The Fragility of Marriage
Thursday, May 5, at 1:30 p.m., U.S. Eastern time
Although much has been made in the last couple of decades about the decline of the traditional family, the historian Stephanie Coontz writes, in this week's issue of The Chronicle Review, that nonmarital sex, out-of-wedlock births, divorce, and even same-sex marriage are nothing new.
"But when it comes to the overall place of marriage in society and the relationship between husbands and wives," she says, "nothing in the past is anything like what we have today, even if it may look similar at first glance." When marriage started to be based more on love than on economic or political expediency, it became more optional, more fragile, and -- to the dismay of some and the indifference of others -- less predictably linked to child rearing than in the past.
We "can never reinstate marriage as the primary source of commitment and caregiving in the modern world," writes Ms. Coontz. But was something lost when marriages became increasingly based on love? How can we adjust our personal expectations and social-support systems to account for the new reality? Should employers and political leaders develop policies to support marriage, and what are the implications of such policies for other committed relationships?
» The New Fragility of Marriage, for Better or for Worse (5/6/2005)
Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College and is director of research and public education for the nonprofit Council on Contemporary Families. She is the author, most recently, of Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, published this month by Viking.
Karen Winkler (Moderator):
Hello and welcome to our live chat with Stephanie Coontz. I'm Karen Winkler, a senior editor of The Chronicle Review. In her essay in this week's Review, Professor Coontz writes that many of the very changes in marriage that we have come to prize (for example, our current emphasis on marrying for love and companionship) have made it increasingly fragile. Today, we'll talk about that history -- and its implications. Stephanie, thanks for joining us.
Stephanie Coontz:
I'm very happy to be here, and I thank The Chronicle for giving me the chance to exchange ideas with interested readers. For the last 15 years, we've been debating whether the changes in family forms, gender roles, and marital values are good or bad, and which ones we want to keep. What I try to do in my book is show that the very things we like most about modern marriage stem from the same historical forces that have made marriage more optional and more brittle. Unfortunately, we can't cherry pick through history, deciding which parts of historical change we'll accept and which we'll toss. It is time to recognize that most of the changes in marriage stem from massive, worldwide, and largely irreversible changes in gender roles and family life. There is no way that we can once more make marriage the exclusive way of organizing young people's introduction to sex and their transitions to adulthood, coordinating the division of labor between men and women. or channeling all caregiving to young and old. But we do have choices about how to deal with the challenges these changes pose, and I hope we can turn to a more productive discussion of those choices.
Question from Sue Greer-Pitt, SKCTC:
Divorce has been declining steadily for the past 25 years, according to the National Vital Statistics Reports http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr53/nvsr53_18.pdf.
Given that, why do you think it is that mass media, politicians, and even many social scientists all seem to act as if we're still facing the dramatically increasing rates of divorce of the 1970's??
Stephanie Coontz:
As you point out, the divorce rate has come down by about 26 percent since 1981. But it remains at pretty near world historic highs, and the rates of non-marriage and cohabitation continue to rise. During the 1990s, the number of female-headed families with children rose five times faster than the number of married couples with children. So of course people have some reason to be concerned about what this means for the future of family life and childrearing. I think an equally interesting question is why the mass media and politicians continue to predict total catastrophe from these trends, when in fact the 1990s saw a huge drop in teen violence, pregnancy, and other social indicators of stress. When we put our two questions together, the answer may be that politicians and the mass media somehow think that if they keep telling us how badly we are doing, Americans will come to their senses and start flocking back to marriage. I try to show in this book that even if we brought the divorce rate down further, we'd not be able to restore the former dominance of marriage in organizing personal and social life. That poses real challenges, but fortunately, as 1990s social trends indicate, it's not necessarily a sentence of doom.
Karen Winkler (Moderator):
Stephanie: There's a related question.
Question from Susan Ardis, University of Texas:
It is often stated that 50% of all marriages end in divorce. How can this be true--marriage is a continuum and divorce is a single act. All marriages end in one of two ways--divorce or death. Some people could have more than 2 marriages that end in death. Here's my question--maybe how can we strengthen something without knowing how long the average marriage lasts?
Stephanie Coontz:
The 50 percent estimate relies on studies that show that of all the marriages contracted in such and such a year, a percentage have ended in divorce within a certain time frame. There is some controversy over these projections, but almost half of all marriages contracted in the late 1970s have ended in divorce by now, hence the figures. The divorce rate has fallen slightly since 1981, to the point that many demographers estimate that about 40 percent of marriages will end in divorce. But this is complicated by all sorts of factors, including the fact that the marriages of more highly educated Americans have been getting more stable over the past 15 years, while the marriages of less-educated couples have been getting less stable.
What psychologists and sociologists are trying to do is to figure out ways to help couples resolve their differences and learn how to avoid divorce. I think everyone is in favor of this. Political differences arise over the question of whether you think it's possible to get enough people married and to keep enough of them married so that you can construct social policies that favor married-couple families and can avoid having to deal with alternative kinds of families. My reading of history suggests that this is impossible, so I propose that we don't put all our eggs into one basket. We have to plan for how to help many different kinds of families succeeds.
Question from Steve Cohen, Barry University:
As marriage increasingly involves two incomes, two occupations/professions, two mindsets, how have children been affected?
Stephanie Coontz:
I like the way you phrase the question. Dual-provider marriages are nothing new. Indeed, they were the norm throughout most of history. But usually couples worked at the same job, so they were held together, not just by similar mindsets and experiences but by practical necessity. Even if you were really, truly miserable you might not be able to divide the job up, so you stayed together. ANd of course, through much of history, husbands and fathers had the final say, and the right to enforce it by violence if necessary, so there was't much to negotiate. Today, people marry at an older age and they bring different experiences and mindsets to marriage, along with independent earning power. This means that there is much more to negotiate, and if negotiations break down, the marriage can fail. All this has mixed effect on kids. If parents are not too stressed by their work schedules and have decent child care, kids can really benefit from seeing both their mothers and fathers perform a variety of roles at home and work, and sociologist Kathleen Gerson found that the majority of kids she interviewed said they benefited from growing up in two-earner households. Watching your parents negotiate things, instead of one dictating and the other submitting, helps boys become more empathetic and girls become more self-confident. But of course, when parents do get stressed and handle their conflicts in unhealthy ways, that poses lots of risks. I'm not a psychologist, but in my work with the Council on Contemporary Families I get to see a lot of the recent psychological and sociological studies, and the basic message I've taken away from them is that there are few one-size-fits-all generalizations you can make about marriage dynamics and family forms today. But the good news that so many media ignore is that we knoe a heck of a lot about how to make every marital (and most non-marital) arrangements function better, for adults and kids alike. If we'd spend more time publicizing that research rather than wringing our hands about things we have little power to change anyway, we'd be a lot better off.
Question from Ana, from online university:
Read your article in Chronicle this week, but it didn't address things like infidelity as a result of people staying married in the past, due to agendas that did not involve happiness and personal satisfaction. So, if people were happy enough because other goals were being met via the marriage, how did they satisfy the goal of personal fulfillment, and didn't infidelity factor in and cause marital unhappiness?
Stephanie Coontz:
One of the things that surprises many people about the history of marriage is that adultery was much more common in many historical time periods than it is today. In medieval courtly love, adultery was actually idealized as the highest from of love, on the grounds that because marriage was made for practical reasons, true love could only exist outside marriage. For most of European history,attitudes were more disapproving in theory, but in practice women were just expected to tolerate infidelity. In researching this book I was surprised at how often, when a woman did depart from convention and complain about her husband's behavior, her own relatives tried to shut her up, or even apologized to the male for her unseemly behavior.
Question from Jennifer K. Ruark, The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Just to play devil's advocate: If marriage is no longer the primary source of commitment and caregiving, and never will regain that status, why should policymakers support subsidized parental leaves, flexible work schedules, and other pro-family policies?
Stephanie Coontz:
This brings me to the question of why we should subsidize family leaves if marriage is no longer the primary source of commitment. For me, this is precisely WHY we should subsidize such pro-family policies, especially ones that make it easier to raise kids. The time is long past when we could assume (to the extent that we ever could) that most kids will be taken care of through their parents' marriage, that all workers have wives to take care of the children while they are at work, and that every woman and child can get health care just by marrying an employed man.
Question from Leslie Tuttle, University of Kansas:
Your article mentions that state and church sanctioning of the marriage relationship is a relatively recent historical phenomenon. My question is about the relationship between state and church sanctioning. Would you discuss your interpretation of how these two modes of sanctioning -- each presumably having different interests in regulating marriage -- came to be intertwined and what the consequences of that have been?
Stephanie Coontz:
That's a great question but also a really complicated one. In Europe the tradition was that if a man and woman acted as if they were married, then they were. Parents often conducted the ceremony, perhaps asking the priest's blessing as an after thought. The Church gradually attempted to wrest control from the powerful noble families, setting up its own rules for when people could marry or divorce. At the same time, the Church defended the doctrine of present consent, according to which is a man and women said to each other "I take thee" for my wife or husband, they were married, whether or not they'd ever had sex, whether or not they had anyone's permission. (If they used the future tense, "I will take you," then they were only married if they had also slept together." As nation states got more powerful, they began to contest with the Church over who had the right to say a marrige was valid. Protestants were tougher in supporting parental rights than the Catholics, often invalidating marriages made without parental consent. They also made stronger efforts to prevent pauper from marrying. It would take longer than I have here to trace how those fights played out, including the gradual development in the 20th century of the notion that people had a right to marry, and the state had to have compelling grounds for denying that.
Question from Michael Greisman, The Chronicle:
How has the transformation of marriage's focus from property to love affected property ownership? It seems to me that an unmarried couple buying a house needs something a married couples doesn't-- a detailed contract.
Stephanie Coontz:
When we think about how the rise of cohabitation affects property, we should remember that for thousands of years, husbands and wives did not really have joint property rights. Until the mid-19th century, any property a woman inherited or earned in marriage belonged to her husband. And most people don't realize how long such "coverture" laws lasted. In many states, right up until the 1970s, the man had the final say over where they lived and whether they disposed on assets. In some states, the husband but not the wife owned all rights to rental income for rooms in their house, or the husband but not the wife could sue for damages if their child was killed. There was a Supreme Court case in the 1950s that said even if a man was relatively affluent, he didn't have to install running water in the kitchen if he didn't want to and his wife could not sue to get part of the property diverted to that use.
But you're right, just as married couples have gotten more joint rights, there is a wave of unmarried persons entering into interdependent or co-owner relations that are not governed by marriage law. That's one reason a major trend in law is to apply some of the same principles of marriage law to unmarried couples when they part, forcing them to divide assets or settle custody disputes much as married couples today need to do.
Karen Winkler (Moderator):
We have about 30 minutes to go. Keep your questions coming.
Question from Oliver Wang @ UC Berkeley:
Why do you think there is so much handwringing over marriage at this point? Why is the Religious Right making this their flagship issue to defend?
Stephanie Coontz:
Well, I think several things converge here. It's certainly understandable why people would worry about the future of children and commitments as marriage, which supposedly organized commitments and protected children for so long, becomes more optional and more vrittle. And religious conservatives are also more likely to subscribe to the supposedly "traditional" gender roles of male breadwinning and female homemaking. The democratization of marriage and the availability of divorce destabilize those roles, and in fact female homemakers are the women who fare worst when a long-time marriage ends. Another part of the problem is that we have developed such polarized values about marriage vs other commitments. I show in the book that loyalty, altruism, and caregiving were once thought to be necessary in many different interpersonal relationships, and they gradually got all loaded onto marriage, and displaced from other arenas of life. The logical thing, I'd think, would be to extend the norms more widely -- to expect that people keep commitments they incur even outside of marriage -- but for some people marriage is the one relationship that counterbalances the free for all they see, and even accept, in other areas, such as the economy. So having strict rules about marriage is the flip side of endorsing unfettered individual initiative everyehre else. Finally, there are some conservatives, such as those in the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, who see marriage as a substitute for investment in social welfare policies. Get poor women married off, they argue, and we won't need to invest in training or educating welfare recipients.
Question from Karen Winkler:
What do you think can be done to shore up the fragile state that you describe - by individuals or by policy makers?
Stephanie Coontz:
I think there are real limits to how much we can do to shore up marriage. Clearly, we can and should remove disincentives to marriage in public policy, and there is fabulous new work being done by some psychologists and sociologists on how to handle conflict and improve marital quality in a world where women are no longer forced to accede to their husbands' wishes. But I don't think we could reverse the optionality -- I just made the word up, I fear -- of marriage without hurting some of the gains we have made. So I favor policies that help strengthen healthy relationships. Healthy relationships will often lead to marriage, but even if they don't, they will lead to better outcomes for children and less interpersonal conflict.
Question from Liz McMillen, The Chronicle:
In your article, you say that the revolution in marriage has "liberated some people from restrictive, inherited roles in society, while stripping others of traditional support systems and rules of behavior without establishing new ones." Can you comment on the rise of gay marriage in this context?
Stephanie Coontz:
It was, of course, the changes in heterosexual marriage that paved the way for the demands for gay and lesbian marriage. As marriage became less about property, inheritance, and legitimation and more about a gratifying personal relationship, and especially as marriage ceased to be organized around rigid gender rules about what husbands and wives could or could not do, gays and lesbians began to say that if marriage was about love and fidelity, they should be entitled to it to.
I meant this statement to apply specifically to the way that heterosexuals have had to struggle to come up with new norms of behavior now that divorce and cohabitation are common, but of course, the reverse is also true for gays and lesbians. As their partnerships have become more open, and especially as more gay and lesbian partners are raising children, many of them are asking to be subject to the same rules and support systems as married heterosexuals.
Question from Wade Luquet, Gwynedd-Mercy College:
In 1972, the sociologis Jessie Bernard wrote in The Future of Marriage, "Not only does marriage have a future, it has many futures". P 270 "It is fallacious, then, to even speak of 'the future of marriage'. We should rather speak of 'marriage in the future'." P.271. Has her prediction come true? Do we now have many marriages and many family types? Do you forsee more changes and variety ahead? Thank you.
Stephanie Coontz:
Yes, I think she was right. Male breadwinner marriages are not going to disappear. Dual-earner families are even more common, but they are dividing into many different forms and arrangements. And increasingly, people who live together are gaining many of the rights and responsibilities of marriage. I think this diversity is here to stay.
Question from Karen Winkler:
You say in your book that the changes you describe are occuring in many places besides the United States. Certainly we hear many comments at home today about particular threats to marriage here. Do you think we face any special challenges?
Stephanie Coontz:
Ironically, many of the special challenges we face in the United States come because we hang on to a type of rigid morality that prevents us from meeting new challenges. For example, America is much more disapproving of teen sex than Germany, but we have much higher rates of teen pregnancy, partly because we're in denial about the fact that with the age of marriage at an all-time high, most young people, whether we like it or not, will have sex before marriage. Recently, there was a big campaign to get teens to pledge to remain virgins until marriage. Now a new study shows that 88% of them broke their pledge. And although they tended to start sex a little later than the teens who didn't pledge, before initiating sex, they were more likely than non-pledging teens to engage in risky practices such as oral and anal sex, to preserve their technical virginity, and much less likely to use contraception once they did start engaging in sex.
Here's another example. We romanticize marriage and value it more highly than Scandinavia, and more people marry. But kids in Scandinavia, on average, actually live longer with both parents than kids in America
Question from Steve Cohen, Miami:
Is there a dark side of divorce.... unintended negative effects on society, children, etc?
Stephanie Coontz:
Oh, for sure. But most sociologists see divorce as a process, not a single event. Sometimes the negative outcomes you see in kids of divorce were created by a bad marriage, not by the divorce. Sometimes divorce worsens things; sometimes it makes things better. There've been trade-offs. Two researchers recently found that the suicide rates of women fell by 20 percent in each state that adopted no-fault divorce, within the next five years. But it's true that many divorces have made things worse for other women. I reviewed a lot of the sociological studies for this book, and while it's preferable to salvage a healthy marriage whenever possible, it is clearly not in the interests of kids to keep parents in an unhealthy one.
Question from Michelle, Wellesley:
Marriage promotion has a good deal of traction among policy makers--especially as it relates to low-income women receiving TANF and in the context of fatherhood efforts. Given your research, why do you believe many policy makers are holding on to marriage promotion like a dog to a bone? How can policy makers be convinced to develop other, broader options--especially since marriage is not necessarily a panacea for poverty?
Stephanie Coontz:
If I had the answer to that question, I'd be very happy. There's a lot of wishful thinking going on in the marriage promotion movement. I show in the book the research suggesting that marriage promotion is not going to raise marriage rates among the poor substantially, so it's better to invest in what we know are anti-poverty measure -- education, job training, reliable child care. And there'a slo interesting research that shows that a poor single mother who marries and later divorces is actually worse off than one who remains single. So we have to figure out how to get policy makers to be more realistic on this question, and I'd love to hear other people's ideas about how to do this.
Question from Jennifer K. Ruark:
As women become more economically independent and cultural expectations of men become (at least slightly) less rigid, can you imagine a future in which the predominate family form might be female breadwinner/full-time-househusband?
Stephanie Coontz:
I doubt that the majority of families will ever be compised of working mothers and househusbands, but I think we will surely see more such arrangements, at least tempoary ones, now that many women earn more than their husbands and couples feel less bound by rigid stereotypes. There is certainly greater tolerance than in the past for couples rearranging married life to meet their own personal needs, but employers still penalize employees, and especially men, who try to take advantage of benefits such as parental leave.
Question from T.A.G.,ITS:
Most girls are brought up with the illusion that marriage is a fairy tale and things are perfect. Where as boys are taught that with less emotion makes for a stronger man. With these ideas now wonder why marriages do not last along with how effortless it is to runaway and back out of marriage that is meant to last forever.
In your opinion what do you think is neccessary to change the mindset of the younger generation and open their minds to realizing that marriage is not 100% perfect and it does take work to make it last?
Do you believe that if divorce was harder to obtain couples may fight harder for thier marriages to work?
Stephanie Coontz:
I agree that pop culture encourages us to fantasize about marriage as the happy ending of alove instead of the beginning of a deepening relationship. And I think many young people recognize that. That's often why they delay marriage. The divorce rate has actually fallen since the late 1970s and early 1980s, partly because people are taking the work of marriage more seriously and partly, I think, because men have begun to adjust to the new work roles of women. Egalitarian ideas now predict higher marital quality.
But I don't think, and I explain why in the book, that making divorce harder would solve our problems. Interesting, in Japan and Italy, where divorce is hard to get, fewer people are marrying at all than here in America
Question from stephen wright, UC Davis:
building on a previous question/response, would you speculate that as the diversity of living arrangements continues in the future, the roles of both the state and the church in legalizing and otherwise legitimizing such arrangements will diminish? if so, would you speculate how these diminishing roles will play forward ?
thank you
Stephanie Coontz:
Yes, I think that is right. I think that the state will probably pay more attention to the fact of a relationship rather than its form or legal status. Many people blame activist judges for granting marriage-like rights to unmarried couples, both heterosexual and same sex, but judges are just responding to reality. When people live together outside of marriage they still incur commitments and entanglements that need regulation if they part.
I think churches will still have an important role in the marriages of their followers, but much less than in the past in the marriages of people who are not members.
Question from Michael Greisman, The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Some science fiction stories, such as many by Larry Niven or Robert Heinlein, described 'marriage contracts' that bound people together for a limited amount of time and for specific purposes (to have children, to share wealth, and/or to share work). Is there currently any (real) place that practices that sort of contractual marriage?
Stephanie Coontz:
I don't know of any place that practices this, but some cohabiting couples -- both heterosexual and gay and lesbian -- and a few married couples I have met in my travels, have begun to draw up agreements that anticipate they may part ways. Their hope is to agree on guidelines if they part, in an attempt to avoid bitter and destructive battles.
Question from Harald E.L. Prins, Anthropology, Kansas State University:
Considering how you framed this discussion (using key words such as "the norm" and "traditional" marriage) we may ask which specific culture(s) are we talking about here? Or should we simply assume that it is about marriage as it has long existed in many European societies? Trying to avoid being ethnocentric in our definitions, my co-authors and I have recently introduced a new anthropological concept of marriage in our current edition of an introduction to anthropology textbook. Titled Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge, (Wadsworth 2005), we have tried to define marriage in a way that has comparative historical and cross-cultural significance: "a culturally sanctioned union between two or more people that establishes certain rights and obligations between the people, between them and their children, and between them and their in-laws. Such marriage rights and obligations most often include, but are not limited to, sex, labor, property, child rearing, exchange and status. Thus defined, marriage is universal" (Haviland, Prins, Walrath & McBride, 2005: 213). It may be of interest in this context that although I teach at a large public university here in the conservative heartland of the US (and well within the boundaries of an ever-expanding bible belt), I have found that our students have had no problem with this new definition at all. Indeed, considering this broadened definition, there is much less reason for panick, politically fabricated or not.
Stephanie Coontz:
I am glad you remind us that this discussion has so far been limited to Western European and North American traditions. I devote two chapters of my book to cross-cultural variations in marriage norms and values. I agree that it is a well-nigh universal institution (with the possible exception of the Na), but that its forms and functions vary immensely. Researching that variability, including reading work that you have done, was one of the most fun parts of writing this book
Question from Oliver Wang @ UC Berkeley:
One of the objections to gay marriage from WITHIN the queer community is that it's not an institution worth even supporting to begin with. I know many straight couples who feel similarly. Given, as you write, the increase in committed (but non-marriage) relationships, is there any *inherent* worth to the idea of marriage as it's come to be understood in contemporary society?
Stephanie Coontz:
As I researched the origins and history of marriage, I began to get past the debates about marriage that raged in the 1970s. I concluded that the institution was not really about either protecting women or exploiting them, but was about acquiring in-laws -- turning strangers into relatives, using marriage partners as "peace-weavers." In some settings, that function of marriage served to circulate goods and people more widely. In others, it served to exlude people. I now believe that marriage is neither inherently oppressive not inherently protective. For many people, though, it still represents the highest expression of commitment they can imagine making, and I have come to respect that immensely, while holding no illusions that marriage magically makes people live up to good intentions.
Question from MB, GMU:
I'd be interested in your thoughts about how this "new fragility" of marriage will impact African Americans and their families in particular given their unique family trajectory and history (i.e., slavery/no legal standing to marry for hundreds of years, persistent employment/wage discrimination, etc).
Stephanie Coontz:
The retreat from marriage has been particularly marked among AFrican-Americans, partly because of intense economic insecurity and racial bias in sentencing. Take a look at the new work by Kthy Edin on why impoverished couples don't marry, for exampe. We don't want to romanticize the alternative arrangements that have arisen as African-Americans have coped with persistent economic and cultural disadvantage, but on the other hand, we should recognize the long tradition in the A-A community of using a variety of family arrangements other than legal marriage to ensure mutual support and caregiving. Ron Mincy's work shows, for example, that black single fathers are much more likely to be involved in their children's lives than white single fathers.
Question from Molly Farrell, Washington D.C.:
Given that before the industrial revolution, the home was a center of economic and agricultural production, are we really in that much of a different position today when women are back at work, instead of being confined to solely caretaking roles? Isn't there benefit in drawing parallels with roles for working women in history as we make the transition from breadwinning in the home versus breadwinning outside of it?
Stephanie Coontz:
Yes, I completely agree. Dual-earner marriages are the historical norm. The male breadwinner marriage was the most non-traditional marriage ever, and had a short historical moment of dominance. However, one thing that's changed is that through most of history, women didn't have the right to control income or resources they produced, and they had to bow to their husbands' will. Now that men and women have much greater economic and legal parity, we are finding that marriages have to work differently, to be successful, than they ever did before. But that's a good kind of challenge, I think.
Karen Winkler (Moderator):
I'm afraid that's all we the questions we have time for. I'm sorry we couldn't use all of them. Stephanie, thank you for joining us.
Stephanie Coontz:
I've really enjoyed this dialogue and want to thank The Chronicle for making it happen, and the people who have written in about the issue. One of the things that really stood out in doing this research is how fast the field of marital history, sociology, and psychology is changing. Generalizations that were once true have been totally reversed. For example, highly-educated women used to be the least likely to marry. Now they are the most likely to do so. We are all scrambling to catch up with the rules and to adjust our own marriages -- or our single lives -- to this revolution. This is not the time when we should be scapegoating people for not "doing" marriage they way we were brought up to think it should be done. It's a time for all of us to learn together across our differences.
Copyright © 2009 by The Chronicle of Higher Education