Marriage, a History (74 page)

21
Ronald Lesthaeghe, “The Second Demographic Transition,” in Mason and Jensen, eds.,
Gender and Family Change,
p. 17; R. L. Cliquet, “The Second Demographic Transition: Fact or Fiction?,”
Population Studies
23 (1992), p. 22; Daniel Scott Smith, “The Dating of the American Sexual Revolution,” in Michael Gordon, ed.,
The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978); Rothman,
Hands and Hearts,
pp. 307-08 (see chap. 10, n. 21).

22
Quoted in Andrea Tone,
Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America
(New York: Hill & Wang, 2001), pp. 234-35. See also Angus McLaren,
Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History
(Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), p. 174; Beth Bailey,
Sex in the Heartland
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

23
Steven Nock, “The Divorce of Marriage and Parenthood,”
Journal of Family Therapy
22 (2000). For a history of how the pill spread and became available to single as well as married women, see Beth Bailey, “Prescribing the Pill: Politics, Culture, and the Sexual Revolution in America’s Heartland,”
Journal of Social History
30 (1997); Casper and Bianchi,
Continuity and Change in the American Family
(Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2002); Kuijsten, “Changing Family Patterns in Europe,”
European Journal of Population
12 (1996).

24
Mary Ann Mason, Mark Fine, and Sarah Carnochan, “Family Law in the New Millennium,”
Journal of Family Issues
22 (2001).

25
Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels,
The Mommy Myth
(New York: Free Press, 2004), pp. 42-43.

26
Wallerstein,
Tell the Court I Love My Wife,
pp. 189-219 (see chap. 12, n. 62).

27
Glendon,
Transformation of Family Law,
pp. 75-81.

28
Quoted in Wallerstein,
Tell the Court,
p. 240.

29
Rolf Nygren, “Interpreting Legitimacy,”
Journal of Family History
28 (2003).

30
Linda Hantrais and Marie-Therese Letablier,
Families and Family Policies in Europe
(New York: Longmans, 1996).

31
Ron Lesthaeghe and Dominique Meekers, “Values Changes and the Dimensions of Familism in the European Community,”
European Journal of Population
2 (1988); Ronald Inglehart, “The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies,”
American Political Science Review
65 (1971); Ronald Inglehart,
The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Ronald Inglehart,
Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Joseph Veroff, Elizabeth Douvan, and Richard Kulka,
The Inner American: A Self-Portrait from 1957 to 1976
(New York: Basic Books, 1981); Daniel Yankelovich,
The New Morality
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974).

32
Veroff, Douvan, and Kulka,
Inner American,
pp. 191-92; Daniel Yankelovich,
New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down
(New York: Random House, 1981).

33
Inglehart and Norris,
Rising Tide.

34
Andrew Sum, Neal Fogg, and Robert Taggert, “The Economics of Despair,”
American Prospect
27 (1996), pp. 83-84. I describe the earnings crisis of 1973-1992 and its effect on family life in more depth in
The Way We Never Were
(see chap. 10, n. 29) and
The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families
(New York: Basic Books, 1997). See also R. M. Rubin and B. J. Riney,
Working Wives and Dual Earner Families
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994) and Ellman, “Divorce Rates, Marriage Rates.” A recent discussion of the international dimensions of this crisis can be found in Oliver Zunz, Leonard Schoppa, and Nobuhiro Hiwatari, eds.,
Social Contracts Under Stress: The Middle Classes of America, Europe, and Japan at the Turn of the Century
(New York: Russell Sage, 2002). Barbara Risman and Pepper Schwartz, “After the Sexual Revolution: Gender Politics in Teen Dating,”
Contexts
1 (2002); Ira Ellman, “Divorce Rates, Marriage Rates, and the Problematic Persistence of Traditional Marital Roles,”
Family Law Quarterly
34 (2000), p. 6; Thornton and Young-DeMarco, “Four Decades of Trends,” p. 1028.

35
Janet Chafetz and Jacqueline Hagan, “The Gender Division of Labor and Family Change in Industrial Societies,”
Journal of Comparative Family Studies
27 (1996); Peter Li, “Labor Reproduction and the Family Under Advanced Capitalism,”
Journal of Comparative Family Studies
24 (1993); Susan McCrae, “Introduction,” in McRae, ed.,
Changing Britain: Families and Households in the 1990s
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Chiara Saraceno, “Changing Gender and Family Models,” in Zunz, Schoppa, and Hiwatari,
Social Contracts;
Ponzetti,
International Encyclopedia.

36
In the United States, for example, one study found that only one-third of women who graduated from high school in 1960 still had full-time jobs five years later. But by 1980, that number had increased to nearly two-thirds. Kristin Smith, “Maternity Leave and Employment Patterns, 1961-1995,” U.S. Census Bureau, Public Information Office, December 5, 2001; Marlis Buchmann,
The Script of Life in Modern Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

37
Suzanne Bianchi and Daphne Spain, “Women in the Labor Force, 1950-1980,” in Sklar and Dublin, eds.,
Women and Power in American History,
vol. 2. For similar trends in Europe, see Hantrais and Letablier,
Families and Family Policies in Europe.

38
Yankelovich,
New Rules.

39
Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim,
Reinventing the Family
(Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002); Ulrich Beck,
Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity
(London: Sage, 1986); Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim,
The Normal Chaos of Love
(Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 1995).

40
Norval Glenn, “Marital Quality,” in David Levinson, ed.,
Encyclopedia of Marriage and the Family
(New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1995), vol. 2.

1
Amitai Etzioni, “The Family: Is It Obsolete?”
Journal of Current Social Issues
14 (1977), p. 4. Measuring divorce rates is very complicated. The crude divorce rate is the number of divorces per thousand married people. But one can also measure the ratio of divorces to marriages in any particular year or track trends over the past decade and project into the past. Because the 50 percent rate was a projection of how many marriages would end before the couple reached their fortieth wedding anniversary, it may have overstated the rate of marital breakdown. Nevertheless, almost 40 percent of first marriages contracted in the 1970s ended in divorce before their fifteenth anniversaries, so the 50 percent estimate was certainly reasonable.

2
Casper and Bianchi,
Continuity and Change
(see chap. 15, n. 23); Helen Rumbelow, “Women Less Likely to Remarry,”
Washington Post,
July 24, 2002.

3
Christopher Marquis, “Total of Unmarried Couples Surged in U.S. Census,”
New York Times,
March 13, 2003; Andrew Hacker, “How Are Women Doing?,”
New York Review of Books
(April 11, 2002); Jane Lewis and Kathleen Kiernan, “The Boundaries Between Marriage, Nonmarriage, and Parenthood,”
Journal of Family History
21 (1996); Kathleen Seltzer, “Cohabitation and Family Change,” in Marilyn Coleman and Lawrence Ganong, eds.,
Handbook of Contemporary Families
(Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2004).

4
Pamela Smock and Sanjiv Gupta, “Cohabitation in Contemporary North America,” in Alan Booth and Ann Crouter, eds.,
Just Living Together: Implications for Children, Families, and Public Policy
(Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002); Wendy Manning and Pamela Smock, “First Comes Cohabitation and Then Comes Marriage,”
Journal of Family Issues
23 (2002); Heath Foster, “More Moms and Dads Aren’t Tying the Knot,”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
May 1, 2003.

5
Joshua Goldstein, “The Leveling of Divorce in the United States,”
Demography
36 (1999); demographer Steven Nock at the University of Virginia, personal communication, July 23, 2003; BBC News, “UK Divorce Rate Lowest for 22 Years,” August 21, 2001; Lois Brady, “Why Marriage Is Hot Again,”
Redbook
(September 1996). Unless otherwise noted, the sources for other figures on stabilization in the United States (and the later discussion of similar trends in Europe) come from Casper and Bianchi,
Continuity and Change
; Linda Hantrais and Marie-Therese Letablier,
Families and Family Policies in Europe
(New York: Longmans, 1996); Hans-Peter Blossfeld, ed.,
The New Role of Women: Family Formation in Modern Societies
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995); Karen Mason and An-Magritt Jensen, eds.,
Gender and Family Change in Industrialized Societies
(Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1995); Chiara Saraceno, “Changing Gender and Family Models,” in Oliver Zunz, Leonard Schoppa, and Nobuhiro Hiwatari, eds.,
Social Contracts Under Stress: The Middle Classes of America, Europe, and Japan at the Turn of the Century
(New York: Russell Sage, 2002); Karin Brewster and Irene Padavic, “Changes in Gender-Ideology, 1977-1996,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
62 (2000); Tom Smith, “The Emerging 21st Century American Family, General Social Survey Social Change Report,” no. 42, National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago, November 24, 1999; Arland Thornton and Linda Young-Demarco, “Four Decades of Trends in Attitudes Toward Family Issues in the United States: The 1960s Through the 1990s,”
Journal of Marriage and Family
63 (2001); James Q. Wilson,
The Marriage Problem
(New York: HarperCollins, 2002); Mark Gillespie, “Americans Consider Infidelity Wrong,” Gallup News Service, July 10, 2001,
SeniorJournal.com
; Vern Bengston, Timothy Biblarz, and Robert Roberts,
How Families Still Matter
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); “Facts at a Glance,”
Child Trends
(William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, November 2003); U.S. Census Bureau, “Living Arrangements of Children Under 18 Years Old: 1960 to Present,” Internet release date, June 29, 2001; Allen Dupree and Wendell Primus, “Declining Share of Children Lived with Single Mothers in the Late 1990s” (Washington, D.C.: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, June 15, 2001); Sharon Vandivere, Kristen Moore, and Martha Zaslow,
Children’s Family Environments: Findings from the National Survey of America’s Families
(Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 2001).

6
For this and the next paragraph, see Tamar Lewin, “More Mothers of Babies Under 1 Are Staying Home,”
New York Times,
October 19, 2001; Stephanie Armour, “More Moms Make Kids Their Career of Choice,”
USA Today,
March 12, 2002; Census Press Release CB03-166, October 23, 2003.

7
Lisa Belkin, “The Opt-Out Revolution,”
New York Times Magazine,
October 26, 2003; Claudia Wallis, “The Case for Staying Home,”
Time
(March 22, 2004), p. 51.

8
In the 1980s, juvenile crime rates and teen pregnancies rose hand in hand with the number of single-parent families, leading many commentators to fear that changing family forms were creating a generation of “superpredators.” But although the number of single-parent homes continued to rise in the 1990s, teen violence and teen birthrates plummeted after 1992. By the end of the century the violent crime rate among teenagers had reached its lowest level in more than twenty years, and the teen birthrate was at an all time historic low. “Juvenile Homicides Decline,”
New York Times,
December 15, 2000; Lina Guzman et al., “How Children Are Doing: The Mismatch Between Public Perception and Statistical Reality,”
Child Trends Research Brief,
Publication 2003-12 (July 2003); Stephanie Ventura et al., “Estimate Pregnancy Rates for the United States, 1990-2000” (New York: Alan Guttmacher Institute, June 14, 2004).

9
Jeff Madrick, “Still a Gender Wage Gap,”
New York Times,
June 10, 2004; Teresa Carson, “Lesbian Moms a Growing U.S. Phenomenon,” Reuters News Service, May 25, 2004.

10
Fertility of American Women, June 2002
(U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, October 2003); Stephanie Armour, “Some Moms Quit as Offices Scrap Family-Friendliness,”
USA Today,
May 4, 2004.

11
Paula England, Carmen Garcia-Beaulieu, and Mary Rose, “Women’s Employment Among Blacks, Whites, and Three Groups of Latinas,”
Gender & Society
18 (2004).

12
Kathleen Gerson, “Moral Dilemmas, Moral Strategies, and the Transformation of Gender: Lessons for Two Generations of Work and Family Change,”
Gender & Society
16 (2002), pp. 17-18.

13
Donald Hernandez,
America’s Children: Resources from Family, Government and the Economy
(New York: Russell Sage, 1993).

14
David Leonhardt, “Wage Gap Between Men and Women Closes to Narrowest,”
New York Times,
February 17, 2003.

15
Arleen Leibowitz and Jacob Klerman, “Explaining Changes in Married Mothers’ Employment over Time,”
Demography
32 (1995).

16
Families and Work Institute,
2002 National Study of the Changing Workforce
(New York: 2002); Ellen Galinsky et al.,
Feeling Overworked: When Work Becomes Too Much
(New York: Families and Work Institute, 2001).