"The Myth of Marriage's Golden Age" OR "The Descendency of Men" OR "The Rise of Women and the Death of Traditional Marriage"
This article is SO jam packed with information that finding one title for this post was difficult.
I found this article to be a really in depth analysis of the modern issues surrounding marriage, female independence, and the transformation of our society. The author does a great job of including personal details as well as a PLETHORA of cool facts. If you have some time, I recommend reading this 5 page long-form.
For thousands of years, marriage had been a primarily economic and political contract between two people, negotiated and policed by their families, church, and community. It took more than one person to make a farm or business thrive, and so a potential mate’s skills, resources, thrift, and industriousness were valued as highly as personality and attractiveness. This held true for all classes. In the American colonies, wealthy merchants entrusted business matters to their landlocked wives while off at sea, just as sailors, vulnerable to the unpredictability of seasonal employment, relied on their wives’ steady income as domestics in elite households. Two-income families were the norm.
Not until the 18th century did labor begin to be divided along a sharp line: wage-earning for the men and unpaid maintenance of household and children for the women. Coontz notes that as recently as the late 17th century, women’s contributions to the family economy were openly recognized, and advice books urged husbands and wives to share domestic tasks. But as labor became separated, so did our spheres of experience—the marketplace versus the home—one founded on reason and action, the other on compassion and comfort. Not until the post-war gains of the 1950s, however, were a majority of American families able to actually afford living off a single breadwinner.
Also interesting to me: this piece illuminated for me just how much of our modern ideas of love and marriage are a direct result of the 1950’s. I never really thought about that, but given the historical details and social norms she and the researcher Stephanie Coontz, whom she cites, illustrate that older norms from hundreds of years ago may have in fact had more in common with our modern world realities than the spasm (and blip- they argue) of conservatism that was the 1950’s.
Most startling are the stats about the decline of the male situation:
As Hanna Rosin laid out in these pages last year (“The End of Men,” July/August 2010), men have been rapidly declining—in income, in educational attainment, and in future employment prospects—relative to women. As of last year, women held 51.4 percent of all managerial and professional positions, up from 26 percent in 1980. Today women outnumber men not only in college but in graduate school; they earned 60 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded in 2010, and men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma.
and
If, in all sectors of society, women are on the ascent, and if gender parity is actually within reach, this means that a marriage regime based on men’s overwhelming economic dominance may be passing into extinction. As long as women were denied the financial and educational opportunities of men, it behooved them to “marry up”—how else would they improve their lot? (As Maureen Dowd memorably put it in her 2005 book, Are Men Necessary?, “Females are still programmed to look for older men with resources, while males are still programmed to look for younger women with adoring gazes.”) Now that we can pursue our own status and security, and are therefore liberated from needing men the way we once did, we are free to like them more, or at least more idiosyncratically, which is how love ought to be, isn’t it?
Anyhow, read it. It’s interesting.
