The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, part 1 of 8
The end of marriage
In the future, who will pay the costs of raising children? My sense is we must eventually move to some kind of socialist system, at least for children. These are the future adult citizens of society and society must ensure they have a healthy and happy upbringing.
For several thousand years, we had a system where a woman was supposed to get married, and then the wife and husband (as well as grandparents) would work together to provide for the children. When these families were out on their own farm, there was much work for both the husband and wife to do. But the spread of the monetary economy, and the spread of wage work, changed the relationship between husband and wife. In the USA, in 1776, only 22% of the population had jobs, everyone else was on their own farm and mostly disengage from monetary exchange. But in the 1800s the monetary economy spread rapidly and by 1900 most people were in the situation where they could not possibly survive without a job that paid money. Suddenly what work a woman might do at the home seemed less important than the money that a man was bringing in from outside the home.
Women have always worked, both on the farm and in the monetary economy. The census of 1890 shows about 25% of adult women working. Still, middle class families established an aspirational ideal that women should not work. And those jobs women could get, circa 1900, typically paid so little that no woman could raise children on those wages.
The mid to late 20th Century brought several big changes. The rate of divorce increased dramatically. In 1900, about 5% of all marriages ended in divorce, by the 1980s that number peaked around 50% -- and that number then declined only because poor people stopped getting married altogether. Poverty was always a contributing factor to divorce, so when poor people stopped getting married, it meant less marriages were going to end in divorce. But among the middle class, divorce continued to become more common, even though their rate had always been lower, and continues to be lower, than 50%.
After the 1960s there was a dramatic growth in the number of children being born to women who were not married. The question arose, how to pay for the upbringing of these children? Surprisingly, one of the biggest revolutionaries in this story turned out to be a Republican President. In 1990 President H W Bush began a campaign against "deadbeat dads", that is, fathers who owed child support and had not yet paid. President Bush was ready to tighten the legal screws on such fathers, applying maximum pressure to get them to pay.
Conservatives felt betrayed by this. The Christian Right went completely ballistic. Several books were published with titles like "The End Of Marriage". And there is in some sense in which the Christian Right was completely correct: for thousands of years a woman had no legal claim on a man's income unless the man and woman had been married, so President Bush was now fighting to extend the most important privilege of marriage to women who had never been married. It was the kind of social and political revolution that perhaps only a Republican President could get a way with (in a "Only Nixon could go to China" kind of way).
For Conservatives, the change raised the question, why would a woman want to get married if she's granted the greatest benefit of marriage without needing to actually get married? More so, what remaining punishment existed that would make people get married? Surely if unmarried women could get money from fathers then there would soon be a lot more children born out of wedlock? This last prediction came true, the number of children born out of wedlock continues to increase, although the trend was already well established when President HW Bush began in his campaign in 1990. Non-whites had seen increasing rates of out of wedlock births since the 1960s and among whites the number of children born out of wedlock had increased 400% during the 1980s, albeit from a very low initial number.
The Christian Right fought to keep the old system, in which a woman got nothing if she had not been married, but the Christian Right lost.
For President HW Bush, the goal was to keep the funding of children an individual, private affair, perhaps because it is obvious that the only other alternative is some kind of socialist system, in which the funding becomes public. But during these last 30 years we've seen all the failures that come from keeping this as an individual, private concern: if both the mother and the father are poor, then the child grows up poor. Society owes each child more than what the mother or father might be able to provide.
Again, only some kind of general fund can ensure that all children receive the education, health care, housing and food that they deserve. There is a much wider debate to be had about what society owes to adults who have made poor decisions as adults, and whether society should allow some adults to fail completely, but such arguments have no validity when we talk about the youngest among us: the moral case is much simpler when we talk about children.
In 1983, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote her book "The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment". She describes her effort this way:
"This book is about the ideology that shaped the breadwinner ethic and how that ideology collapsed, as a persuasive set of expectations, in just the last thirty years."
As we envision what the new system for raising children might look like, it's important to have a sense of why the old system died, and so I hope to talk about Ehrenreich's book, in 8 parts over the next 8 days.
At some later point, I hope to come back to the theme “The Flight from Commitment” which occurred in our economic life at the same time that it was happening in our personal lives, and so it represents a cultural change even deeper than what is commonly understood. Multi-national corporations were, at this time, moving away from old ideas about long-term investments and the importance of fixed capital, and instead were pushing toward a system that was more liquid so the capital could instead… what? The capital was less committed, but this didn’t lead to an era of rising profits, just the opposite. It lead to an era when capital could more easily flee, but flee to where?
The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Copyright © 1983
The fact that, in a purely economic sense, women need men more than the other way round, gives marriage an inherent instability that predates the sexual revolution, the revival of feminism, the “me generation” or other well-worn explanations for what has come to be known as the “breakdown of the family.” It is, in retrospect, frightening to think how much of our sense of social order and continuity has depended on the willingness of men to succumb in the battle of the sexes: to marry, to become wage earners and to reliably share their wages with their dependents.
In fact, most of us require more comforting alternative descriptions of the bond between men and women. We romanticize it, as in the popular song lyrics of the fifties where love was an adventure culminating either in matrimony or premature death. Or we convince ourselves that there is really a fair and equal exchange at work so that the wages men offer to women are more than compensated for by the services women offer to men. Any other conclusion would be a grave embarrassment to both sexes. Women do not like to admit to a disproportionate dependence, just as men do not like to admit that they may have been conned into undertaking what one cynical male called “the lifelong support of the female unemployed.”
Social scientists have generally shared these aversions and, on the whole, their accounts of the economics of marriage tend to be flustered or nonexistent. In the early mid-1970s sociologists produced no less than a half dozen anthologies on the family - its future, its prospects, its changing forms - but few gave more than a passing acknowledgment to its principal source of livelihood - the male wage - and the consequences of that dependence for both internal family relations and the relations of larger social groups. To judge from much of this literature, marriage exists in some realm outside of ordinary economic ties, and families operate more or less like voluntary associations or social clubs, which the members have opted to join.
The intellectual groundwork for such an innocent view of marriage had been laid by early twentieth-century social scientists, foremost among them the historian Arthur W. Calhoun. Calhoun was enthusiastic about the modern family he saw emerging from the wilderness past. The old-style, agrarian family had been a unit of production, its members bound together, somewhat brutishly, by economic necessity. Then came industrialization and the removal of production (cloth and clothing manufacture, food processing, etc.) from the home. The modern family, freed from the imperative of collective work, was thought to be no longer bound by economic necessity, but by more “spiritual” needs and concerns. At a safe remove from the commercial world outside, the family “ceases to be a forced grouping, and develops toward ethical unity and spontaneous democracy.” To Calhoun and the scholars who followed him, the “companionate family,” insulated from the competitiveness and commercialism of the “economy” outside, was not just a liberal ideal, but a description of reality.
What was missing, in this description, was the economy of the family itself. On the point, even Calhoun sometimes wavered. He had thrown “economic necessity” out of the family with the coming of the industrial revolution, and was far too chivalrous to admit that it might be a new kind of economic necessity that bound the modern woman to her husband. Yet when he looked at the middle-class families of his time, he found disturbing signs. Too many women had become “parasitic wives.” Too many men had been reduced to mere “earning mechanisms.” It occurred to him that with industrialization and the removal of women’s traditional productive work from the home, “the father comes to view the family as a responsibility rather than an asset.” Grimly, he suggested that this might be “part of the explanation for the phenomenon of family desertion [by men].”
While Calhoun was equivocating, two of his contemporaries were taking a more hard-headed look at the economics of marriage and the family. They were both intellectual mavericks: one a feminist and a socialist, the other a conservative and a self-professed misogynist. If only because of the tenacity of more sentimental views, their ideas are still fresh, and even radical, today.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the feminist writer and lecturer, came to her views on marriage from unhappy personal experience. Her father was one of the deserters Calhoun warned about. He walked out when Charlotte was very young, leaving his erstwhile family in poverty. Her own marriage to a young painter looked more promising, for, as she later wrote, “a lover more tender, a husband more devoted, woman could not ask.” But shortly after the birth of their child, Charlotte (then Stetson) developed a protracted case of what was then called nervous prostration and what we now diagnose as depression. During the ensuing months of prostration and “absolute misery” she had time to contemplate the dark side of even the best marriage. Divorced and largely recovered, she undertook a strenuous, lifelong assault on those things most of her suffragist contemporaries claimed to hold even dearer than the vote - the traditional middle-class marriage and family.
Gilman described the economics of marriage in the language of biology, and the effect was brutal: “The female of the genus homo is economically dependent on the male,” she wrote. “He is her food supply.” Marriage was a “sexuo-economic relation,” in which men paid money for the personal services performed by women, and paid, ironically, in inverse relation to the work performed. The wives of the poor, lacking servants and conveniences, had to work the hardest and were paid the least: “The women who do the most work get the least money, and the women who get the most money do the least work.” Within the middle and upper classes, women’s position was parasitical. Most of the tasks they performed could either be done by men and children themselves, abolished without any great discomfort, or (in her utopian vision) collectivized through the creation of inexpensive cafeterias, laundromats, day-care centers, etc. With the domestic work thus dispersed or dispensed with, women would be free to enter the workforce as independent wage earners and to enter marriage as men’s equals.
Within the prevailing “sexuo-economic” system, men got the best deal, Gilman thought - though only in moral terms. True, men had to pay a high price for dubious and often inept domestic services, but this was good for them. Anticipating Betty Friedan, she believed that dependency and exclusive concentration on domestic detail infantilized women, potentially making them unfit even for the central vocation of motherhood. And, anticipating George Gilder, she believed that the role of the provider uplifted and “maternalized” men, taming “the destructive action of male energy” and teaching men “to love and care, to work, to serve, to be human.” The question Gilman left open was why men should voluntarily undertake such a costly and demanding course in self-improvement.
The iconoclastic journalist H. L. Mencken had an answer, though it is doubtful that Gilman would have liked it. If men got married, he wrote, it was because they were stupid. In a 1918 book cunningly entitled In Defense of Women, he described the average male as “an almost incredible popinjay,” easily duped by the scheming female of the species. Pathetically, the average male “views it as a great testimony to his prowess at amour to yield up his liberty, his property and his soul to the first woman who, in despair of finding better fame, turns her appraising eye upon him.” Once married, a man’s legal status was little better than an indentured servant’s, for “under the contract of marriage, all the duties lie upon the man and all the privileges appertain to the woman.” The law required a man to support his wife, but it did not require her to so much as prepare a decent meal, so that
"If the average American husband wants a sound dinner he must go to a restaurant to get it, just as if he wants to refresh himself with the society of charming and well-behaved children, he has to go to an orphan asylum."
Whether the average husband sought his meals at diners, his female company at dance halls and his paternal satisfaction among street urchins, he would still be supporting his own wife and children. And if this seems like a somewhat overwrought description of the male condition, the reader should know that Mencken’s intellectual credentials were in perfect order: He himself was a bachelor. Bachelorhood proved a man’s “relative freedom from the ordinary sentimentalism of his sex - in other words, of his greater approximation to the clearheadedness of the enemy sex.”
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The reader may object that this is far too cold-hearted an analysis. There is, after all, love; there is sexual desire; and there is a kind of emotional dependency that can outlast sexual enthusiasm for decades. In her book The Future of Marriage, Jessie Bernard argues that when the intangible satisfactions of marriage are taken into account, it is men, and not women, who are disproportionately dependent. Married men live longer than their single counterparts, and, according to surveys, are happier and more likely to be judged mentally healthy. Among women, there is evidence that the opposite is true; full-time housewives, at any rate, are “sicker” than other women by a variety of measures. Bernard acknowledges that “marriage has had a bad press among men,” but insists that “whether they know it or not, men need marriage more than women do.” She even speculates that male resentment of marriage represents “a kind of compensatory reaction to their dependence on it.”
Bernard may be right about men’s dependence on the loving care of women. But when we put money back into the exchange, the old asymmetry reappears. In a traditional marriage - that is, the union of a male breadwinner and a female homemaker - the husband may need a variety of emotional satisfactions, as may the wife. But the wife needs, in addition, the wherewithal to buy the groceries, and there is no guarantee that a man’s emotional dependency on his wife will last as long as her financial dependency on him. The family wage system takes no account of that great truth reiterated endlessly on AM radio stations: that love is fickle.
...Men cannot be forced to marry; once married, they cannot be forced to bring home their paychecks, to be reliable jobholders or, of course, to remain married. In fact, considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the “breadwinner ethic.”
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This book is about the ideology that shaped the breadwinner ethic and how that ideology collapsed, as a persuasive set of expectations, in just the last thirty years. To describe the change very briefly and oversimply: In the 1950s, where we begin, there was a firm expectation (or as we would now say, “role”) that required men to grow up, marry and support their wives. To do anything else was less than grown-up, and the man who willfully deviated was judged to be somehow “less than a man.” This expectation was supported by an enormous weight of expert opinion, moral sentiment and public bias, both within popular culture and the elite centers of academic wisdom. But by the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, adult manhood was no longer burdened with the automatic expectation of marriage and breadwinning. The man who postpones marriage even into middle age, who avoids women who are likely to become financial dependents, who is dedicated to his own pleasures, is likely to be found not suspiciously deviant, but “healthy.” And this judgment, like the prior one, is supported by expert opinion and by the moral sentiments and biases of a considerable sector of the American middle class.
This drastic change in our cultural expectations of men has been ignored, down-played or else buried under the weary rubric of “changing sex roles,” Obviously, our expectations of adult womanhood have changed just as dramatically in the last thirty years. The old feminine ideal - the full-time housewife with a station wagon full of children - has been largely replaced by the career woman with attaché case and skirted suit. Partly because the changes in women’s role have been given conscious articulation by a feminist movement, changes in men (or in the behavior expected of men) are usually believed to be derivative of, or merely reactive to, the changes in women. Yet I will argue that the collapse of the breadwinner ethic had begun well before the revival of feminism and stemmed from dissatisfactions every bit as deep, if not as idealistically expressed, as those that motivated our founding “second wave” feminists.
...As a feminist, I have been busy with another revolt for the past twelve years, and I approached this one with initial antagonism, a gradual increase in understanding and, finally, a certain impatience. The great irony, as I will argue later, is that the right-wing, antifeminist backlash that emerged in the 1970s is a backlash not so much against feminism as against the male revolt. We live in a time that is dangerous to dissidents of all persuasions, and not least to those too helpless and impoverished to dissent. The question is whether we rebels of both sexes have enough in common to work together toward a more generous, dignified and caring society.