According to Atlantic writers Christina Campbell and Lisa Arnold, “Marital privilege pervades nearly every facet of our lives.” They found that health, life, home, and car insurance all cost more for single people, and report that “It is not a federal crime for landlords to discriminate against potential renters based on their marital status.” Looking at income tax policy, Social Security, healthcare, and housing costs, Campbell and Arnold found that “in each category, the singles paid or lost more than the marrieds.” At some point in their calculations, the authors confess, “We each wanted to run out and get a husband, stat.”14
While single women purchase their own homes at a higher rate than single men, when compared to married adults, the unmarried lag far behind married couples. According to U.S. News & World Report, single people have “the lowest income levels . . . asset levels . . . [and] home ownership rates compared to other family structures.”15
Anita Hill, who, as a law professor, specializes in issues of housing inequality, argued that housing costs are among the biggest issues facing unmarried women. “We can decide that we’re going to be single,” Hill said, “but we have to figure out how we’re going to be able to put a roof over our heads. We’re making eighty cents for every dollar a man makes. So there is a real issue with more and more women spending over 50 percent of their income on housing.” Economic forces, Hill said, push women “into less independent relationships.”
The Price of Motherhood
Even within wealthy populations, the economic advantages of solo working life for women begin to melt when those women have children, both with partners and on their own: When they are forced to take time away from work and divide their attention in ways that are both physically and emotionally demanding, in ways that society still doesn’t expect parenthood to be demanding of men.
Women who are pregnant or have young children find it harder than childless workers to switch jobs, harder to get hired. Sociologist Shelley Correll did a study in which she submitted fake resumes for high-status jobs. When the resumes included clues that the female applicant was a parent, the applicant was only half as likely to receive a call back about the job.16 Correll has found that women earn approximately five percent less per hour, per child, than their childless peers with comparable experience, while sociologist Joya Misra argues that motherhood is now a greater predictor of wage inequality than gender on its own.17
The economic ramifications of having children are of course felt most keenly by unmarried mothers; a staggering 42 percent of people in families headed by single mothers live below the poverty line. One statistic bandied about in 2013 as evidence of how quickly women have advanced was a Pew Research Center finding about how nearly 40 percent of mothers are now the primary breadwinners in their families. But only 37 percent of those breadwinning mothers were women who out-earned husbands; this group enjoyed a median family income of $80,000. The rest—63 percent—were single mothers with a median family income of just $23,000.18
Forty-eight percent of first births in the United States in 2013 were to unmarried women; for those who haven’t finished high school, it was eighty-three percent.19 About 60 percent of American women who have their first babies before they’re thirty have them out of wedlock.20 Forty-one percent of all births are to unmarried women, a number that is four times what it was in 1970.21
Both poverty and single motherhood have historically been racialized in the public imagination, in part thanks to Moynihan-era assumptions about which Americans were having babies outside of marriage, and in part because the racialized Reagan-era caricaturing of so-called welfare queen black mothers has persisted as a talking point for people like Rick Santorum, who said in the 2012 campaign trail, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” And it’s true that the country’s history of racism and the multigenerational cycle of African-Americans being cut off from the kinds of economic securities—union-protected jobs, colleges, housing—that would allow them to build wealth has left a disproportionate number of blacks far more likely to be impoverished than their white counterparts.
However, the splintering of the American economy over the past forty years has diversified poverty, as well as the middle-income working classes, in which the incidence of unmarried motherhood is becoming most common. In 2000, around 22 percent of white households were run by single parents, the same percentage of black households that were single-parented when Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his report.22
Tim Casey, senior staff attorney at Legal Momentum and director of its Women & Poverty Program, says “There’s this idea that all single mothers are black, which is not true.” Though it remains true that the rate of single parenthood is higher among black women than among Hispanic women, which is in turn higher than among white women, Casey points out, “There is a high fraction of single mothers in all racial groups. In fact, there is growth in single parenthood in all high-income countries. It’s just the new reality.”
For their 2005 book, Promises I Can Keep, about poor single mothers, sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas spent years studying eight very low-income urban neighborhoods in Philadelphia and New Jersey, sampling Puerto Ricans, whites, and African-Americans. In a lecture at the University of Michigan, Edin said that there were only very slight distinctions between these groups: domestic violence was most common among whites and Puerto Ricans (in part because African-Americans in their study were less likely to live together); male incarceration rates were higher amongst African-Americans, unsurprisingly, given that the Bureau of Justice Statistics has estimated that nearly one-third of black men born at the turn of the century will be incarcerated at some point in their lives; infidelity was equally common amongst the groups. Mostly, Edin said that she and Kefalas were “absolutely astonished at how few racial and ethnic differences we found.”23
In the eyes of some social conservatives, economists, and libertarians, including Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, and 2012’s book on the class divide, Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010, an aversion to marriage has, over the past forty years, spread from blacks to whites like some kind of sickness. Economist Isabel Sawhill, author of the 2015 book, Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage, has written that, “What we are seeing is alternative living arrangements that have spread from the poor, and especially poor blacks, to the rest of society. The consequences for children and for society have been far from benign.”
There’s truth in this, especially the first part of it. As with so many social developments for women that first stemmed from economic necessity—from working for wages to walking on the street unaccompanied to wearing shorter, lighter clothing—the possibility of not marrying, and of having children out of wedlock, developed amongst people for whom marriage was no longer the most economically beneficial option.
The nation’s history has included many iterations of the privileged white co-option of black, and often poor, habits and behaviors, which, when performed by white populations, have drawn different kinds of attention. When white flappers danced to black jazz beats, they were culture-shifting rebels; when, in the mid-sixties, white women busted out of their domestic sarcophagi and marched back into workforces in which poor and black women had never stopped toiling, when Betty Friedan echoed Sadie Alexander by suggesting that work would be beneficial for both women and their families, that was when the revolution of Second Wave feminism was upon us. It has long been the replicative behaviors or perspectives of white women—and not the original shifts pioneered by poor women and women of color—that make people sit up and take notice and that sometimes become discernible as liberation.
In part, surely, it’s because power is always more rigidly patrolled than powerlessness: When money and status are at stake, lines around who may access and transmit them (white men) and who is barred from them (women and people of color), remain firm. Marriage, historically, has been one of the be
st ways for men to assert, reproduce, and pass on their power, to retain their control. For those with fewer resources to protect, where less power is at stake, there has been a bit less watchfulness. There has also, of course, been more of an incentive for those who are struggling to find ways to survive, even if it means improvising new familial and coupling patterns. But it’s only when more privileged people see how these new, more liberating, forms of behavior might disturb the power structure that people take a different kind of notice.
“The illegitimacy rate is now getting very large even across the board, among the white people,” the antifeminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly told NPR host Michel Martin in 2012. Schlafly, like Murray and others, blames the increased number of single parent homes on welfare and social assistance programs that she believes allow women to substitute government for husbands (never mind that such programs have been radically cut during the years in which marriage rates have plummeted). “When Lyndon Johnson instituted lavish welfare,” Schlafly said, “they gave the money only to the woman and that made the father irrelevant.” It’s all very grim, she concluded, because “we know that most of the social ills come out of mother-headed households.”24
This last point is where the complicated interplay between economic disadvantage, greater independence for women, and increasingly diverse models for family structure get boiled down to two misleading messages.
The first is that the evaporation of the early marriage model leads to greater poverty. “Less marriage means less income and more poverty,” is how Sawhill put it in an interview with The Economist. She’s right only if one assumes that the imagined marriage partners in question would bring in additional income or domestic support, rather than cost additional money and time to feed, clothe, house, and clean up after.
The second and more spurious argument is that the American mothers who either choose to remain single or who find themselves unmarried are the generators and perpetuators of poverty; that they, and not the economically rigged system in which they make their way, are to blame for their families’ economic circumstances. This is the message embedded in the now ubiquitous calls to tackle poverty not through stronger social-welfare policies, but through the promotion of marriage, and more than that, of early marriage.
As Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary for George W. Bush, put it in a 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed25 unsubtly headlined “How to Fight Income Inequality: Get Married,” in place of increased government support to impoverished Americans, “a better and more compassionate policy to fight income inequality would be helping the poor realize that the most important decision they can make is to stay in school, get married and have children—in that order.” Robert Rector, one of the architects of the 1996 Welfare Reform legislation that made welfare harder to qualify for and assistance more temporary, wrote in 2012 for the conservative Heritage Foundation that marriage is “America’s strongest anti-poverty weapon.”
None of this makes much sense given that, in developed countries outside the United States, rates of poverty for single mothers are much lower than they are in the United States, and that this country’s high child poverty rates extend across the board and include children living in married households. As Matt Bruenig at Demos wrote in 2014, “high child poverty in the U.S. is not caused by some overwhelming crush of single mother parenting. The lowest of the low-poverty countries manage to get along in the world with similar levels of single mother parenting just fine. . . . We plunge more than 1 in 5 of our nation’s children into poverty because we choose to.”26
But this reality doesn’t prevent legislators from pouring both concern and funding into promoting marriage, and not social assistance, as the answer.
Claiming that marital decline drives up the rates of poverty and welfare dependence, Rector, who, in his Heritage Foundation piece asserted that “[Government] should clearly and forcefully articulate the value of marriage” and bemoaned that “under current government policies . . . marriage is either ignored or undermined,” knows better than anyone that marriage has been anything but ignored by the government in recent decades.27 Alongside conservative lawmakers, including Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, and Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, Rector pushed George W. Bush in 2003 to enact the $300 million Healthy Marriage Initiative, a national program that diverted money from welfare programs in order to provide marriage education and encouragement to low-income populations.
Under the Bush administration, the project was nurtured by Department of Health and Human Services “marriage czar” Wade Horn, a psychologist who, according to Mother Jones, as the head of the National Fatherhood Initiative had once defended the Southern Baptist Convention’s recommendation that “A wife is to ‘submit’ herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband” and “serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.”28 Horn himself has cited Bible verse explaining that, “The husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church.”
Initially, the Healthy Marriage Initiative worked primarily through religious institutions, offering marriage seminars and classes to low-income people. It was renewed in 2010 under the Obama administration, though in its new incarnation, the focus shifted from faith-based intervention, and away from the enforcement of religiously grounded ideas about wifely submission, toward boosting employment alongside relationship advice.
Still, the Healthy Marriage Initiative has been shown to have little to no impact on marriage rates, which have continued to decline, or on divorce rates, which have remained relatively stable through the two presidential administrations that have now paid more than $800 million for it.29
The only public-policy approaches that have ever shown signs of boosting marriage rates and marital longevity haven’t had anything to do with promoting marriage as an institution, but rather with providing people better financial resources in advance of, and to better facilitate, marriage. Among them was an expansion of welfare, from 1994 to 1998, when the Minnesota Family Investment Program allowed people to keep their welfare benefits, as opposed to cutting them off, even after they found work.30 With the added economic security, the divorce rate for black women in the state fell by 70 percent.31
In approximately the same years, the New Hope Project was implemented in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An antipoverty program, New Hope provided full-time workers whose earnings were below 150 percent of the federal poverty level with income supplements, offered those unable to find work community-service jobs and subsidized health and childcare.32 In a study of marriage rates, researchers found that 21 percent of never married women who participated in the New Hope Project were married five years later, compared to 12 percent of never-married women who did not participate.33 Income and wage growth also rose for participants, while depression decreased.
It seems clear that a government address of poverty is likeliest to make marriage more accessible to those who want it, while programs designed to shove marriage down the throats of Americans least equipped to enter it stably have little impact. If politicians are concerned about dropping marriage rates, they should increase welfare benefits. It’s that simple. If they are concerned about poverty rates? They should increase welfare benefits. When asked what the single biggest step the country needs to take to address the needs of poor single mothers, Tim Casey from Legal Momentum said, “Step one: reforming welfare reform. Step two: reforming welfare reform. Step three: reforming welfare reform.”
But Congress at the start of the twenty-first century isn’t showing much interest in that, voting instead to reduce food stamp benefits, which disproportionately affect the ability of single mothers to feed themselves and their children. In 2014, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul suggested capping welfare benefits for single women who have children out of wedlock, telling a luncheon that “married with kids versus unmarried with kids is the difference between living in poverty and not.”34 What Paul did not acknowledge is tha
t, in his state, there are fewer never-married parents living below the poverty line than there are married parents living below the poverty line.35
In North Carolina in 2013, Republican state senators proposed a bill that would require couples to submit to a two-year waiting period before divorcing.36 And, in 2012, Republican State Senator Glenn Grothman, from Wisconsin, tried to pass a bill that cited single parenthood as a factor that contributed to child abuse. Happily, these legislative attempts have failed, but they showcase what’s particularly dangerous about the combination of malevolence toward single women and a policy-enforced class chasm that leaves poor unmarried women vulnerable.
The irony, as Slate’s Amanda Marcotte has observed, is that conservatives are surely maddest at and most threatened by powerful single women—the privileged, well-positioned women who earn money, wield influence, enjoy national visibility, and have big voices: Anita Hill, Murphy Brown, Sandra Fluke, Lena Dunham. But there’s only so much they can do to stop the surging power of those women, while there remain plenty of terrifying ways for them to take their aggressions out on poorer populations. While Republicans may not be able to stuff threatening wealthy women “back in the kitchen,” Marcotte writes, “they can make life even harder for the single mother working two jobs who lives next door.”37
The Reversal of Order/Disorder
The Family Council, an Arkansas-based group associated with the socially conservative, anti-abortion group Focus on the Family, suggests that “there are four steps you can take in a specific order to reduce the chances your family will ever live in poverty. They are: 1. Graduate from high school. 2. Get married. 3. Have children after you are married. 4. Stay married. If you do those four things in that order, the chances you and your children will live in poverty are reduced by 82%.” In 2013, the Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer, in a column about the decision of affluent Kim Kardashian and Kanye West to have a child out of wedlock, noted that “in more affluent, educated communities, adults know—and make this clear to their children—that the path to success includes education, work, marriage, and kids. In that order.” Reimer cited W. Bradford Wilcox at the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project, who called this education-work-marriage-kids progression “the success sequence.” The foundation of a civil society. A specific order.
All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation Page 23