Unlike many homemakers, this woman would probably not face deep financial stress if her marriage fell apart. When an affluent male breadwinner marriage breaks up, courts generally recognize the important contribution a nonworking wife makes in such unions and assign more financial value to a wealthy wife’s homemaking and child rearing than to that of a woman married to a low-earning husband.
The story is very different for low-earning male breadwinner marriages. In many of these families, a woman stays home because she cannot afford to go out to work. Studying one rural county in the United States, researchers Margaret Nelson and Joan Smith found that when a husband earned a wage that was barely enough for the family to scrape by, the family usually didn’t have enough money to pay for things like child care or a second car or suitable clothes for the workplace that would allow the wife to work and contribute additional income to the family. Also, the kinds of jobs available for the wife typically did not pay enough for the family to recoup those costs.37
Today low-income families in which only the husbands work for wages are at a much greater disadvantage now than were families who adopted this arrangement in the early twentieth century. At that time there were still many ways for wives to supplement the family livelihood outside the official labor market. Today, a wife who stays home may be able to avoid spending money, but she’s rarely able to earn money by selling homemade products, sewing, or taking in boarders. At best she can put in a stint selling cosmetics or cookware to friends and neighbors. But this rarely provides long-term income.
It is also harder than in the past for a stay-at-home wife to save substantial money by self-provisioning, because it is now often cheaper to buy clothing and canned goods at cut-rate outlets than to sew and can yourself. The old equation has changed. Most families no longer save money by keeping wives at home. They lose by not having wives in the workplace, where women have more opportunities than in the past to earn decent wages.
The internal dynamics of low-income families in which wives stay home have also changed. Housewives today are rarely impressed if a husband occasionally offers to dry the dishes, and the male breadwinners in these marriages don’t get the Father Knows Best respect from their wives and children that men with higher earnings and more secure jobs might receive. There are new tensions in these marriages because the prerogatives that used to go with being the male breadwinner in a male-dominant culture are no longer uncontested.
In most middle-class marriages, arrangements in which the husband works and the wife stays home are short-lived adjustments to the birth of a child. But changing expectations give even these short-term male breadwinner marriages a new twist. Most contemporary couples expect to share breadwinning and child-rearing roles more equally than their parents or grandparents did. When they adopt a more “traditional” division of labor after the birth of a child, this often destabilizes their relationship and increases their stress rather than relieving it. A wife who formerly worked outside the home feels isolated, lonely, and undervalued. Her husband doesn’t understand why she isn’t more grateful that he is putting in extra hours at work to support the new addition to the family. When such a couple adopts a traditional division of labor after the birth of a child, both parents usually end up dissatisfied. The more traditional the roles, the more dissatisfaction.38
Many women enjoy staying home while their children grow up and therefore postpone even starting a career until the kids leave home. But this too can have unexpected consequences down the road. Often a wife who starts working late stays on the job after her husband retires. But working women with retired husbands tend to be more dissatisfied with their marriages than any other type of wife.39
The impact of a couple living together without being married is also changing faster than many people realize. Fifty years ago, if a couple decided to live together outside marriage, they were choosing an unconventional course that pigeonholed them into a tiny and suspect segment of the population. Their lives would likely be much less stable than those of people who followed the accepted rules.
Today, however, there are many different kinds of cohabitation. Young people still in college or just beginning to establish job credentials may live together to reap some of the benefits of married life, like income pooling, companionship, and expectations of fidelity, even though they see the relationship as temporary. There are also people who consciously choose cohabitation as an alternative to marriage because they don’t want their commitment to be a matter of legal record. For example, many seniors lose economic benefits if they remarry. In addition, an older couple, each with grown children, may not want to complicate separate inheritance arrangements.
Some cohabiting couples have philosophical objections to involving the state in their relationship. Some just don’t see a need to get married. A growing minority of cohabiting couples have relationships that are hard to distinguish from marriage. They may live together for decades and raise children together. Many other people move in together as a step toward marriage. Indeed, in a majority of marriages today the couple has already lived together.40
Lumping all these different situations together to make overarching generalizations about “the” consequences of living together is a mistake. Cohabiting couples, for example, are more likely, on average, to experience infidelity or domestic violence than married couples. But again we have to disentangle cause and effect. Cohabitation is sometimes an uneasy compromise between one partner who wants to marry and one who doesn’t. Or an individual may hesitate to marry because the partner has a history of infidelity, a drinking or drug problem, or a wicked temper. These problems are not caused by the couple’s failure to marry. They are the reasons a couple doesn’t get married. There is no evidence that a violent man will stop abusing his partner just because she agrees to marry him.41
In the United States and Britain, living together before marriage is associated with an increased risk of divorce later on. That’s not the case in France or Germany. Because attitudes toward unmarried sex are still more disapproving in the United States and Britain than in France or Germany, it may well be that Americans and Britons who decide to live together before marriage are already more open to nontraditional arrangements, including divorce, than the general population. In Germany, where fewer people disapprove of premarital sex, cohabitation before marriage is associated with a slightly lower risk of divorce down the line.
There are many differences in cohabitation patterns across Western Europe and North America, but in general unmarried couples who live together divide housework more evenly than married couples, while men who live with their partners before marrying them do more housework than men who move directly into marriage. Perhaps men who are more egalitarian and more likely to share housework are also more likely to cohabit. But some researchers maintain that because living together does not come with the same package of traditional gender scripts as does marriage, it is easier for a woman to get her partner to do more housework.42
All these new patterns in marriage, cohabitation, and childbearing also create new categories of stepfamilies. Some stepfamilies don’t involve marriage at all. Sometimes even a first marriage by both partners creates a step-family because one or both partners come with children they had outside marriage. There are also big differences among traditional stepfamilies. Do the wife’s or husband’s children by a former marriage live in the household? Are children from the new marriage living with children from a previous marriage? Each of these stepfamilies faces special issues not covered by any list of “time-tested rules.”43
When people try to figure out their best shot at a stable, happy marriage—or, for that matter, a contented single life—they may get frustrated trying to balance the differences in what makes men and women happy or successful in marriage. For example, a woman who holds conventional ideas about gender roles and marriage is, on average, less likely to divorce than a woman who is less traditional. But a woman with traditional views also has a slightly low
er chance of marrying in the first place. A wife whose attitudes become more egalitarian during the course of her marriage often reports a decline in her marital happiness and an increase in conflict.44
For men the patterns are reversed. Men who have traditional gender attitudes are more likely to marry, but also more likely to end up divorced, than men with more egalitarian views. Husbands whose attitudes become more egalitarian during the marriage report increased happiness and fewer marital problems.
Some commentators believe men and women are becoming ever more different in their values and desires. The subtitle of a recent book by political scientist Andrew Hacker was The Growing Gulf Between Women and Men. Hacker argues that men and women today are less willing to make the concessions and take on the obligations that make marriage work.45
But less willing to make concessions and take on obligations than when? For thousands of years every wife was compelled to acknowledge her husband as her lord and master, and he had the right to beat her if she disobeyed or talked back to him. Until the 1970s a husband could force his wife to have sex whenever he wanted. He had complete authority over family finances and, under most legal codes, didn’t even have to consult her about where the couple lived. Until the mid-twentieth century, many families in Europe and America had two separate standards of living: one for the husband that included meat and beer and a lower one for the wife and children.46
Conversely, for thousands of years women chose suitors by the size of their landholdings or inheritance prospects instead of their individual qualities and often made cruel sport of them behind their backs. Wives who had no choice but to accept their husbands’ domination in the big things might retaliate in thousands of little ways that made their husbands miserable.
I don’t see a growing estrangement or widening gender gap in what women and men want from each other. Most men and women are moving in the same direction in their values. It’s true that women’s attitudes, behaviors, and expectations are changing faster than men’s, and this can lead to marital conflict or make some people wary of getting married at all. But most men are much more accepting of equal rights for women than their fathers were and even than they themselves used to be.
Of course some still cling to older norms of marriage, especially in the abstract. In 1998 the sixteen-million-member Southern Baptist Church approved a code for marital conduct that harks right back to the 1950s. The code says a husband should “provide for, protect, and lead his family.” A wife is to “submit herself graciously” to her husband’s leadership and “serve as his helper in managing their household.”47
But even many American women who think they accept this definition of marriage are unlikely to practice it every day. So some men resort to mail-order bride catalogs, seeking women from countries where females still have lower expectations of equality. More than five thousand women from the Philippines come to the United States each year in this capacity. Thousands more come from the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and other impoverished regions. One online matchmaking organization assures its clientele that these “are not the cosmopolitan women that threaten you with divorce each and every time they do not get their own way.” Another Web site promises: “She is the weaker gender and knows it.”48
But most American men no longer want a weaker, subservient partner. Men may not have the same exact definition of equality as women, and they may still have trouble living up to their own ideals, but there is a steady convergence between men and women in their support for mutual respect, fidelity, honesty, and shared tasks.
Take the question of who does how much around the house. Wives still do considerably more household work than husbands, and men usually overestimate what percentage of the chores they do. It is tempting for women to interpret this exaggeration as a sign of male hypocrisy. But I think it reflects a gigantic change in social values. Until fifty years ago, men typically under-reported how much household work or child care they did because they did not want to admit to doing “women’s work.” It is a huge step forward that men think they should say they do more than they actually do. Moreover, even if men are not doing as much as they think, they’re doing a lot more than they used to. During the 1970s and 1980s wives cut back on time spent in routine cooking and cleaning, while husbands increased the time they devoted to those chores. During the late 1980s and the 1990s both husbands and wives increased the time they spent with their children. Men today are much more likely than in the past to report that they enjoy cooking and cleaning, and this is especially true for men under thirty.49
So I don’t think that men and women are growing farther apart in what they want. In sociologist Kathleen Gerson’s interviews with young adults who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, she found that only one-third of the young men wanted a “traditional” marriage in which the man was the main breadwinner and the woman did most of the nurturing. There are still more young men than women who prefer male breadwinner marriages, but the gap has been closing. Most young people of both sexes want good jobs with the flexibility to have fulfilling family lives and loving marriages in which each spouse shares child rearing and breadwinning.50
The big problem doesn’t lie in differences between what men and women want out of life and love. The big problem is how hard it is to achieve equal relationships in a society whose work policies, school schedules, and social programs were constructed on the assumption that male breadwinner families would always be the norm. Tensions between men and women today stem less from different aspirations than from the difficulties they face translating their ideals into practice.
Gerson found that when the demands of daily living and the organization of work make it hard to live out egalitarian ideals, men and women have different fallback positions. Of the young men who wanted egalitarian marriages, 60 percent said that if this was out of reach, they would choose some kind of modified male breadwinner marriage, in which they earned the bulk of family income and their partner took care of most family obligations. The reaction of young women, however, was strikingly different. Eighty percent of them told Gerson they would rather go it alone than be in a traditional or even a modified traditional marriage.
In practice, most women continue to compromise their egalitarian ideals. From 1996 to 2000 Peggy Orenstein interviewed women across the country about their hopes and dreams. She found that many, even as they dreamed about an equal marriage, “were tracking themselves into lower-paying, more flexible jobs than their male peers,” assuming that they would have to do most of the child rearing. Yet she also found that many women said they would consider “bypassing the middle man” and having a baby on their own if they hadn’t found a man they considered good marriage material by the time they were thirty-five or forty.51
A significant historical reversal is occurring in the attitudes of men and women toward marriage. During the first three-quarters of the twentieth century women needed and also wanted marriage much more than men did. Men were more reluctant to enter marriage than women and more likely to complain of its burdens. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, men began to rate marriage much more highly than in previous decades, and by the end of the century more men than women said that marriage was their ideal lifestyle.52
There has also been a subtle but momentous gender shift in attitudes toward having children. Most women have always loved their children. But women were also more aware of the sacrifices involved in child rearing and much more interested than their husbands in limiting the number of children they bore. This is not surprising since through most of history a woman not only risked death in childbirth but bore most of the burdens of child rearing, even cutting back on her own food, but not her husband’s, if a new child arrived and money was tight.53
This began to change in the twentieth century, and by the end of the century many men had discovered the joys of involved parenthood. Because they were more involved, however, they began to feel the restrictions children place on one’s freedom. As men’s invo
lvement in child rearing relieved their responsibilities, women became less likely to say that children restrict parental freedom but men became more likely to do so.54
Once upon a time almost all men and women accepted that their lives had to be a package deal: You get married and then you have kids. Now men and women can customize their life course. They can pick and choose whether they want to marry at all, when they want to marry, whether they want children, how many children they want, and when they want them. Some males and females have become more involved parents and partners than ever before, while others now say that they are not interested in being parents or partners at all.
For most people, there are pros and cons to each of these decisions. And those are now different from the pros and cons for men and women in the past. Men must grapple with new questions: “Do I really want children if I have to do half the work of raising them?”; “Am I willing to stay involved with my children if I’m not still with the mother and getting the benefits of having a wife?”55
Women, on the other hand, grapple with different questions: “What does marriage really offer?”; “What are its costs compared to its benefits?”; “How would marriage be a help to me in raising any children I choose to have?”
The answers that men and women come up with vary from individual to individual, as do the consequences of the choices they make. The democratization of marriage has been messy. People with more choices have more chances to make bad decisions as well as good ones. When a couple has to negotiate because the husband cannot simply impose his will, there is a chance that negotiations will break down. When both partners can have equally important but conflicting career trajectories or life goals, even the most loving couple may come to a parting of the ways. The bad news is that the institution of marriage will never again be as universal or stable as it was when marriage was the only viable option. But that is also the good news.
Marriage, a History Page 40