Marriage Blues Pdf

[Brian Scarano]

Butagain, the lesson is not that college educated people are wiser and stay married and people without college degrees are somehow less wise and do not stay married. A lot of things were different in 1960s: for start, it was a whole lot harder to get divorced, and women had far less access to credit and capital. But college education was also far less neatly associated with class position. A whole lot of people without college degrees, particularly but not exclusively white people, had access to the stability of the middle class.

You can look at the rise in divorces over the course of the 1960s - 1980s as the result of the growing cultural destigmatization of divorce, and you can look at the increasing age of marriage and childbirth as the result of birth control, legal access to abortion, and increasing numbers of women going to college. But you can also think of both of these shifts as a secondary effect of the gradual destabilization of the portion of the middle class without college degrees.

I'm going to have to sit with that for awhile. My marriage, while far from perfect, is solid, and has actually gotten better during quarantine (it helps that my husband has made dinner every single evening of our marriage - other then going out or take out - that REALLY helps, plus he is an excellent co-parent). But where this hits home is the fact that while I KNOW my academic career is dead, and I know and exactly WHY it's dead (because of my academic training), and I TELL myself (and others) that my academic career is dead, I can't quite stop believing that if I just work harder and smarter and keep working the problem, that it will somehow, magically, not be dead. It's fucking pathological.

Thank you very much for this great piece! I think women (all of us) subconsciously understand that the kind of "strong independent women" that society purportedly celebrates is the women who carry an enormous burden silently and make it look absolutely effortless, and the moment it stops looking effortless we know it suddenly becomes a terrible inconvenience to everyone around them and erodes the way others perceive them. So if you have ever experienced anything like that in your life (and many women probably have), it really dictates (or destroys) the vim and vigor you're able to muster for striking out on your own.

This is the midweek edition of Culture Study \u2014 the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.

If you read any of the hundreds of advice columns that have found renewed life on the internet, you\u2019ll recognize a certain genre of question. It comes from a woman, almost always married, who\u2019s describing a partner\u2019s shitty behavior. They often narrativize the behavior in a way that simultaneously asks the reader to understand that something is wrong (my partner/my family/my coworker is the asshole) while also framing the behavior in a larger framework of excuse (maybe I am the asshole?). Men do occasionally submit to these columns, but I find this genre almost always comes from women \u2014 because women have been taught, through various ideological machinations, that if there is something wrong in their lives it is almost certainly their fault, and if it is their fault, they must personally seek ways to fix it.

Earlier this week, Ashley Nicole Black articulated a corner of my fascination with this genre. As she put it, \u201Cdo women not know being single is an option?\u201D (For the unfamiliar, \u2018AITA\u2019 is a Reddit forum where people tell their grievance and ask \u2018Am I The Asshole?)

People do realize that being single is an option \u2014 but, depending on their background, they are often abjectly terrified of it. Why, in a culture that ostensibly celebrates strong, independent women, does this fear remain? It\u2019s about money and keeping things together for the kids, of course \u2014 but it\u2019s also about a lot more than that.

I\u2019ve spent the last week immersed in research about the financial and cultural realities of being unmarried or single. I\u2019ll be expanding on the financial reality at length for the next in my series for Vox , but I\u2019ve been fascinated by the scholarly sub-discipline of \u201Cmarriage studies,\u201D a mix of largely legal and sociological work on who gets married, when and why they do, and whether they stay that way.

If this sounds true to you, and true of the people who surround you, then chances are high that you\u2019re a middle-class college-educated person who is largely surrounded by other middle-class college-educated people. Because the aggregate trend obscures some much more complicated \u2014 and telling \u2014 trends in marriage, divorce, and single parenthood. While divorce rates have continued to decline for those with college degrees since no-fault divorce was first introduced, for people without a college degree, divorce rates leveled off and then began rising in the early \u201890s. For women, the chances of your first marriage lasting 20 years goes up significantly the more education you have.

There are also significant differences in marriage outcome depending on race: for Asian women who were married between 2006 and 2010, the probability of their first marriage lasting 20 years was nearly 70%. For Hispanic and White women, the probability was around 50%. For black women: 37%. A reminder, though, that all of this data is intersectional. You can\u2019t look at those numbers and extrapolate that \u201CBlack women are less likely to stay married because they are Black.\u201D The more accurate conclusion: systemic and historic racism has made it so that Black women are less likely to go to college, but also less likely to have family wealth that affords a robust financial safety net in case of emergency, or provide a down payment on a house, or cushion the blow of job loss or economic downturn, all of which make marriages more likely to last.

Those financial factors also make it less likely for people to get married in the first place. Census data from the 2015 American Community Survey showed that 26% of poor adults between the ages of 18 and 55 were married \u2014 compared with 39% of working class adults and 56% of middle and upper class adults. Sixty percent of poor Americans are single, compared to 50% of the working class and 40% of the upper and middle class. This wasn\u2019t always the case: back in 1960, rates of marriage and divorce were roughly the same amongst the college educated and those without a degree.

And here\u2019s where I think it starts to get really interesting. These trends, now decades in the making, have pulled conceptions of marriage and its purpose in two directions. Legal scholars June Carbone and Naomi Cahn argue that the fetishized Leave it To Beaver middle class marriage of the 1950s was the result of 1) the widescale movement of industry, e.g. work, out of the domestic sphere and into an office and/or factory, which resulted in 2) a less hierarchal understanding of marriage, with the woman as \u2018queen\u2019 of her domestic domain, entrusted with the care and nurturing of children and the suburban home.

We might look back on these marriages and see them as regressive, but as a whole, they were significantly less utilitarian and more companionate than what had come before. Men and women weren\u2019t necessarily equal, but they were two parts of the whole. This understanding flourished in the post-war period, when the United States\u2019 brief industrial dominance, the G.I. Bill, robust unions, and tax structures and regulation reduced income inequality to its lowest levels in record history. Some of the eagerness to enter marriage was, in truth, an eagerness to enjoy the fruits of the middle class: a home in the suburbs, a washing machine, and, if you were a man, a wife to cook you dinner. At the same time, the lack of contraceptives, legal abortion, or culturally acceptable cohabitation made it so that even if you weren\u2019t inclined towards that dream, if you wanted to have sex, you didn\u2019t have a lot of other choices.

As I\u2019ll talk about at length in my piece for Vox, so many of our safety nets \u2014 both public and private, from social security to healthcare \u2014 were set up to favor people who configured themselves in this way. Power pooled in these middle-class marriages. But then the sexual revolution, the feminist movement, the decline in strict religious observance, and the rise of no-fault divorce began to reconfigure the middle-class family into something far more dynamic. Divorces led to remarriages, step-siblings, half-siblings, and custody battles. A whole swath of people dropped out of the middle class entirely, many of them newly divorced mothers whose standard of living, according to one 1976 study, fell between 29 to 73 percent. And as Suzanne Kahn explains in Divorce, American Style, building on that statistic, \u201Ceven many divorced women who had never before identified as feminists turned to the burgeoning women\u2019s movement for an explanation for the situation in which they found themselves and for the tools with which to deal with it.\u201D

3a8082e126