All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (31 page)

In the eyes of some social conservatives, economists, and libertarians, including Charles Murray, author of
The Bell Curve,
and 2012's book on the class divide,
Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010
, an aversion to marriage has, over the past forty years, spread from blacks to whites like some kind of sickness. Economist Isabel Sawhill, author of the 2015 book,
Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage
, has written that, “What we are seeing is alternative living arrangements that have spread from the poor, and especially poor blacks, to the rest of society. The consequences for children and for society have been far from benign.”

There's truth in this, especially the first part of it. As with so many social developments for women that first stemmed from economic necessity—from working for wages to walking on the street unaccompanied to wearing shorter, lighter clothing—the possibility of not marrying, and of having children out of wedlock, developed amongst people for whom marriage was no longer the most economically beneficial option.

The nation's history has included many iterations of the privileged white co-option of black, and often poor, habits and behaviors, which, when performed by white populations, have drawn different kinds of attention. When white flappers danced to black jazz beats, they were culture-shifting rebels; when, in the mid-sixties, white women busted out of their domestic sarcophagi and marched back into workforces in which poor and black women had never stopped toiling, when Betty Friedan echoed Sadie Alexander by suggesting that work would be beneficial for both women and their families,
that
was when the revolution of Second Wave feminism was upon us. It has long been the replicative behaviors or perspectives of
white
women—and not the original shifts pioneered by poor women and women of color—that make people sit up and take notice and that sometimes become discernible as liberation.

In part, surely, it's because power is always more rigidly patrolled than powerlessness: When money and status are at stake, lines around who may access and transmit them (white men) and who is barred from them
(women and people of color), remain firm. Marriage, historically, has been one of the best ways for men to assert, reproduce, and pass on their power, to retain their control. For those with fewer resources to protect, where less power is at stake, there has been a bit less watchfulness. There has also, of course, been more of an incentive for those who are struggling to find ways to survive, even if it means improvising new familial and coupling patterns. But it's only when more privileged people see how these new, more liberating, forms of behavior might disturb the power structure that people take a different kind of notice.

“The illegitimacy rate is now getting very large even across the board, among the white people,” the antifeminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly told NPR host Michel Martin in 2012. Schlafly, like Murray and others, blames the increased number of single parent homes on welfare and social assistance programs that she believes allow women to substitute government for husbands (never mind that such programs have been radically cut during the years in which marriage rates have plummeted). “When Lyndon Johnson instituted lavish welfare,” Schlafly said, “they gave the money only to the woman and that made the father irrelevant.” It's all very grim, she concluded, because “we know that most of the social ills come out of mother-headed households.”
²⁴

This last point is where the complicated interplay between economic disadvantage, greater independence for women, and increasingly diverse models for family structure get boiled down to two misleading messages.

The first is that the evaporation of the early marriage model leads to greater poverty. “Less marriage means less income and more poverty,” is how Sawhill put it in an interview with
The Economist.
She's right only if one assumes that the imagined marriage partners in question would bring in additional income or domestic support, rather than cost additional money and time to feed, clothe, house, and clean up after.

The second and more spurious argument is that the American mothers who either choose to remain single or who find themselves unmarried are the generators and perpetuators of poverty; that they, and not the economically rigged system in which they make their way, are to blame for their families' economic circumstances. This is the message embedded in the now ubiquitous calls to tackle poverty not through stronger
social-welfare policies, but through the promotion of marriage, and more than that, of early marriage.

As Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary for George W. Bush, put it in a 2014
Wall Street Journal
op-ed
²⁵
unsubtly headlined “How to Fight Income Inequality: Get Married,” in place of increased government support to impoverished Americans, “a better and more compassionate policy to fight income inequality would be helping the poor realize that the most important decision they can make is to stay in school, get married and have children—in that order.” Robert Rector, one of the architects of the 1996 Welfare Reform legislation that made welfare harder to qualify for and assistance more temporary, wrote in 2012 for the conservative Heritage Foundation that marriage is “America's strongest anti-poverty weapon.”

None of this makes much sense given that, in developed countries outside the United States, rates of poverty for single mothers are much lower than they are in the United States, and that this country's high child poverty rates extend across the board and include children living in
married
households. As Matt Bruenig at Demos wrote in 2014, “high child poverty in the U.S. is not caused by some overwhelming crush of single mother parenting. The lowest of the low-poverty countries manage to get along in the world with similar levels of single mother parenting just fine. . . . We plunge more than 1 in 5 of our nation's children into poverty because we choose to.”
²⁶

But this reality doesn't prevent legislators from pouring both concern and funding into promoting
marriage
, and not social assistance, as the answer.

Claiming that marital decline drives up the rates of poverty and welfare dependence, Rector, who, in his Heritage Foundation piece asserted that “[Government] should clearly and forcefully articulate the value of marriage” and bemoaned that “under current government policies . . . marriage is either ignored or undermined,” knows better than anyone that marriage has been anything
but
ignored by the government in recent decades.
²⁷
Alongside conservative lawmakers, including Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, and Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, Rector pushed George W. Bush in 2003 to enact the
$300 million Healthy Marriage Initiative, a national program that diverted money from welfare programs in order to provide marriage education and encouragement to low-income populations.

Under the Bush administration, the project was nurtured by Department of Health and Human Services “marriage czar” Wade Horn, a psychologist who, according to
Mother Jones
, as the head of the National Fatherhood Initiative had once defended the Southern Baptist Convention's recommendation that “A wife is to ‘submit' herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband” and “serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.”
²⁸
Horn himself has cited Bible verse explaining that, “The husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church.”

Initially, the Healthy Marriage Initiative worked primarily through religious institutions, offering marriage seminars and classes to low-income people. It was renewed in 2010 under the Obama administration, though in its new incarnation, the focus shifted from faith-based intervention, and away from the enforcement of religiously grounded ideas about wifely submission, toward boosting employment alongside relationship advice.

Still, the Healthy Marriage Initiative has been shown to have little to no impact on marriage rates, which have continued to decline, or on divorce rates, which have remained relatively stable through the two presidential administrations that have now paid more than $800 million for it.
²⁹

The only public-policy approaches that have ever shown signs of boosting marriage rates and marital longevity haven't had anything to do with promoting marriage as an institution, but rather with providing people better financial resources in advance of, and to better facilitate, marriage. Among them was an expansion of welfare, from 1994 to 1998, when the Minnesota Family Investment Program allowed people to keep their welfare benefits, as opposed to cutting them off, even after they found work.
³⁰
With the added economic security, the divorce rate for black women in the state fell by 70 percent.
³¹

In approximately the same years, the New Hope Project was implemented in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An antipoverty program, New Hope provided full-time workers whose earnings were below 150 percent of the
federal poverty level with income supplements, offered those unable to find work community-service jobs and subsidized health and childcare.
³²
In a study of marriage rates, researchers found that 21 percent of never married women who participated in the New Hope Project were married five years later, compared to 12 percent of never-married women who did not participate.
³³
Income and wage growth also rose for participants, while depression decreased.

It seems clear that a government address of
poverty
is likeliest to make marriage more accessible to those who want it, while programs designed to shove marriage down the throats of Americans least equipped to enter it stably have little impact. If politicians are concerned about dropping marriage rates, they should increase welfare benefits. It's that simple. If they are concerned about poverty rates? They should increase welfare benefits. When asked what the single biggest step the country needs to take to address the needs of poor single mothers, Tim Casey from Legal Momentum said, “Step one: reforming welfare reform. Step two: reforming welfare reform. Step three: reforming welfare reform.”

But Congress at the start of the twenty-first century isn't showing much interest in that, voting instead to reduce food stamp benefits, which disproportionately affect the ability of single mothers to feed themselves and their children. In 2014, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul suggested capping welfare benefits for single women who have children out of wedlock, telling a luncheon that “married with kids versus unmarried with kids is the difference between living in poverty and not.”
³⁴
What Paul did not acknowledge is that, in his state, there are fewer never-married parents living below the poverty line than there are married parents living below the poverty line.
³⁵

In North Carolina in 2013, Republican state senators proposed a bill that would require couples to submit to a two-year waiting period before divorcing.
³⁶
And, in 2012, Republican State Senator Glenn Grothman, from Wisconsin, tried to pass a bill that cited single parenthood as a factor that contributed to child abuse. Happily, these legislative attempts have failed, but they showcase what's particularly dangerous about the combination of malevolence toward single women and a policy-enforced class chasm that leaves poor unmarried women vulnerable.

The irony, as
Slate
's Amanda Marcotte has observed, is that conservatives are surely maddest at and most threatened by
powerful
single women—the privileged, well-positioned women who earn money, wield influence, enjoy national visibility, and have big voices: Anita Hill, Murphy Brown, Sandra Fluke, Lena Dunham. But there's only so much they can do to stop the surging power of those women, while there remain plenty of terrifying ways for them to take their aggressions out on poorer populations. While Republicans may not be able to stuff threatening wealthy women “back in the kitchen,” Marcotte writes, “they can make life even harder for the single mother working two jobs who lives next door.”
³⁷

The Family Council, an Arkansas-based group associated with the socially conservative, anti-abortion group Focus on the Family, suggests that “there are four steps you can take in a specific order to reduce the chances your family will ever live in poverty. They are: 1. Graduate from high school. 2. Get married. 3. Have children
after you are married
. 4. Stay married. If you do those four things in that order, the chances you and your children will live in poverty are reduced by 82%.” In 2013, the
Baltimore Sun
columnist Susan Reimer, in a column about the decision of affluent Kim Kardashian and Kanye West to have a child out of wedlock, noted that “in more affluent, educated communities, adults know—and make this clear to their children—that the path to success includes education, work, marriage, and kids. In that order.” Reimer cited W. Bradford Wilcox at the University of Virginia's National Marriage Project, who called this education-work-marriage-kids progression “the success sequence.” The foundation of a civil society. A specific order.

This traditional procession of marriage before children has indeed been reversed in recent decades across much of America. Researchers for 2013's Knot Yet Report, which detailed “the benefits and costs of delayed marriage in America,” highlighted “the great crossover” moment, around 1990, when the age at which women have their first child became lower than the age at which they get married.

And, while the rate for out-of-wedlock births among college graduates has risen in recent years, those who have most dramatically scrambled the old familial sequence are Americans who have either not graduated from high school or those who have graduated and attended some college: most of the working and middle classes. The Knot Yet researchers described the crossover as “The moment at which unmarried motherhood moved from the domain of our poorest populations to become the norm for America's large and already flailing middle class.”
³⁸
They contrast it with the unmarried lives of privileged, college-educated populations, who they imagine “meeting friends or dates for sushi. . . . after a day consulting with bosses and co-workers from their cubicles . . . parlaying the twenties into a time of self-improvement: going to grad school, establishing a career track, and achieving some degree of financial independence.”