HarperCollins Publication Date: March 2002 Hardcover ISBN: 0066209838

The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families
By James Q. Wilson
March 2002

Once a reliable thread in our social fabric, marriage is now a convenient promise easily made and just as easily broken. Long taken for granted, it is now under attack, and the result is devastating. This book exposes the patterns that have allowed us to degrade marriage and shows how we can reclaim it.

Everyone knows and almost everyone regrets the difficulties into which marriage has fallen in the United States. Single-parent families hurt children, even after the effect of low income is taken into account. Divorces hurt many children, even after the predivorce family conflict is considered. Children born to a cohabiting couple are generally worse off than those born to a married couple.

But these problems are not unique to the United States, nor are they simply the result of the cultural changes from the 1960s. Out-of-wedlock births and single-parent families are now commonplace in every English-speaking country--not only the United States, but also Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom--and in most Scandinavian ones, such as Denmark and Sweden. By contrast, the breakdown of marriage is much less a problem in Belgium, Greece, Japan, Korea, and Spain and in most of Latin America.

Paying a Price

These differences suggest a theory: Maybe there is something about English-speaking and northern European countries that predisposes them to weak families. One thing these nations have in common is not a particular welfare plan but a special historical experience. They are all culturally the product of the Enlightenment, that powerful movement in Western civilization that gave us liberty, democracy, free markets, and dazzling scientific and technological success. But just as Milton Friedman found that there was no such thing as a free lunch, it is also the case that there is no such thing as a free culture. The West has paid a price for its extraordinary achievements, one that arises from the profound sense of individualism and personal freedom that we all enjoy.

That price is the weakness of communal attachments, especially of the family. Once, the family was held by law, tradition, and religion to be the indivisible atom of human existence. Now it is held to be an arrangement between two people that is of value only if its members happen to enjoy it.

This change was the result of an important fact about English society: The private ownership of land, going back at least to the year 1300, coupled with a widely shared religious view that a marriage was valid only if the man and woman had freely consented to it (even if there was no formal wedding!), led to the growth of a highly individualistic view of social arrangements. That view produced no large changes until many centuries had passed, but by the 1800s those changes started to appear, especially in the United States, with the expanded freedom of women and the growing concern over disadvantaged children.

In time it became easier to get out of a marriage than out of a mortgage. In fact, it seems hard to get into a marriage in the first place. More than one-fifth of all white children and more than half of all black ones live without a father. Almost all births to teenage girls living in big cities are to unmarried females.

This racial difference, of course, needs explanation. For decades many thinkers either denied that it was a problem (single-parent families are simply an "alternative lifestyle") or said that it arose from the economic costs and racial hostility blacks encountered when they moved to big cities.

But of course that is not how older black scholars, such as W. E. B. DuBois and E. Franklin Frazier, viewed the matter. To them, the problem arose out of slavery. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan said the same thing in the mid-1960s, he was reviled. But now we know that DuBois, Frazier, and Moynihan were essentially correct. Slavery, that vast and horrible system of domination that bought people from Africa, sold them in the United States, and denied to them any legal protections save those motivated by the self-interest of the plantation master, produced here--and in Barbados, Jamaica, and everywhere there was race-based slavery--a high proportion of children born to women who either had no husband or could not live long with the ones they had.

The Problem with Welfare

American welfare policy made matters worse for both blacks and whites. For centuries, children born out of wedlock in England and Europe had no rights and few resources. French women sent their offspring to foundling homes; English ones hoped theirs might be adopted by a sympathetic family. It all appeared rather cruel, but it was based on the widespread belief that a bastard (and that is what they were called) could not be supported by the community without encouraging more bastardy, and in any event, one without a legally recognized father could have no claim on land or other property.

As part of the Progressive movement in America, that began to change when reformers persuaded states to adopt mothers' pension laws. Starting in 1911, the states began to give small sums to the mothers of fatherless children if the moms were "otherwise proper guardians." That typically meant that they were once married but their husbands had been killed in a war or industrial accident. As late as 1931, over 80 percent of the Illinois women getting money were widows.

When the federal government took over the financing of aid to dependent children in 1935, it did not include any rules about suitable homes or decent mothers, leaving it to the states to set these rules. And most states kept the mothers' pension requirements. But under the combined effect of sympathy for children and professional child-care theories, the rules slowly changed so that the money began to go to never-married women.

For a long while many writers argued that this caused no increase in dependency, but we now know, thanks to skilled work by contemporary scholars, that this was not true. Welfare increased significantly the chances that a poor young woman would have a child without first getting married. The result was poverty for the mother and hardship for the child.

These changes accelerated in the 1960s, but they did not begin then. The real beginning can be found in the growing view that what one did with one's life was a personal choice, not the result of a cultural command. When I was young there were a lot of shotgun marriages. A high-school boy who impregnated a girl had two choices--marry her or join the navy before her angry brothers caught up with him. And she had a choice--get married or put the child up for adoption. Today shotgun marriages have almost vanished--not because shotguns are in short supply, but because stigma is.

There are, of course, other explanations for these developments. One of the best known is that of William Julius Wilson, who calls attention to the shortage of employed young black men available to young black women. He is right; there is such a shortage--but of all black men, not just employed ones. And as Christopher Jencks and others have pointed out, marriage rates have declined for employed as well as unemployed black men. Furthermore, other scholars have noted, the shortage of jobs among Mexican-American men has not produced single-parent families at anything like the rate observed among African Americans.

If the problem is a cultural one that has emerged over many centuries, it is futile to talk about government programs that will "solve" it. As Moynihan once remarked, "If you expect government programs to improve families, you know more about the government than I do."

The Importance of Culture

It is the culture more than the government that has weakened families. Many American scholars have argued that jealousy is an unhealthy emotion (even though jealousy keeps men and women together); many American schoolteachers rebel against the idea of teaching courses about marriage and its value (even though by any measure marriage makes both men and women better off); many American politicians are preoccupied with getting welfare mothers to work (even though getting them married would help them more than would making them work); some writers endorse what David Blankenhorn has called the postmarriage society, in which marriage would no longer be "privileged" and instead the state would ensure that unmarried adults took care of children, paid for, where necessary, by state subsidies. These are by no means simply the views of the political Left. Judge Richard Posner has argued that Sweden offers the best hope for America because there cohabitation is on its way to replacing marriage (and the "puritanical attitudes" American marriages foster).

In the nineteenth century, England and America made a vast effort to protect their cultures by private efforts endorsed (but rarely funded or governed) by the state. It was the Victorian period in which people who were claiming wider rights were made part of a community that emphasized temperance and child care, encouraged churches to run orphanages, and (rightly) believed that religious people were more likely to marry than irreligious ones.

That effort was remarkably successful in holding together a society that was beginning to enhance individual rights. Anyone expecting society to do that again, however, must confront the fact that Americans, especially our elites, regard "Victorianism" as bad idea, one that supposedly imposed silly rules on behalf of vague abstractions.