Stuck in a Self-Contradiction
By Katha Pollitt
Posted Monday, Sept. 25, 2000, at 6:04 PM ETI loved the Auden quotation, Tony, but you give Maggie Gallagher, Linda Waite, and Judith Wallerstein too much credit. They do not "commit a social science"--they commit propaganda, publicity, pop-psychology, and politics. The Case for Marriage is basically a think-tank clip-job, except for the think part--part of the endless spate of pro-marriage, anti-divorce, anti-gender-equality books, articles, op-eds, position papers, TV appearances, and blatherfests produced by the Institute for American Values, where Maggie Gallagher heads the Marriage Project. (Judith Wallerstein and Linda Waite are both listed on the Web site as "Personnel," part of the Council on Families.) The book is part of the echo-chamber effect "family values" conservatives strive mightily, and with considerable success, to produce in the media. They quote each other constantly, reinforcing the idea that each is a bona fide expert with many credentials, much academic respect in their respective fields, and a wide following of acolytes. (Does anyone but Amitai Etzioni refer to Amitai Etzioni as "the guru of the communitarian movement"?) The Case for Marriage, for example, works in family values ideologues Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, Norval Glenn, and David Blankenhorn in just the first chapter. An improbable anecdote, in which a young woman is relieved to finally find someone willing to congratulate her on her marriage is ascribed to "a journalist"--in the footnotes, you find out it comes from right-wing anti-feminist Danielle Crittenden's What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us. (Crittenden is a prominent member of the Independent Women's Forum, which is another right-wing echo chamber.)
The whole book has that recycled, chewed-up-newsprint feel. Nothing is looked at freshly: Even their quotation from Open Marriage, George and Nena O'Neill's '70s kitsch classic, is sourced to Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's quotation of same, rather than to the original work. There is much wrenching of quotes from context, too: They even manage to twist an innocuous quotation from Hillary Clinton to make that heroine of marriage look like a disrespecter of the institution! Their sample couples, based on interviews from "a variety of sources" (the IAV and Norval Glenn, for example) are like puppets for the authors' views, except that, since they are really cyborgs or extraterrestrials or androids, they can't get it quite right. Take Matt, for example, of Matt and Dina, who describes "marital love" this way: "It means I never have to worry about it or think about it or have any concern about who she is or how she will feel about me." No, No, Matt! Marital or not, love means you want to think about the beloved. You're curious about her. She never fails to surprise you. Because she is a human being, and human beings change. Not like on the planet Narcissus, where you come from.
As you point out, The Case for Marriage is stuck in a self-contradiction. Gallagher and Waite write as if everybody thinks marriage is a terrible idea, but periodically they have to acknowledge that marriage is very popular. In fact, one reason the United States has a high divorce rate (40 percent of all marriages, not 50 percent as they say in one place) is that it has a very high marriage rate. All sorts of people get married in America who in Western Europe wouldn't, and probably shouldn't--movie stars and drunken poets and Newt Gingrich and people who put naked pictures of their mates up on the Internet and people doing life in prison. In their capacity of marital prophets to a stiff-necked people, Waite and Gallagher set forth all the ways in which marriage is good for you (especially if you are male, although they downplay this). It makes you richer, healthier, happier, and more productive, because partners are able to specialize in what each is good at instead of having to be good at everything, as they imagine single people must have to be, since in their world single people have no friends or relatives or lovers who like to help them. Married people even have more sex.
Except, of course, when they don't. That's the problem with their attempt to sell marriage. Matrimony won't make you richer if you marry a compulsive gambler, or a layabout, or a spendthrift--or a poor person, which is the choice open to the poor single women the authors claim to worry about. It won't make you healthier if you marry an abuser, or a depressive, or someone who doesn't like you very much after a while (the health benefit goes mostly to men--wives monitor their family's health, sometimes to the neglect of their own, but husbands don't seem to care about anybody's health, including their own). Specialization has a downside too--do I become more productive by cleverly arranging to have first a husband and now a live-in love who drives so I can endlessly dither about getting my licence? I'd say no--I'm just letting myself be lazy and neurotic, because I can. Same thing with a man who "specializes" in work, while his wife "specializes" in child-raising and husband-tending. These people may be more "efficient" (a favorite word of Waite and Gallagher), but so what? Each of them has experienced less of the variety of life than would have been the case had they "specialized" less.
People who are happily married already know they're happy. They don't need this book to tell them. Similarly, people who are unhappily married are unhappy because they're not getting the benefits the book details--their spouse is mean or cold or neglectful or unfaithful, there is not enough communication, respect, love, and they haven't had sex since she got pregnant, and that was five years ago. The authors insist that marital unhappiness is only temporary--citing a study in which unhappy spouses who didn't divorce told pollsters several years later than they were happier now. Even if true, this is very poor science: The class of unhappy couples who stay married is not the same as the class that gets divorced. Perhaps they were less unhappy, or more compatible, to start out with or needed to be married more. In any case, most divorced people also tell pollsters they are happier now. So, perhaps people are smarter than Waite and Gallagher, and figure out quite accurately when their marriages are worth saving and when not.
I see I haven't gotten to Judith Wallerstein--much less Ann Pearlman's "infidelity." Nor have we gotten into Waite and Gallagher's trashing of cohabitation. Any thoughts on that? Talk to you tomorrow.
Katha
Stuck in a Self-Contradiction
By Katha Pollitt
Posted Monday, Sept. 25, 2000, at 6:04 PM ET
This week, our Book Clubbers examine three books about divorce: Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher's The Case for Marriage
and Judith Wallerstein's The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce
, which argue that even troubled marriages are worth preserving for the kids' sake, and Ann Pearlman's Infidelity
, a memoir by a relationship guru who discovered that her husband had been cheating on her. Click here to learn more about the critics and here, here, and here to buy the respective books. Reader Comments from The Fray:
Reply from co-author, The Case for Marriage:
Katha Pollitt dismisses The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better-Off Financially as a "clip job." Your readers should know that Katha Pollitt, a committed anti-anti-divorce warrior, has already repeatedly publicly condemned me, the Institute for American Values, and more importantly anyone else who thinks we should try to do something about high rates of family fragmentation. Assigning the book to her, balanced by a film critic who doesn't know much about the issue, was not likely to produce a fair, lively, informative exchange on an important public topic, and, surprise, it surely did not.
Readers who are interested in actually following the current marriage debate might like to know: The Case for Marriage synthesizes the latest and best scientific research on marriage, much of it the original work of my co-author, University of Chicago Prof. Linda J. Waite, a leading family sociologist. Here's the new case in a nutshell: marriage changes men and women's lives in very important, life-enhancing ways that other sorts of relationships, such as cohabitation, cannot. Marriage is not just another lifestyle or an emotional relationship, but a powerful, productive, wealth-creating institution that (like education) builds human and social capital and (like education) therefore deserves public support. If we continue to privatize marriage, only the already highly advantaged will receive the benefits of lasting marriage. This is one reason Linda Waite and I call for new public and community strategies to support marriage, and reduce divorce and family fragmentation.
If your readers would like to know "what's new" about the Case for Marriage, I offer these as just three examples: new scientific evidence that 1) explodes the idea that marriage benefits men at women's expense; 2) shows how marriage actually likely reduces the risk of domestic violence, at least compared to cohabitation and 3) demonstrates for the very first time what happens to bad marriages that don't divorce, using a large nationally representative sample. What are your odds of turning a bad marriage around? The Case for Marriage gives you a ringside seat on the latest scientific evidence about marriage that both family scholars and ordinary people are hotly debating.
To pretend that everybody already knows these things and that there is no marriage debate in America is just silly. (Especially silly, come to think of it, a few weeks after Time magazine put "Who Needs a Husband?" on its cover). Pollitt does more damage to her own reputation than ours by trying to pull it off.
To charge Linda Waite and I with animus against women is also silly. Of course people are free to disagree with us and with what we recommend, as good or bad for women or other Americans. But to lapse into ad hominem attacks on our basic good faith is a sign that you've run out of arguments. Linda Waite is a liberal feminist, as well as one the nation's top family scholars. I am a political conservative who has made the well-being of women (yes, and children) the centerpiece of my own heterodox writing career. As someone who was an unwed mother for ten years, I know whereof I speak from personal, as well as professional experience, and the charge that my real goal is to hurt such women is to me, absurd.
If marriage really is powerfully better for women, men, children and society than the alternatives, we aren't doing anyone any favors by pretending that all family forms are equally good, and should be embraced equally.
--Maggie Gallagher
[Director of the Marriage Program Institute for American Values]
(To reply, click
here.)
(10/9)
The defensiveness of some of these posts is transparent. In general, divorce hurts children. Moving around is not like divorce. To even hint there might be a similarity is absurd. When you move, the entire universe, which is to say parents and siblings, moves with you. The outside stuff is irrelevant. There is no betrayal, no custody-induced moving on weekends or in the summer. Get real. To say that there are some marriages which ought to end in divorce and soon is not addressing the question of whether it hurts the children. That's the point. Nobody has addressed it. With the exception of a few folks who don't count since their views are inconvenient and so they are demonized as right-wing interfering old fools. Thus, whatever they have to say is meaningless, even if true. That there are marriages which are so bad that children ought to be out of them is also true, but the question is whether that applies to all families in which parents are feeling like getting a divorce. That a number of intelligent, well-read people can so obviously duck the question written in neon is the clearest indication imaginable that kids don't count.
--Richard Aubrey
(To reply, click
here.)
Like many people, you seem to have a distaste for generalizations about complex human behavior. You may have a point, but the point is more appropriately placed in your own work against social science, not in a review against a given social science text. If you don't like sociology, or social science, as you imply with that cute poem, you should not read or review this book. Since you readily admit bias against social science, your readers are hard put to take you seriously as a reviewer of social science literature of any kind. The business of sociology is to make generalizations about human behavior. In order to critique sociological arguments, you need to take this as a given.
Arguments stemming from tables of statistics are not necessarily dry or void of emotional content to the reader. Many sports fans don't seem to have trouble incorporating multitudinous tables of stats within their interest in games born out of the passionate support of their local team. Some people are simply not turned off by correlations and regressions that represent patterns in human behavior. If the reviewer finds himself so ill at ease, he should abstain from reviewing such books.
--Jacob Felson
(To reply, click
here.)
BT writes in The Fray: "Marriage is not for everyone, and should not be forced down one's throat like cod liver oil."
The point is not to "force" marriage on anyone. In fact, sometimes I think it should be more difficult to get married, based on the casual way some people seem to get married and divorced on a whim. But in this world of rich old men who discard their wives for younger models, of children shuttled back and forth between divorced (and sometimes battling) ex-spouses, of people passing fatal diseases to each other through casual sex, don't you think that more people might benefit from acting on something other than what makes me feel good at the moment? When people stay married for many, many years, it's not necessarily because they never get mad at each other and never desire another partner. Maybe there are a lot of negative reasons for their sticking with it, but I like to think that at least part of it is that they take commitment seriously, and are willing to put up with some unhappiness in exchange for long-term rewards.
--Michael Ladenson
(To reply, click
here.)
[This post was part on a longer discussion between Mr Ladenson and BT.]
Notes from the Fray Editor: Everyone is either married or not married, so everyone has an opinion. And a status. And a life story. And advice. Check out Robert K, who says being married is like having a favorite book or food (and no, the conclusion is not romantic: "having sex outside of marriage is as natural as eating more than your favorite food") and then read the thread about Beverley and her marriage plans: that'll teach you to get cynical in The Fray, Robert.
There were plenty of personal experiences, and there was Amanda's jaunty list of ways to stay married. Ray Joseph Boudreaux Jr also offers some rather charming advice. And in an interesting post Dan Perreten says "social norms can favor life-long commitment without making pariahs out of those who need to end their marriage for reasons of abuse."
(9/26)
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Reader Comments from The Fray:
Reply from co-author, The Case for Marriage:
Katha Pollitt dismisses The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better-Off Financially as a "clip job." Your readers should know that Katha Pollitt, a committed anti-anti-divorce warrior, has already repeatedly publicly condemned me, the Institute for American Values, and more importantly anyone else who thinks we should try to do something about high rates of family fragmentation. Assigning the book to her, balanced by a film critic who doesn't know much about the issue, was not likely to produce a fair, lively, informative exchange on an important public topic, and, surprise, it surely did not.
Readers who are interested in actually following the current marriage debate might like to know: The Case for Marriage synthesizes the latest and best scientific research on marriage, much of it the original work of my co-author, University of Chicago Prof. Linda J. Waite, a leading family sociologist. Here's the new case in a nutshell: marriage changes men and women's lives in very important, life-enhancing ways that other sorts of relationships, such as cohabitation, cannot. Marriage is not just another lifestyle or an emotional relationship, but a powerful, productive, wealth-creating institution that (like education) builds human and social capital and (like education) therefore deserves public support. If we continue to privatize marriage, only the already highly advantaged will receive the benefits of lasting marriage. This is one reason Linda Waite and I call for new public and community strategies to support marriage, and reduce divorce and family fragmentation.
If your readers would like to know "what's new" about the Case for Marriage, I offer these as just three examples: new scientific evidence that 1) explodes the idea that marriage benefits men at women's expense; 2) shows how marriage actually likely reduces the risk of domestic violence, at least compared to cohabitation and 3) demonstrates for the very first time what happens to bad marriages that don't divorce, using a large nationally representative sample. What are your odds of turning a bad marriage around? The Case for Marriage gives you a ringside seat on the latest scientific evidence about marriage that both family scholars and ordinary people are hotly debating.
To pretend that everybody already knows these things and that there is no marriage debate in America is just silly. (Especially silly, come to think of it, a few weeks after Time magazine put "Who Needs a Husband?" on its cover). Pollitt does more damage to her own reputation than ours by trying to pull it off.
To charge Linda Waite and I with animus against women is also silly. Of course people are free to disagree with us and with what we recommend, as good or bad for women or other Americans. But to lapse into ad hominem attacks on our basic good faith is a sign that you've run out of arguments. Linda Waite is a liberal feminist, as well as one the nation's top family scholars. I am a political conservative who has made the well-being of women (yes, and children) the centerpiece of my own heterodox writing career. As someone who was an unwed mother for ten years, I know whereof I speak from personal, as well as professional experience, and the charge that my real goal is to hurt such women is to me, absurd.
If marriage really is powerfully better for women, men, children and society than the alternatives, we aren't doing anyone any favors by pretending that all family forms are equally good, and should be embraced equally.
--Maggie Gallagher
[Director of the Marriage Program Institute for American Values]
(To reply, click here.)
(10/9)
The defensiveness of some of these posts is transparent. In general, divorce hurts children. Moving around is not like divorce. To even hint there might be a similarity is absurd. When you move, the entire universe, which is to say parents and siblings, moves with you. The outside stuff is irrelevant. There is no betrayal, no custody-induced moving on weekends or in the summer. Get real. To say that there are some marriages which ought to end in divorce and soon is not addressing the question of whether it hurts the children. That's the point. Nobody has addressed it. With the exception of a few folks who don't count since their views are inconvenient and so they are demonized as right-wing interfering old fools. Thus, whatever they have to say is meaningless, even if true. That there are marriages which are so bad that children ought to be out of them is also true, but the question is whether that applies to all families in which parents are feeling like getting a divorce. That a number of intelligent, well-read people can so obviously duck the question written in neon is the clearest indication imaginable that kids don't count.
--Richard Aubrey
(To reply, click here.)
Like many people, you seem to have a distaste for generalizations about complex human behavior. You may have a point, but the point is more appropriately placed in your own work against social science, not in a review against a given social science text. If you don't like sociology, or social science, as you imply with that cute poem, you should not read or review this book. Since you readily admit bias against social science, your readers are hard put to take you seriously as a reviewer of social science literature of any kind. The business of sociology is to make generalizations about human behavior. In order to critique sociological arguments, you need to take this as a given.
Arguments stemming from tables of statistics are not necessarily dry or void of emotional content to the reader. Many sports fans don't seem to have trouble incorporating multitudinous tables of stats within their interest in games born out of the passionate support of their local team. Some people are simply not turned off by correlations and regressions that represent patterns in human behavior. If the reviewer finds himself so ill at ease, he should abstain from reviewing such books.
--Jacob Felson
(To reply, click here.)
BT writes in The Fray: "Marriage is not for everyone, and should not be forced down one's throat like cod liver oil."
The point is not to "force" marriage on anyone. In fact, sometimes I think it should be more difficult to get married, based on the casual way some people seem to get married and divorced on a whim. But in this world of rich old men who discard their wives for younger models, of children shuttled back and forth between divorced (and sometimes battling) ex-spouses, of people passing fatal diseases to each other through casual sex, don't you think that more people might benefit from acting on something other than what makes me feel good at the moment? When people stay married for many, many years, it's not necessarily because they never get mad at each other and never desire another partner. Maybe there are a lot of negative reasons for their sticking with it, but I like to think that at least part of it is that they take commitment seriously, and are willing to put up with some unhappiness in exchange for long-term rewards.
--Michael Ladenson
(To reply, click here.)
[This post was part on a longer discussion between Mr Ladenson and BT.]
Notes from the Fray Editor: Everyone is either married or not married, so everyone has an opinion. And a status. And a life story. And advice. Check out Robert K, who says being married is like having a favorite book or food (and no, the conclusion is not romantic: "having sex outside of marriage is as natural as eating more than your favorite food") and then read the thread about Beverley and her marriage plans: that'll teach you to get cynical in The Fray, Robert.
There were plenty of personal experiences, and there was Amanda's jaunty list of ways to stay married. Ray Joseph Boudreaux Jr also offers some rather charming advice. And in an interesting post Dan Perreten says "social norms can favor life-long commitment without making pariahs out of those who need to end their marriage for reasons of abuse."
(9/26)