Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families by James Q. Wilson

From the Publisher

There are two Americas. One boasts solid families, well-paying jobs, safe homes, and good education. The other has children raised by one parent, poor neighborhoods, crime, and low-paying jobs. What has caused the divide? In this penetrating study, James Q. Wilson argues that the answer lies in the importance of marriage and the devastating effects of divorce and cohabitation.

Wilson's meticulous research shows how the erosion of family life has damaged children's futures, leading to school dropouts, teenage pregnancy, and a greater likelihood of emotional problems, drug use, and criminal activity. With precision and persuasiveness, he reveals the sources of today's crisis -- from the glittering ideals of the Enlightenment to the shameful practice of American slavery -- while also offering bold solutions. Incisive, intelligent, and thought-provoking, The Marriage Problem is a clarion call to rebuild the family, and society, by returning a solid marital structure to its core.

Publishers Weekly

In this study of the implications of broken marriages, conservative social scientist Wilson (The Moral Sense) posits that there is a direct connection between Americans' tolerance for no-fault divorce and unmarried cohabitation, and the country's rising rates of childhood delinquency, teenage births, abuse and single-parent families. As such, Wilson's work is poised to attract fans of Judith Wallerstein.'s important The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study (2000), which suggests that divorce has a much harsher effect on children than previously believed. But many of Wilson's points assume that divorce is de facto a bad thing ("As one popular movie made clear, there is no such thing as a happy divorce"); he refuses to acknowledge that society's attitudes may have shifted precisely because many people now believe that divorce often represents a promising solution rather than a bitter failure. Many readers will take issue with Wilson's claim that the demographics of African-American families (high instances of single motherhood; absent fathers) can be traced to the cultural practices of people in Africa and the West Indies. And in fact, the teen birth rate has fallen significantly in the past 10 years. Wilson's polemic will likely be embraced by readers who already share his traditional views on public policy and shunned by those who don't. (Mar. 24) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

While Maushart looks at what happens between husband and wife, Wilson (management, UCLA; government, Harvard) delves into the effect of "the marriage problem" on society. Wilson argues that the weakening of the family unit has been disastrous for our country and cites two reasons for this development: the individualism that arose following the Enlightenment and the consequences of slavery, which led to the emasculation of fathers and hence to single-parent households. Wilson makes his case with well-reasoned arguments and solid documentation, drawing on research that is both historical and international in scope to reinforce the important role family plays in child care. Wilson's cure: to restore the authority of marriage, for parents who are committed to each other and to their children can build a community and hence a nation that will flourish. Despite their contrasting themes, both books make a valuable contribution to the understanding of marriage in today's society and should find audience in public libraries. Deborah Bigelow, Leonia P.L., NJ Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

• Read an Excerpt

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Two Nations

Americans live in a nation confident of its wealth and proud of its power, yet convinced that this wealth cannot prevent and this power cannot touch a profound corrosion of our cultural soul. We are materially better off than our parents but spiritually worse off.

The poorest Americans today live a better life than all but the richest persons a hundred years ago. But despite this great wealth, we inhabit, as Benjamin Disraeli said a century ago, "two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets." The two nations of which he wrote were the rich and the poor. But the great production and more even distribution of wealth that we achieved have altered the principle on which our nation is divided. Our money, our generosity, and our public spending have left us still with two nations, but separated by law and custom more than by wealth or favor. As Disraeli put it, these worlds are "ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws."

The American sociologist, Elijah Anderson, describes the matter more bluntly: "In our big cities, the middle-class, both white and black, thinks of itself as the outcome of the great tradition of Western culture, but nearby, there is a second culture of young, marginally employed, sexually adventuresome, socially aggressive young men who reject the idea of hard work and social conformity that made their elderssuccessful. For some, decent jobs are hard to find, but for at least as many the effort to find and hold such jobs as exist has disappeared."

In one nation, a child, raised by two parents, acquires an education, a job, a spouse, and a home kept separate from crime and disorder by distance, fences, or guards. In the other nation, a child is raised by an unwed girl, lives in a neighborhood filled with many sexual men but few committed fathers, and finds gang life to be necessary for self-protection and valuable for self-advancement. In the first nation, children look to the future and believe that they control what place they will occupy in it; in the second, they live for the moment and think that fate, not plans, will shape their lives. In both nations, harms occur, but in the second they proliferate -- child abuse and drug abuse, gang violence and personal criminality, economic dependency and continued illegitimacy.

The facts about children raised in the second world -- the world without fathers, without safety, without a decent life or reasonable prospects for the future -- are well known to everybody. What once was a political argument has now become conventional wisdom, and like most such bits of wisdom, it is based on real facts.

In 1960 one-fifth of all black American children under the age of eighteen lived with a mother and no father. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that this was an important social problem, he was reviled. By 1996, nearly one-fifth of all white children were living without a father, and now everybody said it was a problem and Moynihan was hailed as a prophet. When fatherless white children fell into the same plight once occupied only by black ones, the country woke up. But meanwhile the family circumstances of black children continued to deteriorate. In 1996, more than half of all of them lived in a mother-only family.

Matters were even worse for teenage mothers. By 1995, three out of every four births to all teenagers were to unmarried girls; for black girls, it was nine out of every ten. In Washington, D.C., virtually every birth (to be exact, 97 percent of them) to a teenage girl was to an unmarried adolescent.

The number of children born into these families has been falling because the birthrate of women, including teenagers, has been declining for the last several years. But for women who do have children, the illegitimacy rate remains high, and for teenage women, unimaginably so. Children are having children. And to these grim totals must be added the number of children who live with a divorced parent. There were fewer than a half million such kids in 1960; by 1995, there were well over a million.

Of course, some of these children go on to live with a stepparent, usually a stepfather, after the divorced parent remarries, but second marriages are even more vulnerable to breakup than the first ones. More than half of all stepfamilies were disrupted after ten years. What is worse, stepparents -- and again, especially stepfathers -- are much more likely to abuse or murder their own stepchildren. The homicide rate for children in stepfamilies is seventy times higher than it is for those living with both biological parents. The old family legends about evil stepparents were literary expressions of a grim fact: people care for their own children more than they care for those of others.

Why Not just Live Together?

Some children born to an unwed mother will live with her and the father, who stay together without being married. The polite modern term for this is cobabitation; the Census Bureau calls it Persons of the Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters (POSSLQ). When I was a boy, it was called shacking up. Cohabitation has become common throughout the Western world. In England, France, and the United States, cohabitation between a man and woman precedes marriage in roughly half or more of all cases. In Sweden, cohabitation is on its way to becoming the norm; roughly one-third of all couples cohabit instead of marry.

Scholars are divided about what this means. To some, cohabitation is an alternative to marriage; to others, it is an alternative to being single. For the first group, living together is like being married without the fuss and bother of licenses and ceremonies. If marriages are becoming rarer and living...