In the true marriage relation the independence of the husband and wife isequal, their dependence mutual and their obligations reciprocal.-- Lucretia Mott (1793-1880)
Feminists have long been queasy about marriage, but ourqueasiness is not about marriage per se; it concerns the way marriage has beenpracticed. The religious right paints feminists as opposed to marriage and allthat goes with it: heterosexuality, men, family, love, caring, and children.Campaigning against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, Phyllis Schlaflyflatly warned that "feminists hate men, marriage, and children." Twenty yearslater, Pat Robertson advised would-be supporters in a fundraising letter: "Thefeminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist,anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands,kill their children ... and become lesbians."
Clearly, the right misrepresents feminists' struggle with marriage, butmany moderates and even some progressives have misunderstood feminist concerns.What have American feminists really said about marriage? During the first wave ofthe American women's movement, which intensified during the 1840s and culminatedwith the achievement of suffrage in 1920, feminists battled for egalitarianmarriage as passionately as they fought for voting rights. In 1848 -- in theDeclaration of Sentiments adopted at the First Women's Rights Convention atSeneca Falls, New York -- Mary Ann McClintock and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote:
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries andusurpations on the part of man toward woman... . He has made her, if married, inthe eye of the law, civilly dead. He has taken from her all right in property,even to the wages she earns... . In the covenant of marriage, ... the law giveshim power to deprive her of her liberty and to administer chastisement.
For the most part, nineteenth-century feminists did not oppose marriageitself. Rather, they fought tirelessly for the legal rights of wives, graduallywinning statutory reforms that granted married women property rights.
A second wave of American feminism emerged in the 1960s, catalyzed in part byBetty Friedan's 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, which sparked anationwide soul-search about the emptiness of housewifery. "It was a strangestirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning," Friedan wrote. "As [eachsuburban housewife] made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slip covermaterials, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured CubScouts and Brownies ... she was afraid to ask of herself the silent question -- 'Isthis all?'" Friedan's book pulled countless wives into the women's movement anddovetailed with activist efforts aimed at breaking down employment barriers.
While the legal constraints that galvanized their predecessors a centuryearlier were mostly gone, the new women's liberationists found that marriage, defacto, still served many women poorly, especially in conjunction with motherhood.Sexual divisions of labor, locked in by the social norms of marriage, yieldedgender inequality both in the labor market and the home, saddling women with thelion's share of housework. Those divisions of labor institutionalized wives'economic dependence on their husbands; in the worst scenarios, that dependenceplaced women in outright danger. Furthermore, feminists argued, the centrality ofmarriage in the dreams and expectations of girls and young women crowded outlong-term aspirations for education, employment, and civic and politicalengagement.
Those were the central feminist concerns about marriage nearly four decadesago, and they are still the central feminist concerns today. Pegging feminists ascoldhearted haters of heterosexuality, love, care, and commitment has always beena bum rap. Were marriages between women and men to become trulyegalitarian -- especially in economic terms -- most contemporary feminists wouldrejoice. Were same-sex couples invited to participate, feminism and marriagecould announce a full truce.
During the 1990s, a new "marriage war" broke out, one that is nowfront-page news. This time, conservatives fired the first shot when they insertedmarriage-promotion policies into welfare reform. Feminists tend to resist theseschemes because the assumptions that underlie them are largely nonsense.Basically, conservatives argue that if low-income women could be persuaded tomarry, they would join the ranks of the economically secure. Indeed, that mightbe true if poor women in the South Bronx could marry stockbrokers in Westchester.But poor women's options are usually much less promising, and amplesocial-science research confirms that marriage-promotion policies per se areunlikely to reduce poverty. I leave the critique of marriage promotion as welfarepolicy to others in this issue of the Prospect in order to pursue here thechallenge of egalitarian marriage.
Unequal Marriage: The Price Women Pay
Today, a small minority of couples consist of an exclusive male breadwinnerand a full-time female homemaker; in most marriages, husband and wife are bothemployed. However, the labor-force attachment of husbands remains considerablystronger, especially in families with children; very few men are on acareer-sacrificing "daddy track." Married mothers often withdraw from paid workwhen their children are young; many more work part-time; and a substantial shareforgo remunerative jobs that require "24-7" commitment, nighttime meetings, ortravel. Few married fathers make such accommodations to family. Not surprisingly,despite progress in women's employment, men remain the primary breadwinners. Asof 1997, among American married couples with children under age six, fathers tookhome three times the earnings of mothers. And studies confirm that wives, evenwives employed full-time, still devote substantially more time than theirhusbands do to unpaid work -- both caregiving and housework.
Certainly, children need and deserve their parents' time. It's appropriatethat parents weaken labor-market ties when their children are young. The trouble,however, is that marital divisions of labor shape up along gender lines, thereare hazards associated with being the non-earner or lower earner, and thosehazards are very unequally distributed.
Non-earners (and lower earners) in intact couples lack bargaining power bothin the economy and in the marriage. And the lower-earning partner is financiallyvulnerable in the event of marital dissolution, despite divorce and child-supportlaws intended to protect them. In addition, weak labor-market ties often meantenuous civic and political ties, which translate into compromised power bothinside and outside the home. In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnamcontradicts the old picture of housewives as pillars of local civil society andlinks women's connections to employment to their participation in public forms ofcivic engagement.
Another problem: Huge numbers of married women are plain exhausted, battlingworse "time poverty" than their husbands, particularly if they have youngchildren and are also in paid employment. And where are the fruits of wives'unpaid work? One place is in their husbands' wages. A recent study reported inBusinessWeek found that wives' unpaid work raises married men's hourly wagesby about 12 percent -- a "marriage premium" for men that is explained by the"likelihood that wives shoulder household tasks." Women, meanwhile, suffer reduced earnings, not because of marriage per se, but owing to the presence ofchildren. And nearly two-thirds of married women have children. As Ann Crittendenestablishes in The Price of Motherhood, because of their familyresponsibilities women in effect pay a hefty "mommy tax" on their earnings -- a taxnot incurred by their children's daddies.
In their much-argued-about book The Case for Marriage: WhyMarried People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially, Linda Waiteand Maggie Gallagher dismiss most of these concerns. Wives, they argue, aresimply better off financially because they have access to their husbands'(increased) income as well as their own (albeit diminished) income; the twotogether add up to more than she would have had living alone or cohabiting. Asfor wives' economic dependency on their husbands, Waite and Gallagher arelargely unmoved. (I suspected that when, on page 1, they characterized thewomen's movement as criticizing "marriage per se, which the more flamboyantfeminists denounced as, ... worst of all, 'tied up with a sense of dependency.'")For the most part, these writers view the underlying economic inequality as theresult of women's choices -- "married moms earn less because they choose to workless" -- but they don't seriously consider whether those supposed free choices areconstrained by the absence of good alternatives that is inherent in archaicnotions about gender, inflexible employment practices, and unsupportive publicpolicies. In the end, they argue that making divorce more difficult and enactingdivorce laws that repay women for the sacrificed labor-market attachment canindemnify wives against any losses that they incur. Fairer divorce laws arefine -- but why wait for marriages to end? For all their advocacy of marriage,Waite and Gallagher leave untouched the underlying inequities that make marriagecostly for so many women.
Toward Egalitarian Marriage
Among feminists, there are two broad views about greater equity withinmarriage. "Difference feminists" argue that women's unique characteristics, suchas their stronger ties to children, should be celebrated and rewarded. From thisperspective, gender equity would be achieved by making parenting a less-unequalsacrifice; essentially, wives would be repaid for the losses that they incur asindividuals. "Sameness feminists," by contrast, look toward a greater convergencein gender roles -- a rearrangement of marital divisions of labor so that onaverage wives and husbands, in Francine Deutsch's phrase, would "halve it all."
The latter approach seems more promising. Reliably indemnifying women againstlosses caused by their greater role in family caregiving is improbable because itis so easy for husbands, employers, and even governments to free-ride on women'sunpaid work. And any solution that continues gendered divisions of labor leavesin place problematic power imbalances, both public and private.
Across Europe, feminists have taken seriously this idea of greater convergenceof roles in the workplace and the home. In her recent book RestructuringGender Relations and Employment: The Decline of the Male Breadwinner, Britishsociologist Rosemary Crompton lays out the contours of what she calls a"dual-earner/dual-carer" society. This is a society in which women and men engagesymmetrically in market work and in caregiving work -- a society that incorporatestime to care for family members. Wives would not simply become "like husbands arenow"; both wives and husbands would end up with substantial time for caregivingat home.
On the whole, what would a shift to gender-egalitarian time allocations entailin the United States? Imagine that mothers and fathers, on average, spend equaltime in paid work. The accompanying table summarizes how much time married mothers and fathers in the United States spend working for pay each week (parentswho are not employed -- mostly women -- are included in these averages). Thefar-right column lists the number of hours that each parent would work weekly ifthe couple's combined hours on the job were shared equally.
This table tells us three noteworthy things about marital arrangements in thiscountry. First, married mothers' time in paid work is sensitive to the ages oftheir children; their hours on the job rise as their children spend more hoursoutside the home and need less parental time. Second, married fathers' time atwork, in contrast, is absolutely constant -- perhaps not surprisingly, given thatfew are primary caregivers. Third, the average time that married mothers spend inemployment lags behind that of their husbands, and by a considerable margin.
An egalitarian solution would entail both parents working aslightly-shorter-than-standard workweek and sharing caregiving in the home. Inprinciple this might seem appealing to men, who often say they are sick ofemployment pressures, want more balance in their lives, and hope to be betterfathers than their own fathers were. But for this solution to be attractive toboth sexes, workplace practices have to change so that neither spouse suffers asetback as the result of caring for children. And social policy also has tochange -- starting with, for example, the enactment of generous paid family leavefor both fathers and mothers.
At present, the idea that men as a group might shift substantial time frompaid work to caregiving is remarkably controversial in the United States. Butunless we settle for a society in which families "outsource" unacceptably highlevels of family caregiving, a reduction in men's working time is a prerequisitefor a shift toward an egalitarian division of labor both at home and at work.Mainstream advocates of "work/family balance" and "family-friendly programs"rarely suggest that men lessen their working time. But truly egalitarian marriagerests on such a shift.
This scenario of change raises at least two fundamental issues. Do women andmen want to share earning and caring in a more egalitarian way? And would couplesthat share and share alike incur joint costs?
Conservatives -- and even many progressives -- often argue that wivessimply want to be at home more than their husbands do; some claim intrinsicdifferences, while others cite the effect of social norms. There is no questionthat current work-and-family arrangements reflect the individual and jointdecisions of women and men. But those decisions are made in a world withgender-specific constraints and opportunities. Given today's economic and socialrealities, it's impossible to know whether women's and men's current choicesreflect enduring preferences or are, instead, accommodations influenced byinflexible working arrangements, limited options for nonparental child care, andcareer penalties for allocating time to parenting. The meaningful question isnot "What do women and men want now?" but, rather, "What would they prefer in amuch changed world -- one with expectations not based on gender, with flexibleemployers, and with supportive policies in place?" The answer to that question is classically counterfactual; in today's socially constructed and highlyconstrained world, it can't be answered.
An often-raised concern is that there are gains to specialization, so thatequal sharing might lower families' total earnings. If both spouses, for example,rejected 50-plus-hour-a-week employment, the couple might be forced to rule outcertain highly remunerative occupations altogether. But this too remains an openquestion; there is remarkably little empirical research on the economic impact ofdivisions of labor shaped by gender. It's possible, for instance, that having tofit into gender-role expectations reduces parents' productivity, and perhaps thatof their children when they reach adulthood. Conversely, some degree of economicloss might be more than offset by non-monetary benefits -- such as distributionaljustice, for starters. And benefits from equal sharing might accrue to societymore broadly. The rise of egalitarian marriage and the strengthening offatherhood could produce healthier children who are enriched by the balance intheir parents' lives and by more contact with their fathers. It could also helpstem ongoing declines in marriage and childbearing rates and produce morereliable parenting of children generally. Scholars of the family understand thatmany women, in particular, forgo family after assessing the dismal prospects forcombining work and family in a satisfying way.
Supportive Public Policy
How might we get from here to there? As European feminists painted portraitsof the dual-earner/dual-carer society, they also envisioned a change process.Clearly, private changes in gender relations and shifts in employment practicesare part of the story; but the state also plays a crucial role, both in shaping social policy and regulating labor markets.
Couples' capacity to choose egalitarian arrangements would be facilitated by apackage of government policies, many of which are in place across the Europeanwelfare states [see "Family-Friendly Europe," by Karen Christopher, on page 59].A supportive policy package would have at least four aims: to enable and supportthe employment of mothers with young children; to provide incentives for men toengage in caregiving at home; to support the development of high-qualityreduced-hour work for both mothers and fathers; and to provide income and taxsupports for families that would ease the need to maximize market hours whileproviding incentives for more-equal divisions of labor.
First, paid maternity leave and decent child care would go a long way towardsupporting the employment of mothers with young children. Women begin to incurthe mommy tax shortly after they have their first child, especially if they'renot entitled to paid maternity leave -- and most American women are not. All of theWestern European nations and many developing countries grant mothers paidmaternity leave financed by social insurance funds. Public-maternity-leaveschemes have been found to increase mothers' postnatal employment rates, increasethe probability that mothers return to the same employer, and lessen the wagepenalty associated with time away.
In addition, high-quality, affordable child care enables mothers to work forpay. As with leave, Americans get incredibly little child-care support fromgovernment. In the United States, about 5 percent of children under age three arein publicly provided or financed child care, compared with one-quarter in France,one-third in Belgium and Sweden, and fully half in Denmark. Not surprisingly, inall of those countries, married mothers with young children take home largershares of parental earnings than do American mothers.
Second, paid family leave for fathers, especially if designed with incentivesso that fathers actually use the leave, creates a way for men to take off timefrom employment, temporarily, to provide care at home. Fathers in severalEuropean countries are entitled to paternity leave immediately following a birthor adoption and, more consequentially, to paid-parental-leave benefits that canbe used throughout the early years of their children's lives. Furthermore, policymakers in Europe have learned that parental-leave benefits that can't betransferred to female partners and that include high wage-replacement ratesencourage fathers to take the leave to which they're entitled.
In addition, several European governments are running public-educationcampaigns that urge men to do more at home, either via family leave or morebroadly. While the jury is still out on their effectiveness, even the Swissgovernment is going this route; an ongoing campaign in Switzerland -- "Fair Play atHome" -- is aimed at "nudging married men" to share the work at home. Despite allthe lip service conservatives pay to the value of marriage, American socialpolicy does almost nothing to encourage fathers in intact families to contributemore at home.
Third, Americans log the longest employment hours in the world. As Universityof Pennsylvania sociologist Jerry Jacobs observes, long hours on the job andgender equality work at cross-purposes; that is especially true in labor marketsthat lack options for high-quality, reduced-hour employment. Government policiesaimed at shortening standard working time -- either directly or via incentivesplaced on employers -- could go a long way toward enabling men to spend more timeat home. Several of the European welfare states provide models for working-timeregulations designed explicitly to support gender-egalitarian families.Working-time policies (such as maximum hours) can shorten overall hours -- a numberof countries are aiming to set a new standard of 37.5 hours per week -- and "rightto time off" policies guarantee parents the right to work part-time while theirchildren are young. (The United States neither limits total hours nor providesrights to time off.)
Further, labor-market regulations throughout the European Union protectworkers who work less than full-time by requiring employers to provide equal payand prorated benefits. So in a more egalitarian world, each spouse might loghours in paid work that fall into a new range -- more than standard part-time hoursbut fewer than standard full-time hours. Public policies can encourage the growthof reduced-hour employment and shore up its rewards.
Finally, income supports and tax reforms would help. Some form of universalchild benefit, via transfers or refundable tax credits, could replace some or allof the earnings that couples might sacrifice if husbands lessen their time inemployment and wives' increases don't make up the difference. For low-incomecouples, in particular, cash benefits could relax the necessity to maximize (his)hours in the labor market, no matter how high the personal cost. (Among marriedcouples, average gender differences in employment hours are approximately thesame at every point on the income spectrum.) Compared with nearly every countryin Europe, the United States spends very little on public income supports forcouples with children, even including the Earned Income Tax Credit. And a shiftto purely individual-income taxation would encourage a more equal sharing ofemployment by couples. Joint taxation increases the de facto marginal tax rate onthe first dollar earned by the "secondary earner" and that sets up a disincentivefor wives' labor-force participation. Individual-income taxation has beenimplemented in several countries in Europe; it is a major factor underlyingSweden's high female-employment rate. In contrast, the U.S. tax code imposes thesame income-tax burden on one- and two-earner couples. Given that employment hasfixed costs, this formula disadvantages two-earner couples.
From a policy perspective, it would be hard for the United States to doless to encourage and enable economic gender equality in marriage. AcrossEurope, extensive public provisions support gender equality within couples, andmany of these policies were implemented exactly for that reason. These policiesare influential; they are part of the reason that wives and husbands in severalEuropean welfare states share employment time and earnings more equally than wedo in the United States.
Feminist Marriage: Political Prospects
These are conservative times in the United States, especially at the federallevel. It is unlikely that new social-policy offerings along these lines will beenacted any time soon. Yet the current battle over marriage and TemporaryAssistance for Needy Families, silly as it is, could provide feminists andprogressives a window of opportunity if it forces us to clarify our position onmarriage and to organize our interests vis-à-vis the family, theworkplace, and the state. Feminists should staunchly resist getting cornered intoopposing marriage wholesale and, instead, focus on articulating and challengingthe ways in which marriage has institutionalized inequality.
And what of the possibility for common ground between feminists and theconservatives who now hold the upper hand on the policy front? It seems thatthere is one serious stumbling block, but also considerable good news. Inaddition to pressing marriage on low-income women, conservatives have devotedmuch energy in recent years to homophobic legislation aimed at preempting gay andlesbian marriage. Conservatives argue that allowing same-sex marriage woulddevalue marriage among straights. That logic escapes many feminists. The NationalOrganization for Women, the leading U.S. women's organization, has endorsedsame-sex marriage and resolved to fight all legislation prohibiting it, on thegrounds that such laws are discriminatory. For many feminists, an enthusiasticendorsement of marriage hinges on the support of same-sex marriage -- in my view,rightly so. The truth is that feminists and conservatives surely will not agreeon this any time soon.
The good news is that a policy package that would support gender equality inmarriage -- expanded child care, paid family leave (especially for fathers), and ashift to individual-income taxation -- actually has a lot in it for conservatives.These policies support the employment of women (including low-income women),strengthen fathers' ties to their children, and could raise marriage rates -- allelements of the current conservative agenda. The problem is that mostconservatives will resist expanding social-policy outlays and granting women thefreedom to choose nontraditional roles.
Feminists could hasten public support for gender-egalitarian marriage byclarifying, for conservatives and progressives alike, that feminists do not hatemarriage per se and never have. In 1871, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote:"Conservatism cries out we are going to destroy the family. Timid reformersanswer, the ... equality of woman will not change it. They are both wrong. Itwill entirely revolutionize it." Stanton was right. Truly egalitarian marriagewill be revolutionary -- and when it's achieved, feminists will celebrate.