Marriage, a History (47 page)

The pill gave unmarried women a degree of sexual freedom that the sex radicals of the 1920s could only have dreamed of. But when a large number of married couples stopped having children, it also radically changed marriage itself. Not only did effective contraception allow wives to commit more of their lives to work, but it altered the relationship between husbands and wives. Without a constant round of small children competing for their attention, many couples were forced to reexamine their own relationships more carefully. In addition, the growing number of childless marriages weakened the connection between marriage and parenthood, eroding some of the traditional justifications for elevating marriage over all other relationships and limiting it to heterosexual couples.

The social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, in concert with these fundamental changes in women’s work roles and reproductive rights, brought on a series of far-reaching transformations in the 1970s. After 150 years of only incremental progress, women’s legal status and access to civil rights underwent a true revolution. On paper, workplace discrimination in the United States had been outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1963, but the law was not extensively enforced until the 1970s, and then mainly as a result of pressure from women themselves. That pressure became strong enough in the 1970s to push down other legal barriers that had persisted for hundreds of years. In 1972, Title IX of the Education Act prohibited discrimination by sex in any program receiving federal aid, forcing schools to start funding women’s athletics and other programs. In 1973, in
Roe v. Wade,
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that women had the right to choose abortion. In 1975 it became illegal to require a married woman to have her husband’s written permission to get a loan or a credit card.

In rapid order, legislators across North America and Western Europe repealed all remaining “head and master” laws and redefined marriage as an association of two equal individuals rather than as the union of two distinct and specialized roles. A husband could no longer forbid his wife from taking a job because it interfered with his right to her homemaking or child-rearing duties. A wife could no longer assert an absolute right to be supported by her husband if she was capable of holding down a job.
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In homes throughout America, couples were rethinking how their marriages should function. In 1972, feminist Alix Kates Shulman went so far as to write up a marriage contract with her husband. It stipulated that each had “an equal right to his/her own time, work, values, and choices.” It also stated that “the ability to earn more money is already a privilege which must not be compounded by enabling the larger earner to buy out of his/her duties and put the burden on the one who earns less, or on someone hired from outside.” Few couples actually signed formal agreements, but the underlying principles were widely discussed and debated. In 1972,
Life
magazine devoted a cover story to Shulman’s marriage agreement, and
Redbook
reprinted it under the title “A Challenge to Every Marriage.” By 1978 even
Glamour
magazine was explaining how to write your own marriage contract.
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The 1960s and 1970s generated many radical critiques of marriage. But the civil rights climate of the time also encouraged people to think of marriage as a basic human right. This took the principle of free choice of partners farther than ever before. For hundreds of years the state had upheld parents in disputes over whether young people had a right to choose their own mates. Even after this choice had been ceded to young people, most governments retained some control over who could marry whom or permitted local authorities and employers to exercise such control.

In 1923 the U.S. Supreme Court had broken new ground when it listed marriage as one of “the privileges . . . essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness,” but it stopped short of declaring marriage a fundamental right. At the end of the 1920s, forty-two states still banned marriage between whites and blacks, Mongolians, Hindus, Indians, Japanese, or Chinese. In the 1930s several states had added “Malays” to the list, a prohibition usually aimed at Filipinos. And until the 1960s, employers still had the right to require female employees to stay single as a condition of employment.

During the 1950s, however, state legislatures started to repeal their antimiscegenation laws. By 1965 laws prohibiting interracial marriage were found only in the South. When Richard and Mildred Loving appealed their arrest for miscegenation, a Virginia judge declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. . . . The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
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But by the late 1960s there was a widespread sense that marriage was too basic a human right to be left to the whim of state governments. In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Lovings’ conviction for violating Virginia’s antimiscegenation law, claiming that marriage was “one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.” Courts in Europe and North America invoked the same principle to uphold prisoners’ right to marry and to prohibit airline companies from firing flight attendants who got married.
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Almost immediately, several gay and lesbian partners argued that they too should have a fundamental right to marry. In 1970, President Richard Nixon commented that he could understand allowing the intermarriage of blacks and whites, but as for same-sex marriage, “I can’t go that far—That’s the year 2000.”
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Little did he realize just how close his estimate would turn out to be.

Another momentous outcome of the civil rights climate of the 1960s and 1970s was the erosion of the traditional role of marriage in defining legitimacy. Distinguishing between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” offspring had been critical to economic, political, and social order in most societies throughout history. “Illegitimacy” was how families protected themselves from having to share their power or property too widely. Politically, as long as claims to power descended through kinship, the very existence of the state depended on the principle of legitimacy.
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However, on the personal level, these distinctions had severe consequences. Obviously a child born out of wedlock had little claim upon its father. But few people today realize that even the relationship between an unwed mother and her child was not protected by law. An illegitimate child could be taken away from its mother and given up for adoption. If the mother kept her child, their relationship did not have the same legal rights as her relationship with a child she bore while married. Children born out of wedlock could not recover debts owed to their mother and could not bring a wrongful death suit if their mother was killed by negligence. Nor could a mother sue for the wrongful death of her nonmarital child. This was the case in the United States until 1968, when the Supreme Court ruled in
Levy v. Louisiana
that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee extended to the children of unwed parents.

As early as the eighteenth century, humanitarians began complaining that the principle of legitimacy allowed a man to seduce and abandon a woman without taking any responsibility for the child he might have fathered. There was a growing sense that it was wrong to penalize children for the sins or mistakes of their parents, but few countries took any action before the 1960s. Then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was an avalanche of reform in North America and Western Europe. A series of Supreme Court rulings in the United States between 1968 and 1978 expanded the rights of nonmarital children and unwed mothers. In 1969, West Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom gave inheritance rights to out-of-wedlock children. France gave all children the same legal rights in 1973, finally fulfilling the slogan of the 1790 revolutionaries that “there are no bastards in France.” In 1975, the European Convention on the Legal Status of Children Born out of Wedlock recommended that all countries abolish discrimination between children born in and out of marriage.
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Breaking down the distinction between legitimacy and illegitimacy was a humane response to an ancient inequity. But it stripped marriage of a role it had played for thousands of years and weakened its hold on people’s political and economic rights and obligations.

By the late 1970s all these trends had merged to produce an enormous change in people’s attitudes toward personal relationships. Surveys from the late 1950s to the end of the 1970s found a huge drop in support for conformity to social roles and a much greater focus on self-fulfillment, intimacy, fairness, and emotional gratification. More people believed that autonomy and voluntary cooperation were higher values than was obedience to authority. Acceptance of singlehood, unmarried cohabitation, childlessness, divorce, and out-of-wedlock childbearing increased everywhere in North America and Western Europe.
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By 1978 only 25 percent of Americans still believed that people who remained single by choice were “sick,” “neurotic,” or “immoral,” as most had thought in the 1950s. By 1979, 75 percent of the population thought that it was morally okay to be single and have children.
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Some of these changes in attitude and behavior resulted from the increased prosperity of the postwar world and the shift “from survival to self-expression” in people’s values.
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But other challenges to conventional gender roles and marital norms were driven by a countervailing trend, the increasing economic pressure on families in the wake of the international recession of 1973.

The surge of women taking jobs in the fifties and sixties was fueled by the new opportunities created by an expanding economy. But in the 1970s many women were pushed into the workforce by a combination of recession and inflation that kicked off a two-decade-long decline in real wages and job security. Men working in traditional manufacturing jobs were hit especially hard by the downturn, requiring their wives to pick up the slack. In the quarter century between 1947 and 1973, purchasing power of the average American more than doubled. And the poorer sectors of the population made the greatest gains, giving many working-class families their first experience with a male breadwinner/female homemaker marriage. But between 1973 and the late 1980s average real wages for the majority of workers fell, with the bottom 20 percent of the population experiencing the biggest loss. Young people just starting their families were particularly hard hit: Between 1973 and 1986 the median income of families headed by men under age thirty fell by 27 percent. That’s almost exactly the same percentage as per capita income fell during the Great Depression.
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While men faced job and income insecurity during the 1970s and 1980s, employment expanded steadily in female-dominated service jobs. Women, starting from a lower earnings base than men, actually saw their real wages rise during this period. In this context, a wife’s job was the best hedge most families had against inflation and the increasing insecurity of traditional “male” jobs. Women’s earnings became crucial to the economic security of many families.

The surge in housing prices in the 1970s also pushed women into the workforce. As the largest generation in U.S. history began to set up its own households, it faced rampant housing inflation. Between 1972 and 1987 the average price of a new house rose by 294 percent. No longer could the “average Joe” with a pretty good job buy a house. Many families needed two earners to carry the mortgage on a home in a middle-class neighborhood.

This was not just an American phenomenon. A survey of twenty-one industrial countries reported that in the 1970s and 1980s female employment rose twice or even three times as fast as the growth in total employment. In almost every case,
married
women accounted for the majority of the increase in women’s workforce participation.
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By the 1980s women’s workforce participation was beginning to look much more like men’s. Women still spent fewer total years at work, and they were more likely to drop out in the prime child-rearing years. But their dips in labor force participation had become shorter and less pronounced, and women were much less likely to quit work after giving birth.
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Here’s something else interesting. As women spent more of their lives working, men were starting work later and retiring earlier, creating even more convergence. By 1970, women worked about 60 percent as long as men did over the course of their lives. Just a decade later, their lifetime employment was more than 75 percent that of men’s.
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As women spent more of their lives at work, they became more likely to define having a job as an important part of their identity. In 1957, fewer than 60 percent of women who worked outside the home said they would keep their jobs if they didn’t have to work, while 85 percent of men said they would stay on the job. By 1976, more than three-quarters of employed women said they would keep working even if they didn’t need the money.
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Many wives who had only gone to work to help out their husbands in the economic downturn now reported that their jobs gave them a sense of importance they had never gotten from full-time homemaking.

In the 1930s increased economic insecurity had reversed both the rise in divorce and the acceptance of unconventional lifestyles or gender roles. That did not happen in the downturn of the late 1970s and 1980s. For one thing, there was a social safety net that had not existed in the 1930s. For another, the end of the 1970s saw the dawn of a different kind of insecurity. A churning global economy wiped out old jobs and entire industries, but opened up tempting new opportunities in different arenas, then shifted again suddenly. This constantly changing economic and technological environment forced people to move away from conventional scripts for behavior.
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In this context, German researchers Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim argue, men and women had to maximize their individual freedom of action and keep their options open. As people became more likely to change jobs and even neighborhoods frequently, they became more tolerant of the unconventional marital or familial choices that accompanied this upheaval.