Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Unwedded Bliss   [Mona Charen]

The New York Times has analyzed Census Bureau data to suggest that 51 percent of American women are now living without husbands. Reporter Sam Roberts provides some of the reasons: 1) women tend to outlive their husbands so some of the women are widows; and 2) women are marrying later in life and living with partners for longer periods of time. But Roberts then adds this:

. . . and after a divorce, [women] are more likely than men to delay remarriage, sometimes delighting in their newfound freedom.

Is that reporting or editorializing? How does he know that’s the reason divorced women are less likely to remarry? That may be the case for some, but isn’t it also possible that the husband market is tighter at age 45 or 50 than at age 25 or 30? The story then features two photos of smiling single women, one who has had two live-in boyfriends and another who is divorced. The caption under the picture of the divorced woman reads “A gentleman asked me to marry him and I said no. I told him, ‘I’m just beginning to be me. Don’t take that away.’”

This is pure 1970s drivel, when we were all encouraged to free ourselves of the confining terms of bourgeois marriage and “be ourselves.” Since then we’ve learned that both sexes (to say nothing of children, who go largely ignored in this story) are far better off in marriage than outside of it.

The Times account, by focusing on upper middle class women, misses one of the most significant sociological facts about marriage in America – its class implications. Kay Hymowitz has an excellent new book about this, Marriage and Caste in America. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe have also drawn attention to it. Here’s an excerpt from their study, The State of Our Unions:

For the non college-educated population, unfortunately, the marriage situation remains gloomy. Marriage rates are continuing to decline, and the percentage of out-of-wedlock births is rising. In the year 2000, fully forty percent of high-school drop-out mothers were living without husbands, compared with just twelve percent of college-grad mothers. Because of the many statistically well-documented benefits of marriage in such areas as income, health, and longevity, this gap is generating a society of greater inequality. America is becoming a nation divided not only by educational and income levels, but by unequal family structures.

The New York Times cheerleads for social trends that may make some upper West Side New York women happier, but leaves children, and most other women in America, far worse off.

01/16 10:47 AMShare