Half Changed World

Today’s book is The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family, by Dan Savage, of Savage Love [decidedly not work-safe] fame.  It’s the story of his and his boyfriend’s discussions about whether to get matching tattoos, wrapped in various digressions about the marital choices of the rest of his family and the weirdness of the institution of marriage in general. 

It’s a quick read, funny in places, but without the emotional intensity of The Kid, in which Savage wrote about their decision to adopt a child, and the adoption process.  The heart of the book is the personal stories, which put a face on the gay marriage debate.  But fundamentally, I don’t see this book changing many people’s minds; the only ones who are likely to read it are already on Savage’s side.

Savage makes some interesting points about how people hold gays who want to get married to a higher standard than they do to heterosexual couples.  (That is, if they want to get married to their same-sex partners — Savage points out that if he wants to enter into a sham marriage with a woman he has no plans to live with, the state will happily bestow its authority on it.)   He argues in favor of commitment, especially when children are involved, but against enforced monogamy as an essential part of such commitments.  And, in a passage that is both funny and biting, he argues against the perverse logic that says that "only a marriage that ends with someone in the cooler down at Maloney’s [funeral home] is a success."

Via Feministe’s Weekend Roundup, I read this post from Andrea at Vociferate, on Do straight feminists always have to compromise?   Looking at my own marriage, my answer is no, not if you define "compromise" as Andrea seems to, as giving up on something fundamental.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes find myself muttering as I pick up T’s balled socks from the floor.  But I pick them up, and I don’t think it’s a violation of feminist principles to do so.  Because he does lots of things for me, like doing almost all the driving on long trips, especially when the weather is lousy, and puts up with my bad habits, like leaving piles of newspapers and magazines all over the house.  Does it balance out?  More or less, enough so that we’re both happy.  I’m a firm believer in equality in relationships, but I don’t think that means keeping score all the time.

I think the socks are like the woman in the zen koan, who asked two monks for help crossing a river where the bridge had been washed out.  The elder picked her up and carried her across.  Three hours later, the younger said "Master!  We’re not supposed to touch women, and yet you carried that woman across ther river."  The elder replied "I left her behind at the river; it seems that you are still carrying her."  It’s a lot healthier for our relationship to just put the socks in the hamper than to let them fester in the back of my mind.

Andrea’s post made me think of Ann Lander’s famous question "Are you better off with him or without him?"  Landers’ advice was that if you decide you’re better off in a relationship than not, you should stop banging your head against the wall trying to change aspects of your partner.  The problem with that advice, of course, is that abusers tell their partners that they’re too ugly to ever get another partner, too stupid to get a job, and after hearing that enough far too many people start to believe it.

I’ve written here before about Rhonda Mahoney’s book "Kidding Ourselves."  She applies the logic of game theory to compromise in marriage and argues that that the stronger an individual’s fallback position is, the better deal they can negotiate with their partner.  So, if you can make a credible threat of leaving your partner — if you have the skills to support yourself, a decent hope of getting a new partner, a good chance of getting the custody arrangement you’d prefer — you’ll be better off even while married.  Thus, many feminist women are suddenly unhappy with the division of labor in their relationships following the birth of a baby because they’ve been hit by a double whammy: the amount of total work that needs to be done has increased dramatically just when they’ve given up much of their credible threat of walking out.

I see a lot of truth in that story, but I’m enough of a romantic that I resist the suggestion that power and threat points are the only factors that determine who makes which compromises in a relationships.  If I had to point a finger to what makes a committed relationship, it wouldn’t be duration of the relationship, or a marriage license, but to whether the partners really think about "what’s good for us" rather than just "what’s good for me."

A couple of months ago, I wrote about Stephanie Coontz’s book, Marriage.  Coontz argues that the transformation of marriage from an institution about controlling property, making alliances between families, and ensuring legitimate heirs into an emotional bond sowed the seeds of its destruction.  Once marriage was reframed as about romantic love and happiness, it became harder and harder to argue that people should stay married when the relationship failed to make them happy.  Today, pretty much the only argument that people seriously make against divorce is grounded in concern for the well-being of any children involved.  You almost never hear anyone suggest that two childless individuals who are unhappily married should stay together because they stood up and took vows about "till death do us part."

As I think about it, it seems that parenting may be the only commitment that American society takes seriously, and for which "it’s not making me happy" isn’t a sufficient basis for breaking.  Especially not for women.  Laura’s right that what makes parents happy isn’t always what’s best for the kids, but it’s also true that it’s seen as a sign of moral depravity for a mother to say "ok, this might make the kids a little worse off, but it makes me a lot better off, and I’ve made a lot of sacrifices already and it’s time for them to give a bit."  As Jody said, we still hold mothers to impossibly high standards.

Is parenthood supposed to make you happy?  It’s a fascinating question.  Parenting is often described as a selfless activity, in that you’re expected to put your children’s well-being ahead of your own desires.  But I’ve also heard people argue that the choice is have children is always made for selfish reasons; even if it’s no longer an economically rational thing to do, people choose to have kids because they think it will be enjoyable, or because they want someone to love and to love them.

Obviously, not every moment of parenting is going to be fun.  No one likes having a sick child crawl into your bed and puke all over them.  No one likes dealing with a shrieking toddler in the full throes of the "mines."  No one likes it when your child comes home sobbing because their friend was mean to them, and there’s nothing you can do to fix it.  But most of us would say that the joys usually outweigh the frustrations.

But that’s not always the case.  In her comment on my review of We Need to Talk about Kevin, Mary wrote:

"Yes, parents are supposed to be selfless, never asking for anything in return, just giving, giving, giving — but poeple whose kids don’t have special needs don’t know what it’s like to never get a hand-drawn card, or a picture, or a hug in return. It wears you down. It’s human nature to expect some response when you send love out into the universe, or out into your family. Think about it, if she [Eva] had been married to someone who treated her the way that Kevin did, she would have divorced him, and no one would have blamed her."

Meghan, at I’m ablogging, made a similar point recently about her need for emotional feedback:

"I am the adult in this scenario. I understand that as the parent, I need to be loving and patient and kind and warm even if I am not getting anything but accusing screams and wails in return. I love my daughter all the time, no matter what. I hate to admit that her feedback helps to keep me going. I mean, she is only eleven months after all. I can’t rely on her. That’s way too much responsibility for a child of that tender age.

"But those 5:15 smiles sure make it easier. Just one day without one made me realize how much they help to keep me going."

So parenting is a selfless activity, undertaken for selfish reasons.  It’s often a source of deep happiness and satisfaction, but you’re not allowed to quit even if it isn’t.  And if you complain about the ways that the workplace and society are hostile to childrearing, you’re told that "you chose to have kids" so if you’re unhappy it’s your own fault. 

Today’s book is Marriage, a History: from Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage, by Stephanie Coontz.  Coontz’s thesis is that all of the recent phenomena that are often portrayed as signs of "the end of marriage" as a social institution — delayed marriage, increased divorce rates, out-of-wedlock childbearing — are the natural consequences of the transformation of marriage into a relationship grounded in love and intimacy.  Once society stops seeing marriage as simply a mechanism for creating alliances between families, determining the inheritance of property, and controlling both physical and human resources, and starts portraying it as a expression of emotional connection, it becomes hard to argue that people should stay married if they’re no longer in love. In Coontz’s word, marriage has become treasured but "optional."

While focusing mostly on Western Europe, Coontz surveys the huge range of social institutions that we lump together with the label of "marriage" and points out how many of the conditions that we think of as inherent aspects of "traditional marriage" (prohibitions on premarital sex, incest taboos, sexual fidelity, restriction of inheritance to legitimate children, difficulty of divorce) are actually contingent choices, accepted at some historical periods but not at others.

The book covers several thousand years of history and thus is necessarily a quick summary of each period.  Overall, I enjoyed the book and found it a quick read. I didn’t object to the fast pace until the very end, when it felt like Coontz assumed that her audience had already read her previous book, The Way We Never Were. Coontz claims that the specific circumstances of the 60s and 70s — second wave feminism, improved access to birth control, stagnant male wages and growing female earning potention — accelerated the changes, but weren’t necessary for them to occur.

Coontz consistently offers political and economic explanations for why different societies had different moral standards.  I was quite intrigued by her argument that the "separate spheres" story about gender roles developed as a response to the strain that democracy placed on the old assumptions that women were inherently inferior and subordinated.  I was also fascinated by her claim that as early as the beginning of the 19th century, different classes were developing different expectations around the timing of work and marriage — and different moral standards that went with them:

"A shotgun wedding was not a huge problem for people in rural occupations if the young couple had access to the resources needed to set up a new household.  As for unskilled and semi-skilled laborers, whose earning power had often peaked by the end of their teens, it could be an advantage to marry and have children early, because after only a short period of dependence, the children could enter the labor force and increase total household income."

"But for middle-class parents, an unexpected marriage was a bigger problem.  To achieve success in the expanding category of middle-class occupations, a man had to have an education or serve a long period of training in his craft or profession…. This made deferred gratification a cherished principle of middle-class family strategy…. Central to this internal moral order was an unprecedented emphasis on female purity and chastity."

***

I was quite amused last week to look at the Washington Post Book Review and see that they had given this book to none other than Judith Warner to review.  This review mostly serves to confirm Jennifer Weiner’s claim that reviews are more about the reviewer than the book.  Warner concludes: "Relationships between men and women, she [Coontz] implies, are basically healthy — probably better than they’ve ever been in the past. It’s our society that’s sick." 

Anne at EconoMom wrote this week about the best decisions she’s ever made (as judged by maximized utility, or happiness).  She suggests making a list and sharing it with your spouse.  She then writes:

"Of course, you know you have to put ‘marrying my spouse’ at number one on the list, which is where it would be anyway, Rick, in case you’re wondering."

Nine years ago today, T and I got married.  And yes, it was the best decision I’ve ever made.  He’s my friend, my lover, my partner, my co-parent.  He makes me laugh, gives me backrubs, and believes in me more than I believe in myself.  Whatever life throws at us, I’m very glad to have him at my side.  Happy anniversary, sweetie. 

The part that blows my mind is that T and I started dating when we were 18.   I feel like I barely know the adolescent I was then.  T’s grown up a lot too.  And yet, we somehow had the luck or judgment to find each other and to stay together.  It’s not the life pattern I would every have predicted for myself, but it’s worked out very well for us.

For the record, my other nine top utility maximizing decisions, in chronological order, are:

1. Taking David Montgomery’s American Labor History classes.  They changed my life.
2. Not going to law school.
3. Taking my current job.
4. Taking up running and joining the Penguin Brigade. 
5. Buying our house when we did.
6. Having D.
7. Going to Africa with my family, even though it meant taking 14+ hour plane rides with a 20 month old.
8. Having N.
9. Starting this blog. 

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Light blogging ahead this weekend; we’ve got a guest staying with us.  She’s a good friend from college who I don’t see very often, and I probably won’t take the time to write while she’s here.

This week at the bookstore, I noticed The Paperbag Princess on the rotating rack of paperback picturebooks (where there are usually annoying books about characters from television).  Someone had recommended this recently (I thought it was in the comments to this post of Julie’s, but I can’t find it there) so I read it, laughed, then called D over and read it to him.

The punchline of the book is "They didn’t get married."  In the car on the way home, D asked, "what’s ‘married’?"  This surprised me at first, but then I realized that it’s really not something that we’re likely to talk about.  D was the ringbearer at my brother’s wedding last year, but he didn’t ask a lot of questions about what was going on.  And we always sort of mumble past the last few pages of Babar and Zephir where the General gives Isabelle to Zephir to marry as his reward for rescuing him.

We fumbled a minute, then T came up with the answer that marriage is when two people decide to make a new family together.  Sounds about right to me. 

I’ve got a hold in at the library on Stephanie Coontz’s new book; I’ll see if she comes up with any better of a definition.

Someone emailed me after reading yesterday’s post and asked me about the statement that children born to unmarried parents do worse than their peers on a range of measures.  The measures include things from physical health, to how well the children do at school, to drug use, to how early they start having sex and becoming parents themselves.  Here’s a link to a set of charts from the conservative Heritage Foundation, and here’s a summary of the literature by MDRC, a moderately liberal research organization.

There are two important caveats to keep in mind as you look at these studies.  First, all of the studies are looking at group averages.  So they don’t tell you anything about any given individual who is a member of a group.  There are millions of children of single parents who are healthy, do well in school, have healthy relationships, don’t get involved in any sort of criminal activity, etc. 

Second, there is a huge correlation between single parenthood and low incomes.  This is both because single parents typically only have access to one person’s earnings and because people with lower earnings are more likely to have children while not married.  And so, when you just look at the simple average differences between children of single parents and children of married parents (as Heritage does in the link above), most of the gap is probably driven by differences in income.  However, more sophisticated studies do suggest that marital status matters, even after controlling for income.  (One particularly interesting study supporting this comes from Sweden, which has a much more generous economic safety net for single parents than the US.)

Maybe I’ve been working for the Bush Adminstration too long, but I don’t think their Healthy Marriage Initatiive is an inherently evil notion, as most mainstream feminist organizations do, although I do think it is overly narrowly focused.   Instead, I support the Marriage-Plus proposals, which combine support for marriage and stable relationships with job training and other economic supports as well as programs to combat teen pregnancy.  (Heritage and its ilk consider Marriage-Plus to be heresy.)  During the CLASP audioconference last week, Kathy Edin mentioned a "service-learning" program that had suprisingly good results at reducing teen pregnancy; she suggested that it was because it gave the participants a sense that they could contribute to society in a way other than parenting.  That seems like a worthy goal.

Today’s book is Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas.  Over one-third of children in the US are born to unmarried mothers, a figure that has been steadily increasing for decades.  This trend worries a lot of people, both because children born to single parents are disproportionately likely to be poor, and because there’s a growing body of evidence that suggests that such children do worse on a range of measures than their peers, even after you control for income.  But while this trend is very well documented, little is known about why.

Questions about why are generally very hard for researchers to answer; it’s not possible to get at them with administrative data or big national surveys.  Edin and Kefalas are sociologists and ethnographers and so to try to answer the title question, they spent 3 years living and working in low-income neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Camden, talking to 162 low-income single mothers about their lives.

Edin and Kefalas’ main findings are:

• Motherhood was highly valued by the low-income women they talked with.  It was their main source of identity, their main way of leaving a mark in the world, of creating hope for the future.  The idea of not becoming parents — or even of delaying parenting until their 30s, as is common for middle-class women — was horrifying to the women in the study.  One reason, although not the only one, is that many of the other opportunities that life offers to middle-class women are out of reach for these poor women.
• The women in the study valued marriage, and hoped to be married some day.  But they set very high standards for marriage — wanting both an emotional commitment and for themselves and their partners to have achieved some level of economic success — which they were unlikely to reach anytime soon.  If they held off on having kids until they had partners they saw as marriage material, they might never have kids.  This was an unacceptable possibility for them.  Having kids with men they weren’t willing to marry wasn’t their first choice, but it was a lot better than not having kids.
• Early parenting has very little economic opportunity cost for these low-income women.  The earnings path for such women is so flat that having kids doesn’t hold them back very much.  And many of the women told Edin and Kefalas that they were on the fast track into trouble until they got pregnant and turned themselves around because they wanted to be good mothers.
• Being a good parent didn’t seem like an unachievable task.  Even before having kids of their own, they had spent a lot of time taking care of children and mastering the physical skills.  They defined being a good mother as "being there" for the kids, and doing your best, not as providing a certain level of material goods.
• Some of the moral hierarchies advocated by the women in the study were directly contractory to those that dominate middle-class American society.  The one that surprised me the most is that they consistently believed  that having a child out of wedlock was  greatly preferable to marrying and then getting divorced.  They also felt rising to the occasion and dealing with whatever hardship life dealt you was a significant virtue; thus, having an abortion or giving up a child for adoption were both seen as signs of weakness, even selfishness.

This brief summary doesn’t realy do justice to the book, however.  Poor women are often the objects of others’ moral scrutiny.  Even generally sympathetic books like Random Family and American Dream portray their subjects as sort of buffeted by the winds of life, rather than as rational actors and the protagonists of their own stories.  Edin and Kefalas assume that these poor women’s choices make sense by their own values and priorities, given the constraints that they face, and let the voices of the women carry their story.  It’s worth reading.

First, an update on HB1677 — Maura has posted Del Cosgrove’s email to her, in which he indicates that he will be working with legislative staff to revise the bill language to narrow its application.  (Apparently, he’s been totally swamped with email in the past day or two.  I’m shocked.)  I wouldn’t totally assume the problem is fixed, but it makes sense to at least wait and see what the bill says.

Next, I thought I’d shine a little light on some other proposed legislation.  HJ586, also offered by Del. Cosgrove, would amend the Virginia Constitution to say, under the heading BILL OF RIGHTS:

"Marriage is the legal union of one man and one woman as husband and wife, and no other combination of persons may be licensed to marry or recognized as a marriage by the government. A civil union, domestic partnership, or similar civil arrangement that purports to bestow the rights, privileges, benefits, status, or obligations of marriage upon unmarried persons may not be created, recognized, or enforced by the government. A civil arrangement forbidden by this section shall be void and unenforceable even if lawful elsewhere."

Del Cosgrove feels compelled to propose this amendment, even though the Legislature passed a law just last year that clarified the existing law defining marriage as between a man and a woman, in order to say:

"A civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage is prohibited. Any such civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement entered into by persons of the same sex in another state or jurisdiction shall be void in all respects in Virginia and any contractual rights created thereby shall be void and unenforceable."

This law has already come into play in at least one custody dispute.  It strikes me as pure political grandstanding to push for a Constitutional amendment on top of the existing law, and it just turns my stomach to have it under the heading of Bill of Rights.

Finally, I’d like to point out the really well designed Legislative Information System which makes it possible to find out what bills have been introduced on a subject and their current status with just a few clicks of a mouse. 

Why marry at all?

By Marge Piercy, from My Mother’s Body

Why mar what has grown up between the cracks
and flourished like a weed
that discovers itself to bear rugged
spikes of magneta blossoms in August,
ironweed sturdy and bold,
a perennial that endures winters to persist?

Why register with the state?
Why enlist in the legions of the respectable?
Why risk the whole apparatus of roles
and rules, of laws and liabilities?
Why license our bed at the foot
like our Datsun truck: will the mileage improve?

Why encumber our love with patriarchal
word stones, with the old armor
of husband and the corset stays
and the chains of wife? Marriage
meant buying a breeding womb
and sole claim to enforced sexual service.

Marriage has built boxes in which women
have burst their hearts sooner
than those walls; boxes of private
slow murder and the fading of the bloom
in the blood; boxes in which secret
bruises appear like toadstools in the morning.

But we cannot invent a language
of new grunts. We start where we find
ourselves, at this time and place.

Which is always the crossing of roads
that began beyond the earth’s curve
but whose destination we can now alter.

This is a public saying to all our friends
that we want to stay together. We want
to share our lives. We mean to pledge
ourselves through times of broken stone
and seasons of rose and ripe plum;
we have found out, we know, we want to continue.

We included this poem in the program at our wedding, and it’s been on my mind a lot these days.  I don’t have the energy for original writing tonight, so I thought I’d share it.