Wedding Bell Blues

...The changes in the family in the fifteen years beginning in 1965 were "unique in family history," Wilson writes...

...In the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, France, Denmark, and Sweden, a quarter or more of births are to unmarried women...

...But The Marriage Problem is a book about a problem, not about solutions...

...and if that is the case, those constraints and their divine authority, no less than the civic duties of citizens, must be taught to all—an apparent impossibility in our present cultural climate...

...Although he doesn't develop the international comparisons, Wilson does propose one principal explanation for the distinctiveness of the Anglo-American world, and one aggravating factor at work in the United States and the Caribbean...

...Wilson concludes with a brief call for private, "retail" efforts by families, churches, neighborhoods, and the media to persuade the young to marry before they have children...

...Only the Great Depression, which forced families to regroup for economic reasons, and the exigencies of World War II postponed the day when the new freedom would be embraced and pushed to its limit...

...Earlier still, the slave trade had broken kinship groups, and slave codes had forbidden marriage...

...Defending the older view, Wilson points to the holes in leading revisionist works...

...One way or another, we need to find—for exactly the reasons James Q. Wilson so clearly shows—a way back from the "illusory emancipation" that has damaged us so deeply...

...As the first generation born after the war came of age, the dam broke...

...Brenda Stevenson has established, for example, that on George Washington's plantation, "only one-sixth of the slaves lived together as man and wife, and two-thirds of those who considered themselves married lived apart from their spouses...

...in many Caribbean nations, illegitimacy rates are higher still...

...Indeed, this book has the strengths of its unruffled reasonableness—but also perhaps the limitations...

...The first is the influence of the Enlightenment...

...Wilson quotes the work of Harvard scholar Orlando Patterson showing that slavery tended to deprive black men of the ability to perform as husbands and fathers: A slave "could offer to the mother and the child 'no security, no status, no name, no identity.'" Moreover, a male slave often had to live separately from the mother of his child...

...Though he makes plain his personal allegiance to marriage (Wilson dedicates The Marriage Problem to his children and their spouses), he doesn't write with Maggie Gallagher's fervor of the need to restore the ideal of lasting love...

...The Enlightenment, with its confidence in human reason, devalued religion and tradition...

...But all the while, society was living on the moral capital of its religious past...

...But in the English-speaking world and much of Europe, childbear-ing out of wedlock has risen, on average, more than sixfold since 1960...

...Outside avant-garde circles, "the assumption that families were valuable governed almost everyone" well into the twentieth century...

...In this country, divorce has been rising since the nineteenth century, but it Claudia Winkler is a managing editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...in 1996, more than half did...

...For a long time, the edifice of tradition stood...

...Recent scholars hardly seem bold when they argue that slavery's legacy is one reason for the greater vulnerability of African-American families to injurious modern trends...

...the second the legacy of slavery...

...long was regarded as a tragedy or a disgrace...

...Within American society, the erosion of the family has hit African Americans hardest...

...The famous "Moynihan Report" of 1965, warning of trouble in the black family that was bad and getting worse, cited what was then the prevailing view that slavery had weakened or destroyed families...

...But can private initiatives succeed while government is neutral...

...More recent research, meanwhile, suggests that slavery did harm families...

...All through the nineteenth century, Wilson shows, science on the one hand, and artists and intellectuals on the other, were helping redefine "the moral impulse from religion to habit," and thus unmooring "habit from any external support save preference and freedom...

...Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, he says, supply no evidence for their optimistic view of family life under slavery, and Herbert Gutman discusses genealogies, not family structure...

...Today, roughly half of marriages end in divorce, and the old stigma is gone—this despite the fact that the costs for children have become so plain that now, Wilson says, even some sociologists concede them...

...Respectful as he is of the uses of religion, he is too restrained to cast in high relief the awkward implications of his argument: that every-man-for-himself morality unteth-ered to religious truth is turning out to be corrosive of a free society...

...Although Enlightenment thinkers took the traditional family for granted, they accelerated an evolution of ideas that over the ensuing two centuries would gradually emancipate women and change marriage from a sacred covenant to an enforceable contract to an optional arrangement hinging only on the two partners' will...

...To all he brings the rigor, dispassion, and balance that have marked his prolific writings and his long career as a teacher at Harvard, UCLA, and now Pepperdine University...

...that if liberty is the unalienable gift of the Creator, then so may be the moral constraints by which free men are enjoined to live...

...Less distinctively American are other subjects Wilson covers: the speculations of evolutionary psychologists on the origins of marriage, the differences between marriage and cohabitation, the consequences of gender equality...

...The Roaring Twenties, Wilson argues, were a "test run" for the Sixties...

...Moynihan triggered a firestorm, and a politically correct revisionist scholarship was born, which insisted that the black family had come through slavery rather well and that only modern racism and unemployment had seriously damaged it...

...A "careful analysis of census data" by Steven Ruggles shows that as early as 1880, single parenthood was two to three times more common We need to find—for exactly the reasons Wilson shows—a way back from the "illusory emancipation" that has damaged us so deeply...

...Marriage is not in trouble everywhere: In much of the world— Wilson points to parts of Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, and some parts of Europe—"marriage remains the goal of every couple desiring children...

...BY CLAUDIA WINKLER In The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families, the eminent social scientist James Q. Wilson sets out to offer an explanation deeper than "the Sixties" for the destabilization of marriage in recent years...

...Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier...

...Though Wilson begins by warning of "a profound corrosion of our cultural soul," he never sounds the alarm with the urgency of Charles Murray...

...In 1960, 20 percent of black children under eighteen already lived in single-mother households...

...The resulting short book is a fine multidisciplinary survey of the history of marriage and the forces conspiring to weaken it...

...This was the view enshrined in classics by black writers like WE.B...

...In the Anglo-American countries, the ideas of Locke, Hume, and Adam Smith took root in favorable cultural soil, prepared by the citizens' belief in "the rights of Englishmen" and long experience with limited government...

...The shock of World War I left Victorian pieties in ruins...

...He is doubtless right to express skepticism about the government's ability to pull off so delicate an operation as the re-stigmati-zation of childbearing outside marriage...

...A wide array of psychological and social ills, from poor performance in school to unwed parenthood, beset children in one-parent families at much higher rates than children living with both parents, and the differences are not explained away by income status...

...They were sharp, immediate, and affected virtually every industrialized nation all at once," although, as we have seen, to varying degrees...

...among blacks than whites...