Half Changed World

squeaking by...

Can someone please tell me why the Washington Post thought that this story ("Squeaking by on $300,000") deserved to be on the front page of Sunday's paper?  It's not a terrible story, not like the Times' claim that pot bellies are hip, but I don't think it qualifies as serious news by any standard.

It's clear that almost everyone the reporter talked to was totally unwilling to be quoted for the record.  That probably showed good judgment -- it's hard to imagine any possible upside to being featured in this story.  It made me wonder what Steins was hoping to get out of it, since she struck me from the article as being more or less sane and having some sense of perspective.  She has to have known that she's going to get trashed by a significant share of the people who read the article.

Moreover, it's not at all clear to me that Steins is really all that affected by the recession.   Ok, so her bonus is less.  But if she's pulling $50,000 a year out of savings to make her budget balance, it sounds like she'd still have a hole of $30,000 to $40,000 even with her usual bonus.  Her real problem is that she and her ex-husband bought a house that she just can't afford on her own, even with very generous alimony/child support.   And she bought him out in 2006, close to the peak of the market.  If the real estate market was better, maybe she'd downsize and get out of the hole. But it also sounds like she doesn't want to move her kids out of their school.

Fundamentally, I thought this article mostly illustrated the logic to the 60 percent solution.  If your fixed expense are such a high fraction of your income, you can squeeze the little things to death -- not buying a fancy cell phone for your kid, going longer between hair colorings -- and it doesn't fundamentally change the big picture.  Unless Steins has enough savings to keep pulling out $50k a year for the next decade, she needs to bite the bullet and go after the big things -- the house, the nanny, the second car.

Milk

I finally got a chance to watch Milk on DVD, and thought it was terrific.  I knew that he was a gay politician and that he had been killed, and that was about it.  Having learned a little about him, I now want to know more -- after watching the movie, I added The Times of Harvey Milk (which is a documentary about him) to my queue.

If the movie is portraying him fairly, Harvey Milk was a natural-born politician, able to talk to almost anyone, able to bring people together, able to make people have hope in spite of themselves.  Watching the scenes of him leading crowds, knowing what was coming, was almost unbearable.

One of my favorite professors in college used to talk about "Dante's influence on Virgil" meaning that after the Inferno, no one ever looked at the Aeneid the same way.  In the same way, Milk's story resonates differently today, in the age of Obama, with half a dozen states recognizing same-sex marriages, than it could possibly have resonated in 1984, when the documentary was made.

In the movie, Milk insists that all of his friends have to start coming out to their families and straight friends, because once your image of "the gays" is replaced by the face of someone you know, it's hard to hate.  It made me wonder how the equality movement would be different if AIDS hadn't hit the gay community so hard during the 1980s.  HIV/AIDS forced people out of the closet who would have stayed quiet otherwise.  And it's certainly hard to imagine that the right to marry would have become such a central focus of the gay and lesbian movement if the bathhouse culture of the 1970s had continued on.

I highly recommend the movie if you haven't seen it yet.

Write to Marry

This post is part of the Write to Marry blog carnival, organized by Dana at Mombian and Mike at PageOneQ.

I've been listening to the podcast of the Writer's Almanac on my way to and from work and today I heard that last Thursday was the 7th anniversary of the iPod.  It made me gape, because they've become such a ubiquitous part of our lives that it seems unimaginable that they didn't exist that recently.

Five years ago, the idea that same-sex marriages would be be legally recognized in the United States would have seemed unimaginable to me, such a far off possibility that it didn't seem like a fight that was worth taking on.  And then Massachusetts opened the doors, and San Francisco followed and I couldn't stop looking at the pictures of all the happy couples.  And the world shifted.

There's been some bumps in the road since then.  Four years ago, I was worrying about the referenda against same sex marriage and their impacts on the presidential election, and trying to remember that February warmth.  Two years ago, I was knocking on doors trying (unsuccessfully) to stop a hateful amendment to Virginia's constitution.  This blog carnival is focused on stopping California's Proposition 8 which would take away same-sex couples right to marry.

But I truly think the world has changed.  People have seen the couples lining up to marry in California and Massachusetts.  And they've seen that the sky hasn't fallen down.

I've posted this poem before, but it seems appropriate again:

Why marry at all?

By Marge Piercy, from My Mother's Body

Why mar what has grown up between the cracks
and flourished like a weed
that discovers itself to bear rugged
spikes of magneta blossoms in August,
ironweed sturdy and bold,
a perennial that endures winters to persist?

Why register with the state?
Why enlist in the legions of the respectable?
Why risk the whole apparatus of roles
and rules, of laws and liabilities?
Why license our bed at the foot
like our Datsun truck: will the mileage improve?

Why encumber our love with patriarchal
word stones, with the old armor
of husband and the corset stays
and the chains of wife? Marriage
meant buying a breeding womb
and sole claim to enforced sexual service.

Marriage has built boxes in which women
have burst their hearts sooner
than those walls; boxes of private
slow murder and the fading of the bloom
in the blood; boxes in which secret
bruises appear like toadstools in the morning.

But we cannot invent a language
of new grunts. We start where we find
ourselves, at this time and place.

Which is always the crossing of roads
that began beyond the earth's curve
but whose destination we can now alter.

This is a public saying to all our friends
that we want to stay together. We want
to share our lives. We mean to pledge
ourselves through times of broken stone
and seasons of rose and ripe plum;
we have found out, we know, we want to continue.

TBR: Mating in Captivity

This week we've got a guest reviewer for the Tuesday Book Review -- my husband.  HarperCollins sent me a copy of Esther Perel's Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence to review, but before I could get around to reading it, T. had borrowed it.  So I asked him if he wanted to write the review....

Esther Perel's book, Mating in Captivity, takes on the tricky intertwining of love and romance.  Just by addressing the divide, by saying "Love is not the same as romance, caring is not the same as passion," the book accomplishes a worthy and important goal (in ways that I'll return to at the end of the review). The whole book returns, frequently and powerfully, to supporting that central claim.  It gives the appearance that the central claim needs to be hammered home with great force.  Personally, I agreed on page xiv of the introduction (well before page 1 of the book proper).  That said, I'm sure there are many people more thoroughly indoctrinated in the idea that romance and sex can only possibly be good as a reflection of deep, world-shaking love.  For them, the whole book (and several re-readings) might not be enough to quell the arguments instilled in them by parents, friends and culture.  They might need every argument in the book in order to believe a message that is (quite frankly) freeing and relaxing to embrace.  So I don't object to the 220 pages on the subject, even though a snappy pamphlet might have served me better.

Sadly, while Perel's arguments for her central point are compelling, once she steps beyond that central point, the effort to convince suddenly fades away.  She seems to think that the central point is, itself, the argument for all the others.  "(a) Love is not romance *and therefore* (b) understanding and closeness are sexual turnoffs," for example, is asserted with pretty much no convincing argument.  I don't agree that (a) implies (b).  In fact, I don't agree with (b) at all. But the idea that emotional intimacy and passion are mutually exclusive is the foundation of more than one of her chapters ... chapters that, therefore, I pretty much had to write off as a loss.

The "central insight surrounded by dubious pronouncements" is a pattern that I've seen before, in self-help books.  Indeed, this book so strongly resembles a self-help book in both tone and structure (with chapters deliberately assigned to the various troubles that can afflict your sex-life) that it was quite remarkable to hear, over and over again, that Perel has no advice for what you -should- do, only advice for things that you -shouldn't- do ... or at least shouldn't do as a knee-jerk reflex.  It was like reading a book that purported to be about keeping your house clean, but which in fact only said "Don't let clutter accumulate on your tables, or your shelves, and don't let the floor get dirty, and don't pour orange juice on the piano."  Those are all behaviors to avoid, but it doesn't tell what behaviors to put in their place.  Like a demolition crew taking down an old building, Perel gleefully tears down aged and rickety structures ... and then, like the demolition crew, she packs up and goes home, leaving the job of building something new to the reader.

I find this immensely surprising, and more than a little disappointing.  The central message of the book (as I said above) is that "Romance is not love, nor love romance."  Romance and sex are their own emotional field, and while the technical aspects of the act have been ... ahem ... adequately explored in many fine books, the emotional aspects of passion have long been overshadowed by those of love.  We don't talk about how it feels to be wanted, because we're supposed to be talking about how it feels to be valued and trusted. But I pretty well understand how it feels to be valued and trusted, whereas I'd like to spend some time talking about how it feels to be wanted:  That strange combination of egotism and desire and fear that can result from someone making it clear that they desire you.

Perel claims that there are no common factors that all people feel about romance.  It's totally unique, and there's nothing in the experience of one person that would apply to another.  But I don't think that passion and romance are completely unique to each couple.  I think that there are powerful commonalities, patterns in the ways that we think and feel about sex and romance and desire.  Not everyone gets turned on by the same things, but the feeling of getting turned on is universal.  Not everyone fears the same things, but the way fear can both suppress and magnify lust is familiar to everyone.

That's really interesting emotional territory, and I wish the book had explored it.  As I said, I think that the initial message of "There's something there to be explored" is immensely important.  I do appreciate being handed the keys to the kingdom, being told "There's a whole internal world here, just waiting for you to turn your mind to it!"  I'd have been a lot happier, though, with the keys to the kingdom PLUS an artful map of interesting destinations for the curious traveler.

The divorce myth

It seems like talk about divorce is popping up on a bunch of parenting blogs, from RebelDad to the Business Week Working Parents blog.  I just don't have the energy/time right now to write the long thoughtful post I want to about divorce, so I'm just going to put out some links and initial thoughts.

The main point that I want to make is that the number that often gets tossed around about divorce rates -- that 50 percent of marriages end in divorce -- just isn't true.  It was a projection based on looking at what if the increase in divorce rates in the 70s continued at that pace, and in fact, the divorce rates have fallen since then.  Moreover, the most significant trend is that the divorce rates have fallen much faster among more educated individuals than among less educated individuals.

For example, of the women with at least a 4-year college degree who married between 1990 and 1994, only about 17 percent were divorced within 10 years.  For women without a HS degree, the figure is nearly 40 percent.  I don't think either the decline in overall divorce rates since the 1970s or the increasing class gap in the rates has penetrated into the general consciousness.

[For those of you interested in the research: Here's a powerpoint presentation by Steven Martin that goes through the analysis, and here's the full paper of his research on the "divorce divide".  And here's a paper by David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks that talks about it in the context of single parenting more broadly.]

I think it's a good idea to think about the future and to take risks into account when making your choices. But I don't think the Leslie Bennetts of the world are doing people a favor by trying to generate hysteria over the risk of divorce, especially for highly educated women.

Some craziness, some joy

I've heard some interesting stories lately about the complications that are arising because same-sex marriages are recognized in Canada and Massachusetts, but not the rest of the US. 

• Yankee T is frustrated because she can't enjoy any of the benefits of marriage, but has to report her partner's income for financial aid purposes.
• Shannon wonders what to say when asked if she's married.  By a hostile insurance company.
• And Dana reports a surprisingly inclusive response from USAA, of all organizations.

My dad got a letter to the editor published in the NY Times last week, in which he makes the argument that government should get out of the marriage business entirely.  As I wrote when Shannon made a similar argument last year, I think it's an elegant solution in theory, but think that there are circumstances where government does need to treat two people who have made a family together differently from roommates.  So whether you call it marriage or not, the problem still exists.

But there is a power to the word "marriage" and to the legal piece of paper.  My friend Kristie put her wedding on YouTube.  The video is about a minute long, and makes me cry.

Freedom to Marry has an ad campaign out celebrating the 40th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia.  40 years from now, will the current mishmash of laws seem as bizarre as Virginia's ban on interracial marriage does now?

Please vote

Please vote.  Please please please.

I've got a little bubble of hope that's been trying to come out, and I keep pushing it down because I don't want to be too disappointed.  I can still feel what it tasted like in 2000 when the initial Gore lead disappeared somewhere around midnight, and the sick feeling in my stomach in 1994 as the size of the Republican win became clear.  I've been obsessively checking the Post website and Not Larry Sabato, even though neither has anything particularly interesting to say at this point.  While individual polls point in different directions, they're all within the margin of error.

I'm going to head to bed soon, because I'm getting up early to volunteer at one of the local polling places.  I'm actually volunteering for the Commonwealth Coalition, rather than Webb, because I really don't think that anyone is going to show up at the polls not knowing who they're voting for in the Senate race, but I actually think that handing people the full text of Ballot Question 1 might sway some votes.  And then I'm going to vote myself, and then head into work, and then come home and obsess.  If you're in the area and want to come obsess with me, you're invited.

I think it's going to be a long night.  If the Dems lose most of the close Senate races in the East, it could be over early, but otherwise we're all going to be waiting for the Montana results to come in.  And I wouldn't be surprised if one or more races were close enought to require a recount.  (The Post suggests that Missouri is the most likely state to have problems.)  So we may not know Wednesday morning who is in control of the Senate.

Hey, Bill Clinton just called me.  Well, sort of.

How about everyone posting tomorrow after they've voted and saying what the lines were like, etc?

Failure to launch

Via Shawn Fremsted at Inclusionist, I ran across this article by Theda Skocpol reviewing two books about the GI bill (free but annoying registration required).   Skocpol notes how unusual the GI bill was in providing assistance to young families:

"But unlike most other U.S. social programs, the G.I. Bill focused its largesse on young adults at just the moment when they were building lives for their families. Usually, we spend money on the elderly, who have earned the nation’s support after a lifetime of work."

The article made me think about Strapped, by Tamara Draut, which I reviewed earlier this year.  Draut talks about how the changes in the economy -- the increased cost of education, housing, and child care -- particularly pinch young adults right when they're trying to start families.

The key point, I think, is that it was the 50s and 60s that were the anomaly, not today.  One of the reasons that, in most of history, men have married younger women is that men were strongly discouraged from marrying until they were able to support a family, and there was no expectation that they'd be able to do at a young age.  Older teens and young adults were expected to work, but they typically contributed their labor or earnings to their families of origin.  And when times were bad, as in the Great Depression, people married later.

So we've got this perverse combination of an economy that all but requires higher education for success (even though a college degree doesn't guarantee a good job, as Lauren will attest), an educational system that is dependent on student loans, and an expectation that young adults should be able to make it on their own.  There's no historical precedent.

The 50s

In the comments on Tuesday's post, Kai Jones asked what's the basis for comparison for the claim that risk has increased over time.  The answer is, of course, that mythical era, the 1950s.

At a meeting I went to last week, Brink Lindsey from the Cato Institute had a great line -- "The right and left share this strange nostalgia for the 1950s.  The left wants to go to work there, and the right wants to go home there."  Ouch and touche.

Dave s commented that the rigid family structure of the 1950s was itself a form of risk for women, due to "the uncertainty and absolute dependence on men's behavior choices of women in the suburbs."  I think there's certainly some truth to that, although there's a complicated set of interactions:

• Women who divorced suffered much more severe financial consequences in the 1950s than they do today because of both massive discrimination in employment against women and underinvestment in education.  BUT, far fewer women experienced divorce.  Women were more likely to suffer financially due to the death, disability, or indolence of their husbands than from divorce.  (See, for a case study, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio.)  Germany today is probably the place that most resembles America of the 1950s in this regard.
• Women who divorce today are far less likely to be absolutely destitute as a result.  Compared to never-married mothers, divorced mothers are far more educated, and have more employment history.  But divorced women still experience major drops in their standard of living.  And, especially if they try to minimize disruption for their kids by staying in the same house/schools, they're quite likely to wind up in bankruptcy.
• What's new is that men also suffer significant financial hits from divorce.  Katharine Bradbury and Jane Katz have shown that as wives contribute an increasing share of family incomes, divorcing (and widowed) men are more likely to be downwardly mobile due to divorce.

The economics of the 1950s clearly contributed to the social structure in significant ways.  Men married far younger than in the past, mostly because they could afford to support families at earlier ages.  And large numbers of families could afford to live on the income of one breadwinner for one of the first times in history (while married white mothers didn't work very much outside the home in the early 20th century, families often relied on the labor of older children).  I'm not seeing an argument for causality in the other direction, but I'm sure someone could come up with one.

The fine print

I spent a couple of hours yesterday knocking on doors for the Commonwealth Coalition, which is the main group that is organizing against Virginia's anti-gay marriage (or anything that might vaguely resemble gay marriage constitutional amendment).

Mostly we were IDing voters on our side to target get-out-the-vote efforts, but we were also trying to raise the issue for people who might be undecided or not have heard about the measure.  Our strategy was mostly just to hand people the full text of the amendment and ask them to read it:

BALLOT QUESTION NUMBER 1

Question: Shall Article I (the Bill of Rights) of the Constitution of Virginia be amended to state:

"That only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this Commonwealth and its political subdivisions.

This Commonwealth and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage. Nor shall this Commonwealth or its political subdivisions create or recognize another union, partnership, or other legal status to which is assigned the rights, benefits, obligations, qualities, or effects of marriage."?

That second paragraph is so overreaching that you could just see the gears turning in people's heads as they read it.

Here's an ad that makes the same point.

***

I tivoed the Webb-Allen debate this morning but haven't watched it yet.

Why register with the state?

In honor of Blogging for GLBT Families Day, Shannon at Peter's Cross Station wrote a provocative post in which she argues against marriage, for anyone:

"The government should not be in the business of deciding whether or not we or anyone else can have what should be universal human rights based on whether or how or if they have made similar vows to someone else.

"Gay marriage would get Cole and I on equal footing with her heterosexual colleagues. How nice for us. How nice that we too could have an upper-middle-class income, a stay-at-home parent, a child for whom we may choose a high quality private school, a well located, well funded public school or homeschooling by a PhD with teacher’s certification without paying an extra few thousand dollars a year penalty for being lesbians.

"Gay marriage would do nothing for the majority of people we know who either aren’t partnered with someone with good employment benefits or aren’t partnered at all—gay, straight or otherwise."

Moxie made a similar point, writing "And, FWIW, I'm in favor of civil marriage for none; civil rights, benefits, and protections for all; and religious marriage for anyone who wants it."  She later clarified that she meant that anyone should be able to have a private ceremony of whatever sort they choose, but that it should not have legal significance.

I have a lot of sympathy for this point of view.  I agree that everyone should have access to health care, regardless of whether they choose to make a lifetime commitment to another adult.  I also think that it would make a lot of sense to have everyone explicitly designate the people who you want to be able to visit you in the hospital and decisions on your behalf.

I also think that there's a logical elegance to the argument.  It neatly sidesteps the discussion about whether it's possible to draw a line that supports same-sex marriage but opposes polygamy.  (I know this has been debated on Alas, a blog, but can't find the links right now.)  Instead, it says, the government shouldn't be in the business of deciding whose relationships "count" and whose don't.

But (you knew there was a but coming, didn't you?), I do think there are some privileges that are both appropriately within the governmental sphere, and should take relationships into consideration.  The prime example that comes to mind is immigration.  Unless we're going to have a full open door policy, which I think would be disastrous, the government is going to be in the business of deciding who gets to immigrate (legally) and who doesn't.  And I think it would be deeply wrong to say that only blood relations of citizens should get priority in immigrating, that no families of choice rather than birth should be taken into consideration.  There has to be some legally binding way of saying "this is my partner."

I also think that there's a benefit to building on what's already (more or less) working, rather than trying to "invent a language of new grunts."  I've been reading The White Man's Burden, by William Easterly.  It's about the failures of Western aid to less developed countries.  Easterly argues that aid has largely been a failure because planners have tried to impose top-down reform schemes that don't pay enough attention to the cultural realities on the ground.  He quotes Popper (Karl?) as saying "It is not reasonable to assume that a complete reconstruction of our social system would lead at once to a workable system."

That's a roundabout way of saying that I'm somewhat skeptical of grand plans that require knocking down everything that's already place in order to rebuild.  In practice, I think that if civil marriage were eliminated, children would be the ones hurt the most, followed by anyone who is economically dependent on their spouse.  Yes, in theory we could build a system that provided protections for children and caregivers whether or not they had a relationship with another adult.  So far, the closest thing to that we have is welfare, and it hasn't worked so well.

Blogging for LGBT families

I learned via Shannon at Peter's Cross Station that today is Blogging for LGBT Families Day.

I don't have anything terribly profound to say on the subject, so I think I'll just share a kid story:

Last week at dinner, D asked "Do you know who I'm going to marry when I grow up?"

"No honey, who are you going to marry?"

"I'm going to marry Joe."  [One of his good friends.]

"Uh, ok."

"Boys can marry boys, you know."  [Said in a truculent sort of voice, as if he were daring me to disagree.]

"Uh, yes, that's true, at least in some states.  Ummm.  Virginia's not one of them.  But, sweetie, I will do everything I can so that if when you grow up, you still want to marry Joe, you can.  Ok."

"I'm not going to marry N.  Because he's my brother."

"That's right, he's already part of your family."

Two views of marriage

I wanted to share these two posts about marriage that were in response to the same post about "false advertising" I wrote about last week.  They're very different, but both lovely.

Becca at Not Quite Sure writes:

"But I see marriage as two people coming together as autonomous individuals to share their lives. Indeed, in my vision, it is that very autonomy that generates the pleasure and productivity of marriage... But our bodies? Our thoughts? Our work? Our friends? Our passions? Those are very much our own, if sometimes, happily, shared, and one of the cornerstones of our marriage is that we each try to enable the other's life... Our marriage is in no way perfect--sometimes I wish it would just go away, or maybe I wish he would just go away--but one of the things I like best about it is that in it I can be fully myself, knowing that S is supporting and appreciating me for myself, whatever or however I am."

Dutch at Sweet Juniper writes:

"At some point you could almost stop drawing a line between us as individuals, and consider every step that we took and choice that we made as done together. In that way, we were married before we were married. We were one... I realize that kind of experience before marriage might put us in a minority, but I hope that most successful marriages go through that once the knot is tied. Individuality and individual interests sort of become secondary to what works as a unit. Passion doesn't recede, but grows as you find completion in another person. All of that horrible pain of loneliness disappears. What happens on the surface means nothing compared to the inward attraction and bond. One partner can't "let themselves go" because that partner is inextricably bound to the other..."

I guess Tolstoy was wrong.

My image of my marriage is closer to Becca's, but Dutch's comment about "growing up together" very much resonated with me, as T and I met when we were both 18.  My image is of the trees that you sometimes see growing right next to each other -- they're separate, and have their own root trunks and root systems (sometimes they're even different species), but they've each been shaped by the other, and in places their branches intertwine.

(Image borrowed from: http://www.ethicalfutures.co.uk/ethics.html  Found via google images for "two trees intertwined", which also resulted in lots of ketubah pictures.  Guess it's not an original idea.

Promises, contracts, and false advertising

Moxie, Cecily, Jody and others have thoroughly covered the weight issues raised by Morphing into Mama's post, so I'm going to focus on the idea that changing after you get married could be considered a form of "false advertising."  First, as Lisa V points out, it's crazy to think that any of us aren't going to change.  She writes:

We have had 8 pregnancies, 2 births, 2 adoptions, 3 homes, 7 dogs, 5 cats and more jobs and deaths than I can count.  These things have all left physical and emotional scars on our psyches and bodies. But we are grown-ups, we can handle it.  I love Bert not because of his spare tire or lack of it, but because of who he is and how he has changed my life for the good and the bad, and how we are still here through all of it. To me this whole thing comes down to accepting who your spouse is, not who you wish they were or used to be, but who they are. And then love them and like them and build a life together.

Exactly.  Some of us will gain weight, others will lose, some of us will get new jobs that require us to travel 20 weeks a year, some of us well get laid off, some of us will have life-threatening physical conditions, some of us are going to become alcoholics, or get sober.  There's a reason the traditional wedding ceremony talks about "for better or for worse."

But I don't think it's totally crazy to talk about false advertising in relationships.  Part of what drives me crazy about books like The Rules is what happens if they actually work and attract a man.  Either you're stuck the rest of your life pretending that you're totally fascinated by whatever interests him, or he's going to wake up one day and figure out that you totally lied to him.  Ugh.

Similarly, I think in some ways that wifestyles guy was doing the women he was dating a favor.  If someone's going to have a huge long list of expectations for the person you're going to marry, it's nice to have it out on the table in advance, so you can go screaming in the opposite direction if that's not the way you want to live your life.  Much better than having it sprung on you after you're married. Or, worse and more likely, the list stays hidden until you have a child and then all these hidden expectations come out of the woodwork, just when it's become even harder for you to walk away from the relationship.  (I am, of course, ignoring the fact that this guy didn't seem to expect that his wife would have a similar list of his responsibilities.)

Getting this stuff on the table up front is one of the arguments for a pre- or post-nuptual agreement.  If you have major disagreements, it's better to know them sooner rather than later.  Such contracts also promote better negotiations within relationships, because they make sure that everyone has a decent fall-back position (what people who do this stuff professionally call a Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement, or BATNA).

All that said, I don't think it's a terrible thing when two people divorce, even without abuse or anything horrific, but when two people find that they have changed in non-compatible ways.  For all the increase in divorce, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the average length of a marriage has also increased, because of the overall increase in life spans -- 100 years ago, an awful lot of women were still dying in childbirth.  Is it reasonable to expect people to pledge to stay together for 40 or 50 or 60 years?

Shel Silverstein on marriage

Tomorrow, I'll have a serious post responding to the widespread blog discussion of this post about post-marriage weight gain and tying it to Jen's post about wifestyles.  But for tonight, I just want to share this poem by Shel Silverstein.

My Rules

If you want to marry me, here's what you'll have to do:
You must learn how to make a perfect chicken-dumpling stew.
And you must sew my holey socks,
And soothe my troubled mind,
And develop the knack for scratching my back,
And keep my shoes spotlessly shined.
And while I rest you must rake up the leaves,
And when it is hailing and snowing
You must shovel the walk... and be still when I talk,
And -- hey -- where are you going?

From Where The Sidewalk Ends, by Shel Silverstein.

Tierney and Tolstoy

I don't have anything to add to Laura or Amanda's comments on Tierney's column from Tuesday's Times.  I do have a bit to say on Wilcox and Nock's underlying paper, which is far more subtle and interesting.

The article tests the hypothesis that "egalitarian marriages" -- marriages in which husbands and wives share similar work and family responsibilities -- are happier than traditional marriages.  The authors reject this "companionate" model, finding that wives' gender role egalitarianism (e.g. their belief that tasks ought to be split evenly), wives' employment, and wives' earning significant shares of the family's earnings are all associated with lower levels of wives' satisfaction with their marriages.  The factor most associated with wives' satisfaction with their marriages was whether they were happy with the level of affection and understanding shown to them by their husbands.

I'm not actually all that surprised by these findings.  First, I think it's more than a little insulting to suggest that employed and stay-at-home parents won't have "common experiences and interests around which they can build conversations, empathetic regard, mutual understanding and the like."

Lots of people have pointed out that dual working couples -- especially those with small children -- are essentially trying to share at least three jobs between two people.  Of course they're going to be stressed.  And often their marriage is going to be a lower priority. And when both people think they're doing more than half of the work, they're not likely to be especially appreciative of their spouse.

The authors claim that the husbands in dual-earner families are actually less affectionate than those in traditional families.  They hypothesize that wives who are unhappy with the division of labor in the family stir up conflict (e.g. nag) or emotionally withdraw, resulting in less emotional investment by the husbands.  I could also spin a similar story that was grounded in sex -- women who are exhausted and feel unappreciated are less likely to be interested in it.  (In a footnote, the authors point out that their regressions of husbands' satisfaction with their marriages had less explanatory power.  I'd love to see what happened if they were able to include a measure of satisfaction with the sexual side of the relationship.)

One thing to note is that the study's main measure of husbands' "emotional work" is actually a measure of wives' satisfaction with what their husbands are doing.  I think it's a reasonable interpretation of this study's findings to say that the secret of marital happiness is low expectations.

Does this mean that we should all give up on trying to break through the domestic glass ceiling?  I don't think so.  For one thing, the study only looks at happiness with the marriage, not overall happiness.  For another, the study also seems to suggest that to have a happy marriage, you shouldn't have children -- the number of preschool children in the family was consistently associated with lower levels of marital happiness.  But that doesn't seem to stop anyone from having kids.

Bringing Home the Bacon

Today's book is Bringing Home the Bacon: Making Marriage Work When She Makes More Money, by Harriet Pappenheim and Ginny Graves.  It was on display at Powells when I visited over Thanksgiving, and the cover literally made me swivel my head as I walked by.  As soon as I got home, I hunted down the book and requested it from the library.

I've been taking an excellent free course at Barnes and Noble online on Thinking Like An Editor and it's helped me understand why this book was appealing to an editor.  Improving your marriage is one of the perennial hot-selling book topics, and this book is aimed at a clearly defined and large group of women (1/3 of married women earn more than their husbands) that hasn't been addressed before.  The authors' credentials are impressive -- a therapist and a journalist.  On the book jacket, they promise to address such important questions as "why working women still do more housework than their husbands -- even when their husbands stay home" and "how couples can navigate financial decisionmaking when the breadwinner's reins rest firmly in the wife's hands."  They promise to answer them based on Pappenheim's professional experience and interviews with 100 couples.

Unfortunately, all this didn't actual make for a very good book.  As it turns out, 100 interviews is a challenging number to write a book about.  It's not enough to say anything statistically valid about overall trends, but too many for individuals to stand out from the mass.  All the Susans and Bills and Daves blurred together, so you never got a clear picture of any one couple across the topics covered in each chapter (sex, money, housework, etc.)  Pappenheim and Graves never really answered the gripping questions that they posed.   And the advice they offer is so generic as to be useless.  (Their top recommendation for how to make marriage work when she earns more is "Make mutual respect priority Number one."  As opposed to every other marriage, where mutual respect isn't important?)

Overall, I think the problem is that they discovered that marriages where the women earn more than their husbands don't necessarily have that much in common.   As I could have told them, a lot depends on whether it's voluntarily chosen.  In other words, is the husband a SAHD, a low-earning artist, or umemployed?  Some of the generalizations they reached for totally missed the mark for me (fatigue and lack of time may interfere with our sex life, but not lack of respect), while others seemed right on target:

"Women's hunger for options, for leeway, for relief from the relentless grind, were recurrent themes in our interviews.  Perhaps when women pine for a male provider, what they're really craving is greater latitude in a life that's come to feel too restrictive. What's clear is that when a career becomes just another kind of trap, limiting our options, dictating the course of our lives, many of us become disenchanted and start trying to find a way out... It's possible (maybe even probable) that male breadwinners feel the same way about being trapped in the daily grind, but unless they are very wealthy, it never occurs to the majority of them that they have an option to stop working... They certainly don't seriously feel that they are entitled to be taken care of by their wives.  But many women, consciously or unconsciously, feel entitled to being taken care of by their men."

Feminism and marriage

Somewhere in the 231 comments on Bitch, PhD's post about feminism, her marriage, and Kidding Oneself, someone asked her to explain what she thought constituted a good feminist marriage.  I'd also be interested in reading Bitch's take on the subject, but thought I'd throw in my two cents on the matter.

I think Jenell at the Paris Project has it right, that what makes a marriage egalitarian isn't the roles you play, but the distribution of power, and the assumption of equal personhood.  So I wouldn't necessarily look at who earns the money in a family, but at who gets to make decisions about how to spend it.  Not how many hours are spent with the children, but who makes plans without arranging for child care.

But what makes a marriage feminist is the recognition that no couple is making their choices in a vacuum, that there are societal forces shaping those decisions, a lot of history hanging over you.  And as a result, it's easy to drift into patterns that perpetuate inequality, so you need to keep paying attention if you want to keep things in balance.

The tricky part is figuring out how to pay attention to these things without it degenerating into petty scorekeeping, where every last dirty sock or wet towel left on the floor is recorded for history.  Perhaps the definition of a good marriage is one in which each party thinks that the other is doing more than their share of the work.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Policy levers and the domestic glass ceiling

Having been quoted as saying I don't know what's going to break through the domestic glass ceiling, I've been thinking a lot about what will.

In Judith Warner's op-ed on Friedan, she suggests the usual laundry list of "family-friendly" policies: parental leave, child care, universal preschool, better afterschool options, good part-time jobs.  I think that these are good things to demand for other reasons, but I'm intensely skeptical of the idea that they're going to change the division of household labor.  In particular,  I agree with Rhonda Mahony, that increasing the availability of part-time options is likely to accentuate the gender division of labor -- because if you have one part-time worker and one full-time worker in a family, the part-time worker is likely to do the vast majority of the housework.  And in the absence of other major societal shifts, women are much more likely to avail themselves of the part-time options than men. 

It's really hard to think of public policy levers on this issue.  I can't make a case that there's a public interest in cleanliness that justifies subsidizing housecleaning (vs. the very real public interest in well-raised children).  Feminist authors sometimes wax nostalgic about the government interventions during World War II, such as public canteens, that made "Rosie the Riveter" possible, but in a world with a McDonald's on every third block, cooking is probably the household task least in need of further outsourcing.

The one area where I think there might be some productive intervention is in pushing back against the increasing number of hours expected of full-time workers.  As Laura at 11d wrote in The Wolves From Work:

Let me get this straight. He’s gone from the house for 60 hours per week. He sees his kids for an hour per day. And now he’s supposed to be checking his e-mail, while he watches his kid’s soccer game. The people that he spends 10 hours a day with are making him spend more time in the evening with them, so they can do jello shots and pat each other on the back for closing all those deals. As he’s pounding shots and head butting the other guys, the kids and I are supposed to amuse ourselves.

It's just not realistic to expect people with any choice in the matter to work 60+ hours a week and then come home to scrub the bathroom floor.  And men pretty much always have a choice in the matter.

The domestic glass ceiling

I see that Bitch PhD thought much more highly of the Hirshman article than I did. 

In particular, she picked up on Hirshman's statement that:

"The answer I discovered -- an answer neither feminist leaders nor women themselves want to face -- is that while the public world has changed, albeit imperfectly, to accommodate women among the elite, private lives have hardly budged. The real glass ceiling is at home."

I think it's an overstatement to say that "private lives have hardly budged" -- even setting aside the relatively small number of reverse traditional families, most people would agree that fathers today (at least those who are married to their children's mother) are more involved with their kids' lives than in our parents' generation.  But certainly domestic tasks are far from equally divided.

I think Hirshman is totally off-base in thinking that increasing women's earnings will automatically lead to men doing more housework.  Already, about 1/3 of married women earn more than their husbands, but it doesn't seem to have set off any huge changes in the division of domestic labor.  I've written before about stay-at-home dads and housework, and argued that "two basic cultural assumptions -- that housework is the responsibility of the SAH parent, and that housework is the women's responsibility -- conflict.  So there's no default position about who does what, and everything is up for negotiation." 

I don't remember the source right now, but I'm sure I've read something that said that the graph of the relationship between the share of family income brought in by women and the amount of the housework they do is u-shaped -- men who bring in a very small share of the income do less housework than men who bring in about half.  My guess would be that some low-earning or unemployed men feel that their masculinity is threatened by their low earnings and therefore are more resistant to doing traditionally female tasks.  (I have a hold at the library for a new book called Bringing Home the Bacon: Making Marriage Work When She Makes More Money; I'll be interested in their take on this issue.)   

Bitch offers the following advice: "be willing to be a bitch about housework."  In particular, she suggests:

"My advice is, go ahead and do what needs to be done. But let him know what you are doing every goddamn step of the way, and let him know that it pisses you off. "I've just gotten home from work, it's nice to see you're home earlier than I am. Before I take off my coat, I'll put your shoes away for you, shall I? Oh, and I'll pick up your coat from the floor and hang it up. Okay, now I can take off my own coat and hang it up right away, instead of dropping it on the floor for someone else to pick up later. I see there's no dinner started, I'll just get on that shall I? First, though, I'll clear the mail off the dining room table where you seem to have dropped it when you walked in the door. I'll file it over here where it belongs. Ok, now I'm going to go into the kitchen to get a sponge to wipe off the table, which I see hasn't been wiped since breakfast--I guess you didn't have a chance to do that yet, since you had to sit down and read the paper first, right? Wow, now that I'm in the kitchen, I see that before I can start dinner I have to load the dishwasher, but before I can do that I have to unload it...."

Oh my god would that drive me insane.  Either as the person doing it, or as the target of it.  I'd rather live in squalor -- or by myself -- than have that kind of running monologue. I might win the battle over the chores, but I can't imagine my relationship surviving it.  As I've written before, I'd rather pick up T's socks than sulk about them all day.  (Although, honor requires me to note that T's gotten much better about moving them to the hamper since he read that post.)

Yes, I want the house to be clean enough that I'm not embarassed to have people over.  But I don't want to live like a perpetual houseguest either, afraid that if I leave something out for five minutes someone's going to resentfully start cleaning up after me.   And I don't think it's fair to expect my partner to clean on my schedule or to do it exactly the way I would.

I honestly don't know what's going to break through the domestic glass ceiling.  I used to think that it just was going to take time, that of course the younger generation would adopt a more equitable distribution of labor.  I don't see that happening.  But I do think these conversations -- these virtual consciousness raising sessions -- contribute to the change.

TBR: The Commitment

Today's book is The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family, by Dan Savage, of Savage Love [decidedly not work-safe] fame.  It's the story of his and his boyfriend's discussions about whether to get matching tattoos, wrapped in various digressions about the marital choices of the rest of his family and the weirdness of the institution of marriage in general. 

It's a quick read, funny in places, but without the emotional intensity of The Kid, in which Savage wrote about their decision to adopt a child, and the adoption process.  The heart of the book is the personal stories, which put a face on the gay marriage debate.  But fundamentally, I don't see this book changing many people's minds; the only ones who are likely to read it are already on Savage's side.

Savage makes some interesting points about how people hold gays who want to get married to a higher standard than they do to heterosexual couples.  (That is, if they want to get married to their same-sex partners -- Savage points out that if he wants to enter into a sham marriage with a woman he has no plans to live with, the state will happily bestow its authority on it.)   He argues in favor of commitment, especially when children are involved, but against enforced monogamy as an essential part of such commitments.  And, in a passage that is both funny and biting, he argues against the perverse logic that says that "only a marriage that ends with someone in the cooler down at Maloney's [funeral home] is a success."

Marriage and compromise

Via Feministe's Weekend Roundup, I read this post from Andrea at Vociferate, on Do straight feminists always have to compromise?   Looking at my own marriage, my answer is no, not if you define "compromise" as Andrea seems to, as giving up on something fundamental.

That doesn't mean that I don't sometimes find myself muttering as I pick up T's balled socks from the floor.  But I pick them up, and I don't think it's a violation of feminist principles to do so.  Because he does lots of things for me, like doing almost all the driving on long trips, especially when the weather is lousy, and puts up with my bad habits, like leaving piles of newspapers and magazines all over the house.  Does it balance out?  More or less, enough so that we're both happy.  I'm a firm believer in equality in relationships, but I don't think that means keeping score all the time.

I think the socks are like the woman in the zen koan, who asked two monks for help crossing a river where the bridge had been washed out.  The elder picked her up and carried her across.  Three hours later, the younger said "Master!  We're not supposed to touch women, and yet you carried that woman across ther river."  The elder replied "I left her behind at the river; it seems that you are still carrying her."  It's a lot healthier for our relationship to just put the socks in the hamper than to let them fester in the back of my mind.

Andrea's post made me think of Ann Lander's famous question "Are you better off with him or without him?"  Landers' advice was that if you decide you're better off in a relationship than not, you should stop banging your head against the wall trying to change aspects of your partner.  The problem with that advice, of course, is that abusers tell their partners that they're too ugly to ever get another partner, too stupid to get a job, and after hearing that enough far too many people start to believe it.

I've written here before about Rhonda Mahoney's book "Kidding Ourselves."  She applies the logic of game theory to compromise in marriage and argues that that the stronger an individual's fallback position is, the better deal they can negotiate with their partner.  So, if you can make a credible threat of leaving your partner -- if you have the skills to support yourself, a decent hope of getting a new partner, a good chance of getting the custody arrangement you'd prefer -- you'll be better off even while married.  Thus, many feminist women are suddenly unhappy with the division of labor in their relationships following the birth of a baby because they've been hit by a double whammy: the amount of total work that needs to be done has increased dramatically just when they've given up much of their credible threat of walking out.

I see a lot of truth in that story, but I'm enough of a romantic that I resist the suggestion that power and threat points are the only factors that determine who makes which compromises in a relationships.  If I had to point a finger to what makes a committed relationship, it wouldn't be duration of the relationship, or a marriage license, but to whether the partners really think about "what's good for us" rather than just "what's good for me."

Happiness and parenting

A couple of months ago, I wrote about Stephanie Coontz's book, Marriage.  Coontz argues that the transformation of marriage from an institution about controlling property, making alliances between families, and ensuring legitimate heirs into an emotional bond sowed the seeds of its destruction.  Once marriage was reframed as about romantic love and happiness, it became harder and harder to argue that people should stay married when the relationship failed to make them happy.  Today, pretty much the only argument that people seriously make against divorce is grounded in concern for the well-being of any children involved.  You almost never hear anyone suggest that two childless individuals who are unhappily married should stay together because they stood up and took vows about "till death do us part."

As I think about it, it seems that parenting may be the only commitment that American society takes seriously, and for which "it's not making me happy" isn't a sufficient basis for breaking.  Especially not for women.  Laura's right that what makes parents happy isn't always what's best for the kids, but it's also true that it's seen as a sign of moral depravity for a mother to say "ok, this might make the kids a little worse off, but it makes me a lot better off, and I've made a lot of sacrifices already and it's time for them to give a bit."  As Jody said, we still hold mothers to impossibly high standards.

Is parenthood supposed to make you happy?  It's a fascinating question.  Parenting is often described as a selfless activity, in that you're expected to put your children's well-being ahead of your own desires.  But I've also heard people argue that the choice is have children is always made for selfish reasons; even if it's no longer an economically rational thing to do, people choose to have kids because they think it will be enjoyable, or because they want someone to love and to love them.

Obviously, not every moment of parenting is going to be fun.  No one likes having a sick child crawl into your bed and puke all over them.  No one likes dealing with a shrieking toddler in the full throes of the "mines."  No one likes it when your child comes home sobbing because their friend was mean to them, and there's nothing you can do to fix it.  But most of us would say that the joys usually outweigh the frustrations.

But that's not always the case.  In her comment on my review of We Need to Talk about Kevin, Mary wrote:

"Yes, parents are supposed to be selfless, never asking for anything in return, just giving, giving, giving -- but poeple whose kids don't have special needs don't know what it's like to never get a hand-drawn card, or a picture, or a hug in return. It wears you down. It's human nature to expect some response when you send love out into the universe, or out into your family. Think about it, if she [Eva] had been married to someone who treated her the way that Kevin did, she would have divorced him, and no one would have blamed her."

Meghan, at I'm ablogging, made a similar point recently about her need for emotional feedback:

"I am the adult in this scenario. I understand that as the parent, I need to be loving and patient and kind and warm even if I am not getting anything but accusing screams and wails in return. I love my daughter all the time, no matter what. I hate to admit that her feedback helps to keep me going. I mean, she is only eleven months after all. I can't rely on her. That's way too much responsibility for a child of that tender age.

"But those 5:15 smiles sure make it easier. Just one day without one made me realize how much they help to keep me going."

So parenting is a selfless activity, undertaken for selfish reasons.  It's often a source of deep happiness and satisfaction, but you're not allowed to quit even if it isn't.  And if you complain about the ways that the workplace and society are hostile to childrearing, you're told that "you chose to have kids" so if you're unhappy it's your own fault. 

TBR: Marriage, a History

Today's book is Marriage, a History: from Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage, by Stephanie Coontz.  Coontz's thesis is that all of the recent phenomena that are often portrayed as signs of "the end of marriage" as a social institution -- delayed marriage, increased divorce rates, out-of-wedlock childbearing -- are the natural consequences of the transformation of marriage into a relationship grounded in love and intimacy.  Once society stops seeing marriage as simply a mechanism for creating alliances between families, determining the inheritance of property, and controlling both physical and human resources, and starts portraying it as a expression of emotional connection, it becomes hard to argue that people should stay married if they're no longer in love. In Coontz's word, marriage has become treasured but "optional."

While focusing mostly on Western Europe, Coontz surveys the huge range of social institutions that we lump together with the label of "marriage" and points out how many of the conditions that we think of as inherent aspects of "traditional marriage" (prohibitions on premarital sex, incest taboos, sexual fidelity, restriction of inheritance to legitimate children, difficulty of divorce) are actually contingent choices, accepted at some historical periods but not at others.

The book covers several thousand years of history and thus is necessarily a quick summary of each period.  Overall, I enjoyed the book and found it a quick read. I didn't object to the fast pace until the very end, when it felt like Coontz assumed that her audience had already read her previous book, The Way We Never Were. Coontz claims that the specific circumstances of the 60s and 70s -- second wave feminism, improved access to birth control, stagnant male wages and growing female earning potention -- accelerated the changes, but weren't necessary for them to occur.

Coontz consistently offers political and economic explanations for why different societies had different moral standards.  I was quite intrigued by her argument that the "separate spheres" story about gender roles developed as a response to the strain that democracy placed on the old assumptions that women were inherently inferior and subordinated.  I was also fascinated by her claim that as early as the beginning of the 19th century, different classes were developing different expectations around the timing of work and marriage -- and different moral standards that went with them:

"A shotgun wedding was not a huge problem for people in rural occupations if the young couple had access to the resources needed to set up a new household.  As for unskilled and semi-skilled laborers, whose earning power had often peaked by the end of their teens, it could be an advantage to marry and have children early, because after only a short period of dependence, the children could enter the labor force and increase total household income."

"But for middle-class parents, an unexpected marriage was a bigger problem.  To achieve success in the expanding category of middle-class occupations, a man had to have an education or serve a long period of training in his craft or profession.... This made deferred gratification a cherished principle of middle-class family strategy.... Central to this internal moral order was an unprecedented emphasis on female purity and chastity."

***

I was quite amused last week to look at the Washington Post Book Review and see that they had given this book to none other than Judith Warner to review.  This review mostly serves to confirm Jennifer Weiner's claim that reviews are more about the reviewer than the book.  Warner concludes: "Relationships between men and women, she [Coontz] implies, are basically healthy -- probably better than they've ever been in the past. It's our society that's sick." 

A very good decision

Anne at EconoMom wrote this week about the best decisions she's ever made (as judged by maximized utility, or happiness).  She suggests making a list and sharing it with your spouse.  She then writes:

"Of course, you know you have to put 'marrying my spouse' at number one on the list, which is where it would be anyway, Rick, in case you're wondering."

Nine years ago today, T and I got married.  And yes, it was the best decision I've ever made.  He's my friend, my lover, my partner, my co-parent.  He makes me laugh, gives me backrubs, and believes in me more than I believe in myself.  Whatever life throws at us, I'm very glad to have him at my side.  Happy anniversary, sweetie. 

The part that blows my mind is that T and I started dating when we were 18.   I feel like I barely know the adolescent I was then.  T's grown up a lot too.  And yet, we somehow had the luck or judgment to find each other and to stay together.  It's not the life pattern I would every have predicted for myself, but it's worked out very well for us.

For the record, my other nine top utility maximizing decisions, in chronological order, are:

1. Taking David Montgomery's American Labor History classes.  They changed my life.
2. Not going to law school.
3. Taking my current job.
4. Taking up running and joining the Penguin Brigade. 
5. Buying our house when we did.
6. Having D.
7. Going to Africa with my family, even though it meant taking 14+ hour plane rides with a 20 month old.
8. Having N.
9. Starting this blog. 

***

Light blogging ahead this weekend; we've got a guest staying with us.  She's a good friend from college who I don't see very often, and I probably won't take the time to write while she's here.

What's "married"?

This week at the bookstore, I noticed The Paperbag Princess on the rotating rack of paperback picturebooks (where there are usually annoying books about characters from television).  Someone had recommended this recently (I thought it was in the comments to this post of Julie's, but I can't find it there) so I read it, laughed, then called D over and read it to him.

The punchline of the book is "They didn't get married."  In the car on the way home, D asked, "what's 'married'?"  This surprised me at first, but then I realized that it's really not something that we're likely to talk about.  D was the ringbearer at my brother's wedding last year, but he didn't ask a lot of questions about what was going on.  And we always sort of mumble past the last few pages of Babar and Zephir where the General gives Isabelle to Zephir to marry as his reward for rescuing him.

We fumbled a minute, then T came up with the answer that marriage is when two people decide to make a new family together.  Sounds about right to me. 

I've got a hold in at the library on Stephanie Coontz's new book; I'll see if she comes up with any better of a definition.

Child well-being and unwed parenthood

Someone emailed me after reading yesterday's post and asked me about the statement that children born to unmarried parents do worse than their peers on a range of measures.  The measures include things from physical health, to how well the children do at school, to drug use, to how early they start having sex and becoming parents themselves.  Here's a link to a set of charts from the conservative Heritage Foundation, and here's a summary of the literature by MDRC, a moderately liberal research organization.

There are two important caveats to keep in mind as you look at these studies.  First, all of the studies are looking at group averages.  So they don't tell you anything about any given individual who is a member of a group.  There are millions of children of single parents who are healthy, do well in school, have healthy relationships, don't get involved in any sort of criminal activity, etc. 

Second, there is a huge correlation between single parenthood and low incomes.  This is both because single parents typically only have access to one person's earnings and because people with lower earnings are more likely to have children while not married.  And so, when you just look at the simple average differences between children of single parents and children of married parents (as Heritage does in the link above), most of the gap is probably driven by differences in income.  However, more sophisticated studies do suggest that marital status matters, even after controlling for income.  (One particularly interesting study supporting this comes from Sweden, which has a much more generous economic safety net for single parents than the US.)

Maybe I've been working for the Bush Adminstration too long, but I don't think their Healthy Marriage Initatiive is an inherently evil notion, as most mainstream feminist organizations do, although I do think it is overly narrowly focused.   Instead, I support the Marriage-Plus proposals, which combine support for marriage and stable relationships with job training and other economic supports as well as programs to combat teen pregnancy.  (Heritage and its ilk consider Marriage-Plus to be heresy.)  During the CLASP audioconference last week, Kathy Edin mentioned a "service-learning" program that had suprisingly good results at reducing teen pregnancy; she suggested that it was because it gave the participants a sense that they could contribute to society in a way other than parenting.  That seems like a worthy goal.

TBR: Promises I Can Keep

Today's book is Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas.  Over one-third of children in the US are born to unmarried mothers, a figure that has been steadily increasing for decades.  This trend worries a lot of people, both because children born to single parents are disproportionately likely to be poor, and because there's a growing body of evidence that suggests that such children do worse on a range of measures than their peers, even after you control for income.  But while this trend is very well documented, little is known about why.

Questions about why are generally very hard for researchers to answer; it's not possible to get at them with administrative data or big national surveys.  Edin and Kefalas are sociologists and ethnographers and so to try to answer the title question, they spent 3 years living and working in low-income neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Camden, talking to 162 low-income single mothers about their lives.

Edin and Kefalas' main findings are:

• Motherhood was highly valued by the low-income women they talked with.  It was their main source of identity, their main way of leaving a mark in the world, of creating hope for the future.  The idea of not becoming parents -- or even of delaying parenting until their 30s, as is common for middle-class women -- was horrifying to the women in the study.  One reason, although not the only one, is that many of the other opportunities that life offers to middle-class women are out of reach for these poor women.
• The women in the study valued marriage, and hoped to be married some day.  But they set very high standards for marriage -- wanting both an emotional commitment and for themselves and their partners to have achieved some level of economic success -- which they were unlikely to reach anytime soon.  If they held off on having kids until they had partners they saw as marriage material, they might never have kids.  This was an unacceptable possibility for them.  Having kids with men they weren't willing to marry wasn't their first choice, but it was a lot better than not having kids.
• Early parenting has very little economic opportunity cost for these low-income women.  The earnings path for such women is so flat that having kids doesn't hold them back very much.  And many of the women told Edin and Kefalas that they were on the fast track into trouble until they got pregnant and turned themselves around because they wanted to be good mothers.
• Being a good parent didn't seem like an unachievable task.  Even before having kids of their own, they had spent a lot of time taking care of children and mastering the physical skills.  They defined being a good mother as "being there" for the kids, and doing your best, not as providing a certain level of material goods.
• Some of the moral hierarchies advocated by the women in the study were directly contractory to those that dominate middle-class American society.  The one that surprised me the most is that they consistently believed  that having a child out of wedlock was  greatly preferable to marrying and then getting divorced.  They also felt rising to the occasion and dealing with whatever hardship life dealt you was a significant virtue; thus, having an abortion or giving up a child for adoption were both seen as signs of weakness, even selfishness.

This brief summary doesn't realy do justice to the book, however.  Poor women are often the objects of others' moral scrutiny.  Even generally sympathetic books like Random Family and American Dream portray their subjects as sort of buffeted by the winds of life, rather than as rational actors and the protagonists of their own stories.  Edin and Kefalas assume that these poor women's choices make sense by their own values and priorities, given the constraints that they face, and let the voices of the women carry their story.  It's worth reading.

More Virginia politics

First, an update on HB1677 -- Maura has posted Del Cosgrove's email to her, in which he indicates that he will be working with legislative staff to revise the bill language to narrow its application.  (Apparently, he's been totally swamped with email in the past day or two.  I'm shocked.)  I wouldn't totally assume the problem is fixed, but it makes sense to at least wait and see what the bill says.

Next, I thought I'd shine a little light on some other proposed legislation.  HJ586, also offered by Del. Cosgrove, would amend the Virginia Constitution to say, under the heading BILL OF RIGHTS:

"Marriage is the legal union of one man and one woman as husband and wife, and no other combination of persons may be licensed to marry or recognized as a marriage by the government. A civil union, domestic partnership, or similar civil arrangement that purports to bestow the rights, privileges, benefits, status, or obligations of marriage upon unmarried persons may not be created, recognized, or enforced by the government. A civil arrangement forbidden by this section shall be void and unenforceable even if lawful elsewhere."

Del Cosgrove feels compelled to propose this amendment, even though the Legislature passed a law just last year that clarified the existing law defining marriage as between a man and a woman, in order to say:

"A civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage is prohibited. Any such civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement entered into by persons of the same sex in another state or jurisdiction shall be void in all respects in Virginia and any contractual rights created thereby shall be void and unenforceable."

This law has already come into play in at least one custody dispute.  It strikes me as pure political grandstanding to push for a Constitutional amendment on top of the existing law, and it just turns my stomach to have it under the heading of Bill of Rights.

Finally, I'd like to point out the really well designed Legislative Information System which makes it possible to find out what bills have been introduced on a subject and their current status with just a few clicks of a mouse. 

Why marry at all?

Why marry at all?

By Marge Piercy, from My Mother's Body

Why mar what has grown up between the cracks
and flourished like a weed
that discovers itself to bear rugged
spikes of magneta blossoms in August,
ironweed sturdy and bold,
a perennial that endures winters to persist?

Why register with the state?
Why enlist in the legions of the respectable?
Why risk the whole apparatus of roles
and rules, of laws and liabilities?
Why license our bed at the foot
like our Datsun truck: will the mileage improve?

Why encumber our love with patriarchal
word stones, with the old armor
of husband and the corset stays
and the chains of wife? Marriage
meant buying a breeding womb
and sole claim to enforced sexual service.

Marriage has built boxes in which women
have burst their hearts sooner
than those walls; boxes of private
slow murder and the fading of the bloom
in the blood; boxes in which secret
bruises appear like toadstools in the morning.

But we cannot invent a language
of new grunts. We start where we find
ourselves, at this time and place.

Which is always the crossing of roads
that began beyond the earth's curve
but whose destination we can now alter.

This is a public saying to all our friends
that we want to stay together. We want
to share our lives. We mean to pledge
ourselves through times of broken stone
and seasons of rose and ripe plum;
we have found out, we know, we want to continue.

We included this poem in the program at our wedding, and it's been on my mind a lot these days.  I don't have the energy for original writing tonight, so I thought I'd share it.

February warmth

I've been trying to remember just how it felt last February, when the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that it was a violation of the state's constitution not to allow same-sex marriages, when San Francisco started granting marriage licenses, when someone posted online that he wanted to send flowers to the couples waiting to be married and raised over $14,000 in a few weeks. I'm trying to remember just how giddy it felt, and how I cried and smiled at the same time every morning as I read the stories of happy couples in the newspaper on my way to work. (Don't worry -- I take the metro, not drive.)

We're going to need some of that warmth this week, with measures on the ballot in 11 states that would explicitly ban gay marriage, and with 8 of those going much further, to prohibit essentially any recognition of same-sex couples. The best overview I've found of these -- with links to the full text of all the amendments -- is from the GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) resource kit. As they say:

"On Nov. 2, voters in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma and Utah will consider state constitutional amendments that would ban civil unions, marriage equality and, in some cases, any and all legal protections for gay and lesbian families (and, potentially, other families as well). Three other states -- Mississippi, Montana and Oregon -- will vote on proposed amendments which explicitly mention only marriage, but which could still jeopardize other basic protections for gay families."

My understanding is that the only state of these where there's a serious chance of defeating these amendments is Oregon. (The campaign to stop it is discussed at length and with flair at Alas, A Blog.) I think everyone knew that there was likely to be a backlash against those joyous February days, and it's here now. And there's a real possibility that it could affect the results of the Presidential election, by motivating the right wing to vote. So I'm hanging onto the memories of that February warmth.

I got an interesting email last week from the Human Rights Campaign, quoting an op-ed by Vic Basile in which he argues that we should consider it a violation of "our bonds of love, trust and friendship" to vote for candidates who support a constitutional amendment against same sex-marriage. I can't tell from the essay whether he expects people to break off relationships with their family and friends who disagree on this issue, or simply to let them know how much their positions hurt. I can't agree with the former, but the message was certainly more thought-provoking than the zillions of political emails with pleas for money that have been filling my inbox laterly.

I'd also like to call attention to an interesting argument in opposition to anti-gay marriage legislation by FrumDad, an orthodox Jew who believes that homosexuality is an abomination. But he doesn't think the government should be making these decisions:

"Every one of us should be incredibly leery of granting broad powers of this sort to the government just because we happen to agree with the particular exercise of that power. Every one of us should understand that the next time that power will be exercised it will most likely be in a manner with which we do not agree, in a manner which will, in fact be directed against us."

Kidding Ourselves

Today's book is Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies, and Bargaining Power, by Rhona Mahony. This is an absolutely fascinating book, published in 1995, that I don't know anyone else who has ever heard of. I encountered it through a footnote in another book, perhaps The Second Shift.

Kidding Ourselves is almost two books in one. The first two-thirds is an attempt to answer the question of why so many smart ambitious feminist women in egalitarian marriages have kids and all of a sudden find themselves responsible for more than half of the child care and household work. As Naomi Wolf puts it in Misconceptions:

"Our generation did not think we were marrying breadwinners; we thought we were marrying our best friends. But the husbands were pulling rank in a way that best friends don't do."

Mahony's answer is that it's a matter of power, and negotiating positions. And she goes through an interesting list of negotiating strategies that women can use to try to persuade their husbands to do more: Telling them how unhappy the current situation is making, make moral arguments about equality, offer other things in return that will make them happy, nag, threaten to leave. Some of these are more or less effective. Wolf makes similar points, and grimly concludes that men simply aren't going to make real career sacrifices unless forced to, and women aren't going to be able to force them to do it, because their threat to leave isn't serious.

I found Mahony a more optimistic read, even though she also thinks that -- on average -- women are going to lose these negotiations, necause she believes that there are things that women can do to increase their leverage. The key point, however, is that these are mostly choices made long before the children are born -- what career to enter, what spouse to marry.

Mahony argues that as long as women choose careers that don't maximize their earning potential and that give them flexibility, marry men who have more earning potential and less flexibility, and care more for their children as infants, they will always wind up doing more of the child care and housework.

Is it Ms magazine that used to refer to "click" moments? CLICK.

The earning potential part is generally understood. The marriage point is interesting, because it's not just about money. It's that if you want a husband who is intensely involved in child-rearing, you have to marry someone who values it, even if it has a career cost. And career-oriented ambitious women tend to marry equally career-oriented ambitious men.

The child care is a point that I keep making to everyone I know. Child care is not an inherent skill. You can get some ideas of how to do it by reading books or taking classes or talking to other parents, but mostly you learn how to do it by doing it. And you make some mistakes -- forgetting to bring a change of clothes on an outing, bouncing the child too much after a feeding -- but you learn from them. Most fathers spend ridiculously little time on their own with their infants, which puts them behind. And once one parent is "the expert" and the other "the assistant" it becomes far too easy to maintain that role.

The last third of the book, much to my surprise, is a vision of a world in which breadwinning mothers and caregiving fathers are as common as breadwinning fathers and caregiving mothers. Like me (!) Mahony rejects the goal of having all families divide breadwinning and childrearing equally. She writes:

"Not all fathers can do half the child rearing, or want to, or should. Much more to the point, some fathers can do lots more, and want to, and should. People give the incorrect answer [a 50-50 future[, I think, because they can't boost their imaginations over the hump of the present to imagine a future in which there really exists no sexual division of labor. "