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“Politics and marriage don’t really mix,” said Boston College political science professor Alan Wolfe at the June 18 Commonwealth Forum on “The State of the Union: Understanding Marriage in Massachusetts,” moderated by MassINC deputy director Matt Malone. But Wolfe and his fellow panelists agreed that changes in the institution of marriage have had a major impact on American life.
Harvard University historian Nancy Cott, author of Public Vows: A History of Marriage in Massachusetts, questioned the notion of marriage as an immutable concept handed down by “nature or God.” Instead, she said, “marriage, like our Constitution, has an ability to change while remaining basically the same.” Among these changes over time are the “emancipation” that allowed women to hold property separately from their spouses, the striking down of laws against marriage across racial lines, and the rise of “no-fault” divorce.
The economic benefits of marriage today were outlined by Paul Harrington, associate director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. “Wives’ earnings were the overwhelming share of family income gains [in Massachusetts] over the past 20 years,” he said, but “single moms weren’t able to get their incomes [in constant dollars] to rise at all.” Harrington noted that “educational attainment and family structure” determine potential earnings in the Bay State’s high-skills economy. “This is a state that’s pretty unforgiving toward non-married-couple families,” said Harrington, who added that the poverty rate is up to 55 percent among families headed by women without a high-school education.
Despite the public-policy implications of such data, Wolfe said, “I’m not sure that government is central toward addressing our marriage crisis.” The author of One Nation After All pointed to Americans’ “institutionally skeptical culture” and “high value placed on individualism and mobility.” He said that marriage was undermined by a “double whammy” in the 1960s and 1980s, referring to the push for “social and spiritual self-fulfillment” in the former decade and the rise of “economic self-fulfillment” in the latter. But Wolfe added that the trend is not irreversible. “There’s been a significant upturn in the sense that people understand the importance of marriage,” Wolfe said, citing recent public-opinion studies.
Harrington argued that the long-term outlook is not encouraging, saying that women may be less likely to marry as they bypass men in educational attainment, a phenomenon increasingly common among African Americans. He voiced concern about the “lack of family formation that’s occurred at the bottom of the economic structure.”
But Cott challenged the notion of a “crisis,” noting that certain “bedrock attitudes” –such as a disapproval of adultery–have survived the sexual-liberation movement. She said that child care is a major problem in the United States, but “it isn’t only marriage that we need to rely on to do this job.” Harrington responded that it’s not so simple to separate marriage from other factors, noting that even co-habitating couples are consistently worse off economically than married couples.
While Wolfe saw benefits to American individualism, he said that our “high-divorce culture” is harmful to children and is “approaching a crisis.” In response to a question from the audience, Wolfe said that same-sex couples may be able to provide the kind of stability needed to raise children, and that the institution of marriage would probably be strengthened if it included gays and lesbians.
The Commonwealth Forums are a joint project of MassINC and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. A transcript of this forum provided by State House News Service, as well as one of the April 9 forum on “The Political Gender Gap: Women in Massachusetts Politics,” can be found online.