“The decline in marriage – people spending a smaller portion of their lives married, on average – is part of a larger global transition toward gender equality.”
–Philip N. Cohen, Enduring Bonds
“Marriage is the foundation of a successful society.” So proclaimed the 1996 welfare reform act. Since then, more than a billion dollars has been spent to promote marriage (just the “one man, one woman” variety) among the poor.
Conservative think tanks and organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the Institute for American Values, the Bradley Foundation, and the Templeton Foundation have poured copious resources into the goal of persuading more people to get married. They’ve funded meetings, symposia, reports, writings for the popular media, ideologically-inspired research, and programs to educate poor people about marriage.
More Marriage and More Marriage Promotion or More Education and More Jobs?
In several chapters of his new book, Enduring Bonds: Inequality, Marriage, Parenting, and Everything Else that Makes Families Great and Terrible, University of Maryland Professor of Sociology Philip N. Cohen tells the disturbing story of the rise of the marriage promotion movement. Marriage promotion, Cohen explains, “is mostly about convincing (educating, coaching, coercing) poor people to marry other poor people.” The assumption is that “if poor people changed their attitudes (norms, culture) about marriage – if they put more priority on the importance of marriage and worried less about the economic qualities of the match – there would be more marriage. And, marriage promoters say, this would reduce poverty, inequality, violence, and abuse.”
Cohen takes on those claims in Enduring Bonds. For example, in one set of analyses, he looks at various factors linked to child poverty, starting with marriage. The children of married parents are in fact less likely to be poor than the children who do not have married parents: 9% compared to 15%. But then Cohen presents similar analyses of parents’ education and employment. Those factors turn out to be more consequential than marriage. Children living with a college graduate parent are less likely to be poor than those not living with a college graduate parent, 5% compared to 17%. The results are most dramatic for employment. Children living with a parent with full-time year-round employment are far less likely to be poor than those living with a parent who does not have that employment, 7% compared to 40%.
In the marriage education and promotion programs such as the Healthy Marriage Initiative and the Responsible Fatherhood Initiative, couples sometimes spend hours in various training sessions, such as those designed to teach them communication skills. The programs have been evaluated systematically and the results are clear. The billion dollars spent on these efforts – money taken from the federal welfare program – have “unequivocally showed total failure.”
An example is a program that was tested in eight locations. Fifteen months afterwards, the couples who participated were no more likely to be married or still together than the couples in the control group.
Marriage Is Headed in One Direction Only: Down
In the big picture, in the U.S. and around the world, marriage trends have been headed in the exact opposite direction that the marriage promoters have been aiming for. For example, between 1950 and 2010, rates of marriage in the U.S. have declined precipitously. In the four decades after 1970, there was “an unprecedented drop of more than 50 percent.”
In many nations all around the world, the same declining rate of marriage since the 1970s has been occurring. Even in countries in which nearly everyone eventually marries, people are spending more years of their life single because the age at which they first marry is increasing. As Cohen notes about the slipping rates of marriage, “there are as yet no cases of major developed countries reversing this trend.”
A Different Take on Marriage and Inequality
The marriage promotion industry has spent decades trying to persuade us that the ills of the nation, and perhaps the world, can be blamed on the decline of marriage, and that a reversal of that trend will be the solution. Cohen, though, draws from data from 125 nations to document something very different. He looked at the relationship between the proportion of time that people spend married and the degree of gender equality in each country (using a composite measure from the UN). He found that less time spent married is linked to greater gender equality.
Those data were the basis of the quote at the top of this article: “The decline in marriage – people spending a smaller portion of their lives married, on average – is part of a larger global transition toward gender equality.” Marriage, Cohen notes, “is most universal in poorer societies, and also those with less gender equality.”
Links between society-level trends, such as average time spent married and gender equality, are just suggestive. Methodologically, they don’t tell us about causality the way a true experiment would. Different ways of explaining the results can usually be generated. To Cohen, differences in women’s education and their participation in the workforce are especially important.
As an example, Cohen compares China and India. Marriage is nearly universal in both nations; about 98 percent of women are married by their early thirties. In India, though, the average age at which women first marry is about 20, whereas in China, it is about 24. In those four extra years that Chinese women stay single, they invest more in their education, they spent more time in the labor force, and they are less likely to have children than their Indian counterparts. China ranks 40th in the world in gender equality; India ranks 130th. “Early, universal marriage,” Cohen suggests, “is a key barrier to gender equality.”
Solutions: Persuade Single People to Marry or Create a More Equitable Society for Everyone, Regardless of Marital Status?
To the movers and shakers in the marriage promotion movement, societal problems such as growing economic inequality are the fault of single mothers. They are the ones raising boys who will become criminals and girls who will get pregnant while they are still teens and, of course, unmarried. (For some debunking of those kinds of claims, see the brief book, Single Parents and Their Children: The Good News No One Ever Tells You, as well as the relevant sections of Enduring Bonds.)
Cohen, of course, has a whole different view:
“Single mothers are the visible expression of the historical trend toward both gender equality and more diverse family structures, which have had the effect of decentering the married, man-woman, breadwinner-homemaker nuclear family.”
Attempts to get more people to marry have not worked, and Cohen does not believe they ever will. Considering “the apparent impossibility of trying to redirect the ship of marriage,” he argues, “we have to do what we already know we have to do: reduce the disadvantages accruing to those who aren’t married, or whose parents aren’t married.” [Emphasis is mine.]
Just imagine if someone in Congress seriously proposed one of Cohen’s approaches to reducing the disadvantages of the unmarried:
“One obvious solution is to take money away from married high-income people and give it to single low-income people. With all the benefits married people get – many of them through no special efforts of their own, but rather as a result of their social status at birth, race, health, good looks, legal perks, or lucky breaks – it seems reasonable to tax marriage…”
Cohen knows how unlikely that is, and suggests an alternative, which is slightly less provocative: “taxing wealth a little more.”
A single person can dream.
P.S.: Maybe Also of Interest
Enduring Bonds also includes a shocking chapter on the backstory of the publication and promotion of the shoddy study by Mark Regnerus, which purported to show that same-sex marriages were bad for children. I have been in academia for decades. I don’t consider myself a naïve person, but I never thought that such a thing was even remotely possible. If you are interested in this sorry episode, that chapter alone is worth the price of the book.
There is also a section on how, once the marriage promoters failed in their efforts to block same-sex marriage, they tried to co-opt progressives into becoming cheerleaders for marriage. (I wrote about this in my first blog post for Unmarried Equality.)
Professor Cohen also debunks the argument that married people are better off than single people, and so if single people got married, they would be better off, too. He takes a different approach than I’ve been taking, as, for example, in Marriage vs. Single Life: How Science and the Media Got It So Wrong.
Finally, for more on the unearned advantages enjoyed by people who marry, see “Check your marital privilege.”
[Notes: (1) The opinions expressed here do not represent the official positions of Unmarried Equality. (2) The comment option on the UE website has been invaded by spammers, so I have disabled comments for now. I’ll post all these blog posts at the UE Facebook page; please join our discussions there. (3) For links to previous columns, click here.]
About the Author: Bella DePaulo (PhD, Harvard), a long-time member of Unmarried Equality, is the author of Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After and How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century, among other books. She writes the “Living Single” blog for Psychology Today and the “Single at Heart” blog for Psych Central. Visit her website at www.BellaDePaulo.com and take a look at her TEDx talk, “What no one ever told you about people who are single.”
About Bella DePaulo
