Further Beyond the "M" Word: A Response to Arlene Skolnick
Trimberger, E. Kay
I HAVE LONG admired Arlene Skolnick's writing on the family, but both my empirical study of long-term single women and my reading of the demographic data lead me to reject her view in "Beyond...
...In 2000, in Britain, single person households were one-third of the total and in Sweden, 40 percent...
...How do we move toward an alternative system...
...Accepting Skolnick's analysis would mean that the left could continue to put the issues of family change on the back burner...
...Research by Rosanna Hertz and Karen Hansen finds that friendship networks are an important support for single mothers and dual-earner couples with children, respectively...
...These figures are more extreme in large cities, topped by New York City, where 48 percent of households consist of a single person...
...Never have so many people lived alone...
...During this period and beyond, Skolnick asserts, marriage will "remain central to American culture...
...Its studies provide a snapshot of only one point in time, but looking at how the picture has changed between 1970 and 2005, we can see significant alterations...
...We need to initiate a public discussion about friendship as a new source of support and connection, with strengths and weaknesses different from those of marriage and family...
...Sociologist E. KAY TRIMBERGER is the author of The New Single Woman (Beacon Press, 2005...
...In contrast, the right wing in the United States takes seriously the decline of marriage and family...
...If the left, however, does not take seriously that irreversible changes in marriage and family life are occurring, we leave a gap for fundamentalists to fill...
...But in the next several generations, how many family members will there be with whom to connect...
...Never before in U.S...
...With a steady but still high divorce rate, and with 25 percent of children now born out of wedlock (not primarily to teenagers but to women in their twenties and thirties), marriage is fast losing its centrality to childbearing and rearing...
...She is a senior fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families and a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California-Berkeley See www.kaytrimberger.corn...
...By the time women reach forty-four years of age, almost one out of five is childless, double the rate in 1976...
...Even with only one or two children, singleparent families and those of dual-earner couples cannot raise their children without outside help...
...Such policies help stabilize marriage and families, while providing support for the increasing numbers who live outside them...
...Like marriage, families will not die, but I agree with Coontz that we are experiencing a revolution in marriage and family life, one that brings personal turmoil and that is equivalent to, and as irreversible as, the industrial revolution...
...I HAVE LONG admired Arlene Skolnick's writing on the family, but both my empirical study of long-term single women and my reading of the demographic data lead me to reject her view in "Beyond the 'M' Word" (Dissent, Fall 2006...
...The Shrinking Family If we still had large families, with women (of whatever marital status) having many children, the decline in marriage might not affect the centrality of family life in our society...
...Previously, marriage also was a necessary prelude to parenthood...
...There are still small farms and businesses but they do not dominate the economy...
...Despite all the publicity about the rise of cohabitation and of single parents, in 2005, only 5.4 percent of all households had cohabitating couples, both heterosexual and same sex, and 9.8 percent of households consisted of single parents...
...We now look for love and deep intimacy in marriage, not economic security...
...Of course, people living in these small households can reach out to family members living in other households...
...Today, 70 percent of women have two children or less compared to only a little more than 40 percent in 1976...
...I agree with her strong critique of the right's nostalgia for an imaginary family of the past, one free of tensions and conflicts...
...By 2003, 60 percent of households contained only one or two people...
...The Decline of Marriage The U.S...
...Most young women and men went directly from college to married life or to matrimony straight from their parents' home if they did not go to college...
...Nor can our shrinking families supply the material support and caregiving that large, extended families once provided...
...Their experiences reflect national trends...
...Friendship networks are more fluid and provide looser connections than those of nuclear and extended families in the twentieth century...
...Implications for Progressive Politics In a November 2006 article in the magazine Contexts, sociologists Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sakrisian present data from a large national survey showing that singles (especially the never-married) are more likely than married couples to socialize with, encourage, and help their friends and neighbors...
...Likewise, married, nuclear families will continue to exist, but they will no longer monopolize the organization of personal life and reproduction...
...Never before has the number of single person households exceeded those of a husband and wife living with one or more children (27 percent versus 23 percent...
...For example, friendship networks today are good sources of caregiving and caretaking, but most do not share financial and material resources as families do...
...Historian Stephanie Coontz in her comprehensive Marriage: A History concludes, "The spread of solitary living and cohabitation reduces the social weight of marriage in the economy and polity, creating tastes, habits, expectations, and voting blocks that are not tied to the role of wife and husband...
...She believes that the high divorce rate, decreasing remarriage rates, rise in out-of-wedlock births, increasing cohabitation, and the rising age of marriage reflect merely difficulties in moving from a male breadwinner marriage system to one of a union of working and intimate equals—a transition that, she says, may take another generation or so...
...Skolnick argues that the United States is experiencing just a period of flux in the indestructible institution of marriage...
...Given this analysis, progressives need to consider new cultural visions and public policies, not just to support marriage and families, but to replace them with alternative sources of individual security and social solidarity...
...Living in a single-person household depends on economic prosperity...
...In my longiDISSENT / Spring 2007 83 tudinal study of a smaller sample, I found that middle-aged single women who did not have a large network of family ties were not isolated or lonely, but built strong networks of friends who, literally, were there for them in health and sickness, until death did them part...
...We have to replace a health care and social security system that privileges married couples...
...I agree with Skolnick that marriage will not die, but I see no evidence that married households will regain their majority status...
...The current situation especially endangers young adults and many children of all classes, leaving them without medical insurance and adequate care...
...The radical changes are the decline in married couple households (from 70.6 percent of all households in 1970 to 49.7 percent in 2005) and the rise in people living alone (17 percent of households in 1970 compared to 27 percent of households in 2005...
...phenomenon...
...history has the number of households headed by a married couple dropped below 50 percent...
...Progressives need to consider an alternative perspective: marriage will not die, but it will no longer play the central institutional role that it has in the past...
...Progressive intellectuals need to study and theorize about how to institutionalize friendship networks with their own set of norms and expectations...
...The division between kinship and friendship, however, begins to dissolve in new blended families and those formed by open adoption...
...Nor is this just a U.S...
...We cannot turn the clock back in our personal lives any more than we can go back to small-scale farming and artisan production in our economic life," Coontz wisely proclaims...
...The new care systems progressives envision give benefits to individuals, but foster ties between them— networks that can move us out of the isolation of small nuclear families toward new caring communities...
...On a public policy level, we can no longer assume that caregiving can be channeled primarily through marriage and families...
...Likewise, sociologists Claude Fischer and Barry Wellman have discovered that social networks, especially those based on friendship, can be the basis for new forms of community and social integration...
...Rather, my research leads me to the conclusion that marriage will come to be only one of a number of paths to a satisfying life and one of several acceptable ways to raise children...
...For these baby boom women, their singleness (and for some childlessness) was cushioned by strong family networks...
...The progressive push for universal health care and the call for a care economy by Fred Block, Arlie Hochschild, and others move us in the right direction...
...Too often progressive intellectuals posit individualism as the antithesis of community, when in fact they are compatible...
...I agree with Skolnick's rejection of the conservative analysis that changes in marriage and family life in the last third of the twentieth century represent "moral decay...
...Increasingly too, we find that families are neither large enough nor prosperous enough to carry all the burdens in times of an economic or health crisis...
...Rather, in an economic depression or recession more young people will go back to living with their parents, and more of the young, middle-aged, and old will live with others in 82 DISSENT / Spring 2007 alternative living arrangements...
...A number had five to eight siblings...
...Changes already in progress indicate the direction for a progressive agenda...
...This decline in the fertility rate will have a huge impact on the lives of our children and grandchildren...
...Before 1965, marriage marked the transition to adulthood for the majority of young people...
...When I began a study of middle-class, middle-aged single women (both never married and divorced) in 1994, I was surprised at how many of my subjects came from middle-class families with four children or more...
...Now that the median age of marriage is twenty-five years for women and twenty-seven for men, marriage is not the gateway to either adulthood or sex...
...But an economic decline in the United States or other developed countries will not lead to a significant increase in marriage or a decrease in divorce...
...Friends will not replace or become families...
...Some of their married siblings, however, did not have children and most had only one or two...
...Sex was reserved for marriage, even if the reality did not always live up to cultural expectations...
...Census Bureau's reports on household and living arrangements provide the best overview of how people actually live...
Vol. 54 • April 2007 • No. 2
