Cahn Naomi - Marriage markets how inequality is remaking the American family

Marriage Markets

How Inequality Is Remaking the American Family

JUNE CARBONE
and
NAOMI CAHN

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Oxford University Press 2014

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carbone, June.

Marriage markets: how inequality is remaking the American family / June Carbone and Naomi Cahn.
p. cm.

Summary: June Carbone and Naomi Cahn examine how macroeconomic forces are transforming marriage, and how working class and lower income families have paid the highest priceProvided by publisher.
ISBN 9780199916580 (hardback)

1. FamiliesEconomic aspectsUnited States. 2. MarriageEconomic aspectsUnited States.
3. Domestic relationsUnited States. 4. EqualityUnited States. 5. Working classEconomic aspects
United States. 6. Social classesUnited States. I. Cahn, Naomi R. II. Title.
HQ536.C348 2014

306.850973dc23 2013045704

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

In writing a book about marriage markets, we have incurred many debtsof gratitudeto so many people for their support of our work on this project. Weve benefited from discussion and editing from numerous colleagues, friends, and family members. For their review of our work and engagement with our ideas, we thank Bill Black, Don Braman, Tonya Brito, Maxine Eichner, Martha Fineman, Tony Gambino, Marsha Garrison, Jill Hasdsay, Pat Hernandez, Nancy Levit, Linda McClain, Hanna Rosin, and Buffie Scott. Thank you to our OUP editor, Dave McBride, for believing in what we are selling. We are particularly grateful to Michael Guttentag for sharing some of his experiences as a teenager talking to his mother, Marcia Guttentag, about the development of her book on sex ratios. Weve benefited from presenting early pieces of this book at numerous conferences and faculty fora, including Bowdoin College, Boston University, Hofstra University, New England School of Law, St. Louis University, the University of Florida, the University of Miami, Michigan, Michigan State, Missouri, and Wisconsin, and we have appreciated the work of numerous law review editors at Hofstra, New England, Michigan State and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas as they have worked on articles related to the book. We would also like to thank the many colleagues who have listened to usfor many yearsas we have explored the ideas in this book, including Jewel Allers, Barbara Glesner-Fines, Michele Goodwin, Viviana Grieco, Mary Kay Kisthardt, Mary Kay OMalley, and those who have helped us with research, including Mary Kate Hunter, Jodi LeBolt, and Jessica Qian. We have benefited from the generous research support of the Universities of Missouri-Kansas City and Minnesota and George Washington University.

For their belief in equality, and for their understanding of the seemingly infinite amount of time consumed by our writing this book, we thank our own familiesBill, Galen, Genina, and Kenny, Tony, Louisa, and Abigail.

The American family is changingand the changes guarantee that inequality will be greater in the next generation. For the first time, Americas children will almost certainly not be as well educated, healthy, or wealthy as their parents, and the result stems from the growing disconnect between the resources available to adults and those invested in children. The time to address the real explanation for the changing American family is now.

The changes themselves, of course, have been the subject of endless commentary, both positive and negative. The age of marriage is going up, the rate of marriage is falling, and almost half of all marriages fail. An increasing number of states allow women to marry women, and men to marry men. The number of children born outside of marriage is drawing equal with the number of children born within marriage. And, the percentage of children growing up in single-parent households is the highest in the developed world. These changes, however, do not affect everyone equally. Describing how the average family has changed hides what is really going on: economic inequality is remaking the American family along class lines, and families are not going through the same changes together. To understand what is happening to the American familyand how family law locks in the growing class divisionsrequires examining the links between family change along the continuum from the top to the bottom of the American economy.

In the process, many of the existing explanations for why the American family today is so radically different from the American family of fifty years ago will prove hollow. The right blames declining moral values, the pill, welfare as we knew it, the rise of soulmate marriage, and a host of other social ills without providing a convincing explanation of why these changes affect one group more than another. The left celebrates individual choice, sexual liberation, and womens equality without acknowledging that not all sources of change are benign and that the consequences of some of the changes they support contribute to the growing inequality they oppose. Neither group provides a complete explanation of these changes, and without a better explanation of why the top and bottom of American families are moving in opposite directions, efforts at family reform will remain futile.

A complete explanation of family change requires taking seriously the role of class in scripting our lives as well as the effect of greater economic inequality in remaking the terms of marriage, divorce, and childrearing. Such an explanation needs to address not just why marriage has disappeared from the poorest communities, but also why, in a reversal of historical trends, elite women have become the most likely to marry. It requires the ability to explain why divorce rates, which for decades moved in the same direction for the country as a whole, are now diverging, falling back to the levels that existed before nofault divorce for the most educated while continuing to rise for everyone else. A comprehensive analysis must also be able to make sense of the decisions of working-class women, who often describe themselves as religious or conservative, to have children on their own even when the fathers of their children are willing to propose.