A Selection of Books on Divorce
I was glad you quoted that passage about the evils of cohabitation, Tony. My sweetie and I fill every particular of that description of a particularly "negative" ménage: I've been married before, I have a child, and every time Paul and I think well, maybe we should get married and have a big party at Florent, along comes another onslaught of reactionary pro-marriage propaganda and I think, well maybe not--why give them the satisfaction? I think you're right about people nowadays, in all social classes, using cohabitation as a kind of tryout for marriage. (So of course it would be less stable, less committed, and more troublous than marriage, because today cohabitation weeds out a lot of unsuccessful pairings from the marriage stats.)
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StumbleUponStill, there are some people for whom cohabitation is not a preliminary stage but the thing itself. Besides Paul and me (seven years), I know two other couples, both up in their 50s now, who've lived together for decades in what looks like marriage--kids, shared property, fidelity--and who are often assumed by people who don't know them well to be married, but whose relationships have never been certified by church or state. To me, that seems more pure, more real love somehow--more of a break with that old idea of marriage as a "bargain" (another lovely term from those romantic devils, Waite and Gallagher)--she gets support, he gets service. I don't like the idea of God or government in my bed. A friend whose dad was a rabbi once told me that a couple had come to his father because the wife had been through menopause and no longer wanted to have sex. The rabbi explained to the wife that sleeping with her husband was a marital duty. I was just appalled. (And yes, I know that Jewish law also requires the husband to sleep with his wife, although physiology makes that one a little harder to enforce!) That whole way of seeing an intimate relationship--as sexual and emotional obligations enforceable by third parties--it just seems like a degradation of the spirit to me.
It's interesting that in Western Europe, too, more and couples are living together without marriage, and more and more kids are born out of wedlock (half of all births in Sweden)--but by and large this is not seen as a social crisis, producing dropouts and criminals and school shooter-uppers, leaving women impoverished and men behaving like Jim Fallows when Deborah's out of town. That is because in those countries not marriage but general well-being is the public concern--they have national health care, child benefits (money given to mothers), good daycare, much less poverty, and in particular much less of the kind of really desperate poverty you see in, say, the Mississippi Delta or Mott Haven in the Bronx--poverty that we are supposed to believe would be alleviated if only people got married! Those countries are far from perfect, but Western European kids do much better than U.S. ones in studies of child welfare.
I used to ask myself, WHY do conservatives care if people are married or not? I mean, what's it to them (especially given their high divorce rate)? The answer is that the promotion of marriage as a "public" institution that benefits not just you but society connects with the larger project of conservatism, which is the withdrawal of public services and the diminishment of the sense of social solidarity. Marriage becomes the safety net, the means by which scarce goods are distributed, while poverty, untreated illness, no money for college, and even having to live in a dangerous neighborhood become the wages of sin. Did you notice, for instance, how many stories in The Case for Marriage involve health insurance? But why should health care be distributed according to whether you have a government-approved sex partner in the right job? Why is the answer to bad housing and dangerous streets "get married and move"instead of tackling the problems of affordable housing and public safety?
Wallerstein is a much better writer and storyteller than Waite and Gallagher, I agree. She is more empathic toward her struggling subjects, and she gets more of the texture of people's lives and emotions down on the page. But for me, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce is a more masked and muddled version of the same set of ideas. Did you notice, for instance, the way Wallerstein assumes that early marriage is desirable and that marrying late is evidence that a child has been traumatized by parental divorce? But age at first marriage has been rising without a break since the mid-'60s! Today late marriage is virtually a marker of being in the professional classes. Like late childbearing, it has less to do with parental divorce than with general social features like the structure of education and professional training and employment, the availability of sex with good birth control and legal abortion, and all the rest of modern affluent life.
Wallerstein's stories make fascinating reading, but as social science they are hard to take seriously. First, she gets a sample that is anything but random--white couples in wealthy Marin County, going through divorce in l971, who volunteer to be in a 25-year study with a family therapist. Of course she's going to get couples more troubled than, say, my former husband and I, who did not have a lot of "issues" that we wanted our daughter to spend a quarter-century mulling over with a trained professional. Second, she makes recommendations based on the false assumption that getting divorced in l971 is like getting divorced todaywhen it's not. Today, for example, women in the social class of her subjects' parents are much better able to support themselves. (Like Waite and Gallagher, Wallerstein makes much of women's lesser income, for which the cure is marriage, not equality.)In her sample, 8 percent of the mothers had dropped out of high school--obviously, these are women who were either very troubled, expected to be housewives, or both. In any case, they were poorly placed to survive as single mothers and probably account for almost all of the 10 percent of the total group of divorced moms who are poor or nearly poor today. Another change over the decades is that the very routineness of divorce has made it less traumatic and shocking and discombobulating. Parents are better at dealing with it, and so are children. I'm not saying divorce is not painful, and that lots of parents screw up and some behave horribly. But the picture she draws--of inevitable loss of parental care and support, the virtual abandonment of children by stressed moms and angry dads--is really not accurate.
Responding to complaints that she had no control group, Wallerstein has added a "comparison sample" of interviews with young people from intact families who went to school with her subjects. Naturally she finds that these kids did better--but once again, it's apples and oranges. For example, in the comparison group, all the mothers had at least a high school degree--so to the extent that dropping out of high school means you have some serious problems, the comparison interviewees all had the advantage of better-educated, less troubled, less helpless mothers. Finally, as you point out, the very fact of participating in the study would naturally tend to make the kids see their lives through the lens of divorce. They may genuinely think the reason they have career problems is mom and dad's difficult split--but that doesn't mean it's true, any more than people who believe in past life regression are right to blame their problems on their experiences in ancient Egypt. As a warm, kindly person, Wallerstein would naturally elicit from her interviewees the kind of story she wants to hear.
Well, I could go on forever, and perhaps I already have. Tomorrow I want to address your question: How badly does divorce hurt children? I think the answer begins with another question: Compared to what?
Talk to you then,
Katha
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. 
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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)