Marriage and Income Inequality

Turn on any major news network, particularly conservative news outlets, and one will find dozens of talking heads bemoaning the erosion of the traditional family. They say that the family is under attack and this degradation is the cause of many of society’s harms. The intelligent ones will point to the high out-of-wedlock births being a significant cause of urban poverty. They will show that rising divorce rates risk unstable households for a child to grow up in. Some will try and demonstrate that the inclusion of homosexuals into the institution of marriage will hurt society – although the data to support this statement is murky at best. As Coontz showed, a plurality of Americans believes that “the family” is in trouble; many will idealize an earlier time. However, when people stop and realize what reverting to a simpler time means they quickly backtrack to generalizations. A substantial majority of Americans support women entering the workforce. While gay rights are still a contentious issue, public opinion is swaying at a historic rate.

What we find, when looking at the evolution of the institution of the family, is that the family will always shape itself to best suit the people who use it. The family molds itself under the pressure of other social constraints. To give an example, Coontz sights women’s increasing labor force participation as leading to a rise in the reliance on day-care centers and less time spent with children. In the colonial era when communities could consist of a couple dozen families, the family itself exerted a great impact on the society. However as western culture transitioned through the industrial revolution to large cities and then through the technological revolution to globalization, the family has been dwarfed by the sheer scale of society. Now the family is the smallest institution and as such it finds itself coping with and molding to the impacts of other larger institutions. According to Cherlin, as part of this adaption we see marriage (once a tenant of the family) becoming deinstitutionalized. He says that childbirth occurs much more frequently outside wedlock and the cohabitation is quickly filling in the role marriage once served.

Yet I do not see marriage fading away, not even close. Ironically enough, Cherlin has fallen into the very critique Coontz outlines at the beginning of her chapter; “our recurring search for a traditional family model denies the diversity' of family life, both past and present, and leads to false generalizations about the past as well as wildly exaggerated claims about the present and the future” (Coontz, 148). Cherlin seems to believe marriage only serves symbolic purposes but this simply is not true. If you are married you can visit your spouse at the hospital when they are in intensive care. Filing joint income tax returns can save a couple thousands of dollars. If your spouse dies you can receive their Social Security and Medicare benefits. None of this is possible in the status quo without marriage. Marriage allows the integration of an unrelated person into the immediate family of another. Because of this I do not see marriage diverging too far off from the current path. It will remain extremely common, almost universal, for middle and upper class households - if not to demonstrate love and devotion than to serve the social purpose of binding two unrelated people in the eyes of the law. The Atlantic article is very deceptive. It fails to mention that the average age of marriage has increased substantial since the 1980s. Of course marriage rates are going to decrease if you plot it against the exact same age group. Their international chart that predicts potential outcomes until 2040 is horrendously misleading. It includes women ages 15 and up. Who marries at 15 years old? That’s an absurd age to begin collecting marriage statistics.

One final point: if anything should be gleaned from this class it should be the powerful divisive force of class inequality. We’ve talked about its relation to race, education, and touched on its impact on the family. The Cherlin chapter, while it does mention on the relationship between class and marriage, does not delve deep enough. In reality, marriage is only declining among the working class. Amongst the wealthy and educated (which as we learned is a redundant clause) marriage is just as strong as ever.