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It’s Not Just Gender Privilege…

By Matt Zeitlin - Jul 28th, 2008 at 12:25 pm

I won’t pretend that I have been closely following the marriage/male privilege conflagration that has spread across the liberal blogosphere, so if my poınt has already been made, please forgıve me.

I think Haley gets it the most right when she says that men rarely recognize how their own experiences as men can affect the opinions they have and the perspective with which they view the world. And when it comes to debating whether or not marriage is a normalizing institution, one’s gender is incredibly important, especially because women tend to be affected differently by it than men. But there is an even more stark divide when it comes to marriage: a class divide.

Basically, upper-middle-class people are getting married, having children, and staying together like it’s the 1950s. And even if they pursue alternative family arrangements, they don’t suffer for them because they have the financial and social capital to make do. But for those who aren’t graduating from college and have low incomes, marriage is falling apart as an institution, with hugely negative effects. From The Economist:

There is a widening gulf between how the best- and least-educated Americans approach marriage and child-rearing. Among the elite (excluding film stars), the nuclear family is holding up quite well. Only 4% of the children of mothers with college degrees are born out of wedlock. And the divorce rate among college-educated women has plummeted. Of those who first tied the knot between 1975 and 1979, 29% were divorced within ten years. Among those who first married between 1990 and 1994, only 16.5% were.

At the bottom of the education scale, the picture is reversed. Among high-school dropouts, the divorce rate rose from 38% for those who first married in 1975-79 to 46% for those who first married in 1990-94. Among those with a high school diploma but no college, it rose from 35% to 38%. And these figures are only part of the story. Many mothers avoid divorce by never marrying in the first place. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among women who drop out of high school is 15%. Among African-Americans, it is a staggering 67%. [emphasis mine]

Not only are these numbers shocking because of the disparity between rich and poor (and black and white) they represent, but also because they are indicative of trends that bode ill for the well-being of the American working class. We all know that when families far apart, children generally suffer. And with the college wage premium and financial returns to education both at all-time highs, any disruption to a working-class child’s life makes advancement much more difficult. Unstable family structures aren’t great for adults either, especially women. When parents split, it is usually the woman who is left to raise the child, meaning that she has to provide a loving, supportive home, all the while trying to make ends meet as the head of a single-paycheck family.

For those with high amounts of social capital and good jobs, this is a much simpler task, but for everyone else, it is incredibly difficult. This all gets worse when children are born out of wedlock; when parents don’t want to sanctify their bond and committments to each other, it becomes all the easier for one parent to skip out.

In short, saying that one doesn’t need marriage or doesn’t want to participate in the institution is an opinion that is at least partially shaped by privilege. A wide swath of highly educated, highish-income couples can cohabitate, raise kids, and never get married, and in all likelihood things will be fine. The ironic thing is that it is those people that are getting married at high rates and staying together. The second level of irony is that those who feel they can safely opt out of marriage (or even the two-parent family all together) more likely than not come from a family where the parents have been married for a long time.

I am not saying that those who feel like they can have a more fufilling relationship outside the strictures of the two-parent, married model should participate in an institution they don’t like, only that they should recognize why and how they are in a position to scorn an institution that is so important to so many.

Tags: economy, feminism, gender equality, inequality, marriage