Kate Bolick: why marriage is a declining option for modern women (and a riposte, see below)
'...That we would marry, and that there would always be men we wanted to marry, we took on faith. How could we not? One of the many ways in which our lives differed from our mothers' was in the variety of our interactions with the opposite sex. Men were our classmates and colleagues, our bosses and professors, as well as, in time, our students and employees and subordinates – an entire universe of prospective friends, boyfriends, friends with benefits, and even ex-boyfriends-turned-friends. In this brave new world, boundaries were fluid, and roles constantly changing.
In 1969, when my 25-year-old mother, a college-educated high-school teacher, married a handsome lawyer-to-be, most women her age were doing more or less the same thing. By the time she was in her mid-30s, she was raising two small children and struggling to find a satisfying career. What she'd envisioned for me was a future in which I made my own choices. I don't think either of us could have predicted what happens when you multiply that sense of agency by an entire generation.
But what transpired next lay well beyond the powers of everybody's imagination: as women have climbed ever higher, men have been falling behind. We've arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up – and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don't want to go out with...'
'..For thousands of years, marriage had been a primarily economic and political contract between two people, negotiated and policed by their families, church and community. It took more than one person to make a farm or business thrive, and so a potential mate's skills, resources, thrift and industriousness were valued as highly as personality and attractiveness. This held true for all classes. In the American colonies, wealthy merchants entrusted business matters to their landlocked wives while off at sea, just as sailors, vulnerable to the unpredictability of seasonal employment, relied on their wives' steady income as domestics in elite households. Two-income families were the norm.
Not until the 18th century did labour begin to be divided along a sharp line: wage-earning for the men and unpaid maintenance of household and children for the women. Coontz notes that as recently as the late 17th century, women's contributions to the family economy were openly recognised, and advice books urged husbands and wives to share domestic tasks. But as labour became separated, so did our spheres of experience – the marketplace versus the home – one founded on reason and action, the other on compassion and comfort. Not until the postwar gains of the 1950s, however, were a majority of American families able to actually afford living off a single breadwinner.
All of this was intriguing, for sure – but even more surprising to Coontz was the realisation that those alarmed reporters and audiences might be on to something. Coontz still didn't think that marriage was falling apart, but she came to see that it was undergoing a transformation far more radical than anyone could have predicted, and that our current attitudes and arrangements are without precedent. "Today we are experiencing a historical revolution every bit as wrenching, far-reaching, and irreversible as the Industrial Revolution," she wrote...'
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/nov/27/kate-bolick-women-marriage-relationships
Read a rejoinder: Single women: an American obsession
There are many things one can say about how feminism has affected women's attitudes to marriage but one theory of Bolick's exemplified a certain attitude that makes so many depictions of marriage in the media here feel so retrograde. "American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be 'marriageable' men – those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity." Yes, we might call it that, if one could only countenance consorting with men who earn more than oneself.
This weirdly monetised and loveless view of marriage in America will not surprise anyone who has gawped at the "Vows" section in the New York Times' Sunday edition. Photos of grinning couples sit atop detailed descriptions of not just their jobs and social standing ("Mr Jaeger, 28, works at Markit, a financial information services company in Manhattan, for which he heads product development for the index, exchange-traded-funds and research-data businesses," read one typically romantic entry from this weekend) but those of their parents ("His mother is a member of the board of trustees at the Jewish Museum of New York," another entryassures readers.) To read this section is like reading a satirical chapter of an Edith Wharton novel without a punch line, yet it is an established part of the paper, probably best known here for its appearance in an episode of Sex in the City, in which one of the characters frantically tries to be featured in it.
Clearly, Vows is no more representative of New York – let alone America – as a whole than Bridget Jones's daily life was of Britain, but it does reflect an attitude that plays into the fascination the American media has in single women. Such is the popularity of investigations into the enthralling mystery of single women that these articles are pretty much their own genre of journalism in America, characterised by gloomy warnings about the dangers of feminism, cod anthropological claims, regrets about leaving a nice man because the writer wanted an unspecified "more", self-flagellation dressed up as "honesty" about feminism and they are always – always – written by a woman.
Bolick's piece is a perfect example of this, as was Lori Gottlieb's similarly hoo-hahed 2008 article Marry Him!, also published in the Atlantic. The reason they attract so much attention is because the media love any stories that suggest independent women will be punished and because many women readers, in my experience, glob on to articles that voice their worst fears. Read more:
