Soulmates & Deficits
The State of Our Unions Report Looks at Marital Economics
by David Mills
Dan Quayle Was Right,” declared the cover of (of all places) The Atlantic, after the then-vice president had chided a popular television show for glorifying single motherhood, and been roundly abused for his unenlightened views by nearly every major publication in America and every network news show. In the article, published in 1993, a freelance scholar named Barbara Dafoe Whitehead showed with copious evidence from social scientists that divorce and out-of-wedlock births were demonstrably bad for children, countering the convenient myths that the children were happier when their parents pleased themselves and that they easily “bounced back” from divorce.
As the reality of the costs of marital breakdown began to overcome the mythology, the article brought public attention to a growing movement in support of marriage, which used the findings of social scientists of unimpeachable secularity. What had been an issue for the “religious right” became a concern for public intellectuals and policy-makers of all sorts, liberal and conservative. Not all of them, by any means, because such a self-serving mythology cannot easily be dethroned, but a surprising number.
Marriage & Recession
In 1997, Whitehead and Rutgers professor David Popenoe, author of Life Without Father, founded the National Marriage Project. Popenoe’s book, published by Harvard University Press, another unimpeachable source in the world of mainstream thought, proclaimed in its subtitle that “fatherhood and marriage are indispensable for the good of children and society.” This was, though once a truism, now a bold claim.
The project gathered an ideologically diverse group of scholars concerned for marriage, and soon began publishing an annual report called The State of Our Unions. The report came to include a review of the “Social Indicators of Marital Health and Wellbeing,” annually updating the statistics on matters like marriage, divorce, cohabitation, teenagers’ attitudes to marriage and family, “fragile families with children,” and “loss of child centeredness.”
The project is now headed by W. Bradford Wilcox, a University of Virginia sociologist (and occasional contributor to Touchstone). He edits the State of Our Unions with Elizabeth Marquardt, author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce and director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values.
The 2009 State of Our Unions, titled “Money and Marriage,” reflects “on the challenges and opportunities presented to the institution of marriage by the Great Recession,” the editors write in their introduction. The five papers—all written by scholars but accessible to others—attempt not only to measure the effect of the economy on marriage and divorce rates, but also to look at deeper issues, like the effects of family finances (including debt and savings) on marriages, the way husbands and wives should divide their financial responsibilities, and how the “Great Recession” affects the relation of husbands and wives. (The following reviews the five papers in the 114-page report, though not the very helpful second half, giving the “Social Indicators of Marital Health and Wellbeing.”)
Though the five writers disagree at various points, what they found, not surprisingly, is that marriage is much more than a matter of good feelings, but a very practical institution affected by a couple’s economic circumstances and affecting them in turn.
David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things. He edits the opinion page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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