Marriage, a History (48 page)

All these changes led to new tensions between men and women. Single women complained that modern men were afraid to commit to relationships. Men muttered that modern women demanded the same respect as men at work but still expected a man to pay for dinner. Male breadwinners had to work longer hours to get by. Full-time housewives anxiously looked over their shoulders at the increased possibility of divorce. When husbands and wives both worked, they often argued over how to rearrange the division of housework. Working women scrambled to find trustworthy child care and resented husbands who didn’t feel equally responsible for doing so. More couples described themselves as “very happy” in 1976 than in 1957, but they were much more likely to say there were problems in their marriage than they had been in 1950’s polls.
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Anyone who thinks that male-female hostility was invented in the 1970s never spent time in a beauty parlor in the 1950s. When I was a teenager hanging out while my mother had her hair done, I got to listen in as “happily married” women routinely expressed contempt toward their husbands and toward men in general. And I knew from my father and his male friends that hostility toward women ran rampant in all-male settings. But I remember being amazed at the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s by how much anger I heard in the discussion periods after lectures I gave on family issues. What startled me wasn’t the
amount
of mistrust and tension between men and women but the fact that it was being discussed so openly in mixed company.

One meeting in Dallas in 1981 actually broke down into a shouting match. Men complained that their wives or girlfriends asked them to help with housework and then criticized them for doing everything wrong. Women countered that their partners volunteered to help but then bothered them with so many questions about what to do next that it was easier to do it themselves.

One man said that everyone at work thought his wife was Superwoman. But when she got home, she took out her stress on him. “I’m thinking everything is going fine,” he said, “and then she flips out over a sock on the floor or because I didn’t put the kids’ shoes where she always does.” A woman, not his wife, shot back: “There’s no time to hunt for things when we’re all trying to get out the door at once. How come you don’t know where things go? Were we invisible all those years when we had to do everything around the house? Not only couldn’t you help, you couldn’t even see what we were doing?”

If they had thought about the broader picture, these men and women would probably have agreed that the real problem was the lack of work policies amenable to family life. But in practice their daily tensions turned them on each other rather than on their employers. “My wife says, ‘Tell the boss you
have
to leave at five tonight because it’s your turn to pick up the kids,’ ” said one man angrily. “She doesn’t realize how that gets held against you.” Another woman said, “My husband says I should be the one to adjust,” mimicking him sarcastically, “ ‘because supervisors are more understanding when a woman needs to ask for family time.’ Yeah, they’re understanding, and that’s why they never give you a raise. If a woman wants to prove herself on the job, she has to put in
more
hours than the men.”

Women who worked for pay weren’t the only ones with resentments. At a women’s book club in Arizona some homemakers in the group confided their fear that accessible divorce and society’s new approval of working women gave men handy excuses to abandon them. Full-time housewives complained that their husbands and employed female friends did not understand how hard they worked, not only in their own homes but in the neighborhood. “I have to let repairmen into my employed friends’ houses when they can’t get home from work,” said one woman. “I pick up their cleaning for them when they can’t get off before the cleaner’s closes. The neighborhood kids come to me for after-school snacks because their own parents won’t be home until six. I actually subsidize their two-income families, and then they look down on me because I don’t earn money.”

People were not just letting off steam. The divorce rate more than doubled between 1966 and 1979. There were also glimpses of a new trend that was to explode in the 1980s. As the age of marriage rose, many women actually postponed marriage longer than they postponed motherhood. Rates of childbearing by unmarried women began to climb, and the number of children born out of wedlock was all the more noticeable because the birthrate of married couples continued to fall.

In less than twenty years, the whole legal, political, and economic context of marriage was transformed. By the end of the 1970s women had access to legal rights, education, birth control, and decent jobs. Suddenly divorce was easy to get. At the same time, traditional family arrangements became more difficult to sustain in the new economy. And new sexual mores, growing tolerance for out-of-wedlock births, and rising aspirations for self-fulfillment changed the cultural milieu in which people made decisions about their personal relationships. During the 1980s and 1990s, all these changes came together to irrevocably transform the role of marriage in society at large and in people’s personal lives.

It is natural to speculate about what would have happened if one or another of these trends had been sidestepped or reversed. What if youthful civil rights activists had been less influential in challenging traditional authority? What if “hippie” values had not spread to such large numbers of middle-class kids? What if courts and governments had not erased the distinction between illegitimate and legitimate children? What if more wives and mothers had stuck to part-time work? What if most men had continued to earn wages high enough to buy a good house and send their kids to college without their wives needing to go to work? What if technology hadn’t separated sex from reproduction so rapidly? What if no-fault divorce hadn’t been passed? What if ?

But removing one or two of these factors would not have made an appreciable difference. Most of these changes were inextricably intertwined, and in the few countries that avoided one or two of these trends, the other shifts in women’s work patterns, the timing of marriage, and fertility control happened anyway.

The erosion of the male breadwinner family is a classic example of what some historians call an overdetermined event. In the 1960s and 1970s, wives increased their workforce participation for many reasons. When real wages for women rose, wives joined the workforce. When real wages for men fell, wives joined the workforce. When families suffered economic losses, wives joined the workforce. When families anticipated significant economic progress, wives joined the workforce. When a wife was happy in her marriage but bored at home, she joined the workforce. When she was unhappy in her marriage and stressed at home, she joined the workforce.

The male breadwinner marriage began to decline all across North America and Western Europe during the last third of the twentieth century, even in regions least affected by changes in individual values, marriage laws, and legal codes. Everywhere too marriage began to lose its power to organize sexual behavior, living arrangements, and child rearing. All these economic, cultural, demographic, and legal changes converged in the 1980s and 1990s to create “the perfect storm” in family life and marriage formation. And nothing in its path escaped unscathed.

I
n 1977, sociologist Amitai Etzioni warned that if present trends in divorce continued, “not one American family” would be left intact by the 1990s. By 1980 the divorce rate stood at 50 percent. Half of all people who married could be expected to divorce.
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The divorce revolution, as some people have called it, transformed the lives of millions of people. But the surge in divorce was only an early precursor of the bigger storm that swept across marriage and family life between the late 1970s and the end of the century.

As long as rates of marriage and remarriage remained high, the increase in divorce did not threaten the universality of marriage, however disruptive and painful those divorces and remarriages were to the particular families involved. But at the end of the 1970s the impact of high divorce rates was accelerated by a plunge in the number of remarriages and a whole flood of new alternatives to marriage.

After 1981, divorce rates leveled off and began a slow decline, despite the fact that by then no-fault divorce was ubiquitous. But fewer people remarried after divorce. A generation earlier, in the 1950s, two-thirds of divorced women in the United States married again within five years. By the end of the century only half of divorced women were married or even living with partners five years later.
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Equally dramatic was the number of people who waited past their mid-twenties to marry for the first time. In 1960 only one in ten American women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine was single. In 1998, nearly 40 percent of women in that age group were unmarried.

An even more momentous change was the number of couples who lived together without marrying. Between 1970 and 1999 the number of unmarried couples living together in the United States increased sevenfold. When this trend began, most couples married if the woman got pregnant. But by the 1990s, marriage was no longer regarded as the obvious response to pregnancy or childbirth.
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The repercussions were staggering. In 1960, one American child in twenty was born to an unmarried woman. By the end of the century it was one child in three. In 2003, the U.S. census reported that almost 40 percent of cohabiting couples had children under eighteen living with them, a figure nearly as high as the 45 percent of married couples with children under eighteen.
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In the late 1990s the pace of change began to slow, leading some observers to hope that the storm had passed and marriage would soon return to “normal.” By 1998 the divorce rate was 26 percent lower than in 1979. Birthrates for unmarried white women stabilized in the 1990s, and those of black and Hispanic women actually declined. Also, more out-of-wedlock babies were now born to cohabiting couples than to women living alone, the earlier pattern. In popular culture, marriage and family life seemed to be regaining some of their luster. Attitudes toward promiscuity and adultery turned significantly more disapproving, and women’s magazines began to run articles with titles like “Why Marriage Is Hot Again.”
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One particular statistic from the 2000 U.S. census inspired several years of news stories announcing a revival of the male breadwinner family. For the first time in a quarter century, the labor force participation of women with infants under age one had gone down instead of up—from 59 percent in 1988 to 55 percent in 2000.
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That percentage stayed steady through 2002, encouraging some people to conclude that the forty-year erosion of the male-breadwinner marriage had come to an end. An article in
The New York Times Magazine
in 2003 combined Census Bureau statistics with a few anecdotes about high-achieving women who quit their jobs to announce the arrival of “The Opt-Out Revolution” among working mothers. Five months later
Time
magazine proclaimed that “More Women Are Sticking with the Kids.”
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It is not surprising that the pace of change in gender roles, marriage behaviors, and sexual values slowed during the 1990s. In many arenas these changes were already nearing saturation point. And as people became more comfortable with new gender roles and social mores, the more extreme responses to the first traumatic years of change subsided.
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Such stabilization may have signified a normalization of new family patterns, but it was a far cry from any return to the past. The number of children being raised by unmarried parents did not decrease in the 1990s. Nor did the number of two-earner families, which rose from 39 percent of all married couples in 1970 to 62 percent in 1998. Rates of cohabitation increased among heterosexual and same-sex couples alike. More elders joined the trend toward “shacking up.” As sperm banks opened their doors to unmarried women in the 1980s, increasing numbers of older single heterosexual women and lesbians took advantage of the chance to form unconventional families.
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Despite the much-ballyhooed dip in the number of working mothers with children under the age of one, more than 50 percent of such mothers were still in the workforce in 2003, compared with just 30 percent at the beginning of the 1980s. And women with children aged one and over now have the same labor force participation rates as childless women.
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Despite some reports by “trend spotters,” highly educated professional mothers have not been turning their backs on career aspirations. Such women are actually less likely to “opt out” of paid employment while their children are young than lower-paid or lower-skilled ones. Among all mothers with children under six in 2002, more than two-thirds of women with college degrees and three-quarters of mothers holding graduate or professional degrees were in the labor force.
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