What if we wanted all Americans to be economically secure—what would that take? In an important article, “Uncoupling,” just published in the Spring 2021 issue of the Arizona State Law Journal, professors Naomi Cahn and June Carbone offer an answer: Benefits need to be uncoupled from marriage and employment.
It is perhaps the most fundamental tenet of Unmarried Equality that no one should have to marry in order to have access to basic benefits and protections. In their historically grounded, carefully argued review, Cahn and Carbone make the case that a whole new legal framework is needed to protect all Americans from economic vulnerability.
The Route to Economic Security in the Industrial Age
In the industrial era, married men were paid a “family wage,” which was supposed to be enough to support a family. In 1914, Henry Ford paid his married male workers twice the typical rate at the time. Cahn and Carbone include a telling quote from him, explaining why he paid married men double: “The man does the work in the shop, but his wife does the work in the home. The shop must pay them both.” Too bad, single men! But they weren’t the only ones paid less; married men did not get the extra money, either, if their wives worked outside of the home.
Women rarely got paid the family wage, though Ford did include some women who were single and providing for a family. The vast majority of women were supposed to get their economic needs met through marriage. If their husband got paid a family wage, then they were covered and so were the kids. According to the “separate spheres” ideology, it was fine for the men to be the ones in the paid workforce; the women had their own sphere, the domestic one.
Even for those who were married, the family wage did not protect against all possible eventualities that could undermine economic security. People who were elderly, disabled, ill, or widowed, for example, would still need financial support. In 1935, the Federal Social Security Act was passed. That gave employees old-age insurance. If they were married, their dependents through marriage had access to benefits, too. (Even today, Social Security still massively advantages people who are married or who were once married over people who never married.)
The death or incapacity of breadwinner parents could put their children at risk, so under the New Deal, Aid to Dependent Children was passed. Through the 1960s, the legislation allowed states to include moral character requirements. Most often, it wasn’t the White mothers who were denied access to benefits because of their allegedly faulty character.
After World War II, thanks in part to pressure from unions, more and more employers offered pensions and health insurance. Once again, the married workers got to include family members in their health care plans.
The federal government gave generous tax breaks to employers providing health insurance. It also directly funded Medicare, so seniors over 65 would have health insurance, as well as Medicaid, which is need-based, less generous, and administered by the states.
In the 1950s and 1960s, many people were protected, financially, by the system that was in place. Marriage was key to getting access to protections, but at the time, the percentage of people who married was quite high (about 95%) and the age at which people first married was lower than it had been before.
That, of course, didn’t last. But even during the peak marriage years, not everyone was protected. The White men were getting the best industrial jobs, and the mostly non-White domestic workers and farmworkers were excluded from the social insurance ushered in by the New Deal.
The “Family Wage” Isn’t the Answer to Economic Security in the Information Age
Since 1960, the percentage of adults in the U.S. who are married has been headed steadily downward. More people are staying single. Those who do marry are getting to it later and later. More children are being raised by single parents. A system that ties economic security to marriage is going to leave a lot of people financially vulnerable.
The family wage ideology, based on the breadwinner husband and homemaker wife, was imploding for lots of other reasons, too. Women, of course, were generally not all that excited about staying barefoot and pregnant. They wanted more, and in the service economy that emerged in the middle of the last century, their labor was needed more. Not all women shared equally in women’s growing economic independence, but those who did were freer to marry later or not at all, and to divorce if they did marry.
Tying economic security to job security was no longer working, either. Even for White men, secure jobs were disappearing. Automation and globalization reduced the need for manual labor. Workers were not helped as much by unions, once companies set out to undermine them, and the Supreme Court became hostile to them. Corporations increasingly hired temps or independent contractors, and men less often stayed with the same company over the course of their working lives. Secure pensions were getting replaced by riskier defined contribution systems.
Today’s information economy does provide some great jobs with great benefits for a select number of people. Huge numbers of other workers are stuck with low wages and lousy benefits, if they find any steady work at all.
Now What?
Under a familiar way of thinking about economic security, people are responsible for themselves. They can become financially secure by getting a good job and getting married. That model is not working, for the reasons I’ve described and many more that Cahn and Carbone document in their review.
In a different vision more suitable to our current information age, the government has an obligation to ensure everyone’s security. Benefits need to be uncoupled from marriage or employment. Universal health care would be a start, but more would be needed.
A few examples of how this can be done include universal basic income, job guarantees, and giving every adult “a capital stake in the U.S. economy,” such as shares in corporations.
Cahn and Carbone are not advocating any particular model. Rather, their argument is that we need a whole new legal framework for that provides economic security for all Americans—married and unmarried, of all ethnicities, whether healthy or ill, or young or old. No more trying to figure out who is deserving. We are all deserving.
[Notes: (1) The opinions expressed here do not represent the official positions of Unmarried Equality. (2) 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 Bella DePaulo
