Stephanie Coontz has spent several decades explaining that our ideal vision of marriage is a figment of our collective imagination. Her The Way We Never Were regarded the single-male-breadwinner household as a “dangerous” form of remembering, a “nostalgia trap.” Ten years previous, she released Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, which examined the changing social, cultural, and economic environments in which marriage arrangements have evolved over time. It rhymes remarkably well with Ernest Burgess and Harvey Locke’s 1945 The Family: From Institution to Companionship.
Her latest effort, For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage, is perhaps her most even-handed approach to the subject, as its title would suggest. That balance emerges in part because she acknowledges that what many view as a crisis in marriage and family life isn’t merely cultural or moral, but economic in nature.
The left has long embraced Coontz, and the glowing reviews from various scholars and popular outlets are ample testimony to their shared suspicion of the term “traditional family.” Her 2005 article, “For Better, For Worse,” highlighted her view that “As soon as love became the driving force behind marriage, people began to demand the right to remain single if they had not found love or to divorce if they fell out of love.” She further observed, “In the United States and Britain, divorce rates fell slightly during the 1990s, but the incidence of cohabitation and unmarried child-raising continues to rise, as does the percentage of singles in the population… Both trends reduce the social significance of marriage in the economy and culture.”
In For Better and Worse, she traces this deinstitutionalization of marriage, noting that “Marriage was once one of the first steps people took on the road to independent adulthood. Today for most people it’s what they do after they’ve traveled quite some distance along that road.” Citing the sociologist Andrew Cherlin, who coined the term deinstitutionalization, she adds that “People once viewed marriage as the ‘cornerstone’ of a successful adult life…Increasingly, they now see it as the ‘capstone’ – the last piece that completes the structure of their lives.” Few could argue with this observation, especially given the rising age of first marriage across the developed world.
Coontz’s observations on the current situation are accurate enough. Her analysis of the historical eras that brought us to this point deserves credit for a largely fair-minded account. The central idea she puts forward for the nostalgia surrounding the loss of the mid-century household is what she calls “referred pain.” The sense of loss, in short, is real but misattributed. Coontz believes people think they miss a moral order. Instead, what they are really pining for is a lost economic order, typified by security and affordability. Longing for a cultural artifact is in fact longing for a paycheck that went further. Yet she makes no meaningful foray into the causes of that lost purchasing power, focusing instead on rising earned-income inequality. Here lies the key to what she means by a new economic order, one that has brought us to later and fewer marriages.
Coontz paints the current situation as the result of “The triumph of the pro-wealth agenda.” In her view, this victory began with the “rolling back” of the New Deal’s “protection of workers and consumers.” One consequence, she argues, is that widening wealth inequality has increased the difficulty of family formation. She laments:
Over the forty-three years between 1975 and 2018…the richest 10 percent of Americans managed to rake in a mind-boggling $47 trillion dollars more than they would have in the trends if the previous era had continued. Meanwhile the bottom 90 percent got $47 trillion less — an average of $2.5 trillion less each year. (emphasis in original).
Later, she states rhetorically:
No wonder many Americans feel robbed of the ‘better future’ they’d come to believe was an American entitlement. And adding insult to injury, the growth in inequality has reorganized daily life in ways that continually highlight the special privileges accorded to the wealthy and denied to the rest of us in a nominally egalitarian society.
When she takes the time to diagnose the cause of these economic outcomes, Coontz swings and misses, badly.
In her seventh chapter, titled “Has Marriage Become a Luxury Good?” Coontz introduces a section labeled “Explaining the Class Gap in Marriage.” There, her first failure is to ignore Charles Murray’s 2012 classic, Coming Apart, which documents these differences at length. The section only offers more descriptions of marriage mismatches while sidestepping an actual explanation. One such description comes from economist Tara Watson and sociologist Sara McLanahan. They reported that “between 1980 and 2000, as job security deteriorated and real wages of less-educated men declined, there was a sharp drop in the marriage rates of 25- to 34-year-old men, Black and White, in the bottom quarter of the income distribution.” The question that remains unanswered is precisely what policy or institution creates rising inequality and job instability. Coontz’s attempt to answer this is the book’s deepest flaw.
Coontz identifies the culprit for these changes in a section called “Social and Economic Backlash.” There, she recites a startling history: “During the second half of the 1970s, as the pro-business coalition mobilized to tear down the New Deal and Great Society programs of the 1950s and 1960s, another coalition was gearing up to rebuild the marriage, sex, and gender system of that era.” Who were these transformers of culture? According to Coontz, they were “groups claiming to defend ‘free markets’ [who] increasingly made common cause with groups claiming to defend ‘traditional’ gender roles, sexual mores, marital norms, and ‘Christian family values.’” By Coontz’s account, these groups have won out in politics, economics, and culture in the US, giving us today’s arrangements in family life.
This assessment echoes work Maxine Eichner advanced in her 2021 The Free Market Family: How the Market Crushed the American Dream (and How It Can Be Restored). Eichner makes the striking claim that the financialization of the American economy is the result of so-called “deregulation.” In another, similar tale, June Carbone and Naomi Cahn (2014) also explain that “economic inequality is remaking the American family along class lines, and families are not going through the same changes together.” Indeed, they are not. Yet these critics, like Eichner and Coontz, blame the bogeymen of allegedly free markets, which they contend give rise to financialization and inequality. In fairness, Coontz is a historian, while Eichner, Carbone, and Cahn are legal scholars. And here For Better and Worse falls short, misdiagnosing the source of the economic changes that reshaped marriage.
Much like Eichner, Carbone, and Cahn, Coontz is convinced that Americans and the rest of the developed world live in laissez-faire regulatory, fiscal, and monetary regimes. Few claims are further from the truth. The economic pressures they all describe are real, but they originated with governmental winner-picking and scale-tipping within markets. Instead of recognizing the role crony interventionism has played across the broader economy, these authors consistently call for even further intrusions by government officials. Coontz laments, along with sociologists Melissa Milkie and Catharine Warner, “America’s inadequate government and workplace supports (subsidies)” that explain why “mothers in the United States feel especially pressured to focus on cultivating their children’s skills and personal résumés in order to ‘safeguard’ their place in the social hierarchy.” This environment of inflation, high taxation, and steep regulatory barriers to job-market entry harms children. It also pressures mothers (Coontz, Milkie, and Warner curiously exclude fathers), who must pour more time, effort, and money into raising children who have a chance of competing in such an unfree world. That world is not a free-market one. It is loaded with government interference. That fact is lost in Coontz’s volume, and as a result the book is short on institutional solutions.
Instead of addressing these institutional challenges, she breezily moves into her final chapter with what amounts to marriage advice for the new context. In a chapter titled “The New ‘Rules of Engagement’: What Makes a Modern Marriage Work?” Coontz implies that the new rules belong more under “better” than “worse.” She explains that “there are ways to achieve economic security, political advancement, social respect, legal protections, and a loving partnership without getting married” and that “people are less inclined to enter the institution solely for practical advantages that may not be better than what they can get outside marriage. They want different things from marriage than they used to, and they engage in more protracted comparison shopping.”
This may be true, but it never establishes whether most unmarried people find that trade desirable. According to Carbone and Cahn, they do not. Most young people hold a definite desire to be married, yet find matchmaking more difficult than previous generations did.
This “protracted comparison shopping” has produced later, fewer, and more stable marriages in the West. Divorce rates are falling across multiple contexts, even in places with no-fault divorce laws. Traditionalists typically read this as a positive sign for the institution of marriage. It is surely one of the “better” outcomes Coontz has in mind.
On balance, For Better and Worse is well worth reading. If nothing else, it gives the reader a nuanced view of how family life has changed. Where the book falls short is in its lack of sound economic analysis of the causes of the changes to family goals and structure over the past half century. Coontz never diagnoses the economic cause that has made matching harder for those who want to marry. So let the reader be warned. For a description of where marriage now stands, and perhaps how to navigate married life in today’s economic maelstrom, this volume is one of the “better” ones. For a rigorous explanation of why the economy looks the way it does, it falls into the “worse” category.
