Episode 9: Marriage Boosters with Rebecca Traister

And it is to take away exactly those mechanisms that permitted marriage to evolve, which to my mind actually allows it to flourish.

I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Weird Donnekin.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So 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.

There is a growing concern among the academic and pundit and policymaker class about the state of matrimony.

So first came the academics.

We have Melissa Kearney, an economist from the Brookings Institution, who just put out a book called The Two-Parent Privilege, arguing that marriage is correlated with better economic outcomes and calls for public policy to further incentivize marriage.

That's sort of like the center right.

And then on the, you know, nominally 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.

And 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.

Yeah, it's happening in February.

It's Valentine's Day.

It's February.

Oh my God.

Get Married, Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, which links declining marriage rates to all sorts of other factors in declining social health.

And calls calls upon readers to reject the anti-marriage sentiments that he claims are being disseminated from Hollywood, Washington, academia, the media, and corporate America.

Yeah, Hollywood famously anti-marriage.

Yeah, yeah.

Hollywood does not enjoy marriage.

Yeah.

And this got sort of like digested and excreted out by the pundit class.

So we had Ross Duthat endorsing the Peltzman study in a weird little column about the Barbie movie and how it was bad because it didn't end in a marriage.

Olga Kazan of The Atlantic also endorsed Peltzman.

David Brooks did a column on Wilcox's book and Nick Kristoff did one on Kearney.

And then the Kearney book in particular got a lot of sort of like glowing endorsements from the center right.

It was excerpted in the Times.

It was excerpted in The Atlantic.

Megan McArdle wrote a piece about it.

The Washington Post.

And, you know, all of this is coming at a moment, you know, obviously, of regressing gender equality in America, right?

We've got lingering gendered inequalities that were exacerbated by the pandemic.

But then we also have the anniversary weight, meaning that women are less likely to control their own health and destinies.

Contraception access is coming under fire in the wake of new abortion bans.

And I think what's maybe most uncanny for our discussion today is that the far right is articulating a renewed opposition to divorce and like sort of pledging to reverse 20th century reforms of divorce law.

So now opposition to no fault of divorce is in the state platforms of the Texas and Nebraska Republican parties.

You've got the sort of like far-right, alt-right pundits complaining about it quite loudly, particularly when they get divorced by their wives.

And, you know, like, this is all stuff we've seen before.

And I was really grateful, Rebecca, for your intervention with your column in The Cut about the return of the marriage plot.

And it's sort of like revisiting a lot of these panics that, as we discussed off Mike, do get recycled every couple years.

So what do you see in this new moment of the pro-marriage agenda that reminds you of the past?

Well, so I would say, going back to your, the very first way you frame this as a vibe shift, I would actually say that the vibe is very consistent.

It's like got a 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, you know, over the course of hundreds of years.

I published that book in 2016, which is now feels like a long time ago.

But when I went back to look at the book, when I was going to write about this summer's wave of pro-marriage enthusiasm and the sort of very tenuous connections being made between like the notion of what causes declining happiness and maybe it's not marriage, all that, all that stuff.

And I began to look into it and sort of went back to that work that was published in 2016 and I opened my own book, which I hadn't looked at in many years.

There was Ross Douthat.

There was David Brooks, right?

There was certainly Brad Wilcox, who is, this is his steady vibe.

He is actually the director of the, I believe, the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

His entire job is advocating marriage.

It's so fascinating to me that there's this sense that this ever went away, because it certainly comes in these waves.

That's why I wrote the column that I wrote in September, is because there 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 change marriage patterns were the explanation, certainly not outside of marriage changes in relationship to all kinds of other economic and policy changes.

But 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.

But 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, but 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.

And that was true right up until 2015 when I sort of finished writing my book that was published the next year.

This is not, and the same names were writing the same kinds of columns with the same kind of arguments.

This 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, right?

The desire to herd individuals into heteromarried structures is literally longer than our democracy.

And it has been steady throughout.

And we do have periods in which social movements to change the definition of marriage or to change the terms of marriage, which are things that wound up happening in both the women's movement, the gay rights movement, dramatically alter the institution itself and popular ideas about what it might or might not entail.

But the enthusiasm for marriage has never really waned, even as marriage patterns have shifted.

So that gets us to an interesting thing.

Like, I agree with you that the content of this feels quite transhistoric.

At the same time, I feel like this go-around, and I think you point to that in your piece in the cut, has a distinct style.

It's kind of like reheating the marriage

debate for the cancel culture era in the sense that, like, especially the Christophe piece is so intent on saying, like, we're not ready to have this conversation, it goes to painful places.

And, like, I'm so, I'm really holding myself back here, but I feel like I have to say this, right?

Like, it's this kind of weird confessional mode which presents like conventional wisdom as this beleaguered thing.

And I feel like that is very 2020s.

That's the new thing.

Yeah.

No, it is.

That's how to present yourself when you are, in fact, representing the position of the powerful.

To actually represent yourself as the victim and the least powerful voice in the room is very

2020s, witch hunt, cancel culture.

Help me, I'm being silenced on the cover of Harper's.

Like that vibe is exactly how this is being, this round is being framed.

And it's fascinating because that is just, you know, there are plenty of arguments to have about causation and correlation with regard to marriage patterns that have shifted dramatically, marriage, the definitions of the institution that have shifted dramatically, our attitudes about it that have shifted dramatically.

But it is just a straight-up lie to assert that like

this is a message that hasn't been transmitted before.

I mean, again, going back, it is 10 years ago, the New York Times ran a piece called Two Classes Separated by I Do.

And they ran it on the front page of the New York Times.

asserting that class difference can be explained by single parenthood versus married hetero heteroparenthood, right?

On the front page of the New York Times in 2012.

And 10 years later, you have people saying, you can't even say this in public.

I mean, this, it's a lie that this is not, that this message is not out there.

This message infuses so much of our public policy, much of which actually does remain built around married people, right?

The notion that people are living in traditionally married units and family.

So much of the rhetoric around politics presumes that.

So much of our popular culture, that Hollywood that is so antipathetic to marriage, that actually it was really astounding that Barbie didn't get married at the end of the movie.

And that is the aberration that then Ross Douthat uses as the oppressive norm.

I mean, that is exactly what you point to.

It is the spirit of cancellation.

It's the response to Me Too being, there's a witch hunt coming for me.

It is the coverage of, you know, police violence that behaves as though the violence started when protesters threw rocks at a car rather than when Freddie Gray was taken on a rough ride.

You know, all of this is the inversion of power structures where the most powerful present themselves as the beleaguered victims, just trying to speak some quiet truth, and that those who are in any way protesting or critiquing the way that power works are in fact the abusive mob.

I love the idea that, like, well, if Rostowthat didn't like the ending of Barbie, he could, you know, find succor in, I don't know, every single other Hollywood movie put out that year.

It's like, yeah, that's.

right I know well I have to say I wrote this in my column I actually loved Ross Deltat's column on Barbie it made me laugh so hard because it was such I mean it was such a fantastic premise because he's not only he's using the Peltzmann study making a link between the decline in marriage rates and declining happiness and then arguing that the notion that Barbie and Ken and it's so funny that he picked that movie because surely we could find another movie in which the lead hetero characters like liked each other.

Barbie and Ken don't like each other.

Barbie does not like Ken, right?

That's part of the theme of the movie is that she finds almost zero connection with him.

She just wants her house back.

But but but Ross's Ross's premise there wasn't just about Barbie and Ken.

He really made it outsized on purpose.

I think he was doing a bit, right?

But like

that the future of the happiness of the human race depends on whether Barbie and Ken can see that that the thing that they need to do is get married to each other, which is just makes no sense on a basic human level when you're like, okay, these two characters who I've just sat through two hours about, like, don't actually have any connection whatsoever.

The idea of them setting up house together is just a...

flat out terrible idea on an emotional and narrative level, let alone when it comes to like, that could fix the problem of human happiness.

It's also, I think, important to note that in Duthette's column, he says something which, you know, maybe is admirable honesty on his part.

He emphasizes that that the decline in marriage is worse for the happiness of women right it makes women sad first and maybe men sad also later down the line but that's such an interesting thing because part of what they're also saying is that the women's movement made women reject marriage so if the decline in marriage is actually hurting women so much then maybe why are they not so eager to marry right there's no there's no interrogation of that complexity because it's clearly those who are enthusiastic about marriage as a cure for both happiness and class ratification and inequality are either directly or more subtly suggesting that it was feminism and a women's movement and the move of women into workplaces as, in some cases, economic and professional competitors to men, that all these things have led to the decline of marriage.

But then they're also very worried about women's happiness if women aren't marrying as much.

Right.

And there's no sort of like real diving into like, well,

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, you know, a women's movement.

I mean, this is a recurring theme 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?

When the movement fails to eradicate them.

Women hurt themselves by wanting more.

Right.

And they and they cannot be happy while free is also like sort of the subtext.

Right.

One of the things, if you actually look back at the second wave women's movement, you know, the feminine mystique, which explodes out of the middle-class white ennui of early hetero-married norms that were imposed in the middle of the 20th century, Betty Friedan was never arguing against marriage, right?

Oh, quite emphatically in favor of marriage.

In favor of marriage and, in fact, of working outside the home as part of making marriages happier, right?

And better.

Very sloppily, often people say, like, like, well, then came feminism and marriage rates dropped.

The funny thing is that the major changes

to marriage rates and marriage ages didn't really start until the 1990s.

And there's a real, there's actually, there is a feminist sort of timeline that gets to how that is because the major shift in marriages in the wake of a second wave feminist movement came with a big divorce wave of the 70s and 80s, in which a lot of those marriages that had been entered into on starkly unequal gendered terms in the 1950s and 60s, a lot of what the women's movement did in opening up, again, not fighting against marriage, right, but certainly taking up questions of sexual liberation and the ability to have a sex life outside of or in advance of marriage, opening up professional and educational opportunities you might not be able to take advantage of if you were in a traditionally bound marriage that kept you working within the home, realizing that maybe they were in a bad bargain, a lot of women left their heteromarriages and there was a huge divorce wave.

And then the children of that divorce wave sort of began to understand a quality difference, that marriage wasn't just a static thing, which, by the way, we should get back to in terms of what people argue now, that marriage wasn't just like, there's not just marriage and not marriage, right?

That there's this huge variety in qualities of marriage, which is the thing that gets lost every time you try to turn it into a policy prescription.

And that perhaps that they would rather, in some cases, hold out for what they imagine might be a good and lasting and satisfying marriage than to simply begin adulthood by marrying whoever it was that was available to them which is honestly the the chute into which many women were herded over generations before then and that's in the 90s when you begin to see a huge jump in age of first marriage for women and men but for women where first the age of first marriage has always been younger than age of first marriage for for men you see that jump really begin in the 90s and then leap because prior to the 90s, it had really stayed, I believe, between like 20 and 22 was the sort of average age of first marriage for women.

Wow.

And then in the 90s, it begins to jump.

And now I believe, I don't know what it is this year, but it's been about 28.

So if you can imagine over hundreds of years, it's sort of staying stable here.

And then starting in the 90s, it jumps and is now closer to 30.

This might be a good moment to sort of zoom out and look at the pro-marriage campaigners who have emerged this 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?

There's one that Adrian and I, we covered in our episode on gay marriage.

There's for the sake of the children, right?

There's this idea that marriage is a uniquely beneficial way.

to raise kids.

And then there's like for the sake of adults, right?

There's children's thriving and then there's the argument about adult happiness.

And like, let's start with the arguments about kids, which I think are like most unique to the Kearney.

And Adrian, you had some interesting thoughts on like Kearney's argument about marriage.

Yeah, 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 seem struck me as extremely bad arguments.

But I don't know the data on this, on these marriage questions at all.

And Kearney and Christophe both seem to veer between what seem 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 batchit insane.

So 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 the data bear that out.

That seems to be what they're saying, which like on an individual level, having two parents might seem like a good idea.

Losing one parent might seem a misfortune.

Two might smack of carelessness, as Oscar Wilde would say.

But these texts then seem like kind of determined to turn that into a policy prescription, right?

They're trying to say, therefore, we have to do this, not, well, we have to help single moms particularly, or have to say, single parents, or we have to invest in this and that.

It's basically, no, the outcomes are better.

Therefore, you need two parents.

It also seems to assume, well, I should say it's not about two breadwinners, but one, also, it could be one breadwinner and one caretaker, right?

Like, that's, I'm guessing that's what.

It's resources.

So how they would is resources, right?

So that could mean time.

It could mean income, right?

It could mean a present person, yes.

Whose time, whose income conveniently just laid down, right?

It's not really labor, Moira.

It's not really labor.

They do it for love, okay?

I'm kidding.

But then this other claim seems to be liberals, feminists who like hate marriage so much and want.

only key parties, a big societal key party apparently,

make people feel bad about wanting to marry and have made single parenthood cool.

And therefore, we are now

in these destructive family structures or something like that.

And there's so much hand-wringing about this in Christoph's piece where it's like, you know, I resist thinking this because it goes against my cultural values.

And 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?

Like, 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.

Are those the same that are like, oh, I'm a feminist, I'm going to wait till age 28?

Or are these totally different social strata, right?

Like, isn't this a reflection of social stratification rather than inequality rather than its driver?

Yes, every one important thing to know going into this is that the data around married couples versus either single parent homes or unmarried couples is itself a reflection of class stratification at this point.

Because as marriage has become less compulsory, and here's where they're right.

Here's where Wilcox and Kearney are absolutely correct.

That increasingly what has happened is as soon as marriage has become less optional and more compulsory, it has become the purview of the wealthiest in this country, right?

And so when you're looking at statistics about

married people and single people, you are also, you are very often looking at statistics that are badly skewed by looking at wealthy people and less wealthy people, right?

So, and some of the people who are doing research on this are pointing out that you can't take apart those kinds of things.

Dedrick Williams, who has argued that this has so much less to do with family structure as defining or as determining the sort of economic, educational stability of children, and so much more to do, in his case, he's talking about race, you know.

Once you start doing the comparisons with looking at race and economic difference, it's not that family structure in itself is determinative.

And what they're talking about in part, they're talking about money, right?

They're talking about, again, resources, but that means money, right?

So two incomes combined.

And Kearney is very specific.

She really doesn't want to get cast as an anti-feminist.

She keeps saying, I'm not this.

I'm not against women working.

I don't want, right?

She's very careful to not do that.

And I read her book and I was like, so why are you writing this book then?

If you don't want to be all these things, right?

Then why are what you're ultimately selling is marriage as a solution.

But in fact, what a lot of these people are pointing to is economic inequality and that married couples, and again, the more likely you are to be married, the more likely you are to have a college education and resources at the time you get married at 28, after you've gotten your graduate degree and you have your job with benefits, right?

That is the population that is getting married more frequently now because there's stability entering that kind of legally binding relationship that because we have reformed our ideas about what it is and it's supposed to be something that's emotionally satisfying and long-term, then it's something you enter when you feel like secure.

And so, the people who are feeling secure in our society, in which so many of our policies have ripped any kind of economic security from them, are people who are starting out with all kinds of economic class advantages, often racial, you know, with race advantages, right?

So, the bizarre thing to me, because I think identifying that inequality is actually the honest thing that they're doing, right?

And Wilcox is doing it in this Trumpy and like, stick it to the elites, man, by getting married, right?

But like, the thing he's not wrong about is that it is elites who are getting married.

But rather than look at that situation and say, wow, marriage is really declining amongst people, has really declined amongst people who experience all forms of economic.

and social insecurity, right?

Rather than looking at that and thinking, what kinds of policy would give people more security, right?

To then, now, I don't, I don't give a rat's ass if more people get married or not.

But when I was writing my book in 2016, I had come across two different programs that had inadvertently stabilized marriage rates.

They were both welfare programs, right?

And they were ones in which sort of almost accidentally, welfare benefits and job training programs had been extended for a certain population.

And in that population, divorce rates during that period had dropped dramatically.

Because like we know from human lived experience that among the stressors on our relationships, including marriages or romantic or sexual partnerships, are money anxiety and all the things that can go with it.

You know, mental health struggles, depression, drug addiction, all that stuff.

Plus just the fears around poverty, incarceration, all those things make the formation of stable and rewarding relationships much more difficult.

And we know that as humans, we would know that talking to our friends, right?

But when you're talking about it in the realm of prescribing public policy, there are things you could do.

You could send people checks, right?

You could send people a child tax credit.

And Kearney wants to say, Oh, I'm in favor of these things if absolutely necessary because I really care about the children.

But like, those are things you could prescribe and do, and that it is within the government's ability to do to offer a jobs program, a universal basic income, child tax credits, make affordable housing more accessible, make health care accessible, all those things that would give millions of Americans more stability from which then they very well might make more stable families.

For my purposes, in whatever form they might take, for marriage enthusiasts purposes, I bet they'd get married more, right?

But instead of doing that, we're saying, no, marriage is the answer.

When I suspect if we actually thought about what that might look like, amongst people who do not have that security, the idea of like, what is a marriage?

And Kearney says in this book that's so wild.

She says, well i i know everybody has their individual stories but i'm an economist and so i deal in cold hard numbers yeah marriage is not cold hard numbers when you are prescribing there is no marriage there is no there's not a thing that exists as marriage that functions the same way in everybody's life Marriage depends, is a protean institution.

It changes between the two same people over time.

It changes depending on season and circumstance and health and mood and professional realities and the age of children children if you have them or decisions about whether or not to have children.

You cannot simply prescribe it and have it be a number.

It's not a number.

A check is a number.

A welfare benefit is a number.

Job protection, unemployment insurance, those are numbers.

Healthcare insurance, those are numbers.

And we could do those things and probably get a lot of the effects, including greater happiness, stability, and child welfare, if we thought about those things.

I love how you're putting that because the point where honestly I think there was like blood coming out of my ears was basically in the Kristoff Kristoff column when it almost seems like he's describing the after effects of the very policy he's proposing, right?

So Christoph points out that causally explaining poverty by reference to family structures among the poor, in particular in single mother households, is an approach that's obviously made infamous by the Moynihan report about the case for national action, right?

1965, right?

Which basically suggested that black poverty didn't have so much to do with white racism or legacy of inequality, but rather with a set of uniquely black pathologies, usually having to do with family structures, right?

Right, that the women were too independent, right?

Yeah, exactly.

They were too masculinized, essentially.

Yeah.

And the men, who knows where the men were?

It's like, I can, I can tell you where the men were.

You locked them up, but whatever.

What I'm driving at with this is like, so it's, it's the framing is totally bizarre.

Because on the one hand, he's saying, like, oh, people were not ready to hear what Moynihan had to say.

And I was like, buddy, that was like, didn't the Moynihan report basically determine U.S.

social policy, like basically after, once the great society ended, so post-68, 68, we're basically talking it's Moynihan all the way down.

Like, what is Clinton?

But not like a long tale of Moynihan, right?

Exactly.

Which gave us the cuts in welfare benefits that you're describing, which then put pressure on the institution of marriage.

It's like you, you're looking at the head of the snake and you're like, yeah, but if we had that head bite the tail of the snake harder, this whole problem would go away.

It's like, you're driving me nuts, man.

What are you doing?

So, okay, so here's where I want to nerd out a little bit.

When I was writing All the Single Ladies, I had always understood the mid-20th century, like Norman Rockwell, hyper heteromarried, cultural norm.

I'd always been led to understood that this was just post-war.

The soldiers came back.

They wanted, you know, they wanted their jobs on the factory floors back and sent women back home, right?

And it was also post-depression.

And so we need, okay, that was how I'd always been led to understand that period, the 1950s and 1960s in the United States.

When I was researching my book and learning about how, in fact, marriage patterns had fluctuated prior to that period, too, there actually was a period, the end of the 19th century, for a lot of reasons, including westward exploration that sent a lot of men to the West Coast and a lot of women on the East Coast, expansions in educational opportunity after the Civil War for both white women, formerly enslaved, black Americans, host emancipation marriage rates for African Americans went way up and actually got higher than the marriage rates for white Americans in part because of changes brought about by industrialization and a move from an agrarian economy and changes in early education and the creation of new professions for white women.

And marriage rates for white women fell at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century in the progressive era.

And marriage rates for black Americans were 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, but 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?

Or not parity, 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, there 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.

It'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.

Those numbers I was just talking about, they were investing, for example, in housing.

They were building suburbs and investing in housing for white Americans.

Those suburbs were explicitly for white people.

A lot of them did not permit black residents.

They were investing in infrastructure, right?

They were building a white middle class, right?

They were building highways.

The industrialization of the mid-20th century meant new kinds of jobs and professions for white men.

There was the GI Bill, which returning white soldiers were able to take advantage of in a way that returning black soldiers were not able to take advantage of.

You had a series of a lot of white immigrant populations were being absorbed into the notion of being a white American meant.

You had the government making actual corporate taxes were very high, right?

There was, you had a government making investments in creating a white middle class, and they were part of it was creating jobs by building infrastructure, by building highways.

What did those highways do?

They shuttled the white workers from the urban centers where they had these new jobs to the suburbs where they had these houses.

Also, the same highways cut off black neighborhoods.

We know this is the story of Robert Moses, cut off black neighborhoods from public transportation and from jobs.

Black returning soldiers were not able to get the college educations that white returning soldiers were.

Black and brown workers were not protected by the new strengthening labor unions that the labor protections that white workers were benefiting from in the middle of the 20th century, which was sort of the like the peak of the labor movement and the kind of job protection and security that that entailed.

Black and brown workers were much less likely to have those populations.

And so this creates this divided experience.

What begins to happen at that point?

White marriage rates start to soar, which is a corrective to the late 19th and early 20th century.

And black marriage rates start to plummet, okay?

Because there's one population is being, again, via policy that was like fixed policy that was numbers, that was actually housing, jobs, education.

They were being offered a kind of economic stability.

which coupled with cultural messaging led to super high rates of heteromarriage at young ages.

And you actually had white women dropping out of the colleges they had recently won their way into in order to enter early marriages in which there was a model in which the white man was the breadwinner and the white woman was the stay-at-home domestic familial laborer.

Black families and black communities were being destroyed by these infrastructural changes.

They were not getting the kind of labor or educational benefits that permitted them to vault into a middle class.

Their communities were being drained of resources.

And without that kind of economic stability, their marriage rates were falling.

What does this produce?

Literally within two years of each other.

1963, you have Betty Ferdinand and the explosion out of those suffocating white suburbs for white women of the feminine mystique.

And for those black communities, what do you get?

The Moyahan report, which points a finger at single black mothers, right, as the center of a pathology around black poverty.

The other thing that that does is make the experience of white women and black women fundamentally indiscernible to each other.

And so when Fredan is advocating for white women to go out into the workplace, rather than striking new and more equitable bargains with their white husbands, what is she doing?

Like, I mean, this is what winds up happening in many cases is that...

Black women are brought into the homes to do the child care and the domestic labor for very low wages.

And it makes the experiences of black women and white women fundamentally different and indiscernible to each other, which also leads to preventing them from allying with each each other and continuing a joint effort to change the white patriarchy.

Sorry, that was like a super nerdy, weird tangent.

You blew my mind because you're pulling together a whole bunch of things that I had sort of vaguely intuited, but not put together that way.

I mean, there's also, of course, the fact that, like, I mean, as Californians, we see this all the time, right?

That, like, I think Leslie Kern makes that point in her book, Feminist City, that, of course, the gendered paths of the suburbs are really interesting.

And that, like, right, men, right, like, let's say you live in like westchester county you take a train with other men to your insurance company or whatever meanwhile your wife drives the suburban to various other locations like there is a kind of isolation that comes with with that and like who gets to be collectivized and who has to be sort of by themselves and then we look at someone like richard rothstein pointing out like how basically redlining was used to just kind of make domesticity impossible for a lot of black americans right that like you had to share the space if only by renting out part of it, right?

Like there, there was no two-parent, two-kid household because, like, you had to fit in grandma and that uncle who fell on hard times, and maybe that lodger who helps you make rent every month.

And those realities were, that had also been true for all kinds of white immigrant populations and white poor populations prior to a government willing to invest in building single-family homes.

And then, yes, putting white families into those homes at the same time that those government investments were forcing black families to remain or even more be outside of single family homes and be in shared spaces in which there wasn't that defined two-parent household.

I just think about that because,

I mean, A, again,

for the marriage enthusiasts, like, hey, you know what you could do if you really wanted to build marriage rates is you could invest in housing and help Americans who have trouble finding housing get into those.

Why can't we invest in housing in that same way?

That would actually help those populations have more stable.

Again, I don't care who's getting married and who's not getting married, but like if you really cared about that, those are literal policies that have those numbers that Kearney is so enthusiastic about.

There are policies that are like that that you could do that would stabilize so many more millions of Americans.

It's like ensuring that people have health care, ensuring that people have safe maternal health care, reproductive health care, all that stuff

would enable more people to make more stable family units.

And they all have numbers and they don't depend on just like, do you like this person and do you work well with them like at three in the morning, you know?

So there's a mistake in a lot of these like pro-marriage prescriptions between cause and effect, really, right?

The marriage is actually a symptom of economic stability and upward mobility that has been foreclosed to a lot of these populations who are now, in fact, not getting married.

And Kearny and her ilk are sort of mistaking this growing class gulf between who gets married and who doesn't for a like pathological cause of inequality rather than like one of its symptoms.

But also, you know, this is something that Adrian, you said when we did our episode on male loneliness, is what I'm actually seeing is this like vast array of really trenchant structural inequalities produced by policy choices that are being just blamed on personal choices, right?

There's these forces that are keeping people out of housing.

There are these forces that are keeping people out of economic stability.

There are these forces that are having downstream effects on personal stability, things like happiness, things like mental health, things like, you know, family thriving that are just being ascribed to cultural pathology or a

inconvenient feminist trend when they're actually being produced by, you know, decades worth of policy choices.

So this makes sense to me as a very appealing sort of rhetorical tool for a conservative mind to go to.

It's like, oh, it's just that we're not getting married anymore because it allows you to look away from so many other problems that would be very difficult to solve.

I mean, we've been dancing around this issue of the weird rhetorical presentation that this go-around of the marriage boosterism debate sort of has.

We sort of mentioned briefly that like it has the kind of, it's meant for the, for the age of cancel culture.

And of course, that cancel culture is exactly this too, where it's like, are we becoming less secure and more easily fired in our jobs?

Yes.

Can that mean that combined with social media, it can create...

some really unfair outcome for our people?

Absolutely.

But notice that no one who complains about cancel culture ever says, therefore, we should make it harder to fire people.

It's always like, we should be be less judgmental on Twitter, which, like, yeah, good luck with that, but

sure, it's going to go great.

It's all be it's all be nice on Twitter next.

Um, and this is the same thing, right?

Like, oh, what are the things you'd like to do to make it easier for families in America if you care about them so much?

Like, no, no, no, I just want them to found them.

I'm just gonna, we need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and, you know, just dive right into marriage, right?

Uh, there, it's it to me, this feels like the

quintessential neoconservative policy prescription, right?

Which is always, we don't say how we're gonna get there.

We say we have to like will ourselves really hard.

But no, it is, it's the individual fixes for massive structural problems.

Right.

And I believe that the people who are prescribing them and stating with absolute assurance that that would fix the problem are people who are on some level invested in the problem of 60, right?

And because we know that it is impossible, and that is like, you know, use paper straws or whatever to fix climate change.

It is get married to fix class inequality.

And A, you know, you cannot actually like, it's not going to work, right?

Everybody could get married.

And we just know, like, even if you do that math, like, pretend, live in the fantasy structure where everybody marries.

Like, we'll throw in gay marriage too, right?

Like, just everybody marries their partner.

Everybody's married.

Now, if you have ever been a human being on this planet who has known other people and have, you know, A, we know it's not going to fix the vast yawning class chasms, right?

To have two people who are married working multiple shift jobs, unable to afford child care or a safe place to live with at least one and maybe both of them at higher risk for incarceration.

Like the act of them having, you know, gone to a legal location and signed up on a piece of paper to be legally wed is not going to fix any of those problems all by itself, right?

But the people who are prescribing it, they certainly don't want to do or begin to like conceive of the other major policy changes, which in addition to being very difficult to enact, being far-reaching, moving in many different directions, also take money out of the pockets of the richest people and most powerful people and put resources, you know, in the communities that most need them.

They don't want to do that, right?

And so it's so much easier to prescribe a cure that...

on some level, I think everybody has to know is fundamentally impossible because then you can prescribe it and say, I gave you your answer and you just didn't do it.

And so there's no way to fix this problem because they don't want the problem to be fixed.

Yeah, maybe the way to call their bluff would be to be like, What if we mandate marriage, but we ban research assistance?

I don't think they'd go for it.

I don't know why, but I don't think they'd go for it.

This reminds me a little bit about like what the maintenance phase people say about diets, right?

Is that the advice is unfalsifiable, right?

Like if it fails, you can always blame the user.

It's like, no, you're not getting married hard enough.

Right.

Or, you know, you didn't like follow my impossible prescription.

And by the way, that goes back to something we discussed at the beginning: when the false narrative that this isn't, that marriage isn't still an oppressive norm in our popular culture and in our messaging.

When we think of marriage being that oppressive norm, when we think about all the ways in which marriage is transmitted to us, what it means, why we should aspire to it, right?

It is the version we're always presented with is a version of a happy marriage, right?

It's something that Kearney does in her book, where she writes about her own marriage.

And I'm very conscious of it.

I am a totally now like a normie, middle-class, white, heteromarried lady who very much enjoys my partnership and has a happy partnership and a pretty equitable one.

But like that,

well, actually, I mean, that doesn't even matter.

It just doesn't matter because it's just not, A, it's not, if I'd married who I was with when I was 22, that would certainly not be the fucking case.

And all the marriages that are presented to us popularly are happy marriages where you love each other and have great sex.

And, like, you know, like you're, it's hilarious when your kid smears poop on you or whatever.

Like, that's the version of marriage that we get popularly.

And so, the idea that we're rejecting that, that we wouldn't want to have the happy, like, hilarious marriage with the poop smearing kids and like the great sex that they, you know, like, or even the beleaguered but ultimately committed marriage that we get in another sort of sitcom version where like you fight all the time, but you really super love each other.

Like, that's actually not what unhappy marriages necessarily entail.

Unhappy marriages, in addition to millions of cases in which they are actually physically abusive and deadly, right?

are unhappy for the people who are participating in the marriage, for the family members of the married people, for the children of the married people.

You know, that's very rarely the version of marriage that we're presented, which is, okay, so you got married to a person with whom there is nothing actually but misery.

And we're never shown that, which is a real thing that happens plenty of times with people.

I mean, the great innovation of the marriage shifts of the past few decades is that you are less required to enter those kinds of marriage if you haven't found the wonderful, happy, and rewarding kind, right?

That's the liberation.

It's not, people come to me very often, having written the book, I have, and it's very ironic because I am super normie hetero white middle class married but like to behave as though I'm you're pro-marriage or you're anti-marriage I am not at all anti-marriage I am pro having a variety of options should a good partnership not present itself at a particular juncture in your life I am pro

you know, adults having a variety of pathways to travel around everything, including romance, sex, parenthood, work, education, community that can happen in any number of orders as we know from being human beings, like these things come to us in different orders in different lifetimes in different spans, right?

And what I want is the liberation not from marriage in an anti-marriage kind of way, but a liberation to have many paths open to you, some of which may or may not include marriage.

for part or not any part of your of your lifetime, your adulthood.

Which gets to something that you started your book with all the way back in 2016, right?

Like that it's not just that we have a bad picture of marriage, it's that we often decline to narrate it itself or analyze it itself, that we sort of assume we know what the word denotes and then we stop asking questions, right?

Like law enforcement kind of stops asking questions sometimes when it comes to marriage, but we all do, right?

Like the novel ends with a marriage and we stop asking questions.

Another way to describe what you just said would be to say people enter into marriage having tried out what it's like to be in a good relationship that somehow still was doomed or to have been in one that like was kind of bad and like you get a language to articulate what was bad about it.

I think part of what these people are reacting to is that we can verbalize our relationships better.

We don't have this kind of muteness that someone like Friday had to liberate women to sort of like to overcome to say like, no, this actually does suck.

And I don't feel good.

And I, you know, it's not fulfilling.

Like, what the fuck?

In order to have other kinds of resources, and I don't just mean in some cases, income or access to an economic stability that would permit you to leave a marriage if it does become unhappy or abusive, right?

But 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?

And entered into another house, that actually cuts you off from all kinds of resources, not just 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.

And again, there is no one version of this.

Like, I could sit here and paint a picture of what it means to have been, you know, unmarried through your 20s and then you marry.

Like, 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 and you're like, that's actually incredibly restrictive in and of itself.

It is a form of liberation for people who have access to those resources, right?

To be able to live that way and not just marry whoever you were dating at 18.

But that is a very, like, there are also tons of people who are still with the people that they were with at 18, but have had, you know, whether they're married or not.

There are people who have been in and out of several marriages throughout their 20s.

There are people who will never marry at all and have children on their own by choice or because of circumstances or because of illness or death or breakups.

I mean, they're just, there is an infinite, there is many paths through life as there are people.

And the notion that this one institution, which historically, and we got to say, has been used as an organizing institution that historically has subjugated women in its hetero form, right?

That this one institution has some fixed place in any life is comical, actually.

It just makes no sense with the human experience.

Because, you know, what they're doing is they are taking complex structural policy choices that have exacerbated inequality and they're distilling it down to personal choice, but they're also obviating so much about those personal choices and those circumstances, right?

They'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.

They're seeing it as sort of like a quick fix and as

an expression of appropriate values, right?

And that's not how anybody's actually living.

And it's not what we aspire to in our families and in our intimate relationships, right?

We aspire to something more like equitability, more like affection, more like freedom, which is, it's just not in these visions of marriage.

Within Within 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.

Yes,

I think that's exactly right.

And I also just 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 so that those lines can be more effectively policed and censured and rewarded, right?

It is about reestablishing fixed hierarchies along gendered, race, and class lines.

An institution like marriage makes that very easy.

And when, because it has historically been an institution that organized people into legitimate and illegitimate, into by gender in many eras, according to race, class, ethnicity.

You know, I know these are a lot of DEI words, but 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.

And 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.

And 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.

I 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.

That's right.

It's like

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.

The more it becomes possible for women to live independently of men, the more it becomes possible for children to be raised outside of these very familiar-looking stick figure with pants and a stick figure with a skirt,

like family units, the more possibilities of life become vivid and imaginable to people, and the less these hierarchies make sense.

So one thing that this brings up, though, is, you know, we had a marriage debate 10 years ago in the United States, and it's funny, right?

Like,

on the one hand, right, like we talked about gay marriage, both, you know, Moira and I are beneficiaries of legal changes around that.

And yet, two things strike me, right?

Like, one, we never actually debated like what the content of marriage would be, right?

Like, it was basically, or like, implicitly, it just meant like, like, oh, they're just like everyone else.

Like, well, it turns out everyone else is not like everyone else.

And we didn't have that discussion then, right?

And then the second thing is, like, where does this renewed freak out take us?

Like, did gay marriage to some extent make this argument worse or better?

Or, like, or does it make it make it more acute in the sense that, of course, gay people or LGBT people, as a rule, I think, tend to get married even later and like tend to have accumulated even more in the way of resources by the time they do, if they do at all?

The question of how gay marriage played into this, and this is something that I think I argued, I think pretty explicitly in my book, is that actually it was part of what altered the institution, right?

So there was the argument that it was just buying into this traditional and confining institution by a population that was out, you know, that was by definition until the legalization of gay marriage outside of that institution and therefore represented a challenge to it.

But if you're actually interested in marriage and marriage evolving to become more equitable, the thing that gay marriage did, it was, which is not to say that there aren't many unequal

same-sex marriages, that there aren't many unjust and unhappy gay marriages, but it took the gender hierarchy out of the inherent definition of what marriage was, right?

So it complicated the notion and exploded the notion of one of marriage's primary functions historically, which was to offer men different kinds of more power over women, right?

And to my mind, one of the reasons that actually, I mean, in some cases, I sometimes describe myself as a bizarre and backwards advocate for marriage, and that I think that the changes that have been made to marriage to make it more equitable, including marriage equality, has permitted it to survive.

If you look at countries that still, I mean, there are a lot of other countries on this planet where marriage is an absolute free fall and childbearing is in free fall.

And there are like panics because in part, those are marriages where super punishing patriarchal assumptions and cultural practices around marriage persist.

And women are simply having none of it, right?

They're absolutely not going anywhere near not only marriage, but heterocoupling.

You can find that kind of coverage in lots of places.

And one of the arguments that I think I made in all the single ladies is that our ability to change laws, right, to create more reproductive freedom, to permit, remember, 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?

This 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 makes permits more people to still enter into it.

Somebody like me, I, you know, and people like you, right?

Like that we can, that this is a, the changes that we've made to it have perversely permitted our marriage rates to remain high by, in contrast to a lot of other countries around the world, right?

But when you say what is the impact of gay marriage, I mean, there's no question to me that what we are looking at alongside the push for a reinstatement of marriage as a as a, you know, purported cure-all, that's happening alongside the reversal of the overturn of Roe, the stated desire by one of the people who overturned Roe, Clarence Thomas, to reverse gay marriage contraceptive access.

I mean there are you had Republican lawmakers a couple years ago talking about the loving case as having been wrongly decided.

Like all of the marriage-related

Thomas specifically noted Lawrence, Obergfeld, 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 it to my mind actually allows it to flourish in contemporary society, perhaps not at the rates that it that it used to, but like that that's a good thing.

We still have marriage.

We can still feel like happy about getting married in certain circumstances.

And that's just not true in a lot of places that didn't have those kinds of policy shifts that permitted the marriage to become more equitable, less punishing, and less gender hierarchical.

And so, but what your question said, no, they actually just want to, they just want to reverse all of it, you know?

And I'm not saying that Melissa Melissa Kearney wants to reverse all of it.

She would be very eager to explain to you that she does not.

But

the fact that the push that she's eagerly participating in, which is to make it a norm again, right?

And to and to make people marry more frequently than, you know, than they are, is that it's happening in tandem with these legal and political fights to reverse all of the revisions that made it a better and stronger institution for those who do enter it.

I mean, that tells you what the project is.

Right.

The fact that they're not like, well, if you're 21 and you're in a committed non-binary polycule, you definitely have to, you have to nail that down and make sure you make an honest

on paper.

Yeah.

Do not, who's going to buy the cash?

Yeah, yeah.

Get in there.

Yeah.

With these four or five individuals, depending on which way.

Yeah.

Like, that's not what they're saying.

You're absolutely right.

No, it's not what they're saying.

And the one other thing I want to, I know we have to stop and I actually, I probably do have to go soon.

But the other thing to keep in mind is that we've talked about what the impact of these changes in marriage within personal relationships.

But remember that there's also an enormous amount of resentment about women, whether they're married or not.

operating outside of homes in workplaces.

And, you know, so you saw that around Roe and J.D.

Vance, who was at the time running for his Senate seat that he now occupies in Ohio, tweeted, if your worldview tells you it's bad for women to become mothers, but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you've been had, right?

There is anxiety about

women out in professional spheres taking up space that had historically been designated as white male space that reinstalling women in traditional marital structures along with reinstalling them in a world in which they cannot control their own reproductive abilities, like would help take care of, right?

That's J.D.

Vance is presenting that with regard to abortion, which we know is key to this conversation as the contrast.

Like,

you know, and that's really important.

Look, Mike Johnson has, you know, the new speaker of the house talks about how it is incumbent on women to produce able-bodied workers.

That's like straight up, you know,

there is a great desire to move women's function out of the professional and educational spheres where they've competed.

Keep in mind that a lot of the conversation around, you know, the sort of boy crisis conversations is about how much space women are taking up at schools.

You know, there is enormous anxiety, not just about what's going on in homes and domestic situations, but outside of homes too, and that you can't uncouple those two things.

JD Vance, another popularizer of Moynihan, right?

Like updating Moynihan

for the Trump age, basically.

Rebecca Tracer, it was wonderful to have you.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Okay, thank you so much, guys.

It was really nice to talk to you.

You are perfect.

In Bed with the Right would like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Kalfis.