Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  When President Nixon remarked in 1970 that the issue of gay marriage would have to wait until 2000, he picked that year to symbolize the inconceivable future. In fact, though, his prediction turned out to be remarkably accurate. In July 2000, Vermont made same-sex civil unions legally equivalent to marriage. In 2003, Canada legalized gay and lesbian marriage in two of its most populous provinces. On November 18, 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that its state constitution guaranteed equal marriage rights for same-sex couples.

  Then things really heated up. President Bush declared in his January 20, 2004, State of the Union address that the nation must “defend the sanctity of marriage.” The newly elected mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsome, indignant at the thunderous applause that followed the president’s announcement, directed city hall to start issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples on February 12. The first two people he invited to get their licenses were Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, lesbian activists who had been a committed couple for fifty-one years. “Why should my wife and I, who have been married for only two years, be entitled to more rights than they are after half a century?” Newsome asked assembled reporters.32

  Newsome’s directive provoked a storm of activity on both sides of the issue. More than thirty-two hundred gay and lesbian couples, many from out of state, flocked to San Francisco to get married. President Bush called for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting same-sex marriage. This spurred defiant local officials in New Mexico, New York, and Oregon to issue same-sex wedding licenses. Commissioners in one Oregon county decided they didn’t feel comfortable defying their state’s ban on same-sex marriage but didn’t feel ethical not doing so. Their solution was to stop issuing wedding licenses to anyone, same or opposite sex!

  Commentators who had been predicting a return to traditional marriage immediately changed their tune. Phyllis Schlafly claimed that “the gays have moved in to deliver the knockout punch” to marriage. The fundamentalist Protestant minister James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, put it even more starkly. “The institution of marriage is on the ropes,” he wrote in September 2003, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of antisodomy laws and Canada’s acceptance of same-sex marriage. “Barring a miracle,” Dobson warned in his April 2004 newsletter, “the family as it has been known for more than five millennia will crumble, presaging the fall of Western civilization itself.”33

  Opposition to same-sex marriage comes from a number of directions. For some Americans, denying gays and lesbians the right to marry is a matter of deep religious conviction. Others believe that legalizing gay and lesbian marriage would send the message to heterosexuals that it’s okay to raise a child without both a mother and a father in the home. Still others see gay marriage as the final nail in the coffin of traditional marriage and family life. Stanley Kurtz, writing in the August 4-11, 2003, Weekly Standard, an influential conservative magazine, predicted that gay marriage will “take us down a slippery slope to legalized polygamy and ‘polyamory’ [group marriage]. Marriage will be transformed into a variety of relationship contracts, linking two, three, or more individuals . . . in every conceivable combination of male and female.”34

  The religious debate over same-sex marriage rests on personal faith and can’t be settled by comparing the social science evidence, pro and con. But from a historical perspective, the claim that we stand on the brink of legalizing polygamy is a bit farfetched. In fact, the historical trend has been running in the opposite direction. Most countries where polygamy is still legal are moving to repeal those laws. Young women in cultures that practice polygamy are defying their parents and community leaders in order to make their own choices. It is also hard to imagine any government agreeing to pay pensions to three or four survivors instead of one or any employer paying medical insurance for three spouses.

  Some of the agitation on the issue of same-sex marriage strikes me as a case of trying to lock the barn door after the horses have already gone. The demand for gay and lesbian marriage was an inevitable result of the previous revolution in heterosexual marriage. It was heterosexuals who had already created many alternative structures for organizing sexual relationships or raising children and broken down the primacy of two-parent families based on a strict division of labor between men and women.

  In the short run, the United States is unlikely to join Belgium, the Netherlands, and Canada in legalizing same-sex marriage. By the end of 2004, forty-three states had passed statutes limiting marriage to a man and a woman, and eleven had enshrined this defiintion in their constitutions. The United States is one of the most sexually conservative countries in the industrial world. In 2002, 42 percent of Americans told pollsters that homosexuality was morally wrong. Only 16 percent of Italians, 13 percent of the French, and 5 percent of Spaniards felt that way.35

  Still, even in America attitudes toward homosexuality have changed immensely over the past fifteen years. Since the end of the 1990s support for same-sex marriage has bobbed back and forth between a low of 31 percent and a high of 40 percent. This is a minority of the population, to be sure, but half of the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds polled by USA Today in March 2004 supported legalization of gay marriage, compared with just 19 percent of respondents over sixty-five. And ironically, as views have polarized over the question of whether gays and lesbians should be able to use the word marriage to describe their relationships, the once-radical demand for same-sex civil unions has become a compromise position. “Let them have the same rights as me and my wife,” one businessman told me. “Just don’t call it marriage.”36

  Constitutional amendments or not, gay and lesbian families are not going back into the closet. One-third of female same-sex households and more than one-fifth of male same-sex households include biological children under eighteen. Eight U.S. states and the District of Columbia currently allow a child to have two legal mothers or two legal fathers. And 40 percent of the nation’s adoption agencies report that they have placed children with gay or lesbian parents. This is a reality that won’t go away. In 2002 the American Academy of Pediatrics called for legalizing partner adoptions in families where the biological parent of a child lives with a same-sex partner. In 2004 the American Psychological Association endorsed same-sex marriage.37

  Only a small minority of gays and lesbians are interested in marrying at this point. But those who do seek that right are not the main threats to the stable male breadwinner family system or the primacy of marriage in social and personal life. Divorce, single parenthood, and cohabitation among heterosexuals have already reshaped the role of marriage in society and its meaning in people’s lives. Marriage has also been fundamentally transformed by the behavior of married people who will never divorce and by single people who would never consider having children out of wedlock.

  The reproductive revolution has shaken up all the relationships once taken for granted between sex, marriage, conception, childbirth, and parenting. People who could not become parents before can now do so in such bewildering combinations that a child can potentially have five different parents: a sperm donor, an egg donor, a birth mother, and the social father and mother who raise the child. On the other hand, some married couples use new reproductive technologies to avoid having children altogether. Seen in this light, a childless marriage is just as much a challenge to the tradition that children are the central purpose and glue of a wedded relationship as is a gay union.

  The many young people who delay marrying until their late twenties or early thirties also contribute to the diminishing role of marriage in organizing social and personal life. Today, in contrast with medieval Europe and colonial America, most young people go through an extended period when they do not live with and are not under the control of their parents or any other married people. However, as singles they can exercise most of the political and economic privileges of adulthood when they turn eighteen and twenty-one.

  This large pool of single youth, along with the extension of t
he life span, has contributed to a stunning explosion of solitary living in Western societies. More than one-quarter of all U.S. households now contain only one person. At various times and in various places in history, rates of nonmarital sex, divorce, cohabitation, or out-of-wedlock childbearing have been higher than they are today.38 But never before have so many people lived alone. And never before have unmarried people, living alone or in couples, had the same rights as married adults. The spread of solitary living and cohabitation reduces the social weight of marriage in the economy and polity, creating tastes, habits, expectations, and voting blocs that are not tied to the role of wife or husband.

  In the 1950s married couples represented 80 percent all households in the United States. By the beginning of the twenty-first century they were less than 51 percent, and married couples with children were just 25 percent of all households. For the first time ever, there were more single-person households than those with a married couple and children. Married persons were still a majority of the workforce and of the home buyers in 2001, but unmarried individuals were gaining fast, accounting for 42 percent of the workforce and 40 percent of home buyers.39

  Single men and women today also exercise much more personal discretion about whether and when to get married. In the 1950s the average age of marriage was also the age at which most people actually married. Today the average age of marriage is the product of some very early marriages, some very late ones, and lots of variations in between. European demographer Anton Kuijsten comments that rather than ordering from “the standard life course menu, as people used to do,” an individual now “composes his or her history à la carte.” And marriage, “the obligatory entrée” during the 1950s, “has become the optional dessert.”40

  Marriage was once part of the credentialing process that people had to go through to gain adult responsibility and respectability. It was like completing high school today. Few young people go to high school because they expect it to be a deeply fulfilling experience. They go because they need that piece of paper to get entry-level jobs or gain admittance to the more selective and prestigious credentials provided by college.

  Marriage used to be like that. It was the gateway to adulthood and respectability and the best way for people to maximize their resources and pool labor. This is no longer the case. Marriage still allows two people to merge resources, divide tasks, and accumulate more capital than they could as singles. But it is not the only way they can invest in their future. In fact, it’s a riskier investment than it was in the past. The potential gains of getting married need to be weighed against the possibilities offered by staying single to pursue higher education or follow a better job. And the greater likelihood of eventual divorce reinforces the appeal of leaving your options open while investing in your own personal skills and experience.

  Moving lockstep through a series of predictable transitions is no longer a route to personal security. Each man and woman must put together a highly individualized sequence of transitions in and out of school, work, and marriage in order to take advantage of shifting opportunities and respond to unexpected setbacks—a “do-it-yourself biography.”41

  All these changes have profoundly and irreversibly transformed modern marriage. This revolution is not confined to the United States. Despite cultural variations, almost all industrial countries have experienced similar changes. Divorce rates tripled in France and Holland and quadrupled in Britain between 1970 and 1990. As in the United States, divorce rates began to fall in Western Europe in the 1990s, but rates of marriage fell even faster. By the late 1990s 40 percent of all births in France and Britain were to unmarried women. In Iceland, in 1999, more than 60 percent of all births were to unwed parents.42

  The trend toward solitary living is likewise widespread. In 1950 just 10 percent of all households in Europe contained only one person. Five decades later one-person households made up a third of all British households and 40 percent of Swedish households. Even in Greece, which had the lowest percentage of one-person households in Europe at the end of the twentieth century, such households represented almost 20 percent of the total, twice the 1950 average for Europe as a whole.43

  Changes in marital norms are spreading even to countries that were hold-outs in the 1980s and early 1990s. In Spain, Italy, and Japan, the number of two-earner marriages has soared since the mid-1990s. Although divorce is still stigmatized, there has also been a huge fall in the rate of marriage, suggesting we are looking at a massive historical tide that, when blocked in one direction, simply seeks another place to flow. More than half of Spanish women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine are single. The rate of marriage in Italy is much lower than in the United States. Japan shares with Scandinavia the distinction of having the highest percentage of unmarried women between age twenty and forty of anywhere in the world.44

  Recognition of same-sex unions is another global trend. Between 2000 and 2004 same-sex marriage was legalized in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Canada. Countries as diverse as Spain, Iceland, Germany, Hungary, South Africa, Portugal, Taiwan, and Argentina gave same-sex couples many of the same legal rights as married heterosexuals.45

  Finally, the role of women has been transformed in the past thirty years. Between 1970 and 1997 women’s representation in the total labor force increased in every sector of the globe.46 About the only place where it was rolled back during the 1990s was in Afghanistan, where the Taliban regime forced women out of the schools and jobs they had entered under the previous Soviet-backed governments.

  The change in women’s work patterns has been both a cause and an effect of the revolution in fertility, not only in the industrialized countries but in the developing world as well. In the late 1960s a woman in the poorer countries of the world typically had six children. Today the average is fewer than three. In fact, demographers now project that the world’s population will begin to decline before 2050.47

  The “Disestablishment” of Marriage

  Despite all these changes, marriage is not doomed. In most countries, heterosexual marriage still has a privileged legal status. In the United States, for example, it confers more than a thousand legal and tax benefits unavailable to single people. And for most Americans, marriage is the highest expression of commitment they can imagine. Americans are more likely than Europeans or Japanese to tell pollsters they value marriage highly, and they still marry at higher rates than most other industrial countries.

  Nor have people lost respect for the marriage vows. Even as divorce and nonmarriage have increased, our standards for what constitutes a “good” marriage have risen steadily. The percentage of people who believe it is okay to cheat, lie, or keep secrets in a marriage has fallen over the past forty years. Many couples work hard to enrich their relationship and deepen their intimacy, with a dedication that would astonish most couples of the past. Marriage as a relationship between two individuals is taken more seriously and comes with higher emotional expectations than ever before.48

  But marriage as an institution exerts less power over people’s lives than it once did. In the 1930s Mae West quipped: “Marriage is a great institution. But I ain’t ready for an institution.” My grandmother was profoundly shocked by that comment. Most people today would not be. Now people want to live in a relationship, not an institution.

  And unlike my grandmother’s generation, they no longer have to live in an institution. In most Western countries there has been a blurring of the distinctions between the legal responsibilities and rights of married and unmarried individuals. Domestic partnership laws have been adopted by governments or employers in most Western countries, and in some non-Western ones as well. These grant unmarried couples the same insurance benefits, inheritances, and other legal privileges as married partners.

  Nearly half the five hundred largest companies in America now extend benefits to unmarried partners who live together. My husband works for an airline that allows unmarried employees to designate one individual as their domestic travel partner, with
the same rights to free travel as a spouse. That person can be a boyfriend, girlfriend, nephew, or neighbor. Some of the most tradition-bound golf clubs now offer family memberships to unmarried men and women.

  In France and Canada, an individual can establish a legally recognized caregiving or resource-pooling relationship with any other person and receive many legal and financial benefits that used to be reserved for married couples. Two sexual partners can take advantage of this arrangement. So can two sisters, two army buddies, or a celibate priest and his housekeeper. The United States has resisted extending marriage’s legal benefits this far. But it has joined the international trend giving children the right to support and recognition from both parents, whether or not they were ever married. Marriage has lost its legal monopoly over the rules organizing people’s personal rights and obligations.

  Few of these changes in the rights and privileges of marriage were imposed by “activist judges.” In some cases, extending marriagelike rights was a legislative response to pressure from unmarried heterosexual partners or gays and lesbians. In other cases, businesses had to respond to the 42 percent of their employees who were unmarried. The courts generally stepped in only when faced with urgent new problems posed by the already existing changes in living habits—for example, when an unmarried man walked away from a long-term relationship, refusing to help support his children or the woman who sacrificed her career to do the child rearing and housekeeping in the partnership.

  In response to such problems, courts in the United States and some Western European countries began to rule that cohabiting heterosexual partners who built up substantial assets over the years must divide them fairly, even if all the assets were in one person’s name. And many attorneys and judges have come to support legal recognition for same-sex unions because they are already having to deal with the division of assets and similar issues in de facto gay and lesbian divorces.