments I regard this era as the transition to a new more egalitarian marriage/cohabitation and the troubles we see as the pains of that transition, the myths of patriarchal marriage hanging on even after they have become obsolete.

But people like Charles Murray of course wish to revive the patriarchal marriage by telling us about the horrors which will occur without it. Hence the need to pay attention to those who use his framing.