Marriage, a History (54 page)

All these changes create trade-offs and tough choices. A woman has a slightly better shot at a stable marriage if she is a full-time homemaker, for example, but she still faces a much higher chance of divorce than she did fifty years ago. And when a male breadwinner marriage does break up, a homemaker is far more likely to be impoverished by the divorce and find it harder to regain her financial footing than a woman who worked prior to the divorce.
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Every man and woman must weigh these pros and cons according to their individual values and options. And contrary to what many marriage promotion activists believe, these dilemmas cannot be sidestepped by making divorce less accessible.

The enactment of no-fault divorce laws reduced the bargaining power of a partner who does not want to end the marriage. This has often worked against women, especially economically vulnerable full-time homemakers. But when a wife can get a divorce over her husband’s objections, that
increases
a woman’s bargaining power in a marriage the husband wants to maintain.
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The availability of unilateral divorce provides an important escape mechanism in seriously troubled marriages. Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that in states that adopted unilateral divorce, this was followed, on average, by a 20 percent reduction in the number of married women committing suicide, as well as a significant drop in domestic violence for both men and women. Criminologists William Bailey and Ruth Peterson report that higher rates of marital separation lead to lower homicide rates against women. But a woman’s right to leave a marriage can also be a lifesaver for
men.
The Centers on Disease Control reports that the rate at which husbands were killed by their wives fell by approximately two-thirds between 1981 and 1998, in part because women could more easily leave their partners.
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Thankfully, most unhappy marriages don’t lead to murder or suicide, even where divorce is hard to get. In most cases, divorce is not a lifesaver, but a traumatic process that inflicts painful, sometimes long-lasting wounds on everyone involved. It is especially stressful for children. Although 75 to 80 percent of children recover well and function within normal ranges after divorce, children from divorced families have twice the risk of developing behavioral and emotional problems as children from continuously married families.
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But children in high-conflict marriages are often better off if their parents divorce than if they stay together. Children also suffer when exposed to constant and chronic low-level friction in a marriage, such as parents not talking to each other, being critical or moody, exhibiting jealousy, or being domineering.

A well-functioning, continuous, and happily married two-parent family provides an optimal environment for children. But a well-functioning marriage with two cooperating parents is not always what you get. When it’s not, divorce can be an escape hatch for the children as well as the adults. Sociologist Paul Amato estimates that divorce lowers the well-being of 55 to 60 percent of the children involved. But it actually
improves
the well-being of 40 to 45 percent.
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It is not very helpful to give people hard-and-fast personal advice, far less to pass sweeping laws, on the basis of the averages obtained from such variable outcomes.

Just as the impact of divorce varies from family to family and even from sibling to sibling in the same family, the differences
within
male breadwinner marriages, two-earner marriages, cohabiting partners, divorced couples, and unwed parents are now often greater than the differences
between
those categories.

Consider the experience of living in a male breadwinner family today. Most married couples with children have both partners in the labor force, but male breadwinner families are not about to disappear. Some couples organize their entire married lives in that pattern. Others adopt the male breadwinner form for a few years while the children are young. In 2002 about one-quarter of all children under age fifteen lived in families where the mothers did not work for pay.

Here too, however, the dynamics are shifting. And here too policy makers and pundits have not kept up with the change. In the 1950s two-earner couples were concentrated in lower-income families, scrambling to earn enough to survive. In nearly all middle-class and most working-class families, wives did not have paid jobs, at least until the children left home. Today, by contrast, stay-at-home mothers are concentrated in the poorest and richest rungs of the population. The only two segments of the population in which male breadwinner families predominate are the bottom 25 percent of the income distribution and the top 5 percent.
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The fact that both groups have large numbers of families in which wives do not work outside the home for pay does not in any way imply that the dynamics of family life are similar for the richest and poorest families. In high-income male breadwinner marriages, couples can reap big advantages from gender specialization. Managers and top executives with stay-at-home wives generally earn more than their counterparts with working wives. The wife’s activities free her husband to focus on his job, and she can cultivate the social networks that enhance his status.
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Wives in such marriages usually have the resources and time to develop skills that earn them respect from their communities and their husbands even though they don’t bring in income.

Once on a flight back from Europe my seat mate was an executive whose wife had never worked outside the home. He was a trove of information about Italian architecture and art. “How did you ever learn so much about art?” I asked. “I’m completely ignorant,” he replied. “I’m just repeating what my wife told me. She gets to learn all about art,” he said, “because I take care of the money. And I get the benefit of her knowledge when we travel.” The man’s wife is a prominent patron of the arts who probably never feels devalued as “just a housewife.”

Unlike many homemakers, this woman would probably not face deep financial stress if her marriage fell apart. When an affluent male breadwinner marriage breaks up, courts generally recognize the important contribution a nonworking wife makes in such unions and assign more financial value to a wealthy wife’s homemaking and child rearing than to that of a woman married to a low-earning husband.

The story is very different for low-earning male breadwinner marriages. In many of these families, a woman stays home because she cannot
afford
to go out to work. Studying one rural county in the United States, researchers Margaret Nelson and Joan Smith found that when a husband earned a wage that was barely enough for the family to scrape by, the family usually didn’t have enough money to pay for things like child care or a second car or suitable clothes for the workplace that would allow the wife to work and contribute additional income to the family. Also, the kinds of jobs available for the wife typically did not pay enough for the family to recoup those costs.
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Today low-income families in which only the husbands work for wages are at a much greater disadvantage now than were families who adopted this arrangement in the early twentieth century. At that time there were still many ways for wives to supplement the family livelihood outside the official labor market. Today, a wife who stays home may be able to avoid spending money, but she’s rarely able to earn money by selling homemade products, sewing, or taking in boarders. At best she can put in a stint selling cosmetics or cookware to friends and neighbors. But this rarely provides long-term income.

It is also harder than in the past for a stay-at-home wife to save substantial money by self-provisioning, because it is now often cheaper to buy clothing and canned goods at cut-rate outlets than to sew and can yourself. The old equation has changed. Most families no longer save money by keeping wives at home. They lose by not having wives in the workplace, where women have more opportunities than in the past to earn decent wages.

The internal dynamics of low-income families in which wives stay home have also changed. Housewives today are rarely impressed if a husband occasionally offers to dry the dishes, and the male breadwinners in these marriages don’t get the
Father Knows Best
respect from their wives and children that men with higher earnings and more secure jobs might receive. There are new tensions in these marriages because the prerogatives that used to go with being the male breadwinner in a male-dominant culture are no longer uncontested.

In most middle-class marriages, arrangements in which the husband works and the wife stays home are short-lived adjustments to the birth of a child. But changing expectations give even these short-term male breadwinner marriages a new twist. Most contemporary couples expect to share breadwinning and child-rearing roles more equally than their parents or grandparents did. When they adopt a more “traditional” division of labor after the birth of a child, this often
destabilizes
their relationship and increases their stress rather than relieving it. A wife who formerly worked outside the home feels isolated, lonely, and undervalued. Her husband doesn’t understand why she isn’t more grateful that he is putting in extra hours at work to support the new addition to the family. When such a couple adopts a traditional division of labor after the birth of a child,
both
parents usually end up dissatisfied. The more traditional the roles, the more dissatisfaction.
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Many women enjoy staying home while their children grow up and therefore postpone even starting a career until the kids leave home. But this too can have unexpected consequences down the road. Often a wife who starts working late stays on the job after her husband retires. But working women with retired husbands tend to be more dissatisfied with their marriages than any other type of wife.
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The impact of a couple living together without being married is also changing faster than many people realize. Fifty years ago, if a couple decided to live together outside marriage, they were choosing an unconventional course that pigeonholed them into a tiny and suspect segment of the population. Their lives would likely be much less stable than those of people who followed the accepted rules.

Today, however, there are many different kinds of cohabitation. Young people still in college or just beginning to establish job credentials may live together to reap some of the benefits of married life, like income pooling, companionship, and expectations of fidelity, even though they see the relationship as temporary. There are also people who consciously choose cohabitation as an alternative to marriage because they don’t want their commitment to be a matter of legal record. For example, many seniors lose economic benefits if they remarry. In addition, an older couple, each with grown children, may not want to complicate separate inheritance arrangements.

Some cohabiting couples have philosophical objections to involving the state in their relationship. Some just don’t see a need to get married. A growing minority of cohabiting couples have relationships that are hard to distinguish from marriage. They may live together for decades and raise children together. Many other people move in together as a step toward marriage. Indeed, in a majority of marriages today the couple has already lived together.
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Lumping all these different situations together to make overarching generalizations about “the” consequences of living together is a mistake. Cohabiting couples, for example, are more likely, on average, to experience infidelity or domestic violence than married couples. But again we have to disentangle cause and effect. Cohabitation is sometimes an uneasy compromise between one partner who wants to marry and one who doesn’t. Or an individual may hesitate to marry because the partner has a history of infidelity, a drinking or drug problem, or a wicked temper. These problems are not caused by the couple’s failure to marry. They are the reasons a couple doesn’t get married. There is no evidence that a violent man will stop abusing his partner just because she agrees to marry him.
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In the United States and Britain, living together before marriage is associated with an increased risk of divorce later on. That’s not the case in France or Germany. Because attitudes toward unmarried sex are still more disapproving in the United States and Britain than in France or Germany, it may well be that Americans and Britons who decide to live together before marriage are already more open to nontraditional arrangements, including divorce, than the general population. In Germany, where fewer people disapprove of premarital sex, cohabitation before marriage is associated with a slightly
lower
risk of divorce down the line.

There are many differences in cohabitation patterns across Western Europe and North America, but in general unmarried couples who live together divide housework more evenly than married couples, while men who live with their partners before marrying them do more housework than men who move directly into marriage. Perhaps men who are more egalitarian and more likely to share housework are also more likely to cohabit. But some researchers maintain that because living together does not come with the same package of traditional gender scripts as does marriage, it is easier for a woman to get her partner to do more housework.
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All these new patterns in marriage, cohabitation, and childbearing also create new categories of stepfamilies. Some stepfamilies don’t involve marriage at all. Sometimes even a first marriage by both partners creates a step-family because one or both partners come with children they had outside marriage. There are also big differences among traditional stepfamilies. Do the wife’s or husband’s children by a former marriage live in the household? Are children from the new marriage living with children from a previous marriage? Each of these stepfamilies faces special issues not covered by any list of “time-tested rules.”
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