Marriage, a History (77 page)

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.

50
Kathleen Gerson, “Moral Dilemmas, Moral Strategies, and the Transformation of Gender,”
Gender & Society
16 (2002) and
Children of the Gender Revolution: Growing Up in an Age of Gender and Family Change
(forthcoming). For more on the spread of egalitarian views, despite the fact that women may be changing faster than men, see Arland Thornton and Linda Young-DeMarco, “Four Decades of Trends in Attitudes Toward Family Issues in the United States,”
Journal of Marriage and Family
63 (2001); Karin Brester and Irene Padavic, “Changes in Gender Ideology, 1977-1996,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
62 (2000); Karen Mason, Noriko Tsuya, and Minja Choe, eds.,
The Changing Family in Comparative Perspective: Asia and the United States
(Honolulu: East-West Center, 1998); Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers,
She Works/He Works: How Two-Income Families Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off
(New York: HarperCollins, 1996).

51
Peggy Orenstein,
Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids, Love, and Life in a Half-Changed World
(New York: Doubleday, 2000).

52
Arland Thornton and Linda Young-DeMarco, “Four Decades of Trends in Attitudes Toward Family Issues in the United States: The 1960s through the 1990s,”
Journal of Marriage and Family
63 (2001); Gayle Kaufman, “Do Gender Role Attitudes Matter?”
Journal of Family Issues
21 (2000); George Gallup, Jr.,
The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1996
(Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1997); Bruce Chadwick and Tim Heaton,
Statistical Handbook on the American Family
(Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1999); DBB Needham Worldwide Survey; The 1995 Virginia Slims Opinion Poll, Tobacco Documents Online, and John Schulenberg et al., “Historical Trends in Attitudes and Preferences Regarding Family, Work and the Future Among American Adolescents,”
Monitoring the Future,
Occasional Paper 37, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 1994. My thanks to Dorion Solot, coauthor,
Unmarried to Each Other,
for directing my attention to many of these sources and compiling other figures indicating that women are becoming more reluctant to enter marriage.

53
Daniel Scott Smith, “A Higher Quality of Life for Whom?,”
Journal of Family History
19 (1994); Michael Young and Peter Willmott,
The Symmetrical Family
(Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin, 1973).

54
Thornton and Young-DeMarco, “Four Decades of Trends.”

55
For a discussion of how men tend to see their relations with children as mediated through their wives, see Nicholas Townsend,
“The Package Deal”: Marriage, Work and Fatherhood in Men’s Lives
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).

1
For polls showing married people’s happiness, see Ronald Inglehart,
Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), Appendix, Table A-17, p. 451. For the most thorough collection of studies showing the benefits of marriage, although it ignores contradictory and conflicting evidence, see Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher,
The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 2000).

2
International evidence confirms that we might lose many of the benefits of modern marriage if we try to force it back to its dominating role in social and personal life. Polls taken in the 1980s revealed several exceptions to the general finding that married people were happier than non-married ones. In Ireland, Greece, Spain, Japan, and France, couples living together outside marriage were
more
likely to report themselves very happy than were married couples. Interestingly, in four of these five countries divorce was hard to obtain or highly stigmatized and the pressure to marry was quite high, meaning that there were a lot of people stuck in unhappy marriages. In South Korea, where there are few alternatives to marriage, single women tell pollsters that they would be worse off in several respects if they got married, while married women in South Korea say they would be better off in
most
respects if they were single. A recent poll in Japan, where divorce is still highly stigmatized, found that six times as many Japanese schoolgirls as Americans
disagreed
that everyone ought to get married. Inglehart,
Culture Shift,
Appendix, Table A-17, p. 451; “Introduction, ” in Karen Mason, Noriko Tsuya, and Minja Choe, eds.,
The Changing Family in Comparative Perspective: Asia and the United States
(Honolulu: East-West Center, 1998); “A New Class of Drifters,”
JapanEcho
10 (2001).