Comments on: The Decline of Marriage

By: hanaleah

hanaleah — Mon, 10 May 2004 22:10:43 +0000

“I suspect that some paid work is probably good (though I also think there’s a loss when lots of what would be voluntary work under a less productivist regime becomes paid work, for example child-care and political activism).” Is some paid work good for any reason other than the present difficulty in living without it? Raising one’s own child is indeed not the only reason one may want to work less hours, or even not want a paid job at all. I’d like to see more scope for the existence of these less productivist regimes, and opening out the internal choices of nuclear families to be one or two income, pay for childcare or not, only goes so far. We also can’t assume that every person who would like to take up an alternative has someone to bread-win for them, however the tax could work out. The question isn’t always between marriage and a committed, monogamous, heterosexual relationship (which in Australia is an almost identical proposition, give or take a ceremony); some people don’t want (or simply don’t have) a marriage, or a heterosexual relationship, or a partner at all, let alone kids, for many and various reasons. Even Gar’s beautiful vision doesn’t quite acknowledge these sections of the community, and the Scandinavian situation, though it gives a good deal generally, still predicates welfare and political representation on being involved in paid employment, or dependence on someone who is, even more than the rest of the western world. Not that I’d sniff at real pensions, full free education and child care. Surely every aspect is more mobile when all people have better access to education and panic less about a destitute old age.

By: harry

harry — Thu, 06 May 2004 16:12:50 +0000

notofthisblog I can’t tell whether you are teasing me. But, I have to admit, the thought of simultaneously publishing inflammatory and sober versions of the same book/article really appeals to me. I used to have a running list of inflammatory alternative titles of my (soberly titled) academic papers, but I’ve gotten out of the habit. Maybe now I have tenure I’ll start just giving future papers inflammatory titles as their actual titles.

By: notofthisblog

notofthisblog — Wed, 05 May 2004 22:25:59 +0000

Harry – Thanks for the clarification on the difference between Wisconsin academia and the readership of this blog. It would be nice if inflammatory works were published alongside non-inflammatory versions, which could then be discussed in a calm and thoughtful way. Maybe someone could do that for Tooley’s work.

By: harry

harry — Wed, 05 May 2004 14:19:06 +0000

I can only guess that in Wisconsin academia today, suggesting that feminism might have some drawbacks is political suicide. Nonsense. If it makes you feel better, I don’t talk the same way to my students. My job as a teacher is to challenge all my students while simultaneously educating them. In a class of 80 students this means challenging unreflective feminists and un-reflective anti-feminists simultaneously, and also draw in the majority of students who are reflective. This requires presenting both the feminist and the anti-feminist arguments in their best light, and pressing them against objections, as well as pressing objections against them. My participation in a blog is quite different. But, since the way Tooley makes his own argument is deliberately inflammatory, and not designed to persuade his opponents, it is entirely proper of me to try to keep people predisposed against him with me as I try to elucidate the rational kernel.

By: notofthisblog

notofthisblog — Wed, 05 May 2004 03:17:29 +0000

The fact that you were preparing a lecture on “the gendered division of the labour” speaks volumes. ;) You also keep apologising at the suggestion that there might be anything good in anti-feminism, which is a very sad state of affairs to be in, as truth should not be compromised by prejudice, whether it comes from radical or conservative perspectives. I can only guess that in Wisconsin academia today, suggesting that feminism might have some drawbacks is political suicide. The emancipation and masculine progress of women certainly has had an effect of marriage, but there are some much more boring reasons as well. The decline of marriage needs to be put in perspective, average marriage lengths of say 15 years over the years have not declined, if at all, because we live much longer. To be harsh, you could get married to someone 150 years ago that you weren’t that keen on because you knew they might (or you might) die in the next 10 years anyway. Death from war and disease is so much less these days. Also historically, marriage popularity drops in harsh times, so if we see a drop now we need to consider the question are people in some way unhappier at the moment. Quite possibly true for so many reasons. Certainly a lot of people are greedier. Divorce conditions make marriage much less attractive too, as individuals can in theory survive quite well by themselves, there is not the disincentive to get divorced when times get tough. Finally, there is an old marxist/conservative debate as to whether demographics is driven by economy or mentality. The answer is probably somewhere in between. The economy provides the foundation for the mentality in many cases. But who knows!

By: h. e. baber

h. e. baber — Tue, 04 May 2004 17:06:00 +0000

I (philosophy) and a colleague in econ team taught a course on “Women and Work” over the past 15 years. Since the course met GE requirements and requirements for the business major we got a good cross-section of students most of whom had no particular interest in “women’s issues.” Things changed over the years but even when we began teaching the course we found that most men wanted their (future) wives to work. As one said, memorably, “I wouldn’t put up with a wife that was just a drone.” Earlier on though the general attitude that guys had was that while they wanted women to work, they didn’t want women to pursue careers that would interfere with domestic support services, block them from relocating to promote their own careers, etc. They wanted women to be “flexible workers” who could be hired out to earn wages or called back do work in the home as circumstances changed. Some also felt that women were unfairly advantaged because (they said) while they had to work women had a choice and weren’t under the same pressure to achieve. When we last taught the course, 3 years ago, the expectation by both men and women was that women would have careers, not just jobs and that there would have to be compromises when it came to supporting two careers, and the recognition that women really didn’t have the option of not working outside the home. On the downside (from my perspective) most believed that there was little or no discrimination and were firmly opposed to affirmative action. Moreover my impression was that they were more likely than in the past to believe that “men and women think differently” and that women had uniquely feminine “management styles.”

By: Z*lda

Z*lda — Tue, 04 May 2004 16:31:16 +0000

This is a really insightful post which has garned some great comments. I’m speaking as a college educated stay at home mother who struggles with frugality to try to survive on one income. My husband has a good job, for Iowa, yet we are barely keeping up with the bills and unable to afford to be homeowners. I patch our clothes, drive a rusty old car, make home cooked meals and shop at garage sales. On the other hand, our children are growing up healthy and nurtured. We don’t need to rely upon paid childcare. I don’t comprehend how working mothers can cope with all their responsbilities. Something must give. Definitely the children of working mothers have a different experience. Many of them, even middle class kids, are left at home alone at an early age. Has being a stay at home mother been a “choice” for me? Yes and no. My degree is in liberal arts and has never amounted to much in the workforce. My husband is unfortunately a nonparticipant in domestic chores whether or not I work outside the home. Hence, holding a paying job (I tried it for a while) means that my personal workload grows immensely. Has our relationship suffered? Well, early on, when the kids were babies and toddlers, we were excruciatingly poor. I believe that parents are penalized harshly in an economic sense. The money struggles definitely took a toll on our relationship, but have eased up now that my husband is advancing in his career. No wonder that so many people “choose” a two income lifestyle.

By: push

push — Tue, 04 May 2004 16:18:17 +0000

a rather late contribution, and apologies if someone has already made the point and I missed it in my quick scan. My own anecdotal experience appears to be quite different. A lot of my male married friends would rather their wife works, if only part time. As sole earners they have to take high paying pressurised jobs. When they return, their spouses are so fed up with caring for children at home they thrust them on the tired males, and therein lies the cause of many an argument. Also the evidence is that past the first year, mothers going to work do not have a negative impact on child development.

By: harry

harry — Tue, 04 May 2004 16:16:40 +0000

Women are naturally best suited for earliest child-care This is ambiguous. You might be saying that ‘All woemn are better than any men’. But that is just false. Nursing is just one aspect of early child-care, and the other aspects—cuddling, being kind and affectionate, providing warmth, stimulation, etc—are done better by some men than by some women. Some women cannot nurse, and whereas their children used to need wet-nurses or would die, now they can be bottle fed: and neither sex has a natural advantage in that department. Bottle feeding is not, in my view, child abuse, btw. The moment children can thrive nutritionally without nursing the natural advantage you point to that women have disappears. Still, a much weaker reading of your claim might be true: ‘on the whole, for any given man and woman, it is more likely that the woman will be a good child-carer than the man, and this probability is explained by nature, not social forces’. I can believe that (I’m inclined to believe it, but haven’t seen compelling evidence). Not much follows from it, though. There are two, quite different, cases for having parents (male and female) do the bulk of the caring for children. The one you are pushing is that this is best for the child. That may be true. But the one I’m pushing is that, on the whole, it is (usually, by no means always) best for the parents—it contributes to their moral flourishing and ultimate enjoyment of life in a distinctive, and important, way. My case is gender neutral, even if women are naturally better carers, because I believe that (most) men, even if they are not as good at it, can get much more satisfaction from it than form the realistic alternatives. And I think it is only important that children are reared well, not that they are reared in the best possible way. I think that both sexes frequently miss out on aspects of parenting they would rather be there for, and do so because of (rightly or wrongly) perceived economic pressure to earn money. I accept Chris and ADM’s points. Most work, thugh, is not like the work of an academic or lawyer: it is work done primarily for money (in fact, mostof the lawyers I know regard their work that way too). I don’t see how to avoid some trade offs between a satisfying and rewadring work life and a satisfying and rewarding domestic life. But certainly the productivist ethos governing these professions doesn’t help (ironically, my experience of it is that it is worse in the UK in academia than in the US, and worst of all in Education—not academia, but schools). Thanks Richard, for that digression—brilliant to know all that. I was, of course, talking about the introduction of joint-filing in the 40’s.

By: Lindsay B.

Lindsay B. — Tue, 04 May 2004 15:50:42 +0000

This could be an argument for adding wet nurses to the consumer buffet.

By: Lance Boyle

Lance Boyle — Tue, 04 May 2004 05:06:47 +0000

But it isn’t about the parents missing out on something; what a parent is, is a parent. The whole idea of the individual as a consumer unit, that’s new and mostly fictive. The sanctity of the individual with his or her “choices”. It’s why we’re all so damned lonely. People used to work close to where they lived, and have far less a sense of themselves as individuals, and far more a sense of the community operating through them. So the elderly had personal, familial care, the children had care, and everybody had an investment in the upkeep and well-being of place and community. And that business up there about women being mostly caregivers because they’re paid 72 cents on the dollar is egregious. Women have breasts, not as so many young people now think, because it makes them girly-sexy and easier to tell from boys, for the most part, but because they, and their wombs, are where children come from. Because they are genetically predisposed toward motherhood. Breasts are for providing sustenance to infants. I find it exceedingly stark and freakish that people need that explained to them. Women are naturally best suited for earliest child-care. Though an aftermarket Roomba© with appropriate retrofitting and a really well-thought-out suite of software could probably get the job done, at least minimally.

By: cafl

cafl — Tue, 04 May 2004 03:14:01 +0000

Couples like Robert Lyman (above) and his wife might consider the path my husband and I followed. We founded our own professional services company with like minded associates, that is structured to allow us to work less than full time. We did this after we had children. It allowed us to adjust our child care arrangements. Younger school age kids do well in school-sited after-school care (in our experience) since they get to spend time with their friends but have a structured setting for homework. As kids get to middle school, they start to chafe in such an arrangement, and our family coped by my arranging to work at home in the afternoon. In high school this continued, since it was beneficial to be there when the teenagers came home, so that they could “tell about their day”. Both my husband and I spent time volunteering at school and doing the carpool duties so the kids could participate in sports. This wasn’t always easy, but it is possible to do these things if you make the trade off of money for time. This is easier if you are your own boss. Your clients don’t need to know that your blocked out time is for your kids, not for another client.

By: Richard Bellamy

Richard Bellamy — Tue, 04 May 2004 02:01:21 +0000

“I think that’s not quite right. The change was made in the 40’s to close a tax loophole whereby the very rich could get a huge benefit by claiming a substantial part of their investment income in the wife’s name (since she typically had no earned income). Since marginal tax rates were above 90% at the time this was a huge loophole.” Not to get on a tangent about history, when we agree on the substance, but the marriage penalty in its current form dates from the 1969. http://www.taxfoundation.org/marriagepenaltyhistory.html “How a “War Widow” Turned the Marriage Bonus into the Marriage Penalty Paul and Lisa can blame a woman named Vivien Kellerns for their marriage penalty. Thanks to tax scholar Michael Graetz, we know that Kellerns was a single businesswoman who founded War Widows of America. Members were either widows or, like Kellerns, single women who claimed they had never married because WW II had created a shortage of single men. In the 1960s Kellerns and her group protested what they considered to be a singles penalty: At the time, two single people often paid more then a married couple with the same income, sometimes as much as 40 percent more. The higher tax on singles resulted from Congress’s 1948 joint-return provisions, which allowed married couples to file jointly and pay double the single-filer tax on one half of their combined taxable income. The joint-filer provisions negated the effect of some states’ community property laws, which had been passed in an attempt to lower the federal tax burdens of those states’ residents. The joint-filer provisions also ensured that all couples with the same income were taxed equally, regardless of whether one or both spouses had an income. In 1969, after much media attention and many tea bags mailed to members of Congress (a reminder of the Boston Tea Party), Vivien Kellerns and her allies achieved victory: Congress passed legislation that resulted in a “marriage penalty” for some couples—mainly upper-middle-income couples at first—while creating a bonus for others. Subsequent legislation increased the number of couples who received a penalty.”

By: Another Damned Medievalist

Another Damned Medievalist — Tue, 04 May 2004 01:59:39 +0000

I second what Laura and Chris Bertram said. In regards to Richard Bellamy’s comment:

The problem is how — recognizing this in advance — a man who wants a career can seek out a woman who wants to stay home without being considered a sexist.

I would argue that the greater problem is how – recognizing this in advance – a woman who wants a career can seek out a man who wants to stay at home without being considered totally unrealistic and selfish. I would add to H.E.’s comment above that the rational arguments only work if the partners are of the same age and educational background, or if the male partner has the better education. If the woman is significantly younger (10+ years, often the case in second marriages) the woman will be hitting her professional stride as her husband peaks out. Also, I find it interesting that most of our comments have focused on divorce in marriages where there are children present. I’m pretty sure that many of the same tensions exist even for couples who have no children, or whose children are grown. It’s just that then the discussions are not based around childcare and surviving on less money, but on such things as career advancement, shifts in job markets, etc. Think about the moves involved in establishing a successful academic career. Few academics stay in their first jobs (unless it’s a nice tenure-track position in an ideal city with affordable housing and job opportunities for the spouse). I think women often end up in the “stay at home” or “secondary career” position even then.

By: harry

harry — Tue, 04 May 2004 01:45:44 +0000

Divorce is more likely to happen when people are unemployed. Financial stress has a large impact on marriage. Right, I agree with this—so I think the key is to find arrangements in which people can manage ok financially without working ridiculous hours. I suspect that some paid work is probably good (though I also think there’s a loss when lots of what would be voluntary work under a less productivist regime becomes paid work, for example child-care and political activism). bq. am not so quick to dismiss this entirely out of hand, however, simply because of its sexist overtones. I feel that there must be something to be gained from a child being reared by a close family member (with no statement about the sex of the caretaker). Of course, this would suggest that subsidies for childcare should take the form of tax breaks for stay-at-home parents, as opposed to or in concert with similar breaks for dual-earner households Blair—you and Lance seem to have sorted things out, but I agreed both with what you say here and with the worry about McNannying. I also think, though, that the parents miss out when, for whatever reason, childcare is done by someone else, because caring for one’s children is a a source of great good. That’s one reason I think that couples should share it more equally—because I believe that men miss out when they don’t do enough, and also because I suspect women miss out when they do too much. The left has (recently) preferred egalitarian policies which externalise caring activity, and I think that’s a mistake (but I understand that inpractice lots of internalising policiesm disadvantage women, as h.e. says—so the trick is to find non-sexist internalising policies.