[acb-hsp] Traditional Marriage Is Dead - Let's Celebrate

[peter altschul]

Traditional Marriage Is Dead -- Let's Celebrate
  Jill Filipovic, Comment Is Free March 10, 2011
  It's finally time to ring the death knell for traditional 
marriage.  Last week, the Obama administration released a 
comprehensive report on the status of American women, the first 
of its kind since 1963.  The results are mixed.  They have made 
substantial gains in education but still make 80 cents to a man's 
dollar, are more likely than men to live in poverty, and are more 
likely to be stalked or killed by intimate partners.  The report 
also sheds light on the status of the American family -- a social 
unit that has been remade by social liberalism.  Conservatives 
are right: traditional marriage is under attack.  But the assault 
isn't just from gay men and lesbians who want the right to enter 
into marriages of their own.  Heterosexual Janes and Johns are 
also reshaping holy matrimony: they're marrying later, they're 
marrying less, and for reasons other than having children.  And 
it's making them (and their kids) happier and healthier.
  The average age of marriage for a college-educated woman today 
is 30 (for a college-educated man, 31).  Women without a 
high-school diploma typically marry at 26.  Back in 1950, the 
average marriage age was 21; now that's right about the time that 
more women than ever are awarded their undergraduate degrees.  
Marriage for the middle class in America was then a fairly simple 
financial arrangement: husband worked to support the family, wife 
cared for the children and the home.
  It wouldn't be the worst system if all human beings were worker 
bees without individual interests and passions.  But because some 
women are interested in the world beyond cooking dinners and 
changing diapers, and some men don't want to spend their whole 
lives in offices or factories and instead want to get to know 
their kids, marriage evolved.
  Conservatives, of course, want to ride this thing until the 
wheels fall off.  Never mind that the 1950's-style "traditional 
family" that they so wholly exhort isn't actually all that 
"traditional" in the long history of marriage, where women were 
given away as property from fathers to husbands.  Back then, 
women in many states couldn't open their own bank accounts.  
Until recently, there were no laws against marital rape, and 
domestic violence was viewed as a private matter and not one for 
legal intervention.  People who fell outside of rigid gender 
roles or were poor, non-white or disabled didn't live in Leave It 
To Beaver fantasyland.  Women who had children outside of 
marriage were whisked away to private homes where their babies 
were taken from them and put up for adoption; children with 
disabilities were institutionalised; non-white citizens were 
routinely barred from political participation and discriminated 
against with impunity; significantly more children and elderly 
people lived in poverty than today; and physical and sexual abuse 
of children was rarely investigated.
  Thanks to increased gender equality hastened in no small part 
by the advent of the birth control pill and the legalisation of 
abortion, families are better off across the board.  Mothers 
today spend more time with their children than they did in 1965, 
the height of the female-homemaker family.  Fathers also spend 
more time (and more quality time) with their children than ever 
before.  Working outside the home has mental health benefits: 
women who work have a higher sense of social competence and lower 
rates of depression than women who don't.  And with 
sole-breadwinner obligations increasingly loosened, men are freer 
to take on non-traditional roles as caring dads and attentive 
husbands, who provide much more for their families than just a 
pay cheque.
  And the more egalitarian the relationship, the better.  Couples 
who share both paid work and housework have more sex.  Children 
of women with college degrees do better in school.  Women who are 
college-educated tend to marry later, and also have lower divorce 
rates; they are more likely to stay married than women who aren't 
highly educated and financially independent (quite possibly 
because women who are self-sufficient don't need to get married 
for support, and can choose a partner with whom they can have a 
happy and egalitarian relationship).
  Notably, fewer men and women marry today than they did a few 
decades ago: about 15% of women and 20% of men have never 
married.  In 1970, those figures were 7% and 9%, respectively.  
More women are also forgoing childbearing -- nearly twice as many 
women have never given birth today than in 1976.  And when we do 
have children, we're doing it later: the average age of 
childbirth is now 25, compared with 21 in 1970.  The teen 
birthrate is also down significantly: in 1970, the teen birthrate 
was 69 per 1,000 births; today, it's 48.
  Those numbers are no indication that marriage and child-rearing 
are passe or under-valued -- quite the opposite.  Marriage, more 
than ever, is something that more people feel the right to opt 
out of, which means that those of us who do marry (except those 
who are shamefully barred from marriage because of their sexual 
orientation) are opting in, and doing so increasingly because we 
want to, not because of social obligations.  If you believe that 
marriage can be a good thing for people who choose it, this 
should be welcome news.  Children, too, should be welcome 
additions and not obligations.  The fact that more women and 
families are delaying childbirth indicates that there's more 
planning involved, and that women and men are making commitments 
to familial stability and personal ability before deciding to 
have kids.
  We're still a long way from a gender-egalitarian marital 
utopia, but traditional marriage is blessedly deceased.  With its 
demise has come a new marriage model that is by nearly every 
measure better for men, women and children, and is hopefully 
continuing to improve.
  Marriage itself is far from dead.  But the traditional 
conservative vision of it is, and thank goodness for that -- it's 
about time the old thing croaked.
  Jill Filipovic is a lawyer in Manhattan who formerly served as 
the Gender and Reproductive Justice editor at Alterationet.  More 
of her writing is available online at her blog, Feministe.
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