Beyond the 'M' Word: The Tangled Web of Politics and Marriage

...For them, it just confirms the sorry state of American culture and character...

...But they emphasize dealing with new situations MARRIAGE and with the new diversity in people's personal lives: How, for example, "to arrange the seating at a wedding when both sets of parents have divorced and remarried and are still acrimonious," how to plan for a wedding when the bride is pregnant or the couple is gay, how to teach teenagers about safe sex, and how to adjust to "the new codes concerning sex and dating and women taking the initiative romantically and men and women traveling together on business...

...Conservatives demonize anyone who questions their social science or doubts the need for vigorous action to "save" marriage as being against 82 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 marriage...

...One symptom of this instability is higher levels of debt...

...At first, the focus was on welfare as the breeder of crime and inner-city pathologies...

...And unlike some on the left who celebrate "diversity," but seem to exclude the married, the white, and the nonpoor, this is a morality of inclusion...

...Every traditional family and every extended family...

...Legal marriage remained a major institution for the perpetuation of gender inequality, turning individual men and women into husbands and wives with sharply different roles and responsibilities...

...Families have always been diverse and they have always been in flux...

...A decade and a half ago, E.J...

...The shift to a service economy has drawn women into the workplace...

...the others were a fiftieth anniversary revision of Amy Vanderbilt's etiquette guide and Letitia Baldridge's revision of her own earlier volume...

...Although some groups in the movement are explicitly religious, many of the leading marriage movement organizations typically describe themselves as nonpartisan and nonsectarian...

...The attack on a popular television show launched a media frenzy and a torrent of latenight talk-show jokes...

...We do hear about time squeezes and money squeezes—often blamed on the bad choices of women who flee home for work or on consumerism run amok.But the big picture has gone surprisingly unreported...

...The marriage movement insists that rising divorce rates since the 1950s clinch the case that Americans no longer value lifelong marriage...

...Drowning in student loan and credit card debt...

...What really bothers people in the marriage movement is that while Americans prefer marriage over any other lifestyle, they resist the scarlet letter morality that the movement militants would like to restore...

...Educational levels have risen for both sexes...

...Despite a series of reforms over the years, the laws of marriage continued to impose restrictions and disabilities on women until feminist lawsuits chalDISSENT / Fall 2006 n 85 MARRIAGE lenged the status quo...

...Ever since then, marital status and family structure have remained major themes of political rhetoric and government policy...

...Heterosexual couples may not be aware of the thousands of rights that legal marriage bestows on spouses, but gay couples are sorely aware of their absence...

...There has never been a society, so far as we know," writes Anthony Giddens, ". . . in which women have been even approximately equal to men...

...As Frank Furstenberg showed in his article in this series ("Can Marriage be Saved?," Summer 2005), most social scientists take issue with conservative assertions that traditional marriage is the remedy for poverty and the only setting in which children can develop into healthy adults...

...Along with numerous cuts to safety net programs such as food stamps, the bill provides $750 million over five years to promote "healthy marriage" and "responsible fatherhood...

...And economic insecurity is increasingly affecting the middle class...

...One of the most significant but least talked about features of American DISSENT / Fall 2006 n 83 MARRIAGE society over the last twenty-five years is the growth of economic inequality and insecurity...

...There is no evidence that Americans have become indifferent to marriage...

...One was the seventeenth edition of Emily Post's American classic, first published in 1922...

...Farther out on the political spectrum, marriage is actually a fighting word...

...Not since Bill Clinton's "all our families" response to Dan Quayle has a leading politician challenged the divisiveness that pervades current political discourse about family matters...

...FIRST, WE NEED to better understand the complexities of demographic trends and the forces driving family change...

...Can't afford to get married, buy a home, have children...

...Indeed, the breadwinner-caregiver family model that people think of as "traditional" is a nineteenthcentury product—an adaptation to the industrial age...

...The challenge of making a deeply gendered institution into a union of intimate equals may take another generation or so to work out...

...Clinton had barely settled into the White House when a barrage of op-eds, articles, books, and talk-show appearances argued that, as Barbara Dafoe Whitehead put it in the Atlantic Monthly, "Dan Quayle Was Right" after all: the rise of "illegitimacy" and divorce would have dire consequences for the nation's children and for all the rest of us, too...

...Nor is there any evidence that the values and marital expectations of welfare recipients and other poor women differ significantly from those of the middle class...

...Here is the contradiction at the heart of conservative ideology...

...If liberals and leftists are ever to regain a strong political voice, we need to get past both the orthodoxies of the sixties and the Republican-lite cultural politics of centrist Democrats in the 1990s...

...Surveys show that generations X and Y are even more enthusiastic about marriage than their predecessors...

...In short, we are passing through a historical watershed—an unsettled period of several decades when, as Peter Drucker put it, a society has to "rearrange" itself—"its worldview, its social and political structures . . . its key institutions...

...Recently, however, I came across an explicit defense of tolerance and pluralism from a surprising source—three new books on etiquette...

...Studies that look at popular attitudes, across racial, class, and ethnic groups, show that marriage remains the gold standard for couple relationships...

...Such morality has not gone unnoticed by the jeremiadists who want to restore the old scarlet letter version...

...and yet no matter how many times it fails to die, the threat never seems to lose its power—it fits neatly into "the great conservative narrative of moral decline," as James Morone has argued in these pages ("Tropes of Wrath: Virtue, Markets, and the Family," Spring 2005)—the virtue jeremiad reaching back to colonial times...

...Yet mainstream American attitudes have not shifted rightward in recent years...

...There is no use trying to restore the family patterns of the past, but the inevitable "rearrangement" is stalled by a cultural and political stalemate...

...The political aims of the marriage movement, however, are served by framing the marriage issue as a two-sided debate between those who are valiantly trying to save the institution and the liberals and feminists whose agenda is to destroy it...

...Every two-parent family, every single-parent family, every foster family" Yet the Murphy Brown episode turned out to be merely the misfired opening shot in a real political/cultural war...

...Most significantly, the gay experience shattered the cliché that legal marriage is "just a piece of paper...

...Not only is there a growing gap between the "haves" and "havenots," but there is a widening gulf between the middle and the top of the income scale...

...In the media, pundits of all political hues warned that single parenthood had become the preeminent threat to the country because it was the root cause of all the rest: poverty, crime, drugs, juvenile violence, and failing schools—what Joe Klein called "a nauseating buffet of social ills...

...Simplistic notions about the long, stable history of marriage, and its supposed demise at the hands of feminists and the 1960s counterculture, are also at odds with what historians of the family have found...

...But the end of welfare as we know it in 1996 did not end the marriage crusade...

...We need to move the terms of debate from the moral failings of individuals to the wider structural changes of society...

...Following the money, sociologist Scott Coltrane has shown that the marriage movement has been a joint project of the religious right and economic conservatives, funded by the usual right-wing foundations...

...Such "rearrangements" do not happen without distress, disruption, and political and cultural conflict...

...The prevailing assumption is that feminism, along with the hedonism and sexual excess of "the sixties," lured women—and men— away from marriage and home...

...Rather, families are going deeper and deeper into debt to meet basic, fixed expenses—mortgage payments, taxes, tuition for nursery school and college, health insurance, and the like...

...Though conservatives led and funded the new crusade, centrist Democrats and even some liberals inside and outside the Clinton administration joined up...

...So reads the jacket blurb for Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30Somethings Can't Get Ahead, by Tamara Draut, one of a number of new books on the obstacles young Americans face in the harsh new economic landscape...

...In fact, the gender revolution is rooted in trends that reach back a hundred years, to the turn of the twentieth century, if not earlier...

...Although the institution is much changed since the 1960s, and legal marriage coexists with a diverse array of family arrangements, it is very much here to stay...

...Neither party has focused on the implications of the new economic landscape for family life, much less on what to do about it...

...We need to distinguish feminism from the economic and social transformations whose unintended consequence is the erosion of gender inequality...

...Yet a few maverick conservatives were the first to warn that the American or neoliberal version of globalization may be unsustainable without a better balance between free market values and social responsibility "Through its effects on the family" warned John Gray, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, in 1998, "the American free market weakens one of the social institutions through which a liberal capitalist civilization renews itself...

...Instead, Clinton advisers hailed the twoparent family as the "best anti-poverty program...

...This is not the first time Americans have had to rewrite the scripts of family life...

...But I'm happy to assure you that helping people adapt has been a mainstay of the Emily Post tradition from the beginning...

...Home Economics Many of the family problems Americans worry about—delays in marriage, poor unmarried women having children, young adult offspring moving back home, seemingly unable to launch themselves into adulthood—are rooted in economic factors far more than in psychological or cultural ones...

...At the turn of the twenty-first century, the United States is on the verge of becoming such a society...

...Teenage pregnancy had started to decline...

...For years, the Census Bureau has been projecting that 90 percent of Americans will marry at some point in their lives, and in 1994, 91 percent of women had actually been married by the age of forty-five...

...The lawless social anarchy which we saw," he argued, "is directly related to the breakdown of family structure...

...But that is not the only challenge families face in postindustrial America: the new globalized and deregulated economy has unraveled the social contract that sustained workingand middle-class families in the postwar era...

...The current estimate is that about 43 percent of marriages will break up...

...At last, a book for the under-35 generation...

...In the wake of the Los Angeles riots, the thenvice president addressed the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco...

...As sociologist Steven Seidman put it in a defense of gay marriage MARRIAGE against the gay liberationists who oppose it, "this reality must be the starting point for any serious political discussion...

...I suggest a story of historical transition, culture lag, and family sustainability...

...Today's divorce rates may well reflect the difficulties of moving to a more gender-equal family and society...

...The separation of home and work undid the earlier "family economy" of farmers, craftsmen, and shopkeepers...

...Here, for example, is Amy Vanderbilt: "Luckily for us, we have been raised in a society in which democratic principles filter down to the private level...

...In The Two-Income Trap, Warren and her daughter Amelia Tyagi demolish the "myth of overconsumption," beloved by social critics of the left as well as the right...

...And there is beginning to be a substantial literature on the economic underpinnings of American families, or the lack thereof...

...And some law professors and other academics argue that the state should not be in the marriage business at all—in other words, that legal marriage should be abolished...

...They also count as opponents anyone who points to the injustice of government efforts to penalize single parents, gay families, and other "deviant" family forms without regard for the children who live in them...

...He debunks the myths that sustain the practice: that layoffs are a business necessity, that there will be benefits in the form of a stronger economy and better jobs...

...Second, we need some historical perspective to understand how we got to the current predicaments of marriage and family life and where we are likely to go in the future...

...A series of life-course revolutions has reduced the period of active child care in a woman's life to a small segment of an eighty-year span...

...It remains central to American culture, an expected life event for virtually everyone...

...Laws against marital rape, for example, were once unthinkable...

...And they have recruited a politically motley collection of clergy, marriage and family therapists, social scientists, lawyers, and policy analysts to take part in their various activities...

...They agree that the world we live in has been transformed over the past four decades—"Since the early 60s it's as if some Superman-like character has been hurling us through time," Baldridge writes...

...A more flexible, egalitarian model of marriage and family is struggling to be horn...

...Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker has been writing about what he calls "the great risk shift," the "massive transfer of risk from cor84 r DISSENT / Fall 2006 porations and the government onto families and individuals...

...A chastened Quayle denied that he had ever criticized single mothers...

...Yet the United States is far from the post-marital society the alarmists describe...

...The battle over marriage is just one of a long series of culture war distractions that keep the stalemate going...

...The time is ripe for the left to take the family issue back from the social and economic conservatives...

...Some of the statistics cited by marriage militants—that the two-parentmarriedwith-children household is only a quarter or less of the total number of households or that most Americans spend half their lives outside of marriage—reflect the dramatic increase of longevity over the past century rather than the decline of marriage...

...This can lead to stereotyping, prejudice, and ill-mannered treatment of families that are regarded as different...

...The commonsense voices in these three works offer a refreshing antidote to the pervasive moral decline narrative...

...The decline of the steady job and the rise of the mass layoff are the subjects of The Disposable American, an important new book by Louis Uchitelle, the economics writer for the New York Times...

...In the article mentioned earlier, Frank Furstenberg reported that ensuring the well-being of children has far less to do with the marital status of the family they live in than with the resources—financial, psychological, and social—their parents bring to the task of raising them...

...Legally, marriage is a much-transformed and reformed institution, and feminists and gays have had much to do with the changes...

...The Post book even offers a historical perspective on today's family changes...

...But the implicit views that underlie these responses are rarely articulated...

...Emily Post and the New Silent Majority In 1992, when the moral panic over single parenthood and divorce erupted, other disturbing trends, such as crime and drug use, were slowing down or in reverse...

...But she goes on to argue that "we must be cleareyed about the changes that have taken place—and alert to those to come—and arm ourselves with knowledge of how to handle them in today's terms...

...The current wave of family change resembles previous eras when economic transformation destabilized existing social arrangements...

...Presidential candidate Bill Clinton captured the national mood with a pluralistic vision of "an America that includes every family...

...It happened in the backlash against the Clinton impeachment and again when conservatives tried to exploit the Terri Schiavo case...

...In a note to the reader, Emily's great-granddaughter-in-law Peggy Post writes, "Times are changing so rapidly it's a challenge for most of us to keep up...

...Government at all levels became involved in a range of marriagepromotion efforts—high school courses on the benefits of marriage, premarital counseling, bonuses for poor couples who agree to marry, covenant marriage, among many others...

...His research has revealed that family incomes have become wildly unstable over the past twenty years...

...Every once in a while, however, the voice of the tolerant majority is heard in the land...

...She goes on to note that the first edition of the book was also written at a time of rapid social change, the 1920s...

...Indeed, divorce literally came to America on the Mayflower, along with other revisions of traditional marriage arrangements made by the Protestant reformers...

...ARLENE SKOLNICK, author of Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty, is a member of the board of directors of the Council on Contemporary Families and a visiting scholar at New York University...

...At the very end of speech, he denounced "Murphy Brown" and her Hollywood creators for "mocking fatherhood," glamorizing single motherhood, and thereby encouraging family disintegration among the poor...

...The push for gay marriage, far from undermining the institution, is its best advertisement...

...The poverty at the root of the disorders was a "poverty of morals...

...And "If you've ever wondered why families in commercials look so much alike . . . [it's because] married couples make up half of American households, but account for two-thirds of all consumer spending . . . .Media images have a way of creating norms that don't reflect reality...

...Most family researchers see the combination of high marriage rates and high divorce rates as the paradoxical outcome of the high expectations Americans bring to marriage...

...Although the media feature stories on the "mommy wars" and professional women who supposedly "opt out," the reality is that the majority of mothers, even of very young children, are in the work force—by necessity...

...No more was heard about "all our families" no matter what their form...

...1- I IBERALS AND PROGRESSIVES have never found a coherent and politically effective way of challenging conservative claims about marriage—that we live in a "postmarital society" and that Americans, especially the poor, must be persuaded that marriage is a good thing, that marriage is the remedy for poverty and other social ills, that a bit of marriage education or counseling, without any other supports, can result in stable "healthy" marriages...

...one out of seven children in America will live through a family bankruptcy by the end of the decade...

...As he has written elsewhere, marriage has become a "luxury item," available only to those with steady jobs and good incomes...

...Whatever merits these arguments may have in the abstract, they have no relevance to current political and social realities...

...Americans have always valued companionship between spouses and never defined marriage as an unbreakable contract...

...Some argue that it is a white, middle-class thing, irrelevant to the poor, the nonwhite, the non-heterosexual...

...We are not finished with gender inequality, but at least in the eyes of the law, husband and wife are now assumed to be equal...

...Claims about the decline of marriage resonate precisely because Americans, in contrast to other Western countries, care so much about the institution...

...These expectations, contrary (again) to the marriage movement, can't be blamed on the counterculture...

...We know from the past that remaking the cultural blueprints for family life is no easy task...

...In what follows, I attempt to set the stage for such a narrative...

...Just this past February, with little fanfare, Congress finally reauthorized welfare reform...

...He has called for a "politics of sustainable globalization" and a domestic "new New Deal...

...Liberals and the left should be able to put together a coherent and appealing political program based on our own traditional values: fairness, opportunity, enabling individuals and families to cope with the hazards of postindustrial life...

...The left needs a compelling alternative narrative for our own era...

...Clearly, there is an opportunity here for Democrats and progressives to speak to the middle class and those lower down the income scale...

...No reputable historian endorses this talk...

...But media preoccupations might be changing...

...If ever there were a set of issues on which Americans wanted less polarization and political posturing," he wrote, "it was surely those involving families, children, and sexuality" Yet the posturing and polarization continue, and Democrats continue to be stymied by it...

...echos of "smash monogamy" can still be heard, joined now by gay and lesbian liberationists who denounce gay marriage as a kind of assimilation to patriarchal normality...

...WHAT ABOUT divorce...

...What historian Hendrik Hartog calls "the long nineteenth century" lived on in the laws of marriage until the 1970s...

...I can't recall a better moral defense of America's diverse families...

...The symbiotic relationship be86 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 tween the right-wing message machine and the insatiable appetite of today's media for high decibel conflict has driven political discourse far to the right, but there remains a large and diverse center that is simply drowned out by all the noise...

...Women actually started moving into the paid work force in the 1890s, but it was not until the 1970s that a tipping point was reached and gender change became a contentious public issue...

...Economic pressures begin to take their toll early in life, delaying the transition to adulthood...

...In the post-industrial era the distinctive "separate spheres" family arrangement, with its rigid gender roles, has become obsolete...

...Nevertheless, there really are leftists who have a problem with marriage...

...Despite their professed reverence for family values, conservatives oppose in principle the economic arrangements that enable families to flourish, and they work hard to advance the economic forces that disrupt them...

...But divorce rates peaked between 1979 and 1981 and have declined moderately since then...

...The death of marriage has been proclaimed countless times in American history...

...Since the early 1990s, then, marriage has been a major combat zone in the culture wars, at the center of debates over poverty, welfare, sexuality, divorce, race, gender, and gay rights...

...Families have always been in flux...

...Even Thomas Friedman, one of the bestknown boosters of globalization, worries that inequality and insecurity may be the Achilles' heel of the new capitalism...

...The polls are showing increasing levels of public concern with economic security, even as basic economic indicators improve...

...As Nicholas Lehman put it in 1997, the sense of crisis over moral decline and social disintegration was "a phenomenon floating free of reality, driven by no actual contemporary developments...

...But there is no such agenda...

...Elizabeth Warren, of Harvard Law School, has illuminated a little noticed but surprisingly widespread phenomenon: more people declare bankruptcy than file for divorce...

...at their conferences and in their many reports, articles, op-eds, and books they speak the language of social science...

...As sociologist Doug Massey has recently argued, it's time to "turn the tables on conservatives and make them run from the word...

...In sum, they blend the traditional values of civility, tolerance, and a live-and-let-live respect for diversity...

...Moreover, this challenge to the traditional gender hierarchy is not confined to one country or the West, but extends around the globe, along with varying degrees of resistance to it...

...In addition, he argues, layoffs impose severe human costs in the form of family instability, depression, and other mental health problems, and contribute to a general deterioration of American life...

...Dionne argued that the public was frustrated with the moralizing and the personal attacks that had come to dominate American politics...

...As Victorianism gave way to the jazz age, the more informal approach to things foreshadowed the casualness that infuses every aspect of everyday life in the twenty-first century . . ." The books still tell you how to set a formal dinner table and how to deal with weddings, funerals, and the other life cycle rites and rituals...

...The proportion of children born to unwed parents was holding steady...

...It's hard to believe now, but the Quayle fiasco and Pat Buchanan's declaration of cultural war at the Republican National Convention later that summer seemed to bury the hard-line version of "family values" as a political strategy...

...And here is a second contradiction: the Republican Party has abandoned its longstanding (if only formal) commitment to equal rights for women and has sold its soul to religious fundamentalism—while its economic policies undermine the "traditional" male breadwinner role to which the fundamentalists are committed...

...To support families in the new era we will need to rethink deeply embedded ideas concerning men, women, and work—as well as the relationship between families, government, and the private sector...

...The old marriage bargain, whereby he brought home the bacon and wore the pants and she offered sex, babies, and housekeeping in return, is no longer possible or desirable for most Americans...

...We also need to replace the moral decline narrative with an alternative explanation of the remarkable transformations in family, gender, sexuality, and personal life that people have seen with their own eyes, as well as the stress, uncertainty, and disorientation these shifts have brought about...

...But liberals and leftists can take heart that we are not aliens in our own culture, and we need not flee from either "L" word...

...The (New) Trouble with Marriage The other dilemma of the twenty-first century, even more fraught than the economic challenge, is sustaining families in the midst of a MARRIAGE major shift in gender relations...

...DISSENT / Fall 2006 n 8 7...

...In addition, a self-described "marriage movement" began in the 1990s, a broad crusade to "arrest America's moral decay" by resanctifying marriage, restoring traditional faDISSENT / Fall 2006 n 8 MARRIAGE therhood, discouraging alternative family forms, and reviving the stigma and a sense of shame to divorce and single motherhood...

...We need to counter the simplistic before-and-after story conservatives tell about the long, unchanging history of marriage and its sudden demise at the hands of feminists and the 1960s counterculture...

...But the problem is not "affluenza" or "luxury fever...

...For example, in his book on the roots of the gay marriage movement, George Chauncy describes the painful vulnerability of gay partners who lack legal recognition of their relationship and so can't be considered "next of kin" when dealing with hospitals, schools, banks, and other institutions...

...Here is Emily Post on the same subject: "Today's 'ideal' family is found anywhere that love grows, respect is nurtured among individuals, and kindness and consideration flourish...