Sometimes all it takes is a single quote to remind us how timeless the human condition really is.
“Consider the word ‘husband,’” University of North Carolina at Charlotte sociology professor Rosemary L. Hopcroft wrote for the Institute for Family Studies this week. “It derives from two words, ‘hús’ (from the Old Norse for house) and ‘bóndi’ (from the Old Norse for occupier and tiller of the soil), and its original meaning was a man who had a home and therefore could marry and support a family,” Hopcroft continued. “The word thus embodies a principle common in preindustrial England and Europe ‘that a man might not marry until his living was assured.’”
For all the talk we see among sociology and history professors about how the institution of marriage has changed, and there have been changes, the simple fact remains that the custom is still built around the ability of a man to provide a suitable home for a woman who wants to start a family.
In 2004, for example, Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin wrote a widely cited paper called The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage, in which he argued that the social norms around marriage had weakened to an extent that “individuals can no longer rely on shared understandings of how to act. Rather, they must negotiate new ways of acting, a process that is a potential source of conflict and opportunity.”
Sixteen years later, however, Cherlin revisited his deinstitutionalization hypothesis and admitted that while marriage had been deinstitutionalized for some populations, it had actually strengthened among others.
“Among the non-college educated group,” Cherlin wrote, “we have seen transformational change that has weakened the place of marriage in the field of intimate partnerships. Marriage is much diminished. I would argue that deinstitutionalization has occurred.”
The story is different for college graduates, however. “Even though marriage is indeed a choice rather than a necessity, more college-educated are choosing to center their family lives around marriage than are the less educated. College graduates are more likely to ever marry, less likely to divorce, and more likely to have all their children within marriage.”
So why is marriage so much stronger among the college-educated than the non-college-educated? Cherlin doesn’t connect these dots, but he does note that “the norm that men must have steady jobs to be considered as good husbands remains strong. It may be desirable for wives to work too, but it is not required. In a 2014 national survey, 78% of never-married women said that whether a man had a steady job would be very important criterion for them in choosing a spouse or a partner, whereas just 46% of never-married men said it would be important that their spouse or partner have a steady job.”
The problem is, there simply aren’t as many gainfully employed men to go around as there used to be. A 2012 Pew Research Center survey found that, “among never-married adults ages 25 to 34, the number of employed men per 100 women dropped from 139 in 1960 to 91 in 2012, despite the fact that men in this age group outnumber young women in absolute numbers. In other words, if all never-married young women in 2012 wanted to find a young employed man who had also never been married, 9% of them would fail simply because there are not enough men in the target group.”
Where men have jobs and their “living is assured,” marriage is as strong as ever. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer men are reaching a place where their living is assured. And the problem is only looking like it will get worse. Women make up 60% of all college students and 66% of all college graduates.
If we want more children to have an equal opportunity to succeed, we are going to have to find ways to get working-age men into well-paying jobs.
