Marriage, a History (76 page)

3
William Doherty,
The Intentional Family: How to Build Family Ties in Our Modern World
(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997).

4
There are some outstanding exceptions, of course. Researchers and clinicians at the Council on Contemporary Families and the National Council on Family Relations recommend the following books particularly highly: John Gottman and Nan Silver,
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
(New York: Crown Publishers, 1999); Andrew Christensen and Neil Jacobson,
Reconcilable Differences
(New York: Guilford Press, 2000); William Doherty,
Take Back Your Marriage
(New York: Guilford Press, 2001). See also Neil Jacobson and Andrew Christensen,
Acceptance and Change in Couples Therapy
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1998); John Gottman and Clifford Notarius, “Marital Research in the 20th Century and a Research Agenda for the 21st Century,”
Family Process
41 (2002); Frank Fincham and Thomas Bradbury,
The Psychology of Marriage
(New York: Guilford Press, 1990).

5
“Too Late for Prince Charming,”
Newsweek
(June 2, 1986), p. 55; Sylvia Ann Hewlett,
Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children
(New York: TalkMiramax Books, 2002).

6
Barbara Lovenheim,
Beating the Marriage Odds
(New York: William Morrow, 1990), pp. 26-27; Art Levine, “Second Time Around: Realities of Remarriage,”
U.S. News & World Report
108, (January 29, 1990); Felicity Barringer, “Changes in Family Patterns,”
New York Times,
June 7, 1991, p. A1; Robert Schoen and Nicola Standish, “The Retrenchment of Marriage,”
Population and Development Review
27 (2001).

7
Gary Becker,
A Treatise on the Family
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).

8
Andrew Cherlin,
Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). Interestingly, however, cross-cultural studies show that the independence effect of greater female economic or political influence does not necessarily increase divorce when men and women share responsibility in the home and in the community. Instead, increases in women’s power are most likely to produce high divorce rates when there is strict task segregation by sex. Thus the increased specialization that developed with the rise of the male breadwinner marriage may actually have set the stage for the international surge in divorce once women began to earn their own income. See Lewellyn Hendrix and Willie Pearson, “Spousal Interdependence, Female Power and Divorce,”
Journal of Comparative Family Studies
26 (1995).

9
For this and the next paragraph, see Rose Krieder and Jason Fields, “Number, Timing, and Duration of Marriage and Divorce: 1996,”
Current Population Reports
P70-80, February 2002, Table 9, p. 14; Joshua Goldstein and Catherine Kenney, “Marriage Delayed or Marriage Foregone?,”
American Sociological Review
66 (2001); Garance Franke-Ruta, “Creating a Lie: Sylvia Ann Hewlett and the Myth of the Baby Bust,”
American Prospect
(July 1, 2002); Valerie Oppenheimer, “Women’s Employment and the Gains to Marriage,”
Annual Review of Sociology
23 (1997); Hans-Peter Blossfeld, “Changes in the Process of Family Formation and Women’s Growing Economic Independence: A Comparison of Nine Countries,” in Hans-Peter Blossfeld, ed.,
The New Role of Women: Family Formation in Modern Societies
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995); Noriko Tsuya and Karen Mason, “Changing Gender Roles and Below Replacement Fertility in Japan,” in Mason and An-Magritt Jensen, eds.,
Gender and Family Change in Industrialized Countries
(Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1995).

10
Alice Eagly and Wendy Wolf, “The Origins of Sex Differences in Human Behavior,”
American Psychologist
54 (1999).

11
Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers,
Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs
(New York: Basic Books, 2004); Barbara Whitehead and David Popenoe,
The State of Our Unions, 2001
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University National Marriage Project, 2001). In 1967, by contrast, three-quarters of college women said they would marry a man they didn’t love if he met their other criteria, many of which were connected to his ability to support a family.

12
Scott South, “Sociodemographic Differentials in Mate Selection Processes,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
53 (1991); Robert Mare, “Five Decades of Educational Assortative Mating,”
American Sociological Review
56 (1991); Pepper Schwartz quoted by Deborah Siegel, “The New Trophy Wife,”
Psychology Today
(January 7, 2004).

13
There are even hints that several industrial societies might be experiencing the same kind of reversal in patterns of childbearing that we have already seen in marriage rates: More highly educated women may soon be
more
likely to have children than their less educated counterparts. Steven Martin, “Women’s Education and Family Timing,” Department of Sociology and Maryland Population Research Center, June 2003; Franke-Ruta, “Creating a Lie”; N. Ahn and P. Mira, “A Note on the Changing Relationship Between Fertility and Female Employment Rates in Developed Countries,”
Journal of Population Economics
15 (2002); M. L. Dewitt and Z. R. Ravanera, “The Changing Impact of Women’s Employment and Educational Attainment on the Timing of Births in Canada,”
Canadian Studies in Population
25 (1998); Brigit Hoem, “Entry into Motherhood in Sweden,”
Demographic Research
2 (2000).

14
I discuss this movement and quote its main proponents in
The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families
(New York: Basic Books, 1997). See also Kristin Moore et al., “What Is ‘Healthy Marriage’? Defining the Concept,”
Child Trends Research Brief,
publication #2004-16,
www.childtrends.org
.

15
Wendy Carter, “Attitudes Toward Premarital Sex, Non-Marital Childbearing, Cohabitation, and Marriage Among Blacks and Whites,” in Robin Miller, ed.,
With This Ring: Divorce, Intimacy and Cohabitation from a Multicultural Perspective
(Stamford, Conn.: JAI Press, 2001); Dan Vergano, “Here Comes the Bride—After College,”
USA Today,
August 20, 2002; Megan Sweeney, “Two Decades of Family Change: The Shifting Economic Foundations of Marriage,”
American Sociological Review
67 (2002); Mason and Jensen, “Introduction,” in Mason and Jensen,
Gender and Family Change;
“Born Again Christians Just As Likely to Divorce,”
www.barma.org/Flexpage.aspx?Page=BarmaUpdate&BarmaUpdate10=170
, accessed Oct. 6, 2004; Blaine Harden, “Bible Belt Couples ‘Put Asunder’ More,”
New York Times,
May 21, 2001. This doesn’t mean religion is irrelevant to marital stability. Couples who are share religious convictions and are active in church and community associations with like-minded people have more stable marriages than average. But the daily behaviors count much more than the abstract beliefs.

16
Rebekah Coley, “What Mothers Teach, What Daughters Learn: Gender Mistrust and Self-Sufficiency Among Low-Income Women,” in Booth and Crouter,
Just Living Together
(see chap. 16, n. 4); Donna Franklin,
What’s Love Got to Do with It: Understanding and Healing the Rift Between Black Men and Women
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

17
Stephanie Coontz and Nancy Folbre, “Marriage, Poverty, and Public Policy,” a discussion paper from the Council on Contemporary Families prepared for the Fifth Annual CCF Conference, April 26-28, 2002; Kristin Seefeldt and Pamela Smock, “Marriage on the Public Policy Agenda: What Do Policy Makers Need to Know from Research?,” National Poverty Center Working Paper No. 04-2, February 17, 2004, Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan; Daniel Lichter et al., “Is Marriage a Panacea?,”
Social Problems
50 (2003); “Assessing the Importance of Family Structure in Understanding Birth Outcomes,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
56 (1994); E. Cooksey, “Consequences of Young Mothers’ Marital Histories for Children’s Cognitive Development,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
59 (1997).

18
Kathryn Edin, “What Do Low-Income Single Mothers Say About Marriage?,”
Social Problems
47 (2000); Edin, “A Few Good Men: Why Poor Mothers Don’t Marry or Remarry,”
American Prospect
(January 3, 2000); Edin and Laura Lein,
Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work
(New York: Russell Sage, 1998); Wendy Single-Rushton and Sara McLanahan, “For Richer or Poorer?,” manuscript, Center for Research on Child Well-Being, Princeton University, July 2001; Michelle Budig and Paula England, “The Wage Penalty for Motherhood,”
American Sociological Review
66 (2001); Heather Joshi, Pierella Paci, and Jane Waldfogel, “The Wages of Motherhood: Better or Worse,”
Cambridge Journal of Economics
23 (1999); Jane Waldfogel, “The Effect of Children on Women’s Wages,”
American Sociological Review
62 (1997); Shelly Lundberg, “Nonmarital Fertility: Lessons for Family Economics,” in Lawrence Wu and Barbara Wolfe, eds.,
Out of Wedlock: Causes and Consequences of Nonmarital Fertility
(New York: Russell Sage, 2001).

19
Andrew Cherlin, “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage,”
Journal of Marriage and Family
66 (2004). See also Kathryn Edin, Maria Kefalas, and Joanna Reed, “A Peek Inside the Black Box,”
Journal of Marriage and Family
66 (2004). The reluctance of low-income women to marry is reinforced by government policies that penalize poor people for marrying by sharply reducing their eligibility for welfare or tax credits when their income rises even by a very small amount. Repealing such policies would be a sensible way to make it easier for low-income couples to wed, but it would not reinstate marriage as the normative behavior for all.

20
Frank Furstenberg, Jr., “The Future of Marriage,”
American Demographics
18 (1996).

21
Pamela Smock, “The Wax and Wane of Marriage,”
Journal of Marriage and Family,
66 (2004) and personal communication, May 3, 2004. For poll on being “set,” see Whitehead and Popenoe,
State of Our Unions, 2002.

22
Seefeldt and Smock, “Marriage on the Public Policy Agenda”; Thomas Bradbury and Benjamin Karney, “Understanding and Altering the Longitudinal Course of Marriage,”
Journal of Marriage and Family,
66 (2004).

23
Seefeldt and Smock, “Marriage on the Public Policy Agenda.” For more on why these couples don’t wed—and there are often very good reasons for one or the other partner to back away—see Single-Rushton and McLanahan, “For Richer or Poorer?,” p. 4; Edin, “What Do Low-Income Single Mothers Say About Marriage?,” pp. 112-33. For more information on the Fragile Families study, see
http://crcw.princeton.edu/fragilefamilies/national report.pdf
.

24
The importance of promoting healthy conflict-solving skills for unmarried and divorced couples, not just couples about to marry, has been shown by Robert Emery’s twelve-year follow-up study of high-conflict, low-income couples randomly assigned to mediation and litigation. He found that an average of five hours in mediation resulted in dramatic improvements in nonresidential parent-child relationships twelve years into the future. Emery,
The Truth About Children and Divorce
(New York: Viking, 2004).

25
Andrew Hacker,
Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Woman and Men
(New York: Scribner, 2003), p. 29; Elizabeth Enright, “House Divided,”
AARP Magazine,
(July/August 2004).

26
Edin, Kefalas, and Reed, “A Peek Inside the Black Box”; Liana Sayer and Suzanne Bianchi, “Women’s Economic Independence and the Probability of Divorce,”
Journal of Family Issues
21 (2000); Krieder and Fields, “Number, Timing, and Duration of Marriages,” Table 9, p. 14. For international comparisons of the changing relationship between divorce and education, see Hans-Peter Blossfeld et al., “Education, Modernization, and the Risk of Marriage Disruption in Sweden, West Germany, and Italy,” in Mason and Jensen, eds.,
Gender and Family Change.

27
Stacy Rogers, “Wives’ Income and Marital Quality,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
61 (1999).

28
Stacy Rogers and Danielle DeBoer, “Changes in Wives’ Income: Effects on Marital Happiness, Psychological Well-Being, and the Risk of Divorce,”
Journal of Marriage and Family
63 (2001); Hiromi Ono, “Husbands’ and Wives’ Resources and Marital Dissolution,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
60 (1998); Janice Stiehl,
Marital Equality: Its Relationship to the Well-Being of Husbands and Wives
(Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997); Mary Hicks and Marilyn Platt, “Marital Happiness and Stability: A Review of the Research in the Sixties,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
32 (1970); Jane Wilkie, Myra Ferree, and Kathryn Ratcliff, “Gender and Fairness: Marital Satisfaction in Two-Earner Couples,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
60 (1998); Maureen Perry-Jenkins and Elizabeth Turner, “Jobs, Marriage, and Parenting: Working It Out in Dual-Earner Families,” in Marilyn Coleman and Larry Ganong, eds.,
Handbook of Contemporary Families: Considering the Past, Contemplating the Future
(Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2003); Scott Coltrane,
Family Man
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Paul Amato, David Johnson, Alan Booth, and Stacy Rogers, “Continuity and Change in Marital Quality Between 1980 and 2000,”
Journal of Marriage and Family
65 (2003).

29
For this and the next paragraph, see Amato, Johnson, Booth, and Rogers, “Continuity and Change in Marital Quality Between 1980 and 2000”; Matthus Kalmijn, “Father Involvement in Childrearing and the Perceived Stability of Marriage,”
Journal of Marriage and Family Life
16 (1999); Coltrane,
Family Man.