Can [this] marriage be saved?

[lolaraincoat]

I forget which women's magazine of my childhood, back in the early 1970s, used to run a monthly column titled "Can This Marriage be Saved?" but I remember reading it while my mother did the grocery shopping, and I remember that the answer was always yes! it can be saved! with just a little more feminine self-abnegation! etc. Even as a cranky eight-year-old trailing through the supermarket behind my mom, a miserable housewife, I knew that something was not right (as Miss Clavel used to say) with that notion. Marriage was some kind of trap; marriage was How They Got You. My life plan in third grade involved becoming a nun, as soon as they started accepting little Jewish girls into the convents, because nuns lived with each other and didn't have to spend all their time catering to men and nobody made them wear stupid, itchy girly clothes that were too tight at the waist and elbows. (It was an era of liberation movements of all kinds, so my dream of convent-integration wasn't so farfetched.) Also, my Catholic friends told me that nuns were mean, and that appealed, oh yes it did: could I grow up into a woman without having to become nice, or sweet, or agreeable?

By fourth grade my plan had evolved, and I was going to live in outer space or else be a jockey.

It wasn't that my own parents' marriage was so gruesome -- well, it was, but that isn't what worried me about the institution of marriage -- it was that everything I saw on TV, and soup can labels and newspapers and comic books too, told me that good marriages were all about women being nice to men, taking care of their physical and emotional needs, in exchange for men supporting women financially. That seemed like a bad deal to me, and in fact it still does. So for me the idea of marriage was linked to all the ways of being a woman that I wanted nothing to do with, there in the darkness of 1971, and luckily the world changed enough that I have been able to avoid much of that crap -- though I haven't been able to avoid thinking about it.

I'm not opposed to your marriage, of course, or to my own (very happy) household arrangements. I am opposed to the model of heterosexual sanctioned-by-the-state marriage, the one that the legal code and the economic system of the US so strongly support, the one that the religious right fears will be rejected by most people if they have better options.

And women in the United States are, it turns out, rejecting marriage. An article in The New York Times today reported that 2005 census data show that 51% of adult American women do not live with a male spouse, up from 35% in 1960. (47% of American men do not live with a female spouse, with the difference accounted for by female longevity as compared to men and men remarrying more quickly after divorce -- in other words, women on average spend more years outside of marriage in their lifetimes than men do.)

I don't know for sure what this means, and neither does the Times. This is an intensification of the same demographic trend that when it was first noted twenty years ago resulted in a lot of very silly newspaper articles aimed at women warning us that we would, oh NO! be single forever! if we didn't shape up and start simpering. Now the Times is reporting this trend as a triumph of happy individualism on the part of tough career girls. Who the hell knows what it really means?

But I believe that a lot of little girls were thinking more or less what I was thinking, back in the supermarket checkout lines of 1971.

Comments

[cordelia_v]

Um. Not quite yet.

The article is based on statistics that define "adult women" as age 15 and up. So, all those teenagers living with their parents (or in dorms) still count. But to me, a 16 year old living at home isn't quite the same thing (in terms of showing a social change) as a 40 year old woman who has chosen to remain single.

Also, you'd really have to take out those adult women who are living, by choice, with another woman. I mean, lesbians are invisible here. And yet, again, not quite the same thing.

So, if you deduct all teenage women (and I think you should) and all women who are happily partnered (to another woman) . . . you're still not at a majority of adult women living without a male spouse. Not yet.

Also. Not to rain on anything (because I share many of your sentiments), but many many of the adult women I know who have remained single? Did not do so by choice, at all. The pressure on men to marry is much less than it used to be.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

The article is based on statistics that define "adult women" as age 15 and up. So, all those teenagers living with their parents (or in dorms) still count. But to me, a 16 year old living at home isn't quite the same thing (in terms of showing a social change) as a 40 year old woman who has chosen to remain single.

I'm not sure what you mean by "still count" here. The statistic that changed is % of women over age 15 living with a man to whom they are married. Women over 15 who are not living with a man to whom they are married are, obviously, not all single; that was true in 1950 and it is true now. It's not a very satisfactory binary, but the Times is at least making an apples-to-apples comparison and probably the best one possible, given how the census divvies up the data and the kinds of questions it was asking in 1950.

Some of the women in the not-living-with-husbands category are living in marriage-like arrangements with men or women, some are widows, some are divorced, some have been single forever, whether by choice or not, some are living with their parents or at university, and some are married but separated teporarily from their spouses by military service or some other career reason. The figures in the graphic help sort those categories out at least a little. Still, the overly broad categorization is why I say that neither the Times nor I can know what the drop in the percentage of the over-15 population who are living with a man to who they are married means.

I agree that this result would be more interesting if the Times had omitted the 15-to-24 age group from the census figures, but I'm not sure that the result would be so different -- keep in mind that age at first marriage has been climbing very fast in the US since 1960, so that the change in that age group of percentage who are married and living with husband is much larger between 1950 and the present (42% in 1950! 16% now!)

So anyway. These numbers might reflect any number of things, including inability to find a suitable mate. But here I think "not by choice" might equally be glossed as "increasingly picky because increasingly economically independent" and thus indicative (as much as any of our lives indicate anything much) of social change.

I'd say that pressure on both sexes to marry has eased off significantly over the past 50 years, maybe a bit more so for men than for women. Women are, according to these figures, somewhat more likely than men to marry at some point in their lives, which probably reflects that.