Further Beyond the "M" Word: A Response to Arlene Skolnick: Replies
Skolnick, Arlene
KAY TRIMBERGER and I are not far apart politically. We share a feminist perspective. We agree that "irreversible changes" have occurred to marriage and family life, and we agree that family...
...For one thing, counting the people in a household says little about their relationships with people outside, Many demographers believe that counting individuals rather than homes gives a better description of how Americans actually live...
...But such statistics can be misleading...
...Another new trend is that older adults prefer to live in empty nest or single-person households, rather than with relatives, as in the past...
...Indeed, the really interesting question is why, now that marriage is no longer compulsory, especially for women, the institution remains so popular...
...And it also affects family statistics...
...The statistics cited above show that the family changes of the past several decades are more complex and nuanced than most people realize...
...For example, shortly after Trimberger wrote her response to my piece, the New York Times (January 16) proclaimed on its front page that 51 percent of American women were living without spouses: "For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one . . . The article is typical of the way statistical factoids become big news for a while...
...Indeed, my article focuses on those stresses...
...Thus, Fischer and Hout report that in 2000, while 26 percent of households contained only a single person, only 13 percent of individuals lived alone...
...It has had profound but little discussed effects on marital and parent-child relationships...
...they think children do better in two-parent families, but not in abusive or conflict-ridden homes...
...degrees did so...
...Many households are headed by widows...
...The issue is ranked at the top of the public agenda, "far more important than immigration, cutting taxes or promoting traditional values...
...I don't contend that marriage is "indestructible" as Trimberger puts it, only that it hasn't 84 DISSENT / Spring 2007 been destroyed...
...The statistics that rain down from the media typically seem to confirm this demise-and-decline view...
...There has for some time been a progressive majority on many issues, but until November it had been a silent one...
...THE 2006 ELECTION has given us an opportunity for which we may not be ready...
...It was as prevalent in 2000 as in 1900, except among African Americans...
...DISSENT / Spring 2007 85 Fewer households of married couples are one indicator of a graying society...
...But demographers have been pointing out for some time that the fifties and sixties were an exceptional period—the age of first marriage fell to an all-time low, birth rates shot up, producing the baby boom, and divorce rates, which had been rising for every cohort across the twentieth century, leveled off before resuming their climb...
...Trimberger picks 1970...
...On March 2, The New York Times reported that a majority of Americans want the federal government to guarantee health care to everyone, especially children, and are willing to pay higher taxes for it...
...Between now and November 2008 will be a critical period...
...The public has changed the terms of debate, as well as control of Congress...
...In polls cited by Jane Quinn in Newsweek, half the voters called the economy "not good" or "poor...
...Also, in talking about the decline of "marriage and the family," Trimberger reinforces the idea that the American family is a monolithic entity...
...And this complexity makes summing up the state of the family something like a Rorschach test...
...But our message should focus on the major trends affecting Americans' personal and family lives and the lack of public and private policies to deal with them: the unfinished gender revolution...
...Black children are disproportionately likely to live in single-parent families, a trend that has paralleled the increasing economic difficulties of black men...
...We agree about the kind of policies progressives should support—health care, child care, and so on that have been on the liberal agenda for decades...
...And a young man with a high school education could find a family-supporting job...
...The political discourse has already changed, and there are new stirrings at the grassroots—especially around work-life balance, family leave, health care, and the workplace bias against mothers and other workers with family responsibilities...
...ARLENE SKOLNICK is the author of Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty...
...and a high-risk, high-stress economy that has brought new insecurity even to solidly middle-class families...
...Single adults under forty-five also prefer to live on their own now, adding to the non-nuclear-family household population...
...Rather than debating numbers with the right, or whether or not abstract and ambiguous terms like "decline" apply, progressives need a more pragmatic focus...
...86 DISSENT / Spring 2007...
...She is a visiting scholar at the New York University Department of Sociology and a senior fellow at the Council on Contemporary Families...
...Another major caution: it matters a great deal what date you use as a starting point for tracking current family trends...
...Ironically, the right was using American reverence for marriage as a tool to frighten Americans into believing that their fellow Americans no longer value marriage...
...But the changes are not the ones that usually make headlines...
...If the left does not take this decline as seriously as the right, she argues, we "leave a gap for the fundamentalists to fill...
...We agree that "irreversible changes" have occurred to marriage and family life, and we agree that family change does not equate to moral decay...
...The right, despite all its rhetoric, has created the least family-sustaining society in the Western world...
...Most significantly, we disagree about what political stance progressives should take with regard to family matters in general and marriage in particular— and what language we should use...
...The left should use its considerable intellectual firepower to exploit this weakness...
...Trimberger holds to the view that prevails among pundits of all persuasions, the media, and the general public that marriage and "the family" are in decline, fading away, on the verge of disappearing...
...But family change and family trouble are not equal-opportunity phenomena...
...We need to focus on the unaddressed problems that have been piling up since the Reagan era— health care costs, child care lacks, retirement and job insecurity, and other risks and stresses Americans face in an unsupportive new socioeconomic landscape...
...Only 31 percent said they were "getting ahead" financially...
...In contrast, I argue that something is seriously wrong with the demise and decline thesis...
...Since the 1940s for example, there has been a growing divergence in the family lives of African Americans and whites...
...Emerging from conservative think tanks, the movement evolved into a crusade that eventually attracted a wide array of supporters from across the political spectrum...
...Less-educated white women are increasingly likely to become single mothers, while there has been little change among women who have graduated from college...
...I argue that rather than reinforce the right's "decline" message or pit one family form or lifestyle against another, we should craft a message of our own...
...At a time when 90 percent of Americans marry at some point in their lives, 75 percent of the divorced remarry, gay couples are lining up in droves for marriage licenses, and the "marital industrialcomplex" is a multibillion-dollar enterprise, this persistence must be the basis for any serious discussion of life in the United States today...
...The fact that the Census Bureau counts households does not guarantee an accurate picture of people's lives...
...In a report prepared for the Russell Sage Foundation, Berkeley sociologists Claude S. Fischer and Michael Hout conclude that there has never been "an American family" Americans have always lived in a mixture of diverse families and households, but the two-parent nuclear family has been the dominant type throughout the century...
...Throughout the 1990s, governments at all levels got involved in marriage promotion, in league with a selflabeled "marriage movement...
...work-life imbalance and the care crisis it creates...
...Only 48 percent of white high school dropouts aged thirty to forty-four lived as married couples, while 70 percent of whites with B.A...
...and they don't like it when politicians denigrate single mothers or discriminate against gays...
...Indeed, we are starting to see a backlash against the religious right...
...One major change has been the longevity revolution...
...It should acknowledge the ambivalence most Americans feel about family change: they don't like divorce, but also don't believe people should be made to stay in miserable marriages...
...It provoked splits on the left, as did the sudden rise of the gay-marriage issue in the year before the 2004 elections...
...This is not to understate the pressures and troubles that afflict too many of our families...
...Among whites, there is also a sharp divide, based on education...
...In short, using the exceptional behavior of mid-century young adults as a benchmark gives a distorted picture of today's patterns of family formation...
...Consider, for example, that 77 percent of non-Hispanic white children lived in a two- parent household in 2000, while only 36 percent of African American children did...
...My article was a response to the conservative drive to make the supposed marriage crisis into a major political issue...
...LOOKING AT FAMILY change over the entire twentieth century reveals impressive continuities as well as some dramatic shifts...
...The problem with the Times story, as the Times itself later pointed out, is that the statistic included fifteen-yearold girls and the 42 percent of women over sixty-five who are widows...
...As Fischer and Hout show, difficulty in forming and maintaining families is concentrated among the least advantaged Americans—African Americans, and people with less education...
...Far from it...
...We differ, however, on how to describe family change, on what the statistics show—or fail to show—as well as on the historical background to current family trends...
Vol. 54 • April 2007 • No. 2
