A Crucial Measure of Autonomy
By A.O. Scott
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2000, at 1:10 PM ETDear Katha,
What makes Wallerstein's book readable as a collection of narratives is also, as you suggest, what makes it unreliable as social science. It's as though she conducted a survey of the characters in an Ann Beattie novel. But at the same time, while she may be over-generalizing, filtering data through her own biases, and hearing what she wants to hear in the responses of her subjects, I don't think her larger point can be dismissed. The question with which I closed my last post--does divorce hurt children?--was overly general and demands some qualifications. Which divorces? Which children? And, as you say, compared to what?
There are of course easy--facile, perhaps--answers to that last one. Certainly compared to life in a violent intact household, compared to abuse, compared to poverty, divorce is a minor hurt and may indeed be a good thing. But to a child, compared to what is a meaninglessly abstract question. Larry (one of the kids Wallerstein studies) grew up in a hellishly dysfunctional family. By any objective standard, for the mother's physical safety as well as the mental well-being of Larry and his sister, divorce was the best outcome. But for most of his childhood, Larry--self-destructively, wrongly, but with unshakable conviction--wished that his parents had stayed together and hoped that they might reunite.
One of Wallerstein's more persuasive points is that children don't simply relate to their parents singularly but also imagine their parents as a unit. My 4-year-old son often calls me mommy and my wife daddy--not, I think, because he's confused, but because we're at some level interchangeable or even the same person. On the wall behind my computer is a picture he drew a while ago, shortly after his little sister was born, in which the four of us are discrete blobs joined together by elaborate curlicues, some very faint, some bold and decisive. It's a kind of allegorical picture of what it is to be in a family--whatever its composition, marital status, relative happiness, etc. Even in cruel, cold, or faltering families--also in gay families, families with only one parent, extended multi-generational families--these webs of connection exist and structure the child's universe. When some of them are severed, that universe is altered, and whether or not this alteration is for the child's ultimate or objective good, he or she is likely to experience it as catastrophic. This is not to say that the damage is irrevocable or worse than the damage that can be sustained over years of living in some families--those wavy lines could be high-voltage cables or strands of barbed wire. But the breakup of a family produces a specific form of hurt: to say that my skinned knee is not as bad as a concussion doesn't make it sting any less.
I don't think, as Wallerstein does, that divorce is a social disaster, but I do think it's a tragedy--and I mean that in a precise, quasi-Greek sense. It represents the collision of two absolute and irreconcilable moral imperatives--the autonomy of adults and the security of children. A free and healthy society is one that treats its citizens as adults, with dominion over the important decisions in their lives. Without the right to divorce, people would be denied a crucial measure of autonomy, which is not the prerogative of doing whatever you want (as some conservatives, and also some liberals, may think) but rather the right to make important decisions without undue constraint or interference. Wallerstein and the others, as well as some of our readers in "The Fray," pretend that no-fault divorce has led to an epidemic of whimsical splitting, another example of people doing whatever feels good and damn the consequences. Certainly, some people (men mostly) walk out on their families for selfish, shallow reasons. But the spirit of democracy requires giving them the benefit of the doubt, and I, with my sunny view of human nature, believe that most people don't take the decision to divorce (or the decision to marry) lightly. The freedom to leave a marriage--which I think it's important to defend against both overt and implicit attacks--nonetheless has as one of its consequences the specific, incomparable unhappiness of a lot of children.
I have a feeling you'll take issue with this and point out that if we as a society really cared about the well-being of children, we'd guarantee them health care, better schools, safer neighborhoods, and so on. Fair enough. But let me play devil's advocate for a moment and quarrel with your characterization of the aims of conservatism, the project of which you say is "the withdrawal of public services and the diminishment of the sense of social solidarity." Conservatives--and as a former contributor and lifetime subscriber to The Nation I don't qualify--would argue that what they want is the restoration of social solidarity, which they feel has been usurped by the state. The Western European countries you regard with admiration they look at with horror, and they fear the erosion of family, religion, and the bonds of place and kinship. Whether these fears are justified is obviously a matter for fierce ideological disputation, but I don't think that conservatives are motivated by a cynical desire to make people unhappy and boss them around any more than leftists are. (The defense of family against the incursions of the state and the capitalist market is not exclusive historical property of the right, by the way.) And a conservative might point out that while you don't want the government in your or anybody else's bedroom, you don't mind if it raises everybody's kids.
But as I said, I'm not a conservative. (Are you out there, Chris?) I, too, want more of the state's money and less of its prying attention. I am, however, a person living in the state of spiritual degradation called marriage--not for ideological reasons, not, in fact, for any reasons I could articulate in the space that remains. My reason knows who she is. At our house, you'll be glad to know, the government sleeps on the couch.
Katha, this has been a lot of fun--not reading these books (we didn't get to Ann Pearlman's pallid little piece of writing-workshop theraporn) but wrestling with the issues they raise, which, as the endless Fray shows, touch all kinds of nerves people didn't even know they had. I look forward to our next meeting.
For better or for worse,
Tony
A Crucial Measure of Autonomy
By A.O. Scott
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2000, at 1:10 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)