Two must reads were in yesterday’s Outlook section of The Washington Post. Together, they provide keen insight into the institution of marriage and provide some guidance to liberals to counter the “traditional marriage” screed from the far right.
Marriage is stronger than ever, according to Stephanie Coontz.
Indeed, most people have a higher regard for the marital relationship today than when marriage was practically mandatory. Marriage as a private relationship between two individuals is taken more seriously and comes with higher emotional expectations than ever before in history.
Traditional marriage, she argues, meant women were more dependent on men for their financial security. Many woman even 50 years ago would marry for security as much for the ideals of love, emotional commitment and fidelity. And that I think is what’s behind many conservatives’ push for traditional marriage. They want a more paternalistic society where men make the decisions and have the real power. But women today can have security without men and raise children without men. So why get married unless you can have the ideals of marriage?
This is true even for poor unwed mothers, according to the other article, authored by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, who studied 162 such moms.
Instead of a rejection of marriage, we found a deep respect for it among many young mothers, who told us that getting married was their ultimate life ambition. While they acknowledge that putting children before marriage is not the ideal way of doing things, they’re not about to risk going through life childless while waiting for Mr. Right. They build their dreams around children: As one 20-year-old mother explained as she watched her toddler, “I wanted to have a baby. It wasn’t, like, because everybody else had a baby. . . . I wanted somebody to take care of.”
Their hopes for marriage are tempered by caution: These women calculate the risks and rewards of a permanent tie to the men they believe are available to them. They also balance their marital aspirations against their strong moral views about the conditions under which it is right to marry.
Marriage, we heard time and again, ought to be reserved for those couples who’ve acquired the symbols of working-class respectability — a mortgage on a modest rowhouse, a reliable car, a savings account and enough money left over to host a “decent” wedding. But unlike their mothers and grandmothers, young women coming of age in poor neighborhoods today are not willing to achieve these goals by relying on a man. A 21-year-old mother argued, “I’m gonna make sure I have my own stability. I mean, because they’re my kids. I don’t care who the fathers are, they’re mine . For the rest of my life they’re gonna be my kids and I’m gonna have to take care of them, with or without their fathers.”
That I think is what scares some among traditional marriage advocates: powerful women; women who say “they’re my kids.” The transformation of marriage to one that is based more on the ideals of what we think of as the perfect marriage is precisely what conservatives may, perhaps unwittingly, be working against.
[R]ecent changes in marriage are part of a worldwide upheaval in family life that has transformed the way people conduct their personal lives as thoroughly and permanently as the Industrial Revolution transformed their working lives 200 years ago. Marriage is no longer the main way in which societies regulate sexuality and parenting or organize the division of labor between men and women. And although some people hope to turn back the tide by promoting traditional values, making divorce harder or outlawing gay marriage, they are having to confront a startling irony: The very factors that have made marriage more satisfying in modern times have also made it more optional.
The origins of modern marital instability lie largely in the triumph of what many people believe to be marriage’s traditional role — providing love, intimacy, fidelity and mutual fulfillment. The truth is that for centuries, marriage was stable precisely because it was not expected to provide such benefits. As soon as love became the driving force behind marriage, people began to demand the right to remain single if they had not found love or to divorce if they fell out of love.
Perhaps what liberals can now argue is that they are the ones with the agenda that could help the institution of marriage. By providing help to poor families and options for child raising that are as strong as a mom and pop stereotypical family, they are helping people find the patience to pursue the traditional values of marriage that lead to lifetime bliss. It won’t be the first attack on marriage by conservatives that liberals will need to defend.
[D]emands [that marriage involve love] were raised as early as the 1790s, which prompted conservatives to predict that love would be the death of marriage. For the next 150 years, the inherently destabilizing effects of the love revolution were held in check by women’s economic dependence on men, the unreliability of birth control and the harsh legal treatment of children born out of wedlock, as well as the social ostracism of their mothers. As late as the 1960s, two-thirds of college women in the United States said they would marry a man they didn’t love if he met all their other, often economic, criteria. Men also felt compelled to marry if they hoped for promotions at work or for political credibility.
Nearly a majority of kids spend their lives in families that don’t involve mom and pop. Almost as many couples who aren’t married have kids living with them as do married couples. These changes are not — and perhaps should not — be undone, unless you can prove that kids are better off in traditional marriages. And I don’t know where that proof is.
Marriage is no longer the institution where people are initiated into sex. It no longer determines the work men and women do on the job or at home, regulates who has children and who doesn’t, or coordinates care-giving for the ill or the aged. For better or worse, marriage has been displaced from its pivotal position in personal and social life, and will not regain it short of a Taliban-like counterrevolution.
Hmmm. That wouldn’t be the first time right wing regressives were compared to their Afghan brethren.