00:00:00.000And it is to take away exactly those mechanisms that permitted marriage to evolve, which to my
00:00:05.000mind actually allows it to flourish. I'm Adrian Dobb. And I'm Moira Donegan.
00:00:21.720And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.
00:00:23.740So today, we are talking to one of my favorite writers, the brilliant New York Magazine writer, Rebecca Traister. And Rebecca, I wanted to have you on because I've noticed, I think what the kids call a vibe shift.
00:00:38.820there is a growing concern among the academic and pundit and policymaker class about the state of0.99
00:00:47.460matrimony. So first came the academics. We have Melissa Kearney, a economist from the Brookings
00:00:54.660Institution, who just put out a book called The Two-Parent Privilege, arguing that marriage is
00:01:00.520correlated with better economic outcomes and calls for public policy to further incentivize marriage.
00:01:06.460That's sort of like the center right. And then on the, you know, not only more empirical side, we have Sam Peltzman, who is a University of Chicago economist who put out a paper this summer tracing declining reports of happiness among American adults over the course of the same years when marriage rates also declined and age of first marriage receded.
00:01:29.200And then we've got sort of on the wacky far right, we've got this interesting character named Brad Wilcox, who's got a book, which I think is still forthcoming, I might be wrong about that, called Get Married.
00:01:40.880Yeah, it's happening in February. It's for Valentine's Day. It's February.
00:01:43.740oh my god uh get married why americans must defy the elites forge strong families and save
00:01:49.980civilization which links uh declining marriage rates to all sorts of other factors in declining
00:01:57.160social health and calls upon readers to reject the anti-marriage sentiments that he claims are
00:02:03.840being disseminated from hollywood washington academia the media and corporate america
00:02:09.640yeah hollywood famously anti-marriage yeah yeah hollywood does not enjoy marriage yeah
00:02:14.980and this got sort of like digested and um excreted out by the pundit class so we had
00:02:21.980ross do that endorsing the peltzman study you know weird little column about the barbie movie
00:02:27.440and how it was bad because it didn't end in a marriage olga kazan of the atlantic also endorsed0.90
00:02:32.700Peltzman. David Brooks did a column on Wilcox's book. And Nick Kristoff did one on Kearney.
00:02:40.960And then the Kearney book in particular got a lot of glowing endorsements from the center-right.
00:02:47.340It was excerpted in The Times. It was excerpted in The Atlantic. Megan McArdle wrote a piece
00:02:51.900about it in The Washington Post. And all of this is coming at a moment, obviously, of regressing
00:02:57.760gender equality in America, right? We've got lingering gender inequalities that were exacerbated
00:03:03.120by the pandemic. But then we also have the end of Roe v. Wade, meaning that women are less likely1.00
00:03:07.840to control their own health and destinies. Contraception access is coming under fire
00:03:11.900in the wake of new abortion bans. And I think what's maybe most uncanny for our discussion
00:03:18.440today is that the far right is articulating a renewed opposition to divorce and sort of pledging
00:03:24.540to reverse 20th century reforms of divorce law.
00:03:28.220So now opposition to no fault to divorce is in the state platforms of the Texas and
00:03:45.020And, you know, like this is all stuff we've seen before.
00:03:48.080And I was really grateful, Rebecca, for your intervention with your column in The Cut about the return of the marriage plot and sort of like revisiting a lot of these panics that, as we discussed off mic, do get recycled every couple of years.
00:04:07.700So what do you see in this new moment of the pro-marriage agenda that reminds you of the past?
00:04:13.100Well, so I would say, going back to the very first way you framed this as a vibe shift, I would actually say that the vibe is very consistent. It's like got to beat. You can dance to it. It has been. In fact, one of the funny things, I wrote a book about changing marriage patterns in the United States over the course of hundreds of years.
00:04:33.240I published that book in 2016, which is now feels like a long time ago. But when I went back to look
00:04:39.660at the book, when I was going to write about this summer's wave of pro-marriage enthusiasm and the
00:04:44.920sort of very tenuous connections being made between like the notion of what causes declining
00:04:50.140happiness and maybe it's not marriage, all that, all that stuff. And I began to look into it and
00:04:54.160sort of went back to that work that was published in 2016. And I opened my own book, which I hadn't
00:04:58.840looked at in many years, there was Ross Douthat. There was David Brooks, right? There was certainly
00:05:05.260Brad Wilcox, who is, this is his steady vibe. He is actually the director of the, I believe,
00:05:10.300the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. His entire job is advocating marriage.
00:05:15.920It's so fascinating to me that there's this sense that this ever went away, because it certainly
00:05:21.060comes in these waves. That's why I wrote the column that I wrote in September, is because
00:05:25.820There was this Peltzman study that seemed to link very, I mean, Peltzman, I don't think, was even particularly sold on the idea that marriage or changed marriage patterns were the explanation.
00:05:38.140Certainly not outside of marriage changes in relationship to all kinds of other economic and policy changes.
00:05:44.900But you had people taking this up with great enthusiasm and talking as though this was an entirely new revelation and the kind of, you know, the thing that we dare not speak its name.
00:05:54.280But in fact, when I was writing my book, which I did from sort of 2012 to 2015, the Barack Obama presidential administration was pouring money into so-called marriage education programs, not as much as the previous Bush administration had poured in.
00:06:09.440But there was, coming from our White House, over the course of two administrations, one Republican and one Democratic, there were millions of dollars being poured into pro-marriage programming.
00:06:23.560And that was true right up until 2015, when I sort of finished writing my book that was published the next year.
00:06:30.580This is not, and the same names were writing the same kinds of columns with the same kind of arguments.
00:06:35.120This is the drumbeat of American popular social advice culture, and it has been in various forms since genuinely before our founding, when there were rules inscribed in the colonies that people unattached within a family unit headed by a landowning white man, those unattached from that family unit might be a source of disturbance or disorder to the community.
00:07:04.940right? The desire to herd individuals into heteromarried structures is literally longer
00:07:11.800than our democracy. And it has been steady throughout. And we do have periods in which
00:07:17.680social movements to change the definition of marriage or to change the terms of marriage,
00:07:22.680which are things that wound up happening in both the women's movement, the gay rights movement,
00:07:27.340dramatically alter the institution itself and popular ideas about what it might or might not
00:07:33.760entail. But the enthusiasm for marriage has never really waned, even as marriage patterns have
00:07:40.620shifted. So that gets us to an interesting thing. Like, I agree with you that the content of this
00:07:44.960feels quite transhistoric. At the same time, I feel like this go around, and I think you pointed
00:07:49.380that in your piece in the cut, has a distinct style. It's kind of like reheating the marriage,
00:07:55.100you know, debate for the cancel culture era in the sense that like, especially the Christoph
00:08:00.200piece is so intent on saying like we're not ready to have this conversation it goes to painful
00:08:05.700places and like i'm so i'm really holding myself back here but i feel like i have to say this right
00:08:11.320like it's this kind of weird confessional mode which presents like conventional wisdom as this
00:08:16.160beleaguered thing and i feel like that is very 2020s that's the new thing yeah no it is that's
00:08:21.140how to present yourself when you are in fact representing the position of the powerful
00:08:25.300to actually represent yourself as the victim
00:08:28.580and the least powerful voice in the room
00:08:31.020is very 2020s witch hunt, cancel culture,
00:08:36.800help me, I'm being silenced on the cover of Harper's.
00:08:40.180Like that vibe is exactly how this round is being framed.
00:08:45.000And it's fascinating because that is just,
00:08:53.740that have shifted dramatically, marriage, the definitions of the institution that have shifted
00:08:57.140dramatically, our attitudes about it that have shifted dramatically. But it is just a straight
00:09:00.820up lie to assert that like, this is a message that hasn't been transmitted before. I mean,
00:09:07.420again, going back, it is 10 years ago, the New York Times ran a piece called
00:09:13.420Two Classes Separated by I Do. And they ran it on the front page of the New York Times,
00:09:21.200asserting that class difference can be explained by single parenthood versus married heteroparenthood,
00:09:31.000right? On the front page of the New York Times in 2012. And 10 years later, you have people saying,
00:09:38.140you can't even say this in public. I mean, it's a lie that this message is not out there.
00:09:44.840This message infuses so much of our public policy, much of which actually does remain built around
00:09:51.080married people, right? The notion that people are living in traditionally married units and
00:09:57.200families. So much of the rhetoric around politics presumes that. So much of our popular culture,
00:10:02.460that Hollywood that is so antipathetic to marriage, that actually it was really astounding
00:10:06.560that Barbie didn't get married at the end of the movie. And that is the aberration that then
00:10:11.320Ross Douthat uses as the oppressive norm. I mean, that is exactly what you point to. It is the
00:10:16.700spirit of cancellation. It's the response to Me Too being, there's a witch hunt coming for me.
00:10:21.160It is the coverage of police violence that behaves as though the violence started when
00:10:26.700protesters threw rocks at a car rather than when Freddie Gray was taken on a rough ride.
00:10:32.200All of this is the inversion of power structures where the most powerful present themselves as
00:10:37.600the beleaguered victims just trying to speak some quiet truth and that those who are in any way
00:10:45.440protesting or critiquing the way that power works are in fact the abusive mob i love the idea that
00:10:51.440like well if ross douthat didn't like the ending of barbie he could you know find sucker in i don't
00:10:56.260know every single other hollywood movie put out that year it's like yeah that's right i know well
00:11:01.000i have to say i wrote this in my column i actually loved ross douthat's column on barbie it made me
00:11:07.300laugh so hard because it was such i mean it was such a fantastic premise because he's not only
00:11:12.760he's using the Peltzman study, making a link between the decline in marriage rates and declining
00:11:19.920happiness, and then arguing that the notion that Barbie and Ken, and it's so funny that he picked0.52
00:11:24.840that movie because surely we could find another movie in which the lead hetero characters liked
00:11:30.860each other. Barbie and Ken don't like each other. Barbie does not like Ken, right? That's part of0.64
00:11:37.420the theme of the movie is that she finds almost zero connection with him she just wants her house
00:11:43.380back but but but ross's ross's premise there wasn't just about barbie and right he really
00:11:49.020made it outsized on purpose i think he was doing a bit right but like the future of the happiness
00:11:55.280of the human race depends on whether barbie and ken can see that the thing that they need to do
00:12:01.620is get married to each other which is just makes no sense on a basic human level when you're like
00:12:06.420okay these two characters who i've just sat through two hours about like don't actually
00:12:09.940have any connection whatsoever the idea of them setting up house together is just a flat out
00:12:14.280terrible idea on an emotional and narrative level let alone when it comes to like that could fix the
00:12:19.680problem of human happiness yeah it's also i think important to note that in two sets column he says
00:12:25.340something which you know maybe is admirable honesty on his part he emphasizes that the
00:12:30.320decline in marriage is worse for the happiness of women right it makes women sad first and maybe
00:12:35.820men said also later down the line. But that's such an interesting thing because part of what
00:12:41.160they're also saying is that the women's movement made women reject marriage. So if the decline in
00:12:46.400marriage is actually hurting women so much, then maybe why are they not so eager to marry, right?
00:12:52.640There's no interrogation of that complexity because it's clearly those who are enthusiastic
00:12:57.660about marriage as a cure for both happiness and class stratification, inequality, are either
00:13:03.960directly or more subtly suggesting that it was feminism and a women's movement and the move of
00:13:10.520women into workplaces as in some cases economic and professional competitors to men that all these
00:13:16.620things have led to the decline of marriage but then they're also very worried about women's
00:13:21.820happiness if women aren't marrying as much right and there's no sort of like real diving into like
00:13:29.440Well, if there was a social movement that created conditions in which marriage was no longer the only institution that could legitimize adult female life in the United States, and that in fact meant that women had a variety of other options, it just strikes at the heart of the conviction that a movement for liberation and gender equality was fundamentally not what women wanted, even though it was actually a women's movement.
00:13:58.580I mean, this is a recurring theme you'll find in a lot of anti-feminism is that the sort of social ills or personal problems that feminists set out to combat, things like poverty and inequality, things like unhappiness in romantic relationships, like these are actually then blamed upon feminism itself, right?
00:14:21.480When the movement fails to eradicate them.1.00
00:14:23.840Women hurt themselves by wanting more.1.00
00:14:25.760Right. And they cannot be happy while free.1.00
00:14:28.580is also like sort of the subtext. Right. One of the things, if you actually look back at the
00:14:32.880second wave women's movement, you know, the feminine mystique, which explodes out of the
00:14:37.840middle-class white ennui of early hetero married norms that were imposed in the middle of the 20th0.88
00:14:44.260century. Betty Friedan was never arguing against marriage, right? Oh, quite emphatically in favor0.80
00:14:49.740of marriage. In favor of marriage. And in fact, of working outside the home as part of making
00:14:54.600marriages happier, right? And better. Very sloppily often people say like, well, then came
00:15:00.640feminism and marriage rates dropped. The funny thing is that the major changes to marriage rates
00:15:08.380and marriage ages didn't really start until the 1990s. And there's a real, there's actually,
00:15:13.020there is a feminist sort of timeline that gets to how that is because the major shift in marriages0.99
00:15:18.500in the wake of a second wave feminist movement came with a big divorce wave of the seventies0.87
00:15:23.580and 80s, in which a lot of those marriages that had been entered into on starkly unequal0.99
00:15:28.980gendered terms in the 1950s and 60s, a lot of what the women's movement did in opening
00:15:34.580up, again, not fighting against marriage, but certainly taking up questions of sexual
00:15:39.960liberation and the ability to have a sex life outside of or in advance of marriage, opening
00:15:45.720up professional and educational opportunities you might not be able to take advantage of
00:15:49.880if you were in a traditionally bound marriage that kept you working within the home, realizing
00:15:55.500that maybe they were in a bad bargain. A lot of women left their hetero marriages and there was
00:16:00.020a huge divorce wave. And then the children of that divorce wave sort of began to understand
00:16:06.180a quality difference, that marriage wasn't just a static thing, which by the way, we should get
00:16:11.440back to in terms of what people argue now, that marriage wasn't just like, there's not just
00:16:14.720marriage and not marriage, right? That there's this huge variety and qualities of marriage,
00:16:18.900which is the thing that gets lost every time you try to turn it into a policy prescription,
00:16:22.780and that perhaps that they would rather, in some cases, hold out for what they imagine might be a
00:16:30.340good and lasting and satisfying marriage than to simply begin adulthood by marrying whoever it was
00:16:36.360that was available to them, which is honestly the shoot into which many women were herded0.95
00:16:41.220over generations before then. And that's in the 90s when you begin to see a huge jump
00:16:46.860in age of first marriage for women and men,
00:16:51.240but for women where the age of first marriage
00:16:53.680has always been younger than age of first marriage for men,
00:16:56.960you see that jump really begin in the 90s
00:16:59.460and then leap because prior to the 90s,
00:17:16.860And then starting in the 90s, it jumps and is now closer to 30.
00:17:21.260This might be a good moment to sort of zoom out and look at the pro-marriage campaigners who have emerged a summer and just like do them great fairness and look at what they're actually arguing because there's a few different lines of argument, right?
00:17:38.280There's one that Adrienne and I, we covered in our episode on gay marriage.
00:17:43.000There's for the sake of the children, right?
00:17:44.880There's this idea that marriage is a uniquely beneficial way to raise kids.
00:17:52.760And then there's like for the sake of adults, right?
00:17:58.020And then there's the argument about adult happiness.
00:18:01.320And like, let's start with the arguments about kids, which I think are like most unique to the Kearney.
00:18:07.600And Adrian, you had some interesting thoughts on like Kearney's argument about marriage.
00:18:11.620Yeah, so I find, I mean, I have to admit that I'm sort of a babe in the woods here, at least when it comes to the statistics. I recognize a bad argument when I see one, and these struck me as extremely bad arguments. But I don't know the data on these marriage questions at all. And Kearney and Christoph both seem to veer between what seemed to me two totally different kinds of claims, one of which seems, at least to me, uncontroversial, but maybe not proving what they think it proves. And the other one seemed just batshit insane.
00:18:39.420So the first one is basically in the capitalist economy, as it is set up in the United States, having two breadwinners provide for children is usually advantageous and data bear that out.
00:18:51.160That seems to be what they're saying, which like on an individual level, having two parents might seem like a good idea.
00:18:57.460Losing one parent might seem a misfortune. Two might smack of carelessness, as Oscar Wilde would say.
00:19:02.100But these texts then seem like kind of determined to turn that into a policy prescription, right?
00:19:07.920They're trying to say, therefore, we have to do this, not we have to help single moms
00:19:12.880particularly or have to have single parents or we have to invest in this and that.
00:19:16.920It's basically, no, the outcomes are better.0.74
00:19:46.840But then this other claim seems to be liberals, feminists who hate marriage so much and want1.00
00:19:52.920only key parties, a big societal key party, apparently, make people feel bad about wanting1.00
00:19:58.400to marry and have made single parenthood cool.
00:20:02.120And therefore, now we're in these destructive family structures or something like that.
00:20:07.140And there's so much hand-wringing about this in Christophe's piece where it's like, you know, I resist thinking this because it goes against my cultural values.
00:20:13.700And I guess, again, this is where I would love to have the data because I'm like, it's hard for me to imagine that any of this is about cultural factors, right?
00:20:20.900Like, are the people who are, let's say, where the resources in the family are low because it's a single parent who didn't have time to develop a skill set to command a large salary in this economy?
00:20:34.900are those the same that are like oh i'm a feminist i'm gonna wait till age 28 or are these totally
00:20:40.380different social strata right like isn't this a reflection of social stratification rather
00:20:46.100inequality rather than its driver yes every one important thing to know going into this is that
00:20:51.880the data around married couples versus either single parent homes or unmarried couples is
00:20:59.220itself a reflection of class stratification at this point, because as marriage has become0.83
00:21:04.320less compulsory, and here's where they're right. Here's where Wilcox and Kearney are absolutely
00:21:09.580correct, that increasingly what has happened is as soon as marriage has become less optional and
00:21:15.080more compulsory, it has become the purview of the wealthiest in this country, right? And so when
00:21:21.540you're looking at statistics about married people and single people, you are also, you are very
00:21:27.960often looking at statistics that are badly skewed by looking at wealthy people and less wealthy
00:21:32.340people, right? And some of the people who are doing research on this are pointing out that you
00:21:37.440can't take apart those kinds of things. Dedrick Williams, who has argued that this has so much
00:21:43.740less to do with family structure as defining or as determining the sort of economic, educational
00:21:50.700stability of children, and so much more to do. In his case, he's talking about race. Once you
00:21:56.040start doing the comparisons with looking at race and economic difference, it's not that family
00:22:01.980structure in itself is determinative. And what they're talking about in part, they're talking
00:22:08.880about money, right? They're talking about, again, resources, but that means money, right? So two
00:22:14.620incomes combined. And Kearney's very specific. She really doesn't want to get cast as an anti-feminist.
00:22:18.800She keeps saying, I'm not this. I'm not against women working. I don't want... She's very careful
00:22:23.080to not do that. And I read her book and I was like, so why are you writing this book? Then if
00:22:27.100you don't want to be all these things, right, then why are what you're ultimately selling is
00:22:31.840marriage as a solution. But in fact, what a lot of these people are pointing to is economic
00:22:36.660inequality and that married couples. And again, the more likely you are to be married, the more
00:22:42.460likely you are to have a college education and resources at the time you get married at 28,
00:22:47.240after you've gotten your graduate degree and you have your job with benefits, right? That is
00:22:53.000the population that is getting married more frequently now because there's stability entering
00:22:58.220that kind of legally binding relationship that because we have reformed our ideas about what it
00:23:03.220is and it's supposed to be something that's emotionally satisfying and long-term, then it's
00:23:08.000something you enter when you feel like secure. And so the people who are feeling secure in our
00:23:12.260society in which so many of our policies have ripped any kind of economic security from them
00:23:17.060are people who are starting out with all kinds of economic class advantages, often racial,
00:23:22.120you know, with race advantages. Right. So the bizarre thing to me, because I think identifying
00:23:29.620that inequality is actually the honest thing that they're doing. Right. And Wilcox is doing it in
00:23:34.020this Trumpy and like stick it to the elites, man, by getting married. Right. But like the thing he's
00:23:39.220not wrong about is that it is elites who are getting married. But rather than look at that
00:23:43.920situation and say, wow, marriage is really declining amongst people, has really declined
00:23:48.860amongst people who experience all forms of economic and social insecurity, right? Rather
00:23:56.400than looking at that and thinking, what kinds of policy would give people more security, right?0.99
00:24:01.980Now, I don't give a rat's ass if more people get married or not. But when I was writing my book in0.95
00:24:07.1002016, I had come across two different programs that had inadvertently stabilized marriage rates.
00:24:11.980They were both welfare programs, right? And they were ones in which sort of almost accidentally
00:24:16.760welfare benefits and job training programs had been extended for a certain population.
00:24:21.840And in that population, divorce rates during that period had dropped dramatically because
00:24:26.980like we know from human lived experience that among the stressors on our relationships,
00:24:31.700including marriages or romantic or sexual partnerships, are money anxiety and all the
00:24:38.060things that can go with it. You know, mental health struggles, depression, drug addiction,
00:24:42.980all that stuff, plus just the fears around poverty, incarceration, all those things
00:24:50.480make the formation of stable and rewarding relationships much more difficult. And we
00:24:55.780know that as humans, we would know that talking to our friends, right? But when you're talking
00:24:59.840about it in the realm of prescribing public policy, there are things you could do. You could
00:25:03.980send people checks, right? You could send people a child tax credit. And Kearney wants to say,
00:25:10.320oh, I'm in favor of these things if absolutely necessary, because I really care about the
00:25:13.700children. But like, those are things you could prescribe and do, and that it is within the
00:25:17.680government's ability to do, to offer a jobs program, a universal basic income, child tax
00:25:22.720credits, make affordable housing more accessible, make healthcare accessible, all those things that
00:25:27.360would give millions of Americans more stability from which then they very well might make more
00:25:34.900stable families, for my purposes, in whatever form they might take. For marriage enthusiast
00:25:39.940purposes, I bet they'd get married more. Right. But, but instead of doing that, we're saying no
00:25:45.320marriage is the answer. When I suspect if we actually thought about what that might look like
00:25:50.820amongst people who do not have that security, the idea of like, what is a marriage? And Kearney says
00:25:57.220in this book, that's so wild. She says, well, I know everybody has their individual stories,
00:26:02.040but I'm an economist. And so I deal in cold, hard numbers. Yeah. Marriage is not cold,
00:26:07.000hard numbers. When you are prescribing, there is no marriage. There is no, there's not a thing that
00:26:12.480exists as marriage that functions the same way in everybody's life. Marriage depends, is a protean
00:26:17.900institution. It changes between the two same people over time. It changes depending on season
00:26:23.960and circumstance and health and mood and professional realities and the age of children
00:26:30.120if you have them or decisions about whether or not to have children. You cannot simply prescribe
00:26:34.660it and have it be a number. It's not a number. A check is a number. A welfare benefit is a number.
00:26:41.460Job protection, unemployment insurance, those are numbers. Healthcare insurance, those are numbers.
00:26:46.100And we could do those things and probably get a lot of the effects, including greater happiness,
00:26:50.740stability, and child welfare, if we thought about those things.
00:26:55.040I love how you're putting that because the point where, honestly, I think there was like blood
00:26:58.160coming out of my ears was basically in the Kristoff column when it almost seems like he's
00:27:02.480describing the after effects of the very policy he's proposing, right?
00:27:07.080So Christoph points out that causally explaining poverty by reference to family structures
00:27:11.580among the poor, in particular in single mother households, is an approach that's obviously
00:27:16.220made infamous by the Moynihan Report about the case for national action, right?
00:27:22.260Which basically suggested that Black poverty didn't have so much to do with white racism0.99
00:27:26.240or legacy of inequality, but rather with a set of uniquely Black pathologies usually0.94
00:27:31.420having to do with family structures right right that the women were too independent right yeah
00:27:35.740too masculinized essentially yeah and and the men who knows where the men were it's like i can i can
00:27:41.040tell you where the men were you you locked them up but whatever what i'm driving at with this is
00:27:44.660like so it's it's the framing is totally bizarre because on the one hand he's saying like oh people
00:27:47.960were not ready to hear what Moynihan had to say and i was like buddy that was like didn't the
00:27:52.760Moynihan report basically determine u.s social policy like basically after once the great society
00:27:58.400ended so post 68 we're basically talking it's Moynihan all the way down like what is Clinton
00:28:04.000but not like a long tale of Moynihan right exactly which gave us the cuts in welfare benefits that
00:28:11.340you're describing which then put pressure on the institution of marriage it's like you you're
00:28:16.420looking at the head of the snake and you're like yeah what if we had that head bite the tail of
00:28:20.100the snake harder this whole problem would go away like you're you're driving me nuts man what are
00:28:25.020you doing so okay so here's where i want to nerd out a little bit when i was writing all the single1.00
00:28:30.040ladies i had always understood the mid-20th century like norman rockwell hyper heteromarried
00:28:37.640cultural norm i'd always been led to understand that this was just post-war the soldiers came1.00
00:28:43.480back they wanted you know they wanted their jobs on the factory floors back and and sent women back
00:28:48.040home right and it was also post-depression and so we need okay that was how i'd always been led
00:28:52.700to understand that period, the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. When I was researching my book
00:28:58.000and learning about how, in fact, marriage patterns had fluctuated prior to that period, too, there
00:29:03.240actually was a period, the end of the 19th century, for a lot of reasons, including westward
00:29:09.260exploration that sent a lot of men to the West Coast and a lot of women on the East Coast,
00:29:14.160expansions in educational opportunity after the Civil War for both white women, formerly enslaved
00:29:20.020Black Americans. Post-emancipation marriage rates for African Americans went way up and actually
00:29:26.180got higher than the marriage rates for white Americans, in part because of changes brought
00:29:31.680about by industrialization and a move from an agrarian economy and changes in early education
00:29:37.360and the creation of new professions for white women. And marriage rates for white women fell
00:29:43.400at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century in the progressive era.
00:29:47.780And marriage rates for black Americans went very high after the end of slavery. And among the things that were happening in the early 20th century were a series of social movements that were intertwined, right, coming out and they were, I don't mean to paint a beautiful picture of them, they were often very much at odds with each other.
00:30:07.280But coming out of the linked and fractious fights for abolition and suffrage, labor protections, it was a period of tremendous social and political change in which a lot of people who had been oppressed within the white capitalist patriarchy were gaining access to professional, educational, economic forms of inclusion or parity, right?
00:30:33.580Or not parody, but coming closer to it. And in the beginning of the 20th century, a whole series of things began to happen in response to that. Right. And those things that were cultural messages being sent suddenly, you know, messages being sent to white women about dating, which had, which was kind of an invention of the early mid 20th century that also had to do with the proliferation of cars and streetlights.
00:31:00.480It's amazing how all these things happen together. But what was happening, starting with the New Deal and in the post-war political policies, the policies enacted after the Second World War, was that the government was investing.
00:31:16.280Those numbers I was just talking about, they were investing, for example, in housing. They were
00:31:21.140building suburbs and investing in housing for white Americans. Those suburbs were explicitly0.55
00:31:28.100for white people. A lot of them did not permit Black residents. They were investing in infrastructure,0.86
00:31:33.780right? They were building a white middle class, right? They were building highways.0.75
00:31:38.120The industrialization of the mid-20th century meant new kinds of jobs and professions for white0.66
00:31:42.060men. There was the GI Bill, which returning white soldiers were able to take advantage of in a way0.64
00:31:46.180that returning Black soldiers were not able to take advantage of. You had a series of a lot of0.59
00:31:51.280white immigrant populations were being absorbed into the notion of being a white American
00:31:55.260meant. You had the government making actual corporate taxes were very high, right? You had
00:32:04.420a government making investments in creating a white middle class, and part of it was creating jobs0.63
00:32:09.920by building infrastructure, by building highways. What did those highways do? They shuttled the
00:32:15.120white workers from the urban centers where they had these new jobs to the suburbs where they had0.68
00:32:19.480these houses. Also, the same highways cut off Black neighborhoods. We know this is the story0.83
00:32:24.880of Robert Moses, cut off Black neighborhoods from public transportation and from jobs. Black0.99
00:32:31.140returning soldiers were not able to get the college educations that white returning soldiers0.96
00:32:35.100were. Black and brown workers were not protected by the new strengthening labor unions, the labor
00:32:41.180protections that white workers were benefiting from in the middle of the 20th century, which was
00:32:45.780sort of like the peak of the labor movement and the kind of job protection and security that that
00:32:50.440entailed, black and brown workers were much less likely to have those populations. And so this
00:32:54.920creates this divided experience. What begins to happen at that point? White marriage rates start
00:33:00.500to soar, which is a corrective to the late 19th and early 20th century, and black marriage rates0.72
00:33:06.300start to plummet okay because there's one population is being again via policy that was
00:33:13.240like fixed policy that was numbers that was actually housing jobs education they were being
00:33:20.420offered a kind of economic stability which coupled with cultural messaging led to super high rates of
00:33:26.820hetero marriage at young ages and you actually had white women dropping out of the colleges they had0.98
00:33:31.140recently won their way into in order to enter early marriages in which there was a model in0.98
00:33:37.100which the white man was the breadwinner and the white woman was the stay-at-home domestic familial
00:33:43.680laborer. Black families and black communities were being destroyed by these infrastructural changes.0.91
00:33:50.120They were not getting the kind of labor or educational benefits that permitted them to
00:33:53.820vault into a middle class. Their communities were being drained of resources. And without that kind
00:33:59.560of economic stability, their marriage rates were falling. What does this produce literally within
00:34:03.460two years of each other? 1963, you have Betty Friedan and the explosion out of those suffocating
00:34:08.640white suburbs for white women of the Feminine Mystique. And for those Black communities,0.98
00:34:13.800what do you get? The Moynihan Report, which points a finger at single Black mothers as0.94
00:34:20.480the center of a pathology around Black poverty. The other thing that that does is make the
00:34:26.940experience of white women and black women fundamentally indiscernible to each other0.98
00:34:29.980and so when for dan is advocating for white women to go out into the workplace rather than
00:34:34.620striking new and more equitable bargains with their white husbands what is she doing like i0.98
00:34:40.560mean this is but what winds up happening in many cases is that black women are brought into the
00:34:47.140homes to do the child care and the domestic labor for very low wages and it makes the experiences
00:34:53.060of black women and white women fundamentally different and indiscernible to each other,0.98
00:34:57.020which also leads to preventing them from allying with each other and continuing a joint effort0.74
00:35:02.660to change the white patriarchy. Sorry, that was like a super nerdy, weird tangent.
00:35:09.240You blew my mind because you're pulling together a whole bunch of things that I had sort of vaguely
00:35:12.920intuited, but not put together that way. I mean, there's also, of course, the fact that like, I
00:35:16.640mean, as Californians, we see this all the time, right? That like, I think Leslie Kern makes that
00:35:21.680point in her book feminist city that of course the gendered paths of the suburbs are really1.00
00:35:26.300interesting and that like right men right like let's say you live in like westchester county0.99
00:35:30.920you take a train with other men to your insurance company or whatever meanwhile your wife drives the
00:35:38.740suburban to various other locations like there is a kind of isolation that comes with with that and
00:35:44.980like who gets to be collectivized and who has to be sort of by themselves and then we look at
00:35:49.900someone like richard rothstein pointing out like how basically redlining was used to just kind of
00:35:54.100make domesticity impossible for a lot of black americans right that like you had to share the
00:35:59.040space if only by renting out part of it right like there there was no two parent two kid household
00:36:05.280because like you had to fit in grandma and that uncle who like fell on hard times and maybe that
00:36:11.260lodger who helps you make rent every month and those realities were that had also been true for
00:36:16.680all kinds of white immigrant populations and white poor populations prior to a government willing to
00:36:21.820invest in building single family homes. And then yes, putting white families into those homes0.80
00:36:28.160at the same time that those government investments were forcing black families to remain or even more
00:36:36.080be outside of single family homes and be in shared spaces in which there wasn't that defined
00:36:41.580two-parent household. And just think about that because, I mean, A, again, for the marriage
00:36:47.660enthusiasts, like, hey, you know what you could do if you really wanted to build marriage rates
00:36:51.920is you could invest in housing and help Americans who have trouble finding housing get into those.
00:36:57.840Why can't we invest in housing in that same way? That would actually help those populations have
00:37:02.740more stable. Again, I don't care who's getting married and who's not getting married. But like,
00:37:07.260if you really cared about that, those are, they're literal policies that have those numbers
00:37:11.820that Kearney is so enthusiastic about. There are policies that are like that, that you could do
00:37:16.980that would stabilize so many more millions of Americans. It's like ensuring that people have
00:37:20.820healthcare, ensuring that people have safe maternal healthcare, reproductive healthcare,
00:37:24.620all that stuff would enable more people to make more stable family units. And they all have
00:37:31.680numbers and they don't depend on just like, do you like this person? And do you work well with
00:37:35.660them like at three in the morning you know so there's a mistake in a lot of these like pro
00:37:59.560marriage prescriptions between cause and effect really right the marriage is actually a symptom
00:38:05.160of economic stability and upward mobility that has been foreclosed to a lot of these populations
00:38:09.780who are now, in fact, not getting married. And Kearney and her ilk are sort of mistaking
00:38:15.040this growing class gulf between who gets married and who doesn't for a pathological cause of
00:38:22.460inequality rather than one of its symptoms. But also, this is something that Adrienne,
00:38:27.120you said when we did our episode on male loneliness, is what I'm actually seeing is
00:38:32.900this like vast array of really trenchant structural inequalities produced by policy choices that are
00:38:39.800being just blamed on personal choices, right? There's these forces that are keeping people
00:38:45.420out of housing. There are these forces that are keeping people out of economic stability. There
00:38:49.120are these forces that are having down extreme effects on personal stability, things like
00:38:53.660happiness, things like mental health, things like, you know, family thriving that are just being0.95
00:38:58.160ascribed to cultural pathology or a inconvenient feminist trend when they're actually being
00:39:06.180produced by, you know, decades worth of policy choices. So this makes sense to me as a very
00:39:13.820appealing sort of rhetorical tool for a conservative mind to go to. It's like, oh,
00:39:18.440it's just that we're not getting married anymore because it allows you to look away from so many
00:39:24.000other problems would be very difficult to solve.
00:39:27.020I mean, we've been dancing around this issue of the weird rhetorical presentation that
00:39:31.400this go around of the marriage boosterism debate sort of has.
00:39:35.640We sort of mentioned briefly that it has the kind of, it's meant for the age of cancer
00:47:30.400income or access to an economic stability
00:47:33.580that would permit you to leave a marriage
00:47:35.000if it does become unhappy or abusive, right?
00:47:37.200But also networks, friendships, relationships where you're not in that, what you described as the isolation that often happens, you know, or that happened when marriage was imposed as the legitimizing institution of adulthood and that you entered just as you were leaving the house in which you grew up, right?
00:47:55.640And entered into another house, that actually cuts you off from all kinds of resources, not just economic resources, but social resources, the kinds of bonds that can, you know, that you have, as you say, the absence of collectivity when you are isolated, where there's nobody you can talk to, where there's no perspective that you can get, where there's nobody who you can go to for help.
00:48:15.400And again, there is no one version of this. I could sit here and paint a picture of what it means to have been unmarried through your 20s and then you marry. Again, what turns out to be a fairly normie upper middle class and upper class pattern, which is a college education and then you go and you have an income and you have some savings and then you marry.
00:48:36.160and you're like, that's actually incredibly restrictive in and of itself. It is a form
00:48:39.880of liberation for people who have access to those resources, right? To be able to live that way and
00:48:44.220not just marry whoever you were dating at 18. But that is a very, like, there are also tons of
00:48:49.640people who are still with the people that they were with at 18, but have had, you know, whether
00:48:54.280they're married or not, there are people who have been in and out of several marriages throughout
00:48:58.220their twenties. There are people who will never marry at all and have children on their own by
00:49:02.600choice or because of circumstances or because of illness or death or breakups. I mean,
00:49:08.060there's an infinite, there's many paths through life as there are people. And the notion that
00:49:14.480this one institution, which historically, and we got to say, has been used as an organizing
00:49:19.680institution that historically has subjugated women in its hetero form, right? That this one
00:49:27.400institution has some fixed place in any life is comical actually it just makes no sense with the
00:49:33.700human experience yeah because you know what they're doing is they're taking complex structural
00:49:40.320policy choices that have exacerbated inequality and they're distilling it down to personal choice
00:49:46.320but they're also obviating so much about those personal choices and those circumstances right
00:49:51.560They're seeing marriage not as what it is, which is like, as Rebecca pointed out, this, you know, changing relationship between two people that will be dependent on a lot of factors about those people's lives beyond and outside of that relationship.
00:50:08.320They're seeing it as sort of like a quick fix and as an expression of appropriate values, right?
00:50:15.040And that's not how anybody's actually living.
00:50:16.900And it's not what we aspire to in our families and in our intimate relationships, right?
00:50:21.220We aspire to something more like equitability, more like affection, more like freedom, which is, it's just not in these visions of marriage. What's in these visions of marriage is discipline, orderliness, sort of a bland concept of virtue that doesn't correlate much to what it really looks like to try and live an honorable life with as much freedom as possible.
00:50:44.040Yes, I think that's exactly right. And I also just, I want to say that coming off of what you just said, it's important to know that those who are super invested in marriage are ultimately invested in the same way that those who are fighting other related battles in reestablishing fixed hierarchies and categories of human experience and want certain kinds of institutions and laws to delineate bright lines between different kinds of people.
00:51:14.040people so that those lines can be more effectively policed and censured and rewarded, right? It is
00:51:21.420about reestablishing fixed hierarchies along gendered race and class lines. An institution0.84
00:51:27.060like marriage makes that very easy. And when, because it has historically been an institution
00:51:30.880that organized people into legitimate and illegitimate into by gender in many eras,
00:51:36.860according to race, class, ethnicity, you know, I know these are a lot of DEI words,
00:51:41.400But if you actually think about what it means to have like the diversity of human experience, not just diversity in terms of like, again, in that sort of bullshit DEI way, but like a diversity of human experience of how people live lives and reimagining a society in a way that includes all these different options and drives and pleasures and attractions and versions of distress and unhappiness and ambition.
00:52:09.000And that's actually a world in which these kinds of organizing institutions would, instead of being reimposed, get sort of thrown up in the air as like an option. And that's what they don't want, because it confuses who's supposed to have power and who's not and who's supposed to have resources and who's not and who's supposed to do what kind of labor and who's supposed to do what other kind of labor.
00:52:30.040And marriage has always been a very useful organizing hierarchical institution in that regard. And that's one of the reasons that people are invested in bringing it back as a norm.
00:52:39.000I think what they're most afraid of, these people who are really invested in marriage, is not the suffering or marginalization of single mothers, but their success.
00:52:47.420That's right. It's like the more the more it becomes possible for people, but but really, I think women to live outside of relationships that are domestically hierarchical, recognized by the state.
00:53:01.220the more it becomes possible for women to live independently of men, the more it becomes possible0.71
00:53:05.980for children to be raised outside of these very familiar looking, a stick figure with pants and0.56
00:53:13.720a stick figure with a skirt, like family units, the more possibilities of life become vivid and
00:53:20.800imaginable to people. And the less these hierarchies make sense. So one thing that this
00:53:25.140brings up, though, is, you know, we had a marriage debate 10 years ago in the United States. And
00:53:29.700it's funny right like on the one hand right like we we talked about gay marriage both uh you know
00:53:35.260moira and i are beneficiaries of legal changes around that and yet two things strike me right
00:53:40.140like one we never actually debated like what the content of marriage would be right like it was
00:53:45.560basically or like implicitly it just meant like like oh they're just like everyone else like well
00:53:50.140it turns out everyone else is not like everyone else and we didn't have that discussion then0.84
00:53:53.380right and then the second thing is like where does this renewed freak out take us like did gay
00:53:58.860marriage to some extent make this argument worse or better or like or does it make it make it more
00:54:04.840acute in the sense that of course gay people or lgbt people as a rule i think tend to get married
00:54:10.940even later and like tend to have accumulate even more in the way of resources by the time they do
00:54:16.420if they do at all the question of how gay marriage played into this and this is something that i
00:54:20.900think i argued i think pretty explicitly in my book is that actually it was part of what altered
00:54:27.020the institution, right? So there was the argument that it was just buying into this traditional and
00:54:32.460confining institution by a population that was out, you know, that was by definition until the
00:54:39.060legalization of gay marriage outside of that institution and therefore represented a challenge
00:54:42.660to it. But if you're actually interested in marriage and marriage evolving to become more
00:54:48.540equitable, the thing that gay marriage did, it was, which is not to say that there aren't many0.67
00:54:52.780unequal same same-sex marriages that there aren't many unjust and unhappy gay marriages but it took
00:54:59.940the gender hierarchy out of the inherent definition of what marriage was right so it complicated the
00:55:05.360notion and exploded the notion of one of marriage's primary functions historically which was
00:55:11.220to offer men different kinds of more power over women right and to my mind one of the reasons
00:55:18.400that actually, I mean, in some cases, I sometimes describe myself as a bizarre and backwards
00:55:23.300advocate for marriage in that I think that the changes that have been made to marriage to make
00:55:27.560it more equitable, including marriage equality, has permitted it to survive. If you look at
00:55:33.680countries that still, I mean, there are a lot of other countries on this planet where marriage is
00:55:38.400an absolute freefall and childbearing is in freefall. And there are like panics because in
00:55:44.340part, those are marriages where super punishing patriarchal assumptions and cultural practices
00:55:50.300around marriage persist. And women are simply having none of it, right? They're absolutely0.77
00:55:54.780not going anywhere near not only marriage, but hetero coupling. You can find that kind of
00:56:00.320coverage in lots of places. And one of the arguments that I think I made in all the single
00:56:03.640ladies is that our ability to change laws, right? To create more reproductive freedom, to permit,1.00
00:56:10.340Remember, it's interesting that contraception was legalized for married people in Griswold v. Connecticut, and it was legalized completely separately like five years later in 1972 for single people in Eisenstadt v. Baird, right?
00:56:22.680This is that in creating the ability for childbearing people to access contraception and abortion, in opening marriage and making it not just inherently hetero in its nature, in expanding educational, professional and economic opportunities for women, actually it has permitted marriage to evolve and become more equitable in a way that permits more people to still enter into it.
00:56:49.200somebody like me, I, you know, and people like you, right? Like that we can, that this is a,
00:56:56.040the changes that we've made to it have perversely permitted our marriage rates to remain high by,
00:57:04.100in contrast to a lot of other countries around the world. Right. But when you say,
00:57:09.520what is the impact of gay marriage? I mean, there's no question to me that what we are looking at
00:57:14.020alongside the push for a reinstatement of marriage as a purported cure-all,0.58
00:57:23.000that's happening alongside the reversal of the overturn of Roe,
00:57:27.680the stated desire by one of the people who overturned Roe, Clarence Thomas,
00:57:37.040I mean, you had Republican lawmakers a couple years ago
00:57:39.840talking about the Loving case as having been wrongly decided.
00:57:42.820Like, all of the marriage-related, Thomas specifically noted Lawrence, Obergefell, and Griswold in his concurrence to Roe. This is a much broader project, and it is to take away exactly those mechanisms that permitted marriage to evolve, which, to my mind, actually allows it to flourish in contemporary society.
00:58:05.040perhaps not at the rates that it that it used to but like that that's a good thing we still have
00:58:09.520marriage we can still feel like happy about getting married in certain circumstances and
00:58:13.900that's just not true in a lot of places that didn't have those kinds of policy shifts that
00:58:18.160permitted the marriage to become more equitable less punishing and less gender hierarchical and
00:58:23.600so but what your question said no they actually just want to they just want to reverse all right
00:58:28.240you know and i'm not saying that melissa kearney wants to reverse all of it she would be very eager
00:58:32.600to explain to you that she does not but the fact that the push that she's eagerly participating in0.85
00:58:38.920which is to make it a norm again right and to and to make people marry more frequently than
00:58:44.000you know than they are is that it's happening in tandem with these legal and political
00:58:49.580fights to reverse all of the revisions that made it a better and stronger institution for those
00:58:54.340who do enter it i mean that tells you what the project is right the fact that they're not like0.96
00:58:59.400well if you're 21 and you're in a committed non-binary polycule you definitely have to0.69
00:59:04.320you have to nail that down and make sure you you make an honest uh on paper yeah do not who's gonna0.55
00:59:11.220buy the cash yeah yeah get in there for free yeah with these four or five individuals depending on
00:59:16.980which day yeah like that's not what they're saying you're absolutely right it's like no it's not what
00:59:22.500they're saying and the one other thing i want to i know we have to stop and i actually i probably
00:59:28.480do have to go soon. But the other thing to keep in mind is that we've talked about what the impact
00:59:33.460of these changes in marriage within personal relationships. But remember that there's also
00:59:38.100an enormous amount of resentment about women, whether they're married or not, operating outside
00:59:44.140of homes in workplaces. And so you saw that around Roe and J.D. Vance, who was at the time running for
00:59:50.840his Senate seat that he now occupies in Ohio, tweeted, if your worldview tells you it's bad
00:59:55.440for women to become mothers, but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the
00:59:59.300New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you've been had, right? There is anxiety about women out in0.52
01:00:08.320professional spheres taking up space that had historically been designated as white male space,
01:00:14.780that reinstalling women in traditional marital structures, along with reinstalling them in a0.62
01:00:21.940world in which they cannot control their own reproductive abilities like would help take care
01:00:27.060of right that's jd vance is presenting that with regard to abortion which we know is key to this
01:00:31.420conversation as the contrast like you know and and that's really important look mike johnson
01:00:37.880has you know we the new speaker of the house talks about how it is incumbent on women to
01:00:44.180produce able-bodied workers that's like straight up you know there is a great desire to move
01:00:51.140women's function out of the professional and educational spheres where they competed. Keep1.00
01:00:56.060in mind that a lot of the conversation around those sort of boy crisis conversations is about
01:01:00.240how much space women are taking up at schools. There is enormous anxiety, not just about what's
01:01:05.460going on in homes and domestic situations, but outside of homes too, and that you can't uncouple
01:01:11.280those two things. J.D. Vance, another popularizer of Moynihan, right? Like updating Moynihan
01:01:15.840for the Trump age, basically. Rebecca Tracer, it was wonderful to have you.