Over at National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty looks at the decline of marriage in the US and places some of blame on the LGBT movement in general and the Supreme Court's 2015 Obergefell decision in particular:
Proponents of same-sex marriage like Sullivan and Rauch won in the courts, and in a thin slice of the elite. But it looks more like the anti-marriage radicals won the future in the culture. Marriage is in steady and steep decline, as the rise in unmarried and never-married adults and in the share of out-of-wedlock births continues.
As they say, let's roll the tape:
It's pretty plain that Obergefell had no influence on marriage at all.
More interestingly, perhaps, is the common notion that the decline of marriage can be pinned on the rise of feminism and the counterculture in the 1960s. I don't doubt that both have played a role, but take a look at the data: marriage in the US peaked in 1949 and had been declining for 16 years before the counterculture was even a glimmer in your mother's eyes.
FWIW, I'd give social changes some of the blame for the decline of marriage, but I suspect the biggest share of the blame is down to pure economics. As America got richer, marriage simply became less necessary for a lot of people. Some of those people kept on getting married because they wanted to, but a lot of them never really wanted to in the first place. So they stopped.
I blame the Beatniks.
No mention of the pill? Griswold was decided in 1965.
👍👍👍👍👍
World War 2
Yeah, I recall a bit about the WWII women who held countries together - eg the Land Army in various nations (even America had a women's Land Army along with Rosie the Riveter) who then were sent back to Kinder, Küche, Kirche when the men were demobilised and wanted their jobs back.
As I recall, a lot of women more or less declared 'Äll right, but I am the last, my daughters will have the same opportunities as my sons' and I think the traditional male worker-female homemaker went downhill from there.
Yep. There's a Hollywood movie about it called "Swing Shift". If that intrigues you, poke around the internet for the director's cut.
or Vietnam
Marriage peaked in 1949 because the second world war was over and young people had something to celebrate and look forawrd to a just, peaceful and prosperous world. That was the high point. Since then things have gone south, especially with nuclear proliferation, endless local wars, environmental degradation and declining economic prospects. In the aggregate, young people are being wise.
Declining economic prospects?? Nope. More like decadence.
Somebody left a brain fart here, who has a moist towlette for it?
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All Shooter comments require this.
Also, women went to work in massive numbers to support the war effort. Once they had experienced economic freedom, the need to secure a breadwinner started to decline. A woman with economic stability of her own can choose whether or not to marry and can be much more choosy about who she does marry.
Shorter: incels aren't wrong about this cause, but they don't understand that they're being shuffled out of the gene pool because they're lousy partners.
Right. The war scrambled everything, including racial hierarchies.
Marriage was on its way down before the war. People were not getting married or having children during the 1930s Great Depression. After World War II, there was a pent up demand to marry and "get back to normal" where normal was a fantasy of a marriage, children, single income, suburban home. Compare the original Cat Women movie to its sequel. Then came the Red Scare and the social pressures were enormous. The looser morals of the 1920s were extirpated.
The modern downward trend of marriage is just a continuation of a trend that started with rising urbanization in the late 19th century and was briefly interrupted in the late 1940s and 1950s. During that era, there was a turning back of social values and attitudes about things like pre-marital sex and women in the workplace. Women were fired en masse and pushed into having children which is why we have that coat hanger scene in Mommy Dearest and a wave of divorces in the 1960s.
Urbanization played a big role in this. In 1920, half the US population was urban and only half of all brides were virgins at their wedding. This isn't the first time for this kind of reversal. In the 18th century, church registries of marriages and births in New England show that most brides were pregnant at their wedding, and contemporary accounts imply that not getting pregnant before marriage was an argument for calling off the wedding. This changed in 19th century.
Incels get it wrong because they read too much Jane Austen where the heroine has no choice but to marry if she wishes the retain her upper class lifestyle. Even that was on the way out during the Regency with the courts overturning all those plot driving entailments and the industrial revolution introducing a new source of wealth.
Women were always in the workplace, especially in rural societies. A farmer couldn't afford to keep a non-working wife. It was only in the 19th century that upper middle class women were discouraged from working. Those were the women who read Godey's Ladies' Book which encouraged them to sew decorative items but leave the real garment making and mending as paid work for lower class women. As Senator Schroeder of Colorado once pointed out, every frontier fort, by law, used to have one woman working at the fort for every three men. Someone had to do the washing.
And all around lousy people.
Women were working long before wwii. The increase alone from 1890-1929 was impressive.
Good lawd, are there any "conservatives" who aren't just loony homophobes?
I'm serious. I have some "conservative" views (economics) but these people are all just repulsive.
More like self hatred. When Monkeypox starts hitting them....well you know.
Wait, was that a joke? Almost normal.
You really cannot discuss this without considering the impact of effective birth control. I think that should be one of the milestones on the graph. It gave women the opportunity to have a sexual relationship without getting married. Sex positive attitudes emerged in the 1950s but contraceptives gave women the means to enjoy sex instead of fearing pregnancy or needing to get married to avoid social stigma. The 60s free love movement was a result of this change, not a cause of it.
I think at least some women had been 'enjoying sex' throughout the entirety of human existence, but you do have a good point - it was a great 'liberation' for many.
But enough about Eleanor Roosevelt's Trib Room in the East Wing of the White House.
Her threesome with a young, naive Greta Garbo and George Arliss was legendary.
It inspired Hunter Biden's oeuvre.
Is that what's on the laptop? And Giuliani didn't even look!
Giuliani was more into Franklin & Eleanor being cousins.
Because he's classy.
He's a WOP genius.
H/t Wedding Crashers
Birth control had a big impact in the 18th century when the French decided to cut their fertility rate. They actually had a much higher GDP per capita starting around 1760 - the year Casanova started using condoms - than England until the mid-19th century. This is also when French writers started cranking out pornography. People were looking for alternative ways to get it on.
There was another push in the late 19th century with the invention of the diaphragm and improved latex condoms. The birth control pill, which came out in 1959, did change things, but there was a reason McCormick among others were funding the pill. (McCormick funded the pill and also the women's dormitory at MIT where I met the woman I have been living with since.)
The rate of divorce has increased - about 45% of marriages end in divorce (it was higher a while ago). Republicans are somewhat less likely to divorce but the difference is not huge.
Bingo. The survey is currently married. The rate of marriage dropped too, I think, but that's not this survey. Shifting demographics play a little role too--women typically outline their husbands.
For a while, and maybe still is, there was a "marriage penalty" with respect to benefits for the poor. The conservatives were all over that--demanding that. First they caused the problem by insisting benefits only go to the truly needy, e.g. single moms. Then they tried to end that because it was penalizing marriage.
Isn't the divorce rate spike as much a result of second, third, etc., marriages not making it?
The divorce rate of first marriages is actually not 55%.
Right. Just like the reported number of guns is so high when so few people actually own one.
May I ask wTF gay marriage has to do with Hetero marriage?
What a bizzarro thought. Lord what is wrong with the Conservative Id?
Well, marriage is marriage, isn't it? But looking closely at the end of the chart, it looks as if the Obergefell decision may have halted the decline of marriages in the U.S.
Poofters being able to wed devalues marriage by making it more accessible, & thus is less of a precious gem for GQP country club types to lord over the rest of us.
It's democratizing, small d, & as a result, career GQP divorcees like Newton Leroy Gingrich need to go thru the hassle of conversion to Popery & annulment of prior marriages to show their power & righteousness. When everyone can get married, those who always could don't look so much better.
The data does not unequivocally show a ‘decline in marriage’, it shows an increase in households comprising unmarried persons. The same trend would be seen in a society in which unmarried young adults formerly remained in their parents’ home until they married, but as time passed, young adults increasingly left home and established their own residences while still single. The change in choice of residence might be the consequence of a) the decline in family farms, where children were expected to work on the family farm until marriage; b) increase in college attendance rate, which generally meant leaving home. Both changes were ongoing or accelerating in the postwar period.
What would be more informative would be multiple plots of persons never married at 30, 40, 50 years of age, plotted over time.
Another factor is the aging population. Go to a nursing home or retirement village or the like; women way outnumber men, because they live longer, and generally married men older than them. That means that widows are far more common than widowers. Some widows & widowers do re-marry, of course, but there are lots of "No longer married" women (like my mother & mother-in-law, and plenty like them). As the proportion of the population in their 60s, 70s, 80s and older increased (and continues to do so), this will continue.
Not saying it's the only factor; there's definitely been a rise in "Never Married", who now don't care about "Living in Sin", but in the past would have succumbed to social pressure to "make an honest woman out of her".
I also seem to recall seeing some research that (generally) marriage rates are higher, divorce rates lower and out-of-wedlock births lower in blue states (and blue areas of states) compared with red States/red areas. That sort of goes against the claim that it's all the evil libruls who are destroying marriage. Then again, since when have the cons let the facts get in the way of their polemics?
Not even the gays really want to get married. Kind of funny really.
About one in 10 LGBT adults in the U.S. (9.6%) are married to a same-sex spouse, with a slightly smaller proportion (7.1%) living with a same-sex domestic partner. Half of LGBT adults have never been married, while 11.4% are married to an opposite-sex spouse and 9.5% are either divorced or separated.
The industrial revolution the use of marriage. The socialist then had the collectivist patriarchy. Free enterprisers have open marriage for couples because of the growth fix. If capitalism created decadence. Decadence leads to sexual immorality. Then capitalism basically forced it. Without women it's dead. Something most new leftists and feminists never understood. They likewise drink the bourgeois cup of decadence.
Just think how the obsession with "luxery" feminizes society. It's a large reason contards are the whores of dollar globalism. They know when it goes, life will not be so abundant anymore.
Sexual immorality predates capitalism. Men have been raping women forever. The other stuff: gay sex, ass sex, sex not causing pain to a woman during sex is only immoral in certain circles.
And all this time, I was sure it was the fluoride in the water.
No, it was the polio vaccine.
Typical Republicans. Save marriage by giving people, especially women, no other option. I guess there is a philosophy that having no option, no desire for a better life, creates happiness.
"Oh, such are the dreams of the everyday housewife
You see everywhere any time of the day
An everyday housewife who gave up the good life for me"
I suppose the stats get iffyer as one goes back in time, but I wonder what that line looks like in the decades before 1940.
That depends on which part of human society you were investigating and when. We do all remember what 'common law marriage' means and how frequent it was amongst the 'lower classes' don't we ?
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But if you plot a trend line starting at that decision you could claim it increased marriage…
+1 hockey stick
What do we ACTUALLY care about?
- people living together (economics, I guess)
- people in a longterm stable relationship with all that implies (someone to rely on, less lonely)
- something about raising kids
These three are all somewhat different, but vaguely marriage adjacent. The decline in marriage per se seems uninteresting to anyone except, perhaps, the church; the others are more important. But they are not covered by the data being presented.
Are people in fact unhappier because they are not in as many long term stable relationships? I have no idea. On the one hand, such relationships still have a slight element on insecurity in them (especially if one partner is continually going on about "we don't need a piece of paper, as soon as we don't like being together we'll split"); on the other hand it's not great being in a stable longterm relationship with someone you hate but can't leave! No idea how that balances out.
Kids is one place where there are statistics, and I think it's clear that bad things have happened there, first in the poor African-American family in the 60s/70s, then in the poor White family in the 90s/2000s. That seems unlikely to be economics (poor mothers are the ones who need the help of a second income more than anyone).
I'd say the culprit is "social mores" (ie precisely the Murphy Brown behavior that Dan Quayle criticized). You can pin this on a few different villains, but I think generically the issue is that somewhere in the 60s, the very concept of self-responsibility and taking the long view (of your life, and future generations) became uncool, and it's never really returned to cool. There are occasional rare movies that show people (especially teens to 20s) making responsible decisions and delaying gratification, but they are precisely that, rare. The dominant tone is carpe diem, follow your bliss, just do it. Such behavior can (sometimes...) be patched up after the fact, after the third stint in rehab or the second abortion, in wealthy patient families; it allows for no second chances in poor families.
"...anti-marriage radicals..."
This is all they have - seething hatred and fear (same thing) of anyone who doesn't fit in their increasingly barren definition of 'American.' But whether or not what this propagandist says is even remotely true does not matter AT ALL anymore, does it? It's all about ruthless revanchist vengeance for (perceived or real) lost power and hegemony.
@ConradsGhost
👍
But their version of America is impossible due to technology. It's the paradox of the whole conservative movement.
Income inequality.
That certainly does making raising a family harder...
Income inequality was worse before the great depression.
This is framed all wrong. It's not "the decline of marriage." It's an increase in personal autonomy. And in the land of the free, that's a good thing, right?
Yes, a result of the industrial revolution. Trying to move the old manor system into a industrial world over the course of the 20th century ended up futile. The obsession with luxury made men hornier and women wanna have their own "ownership society". Less clothing and more capital expansion. It's why feminists get pissed at scantly cladded women. They know it's what men want and making the their men happy makes them feel good. It's nature.
The sexual revolution really got its start in 1900 with the rise of Bahamian. It was a slow mo surge the picked up pace by the late 60's. The 2 part bathing in the 30's was scandalous as my grandmother told me. Showing some tummy????? How awful.
WHO LET THE DOGS OUT!?
A couple of thoughts come to mind:
1) We live in a retirement region where the bulk of the service people were raised locally in low economic circumstances and a poor educational system. The women in their 20s and 30s have children by one or more partners but a low proportion of them are married. These are not radicals. They're just practical working poor.
2) Following on the gradual increase in women's independence since the 1960s, fewer women are forced to marry the jerk in order to survive. It pisses the jerks off no end, as evidenced by the state of the current Republican Party.
After her husband's performance at his Supremes audition & seeing her eyerolling reaction in realtime, I have to ask, what keeps Ashley Estes Kavanaugh together with Brett? I honestly think she would be a lot happier leaving him, moving back to Texas with the kids, & starting a Lesbian Brady Bunch blended family with Elizabeth Bruenig & her brood after she leaves Matt.