my name is Sean Annan and I'm a student
project manager at the Clark tender
Dickinson College on behalf of the Clark
center and the department's of history
sociology and Women's Studies I'd like
to welcome you to this week's common our
lecture the way we were memories of
traditional marriage and family life
modern society is strongly being
criticized for his lack of family values
and a declining respect for marriage in
general he would disagree that the
family oriented 1950s
is often used as the basis of comparison
while many argue that the ills of modern
society are to blame for its breakdown
in traditional marriage values and
family life it is important to recall
that during the idolized mid 19th
century teenage childbearing peaked and
alcoholism and drug abuse were just as
prevalent as this today Stephanie Coontz
will discuss a surprising number of
myths about the history of marriage and
family life and how they prevent us from
coping effectively with the challenge of
recent changes she is a professor of
history and Family Studies at Evergreen
State College and director of research
and public education for the Council on
contemporary families she is published
extensively on the topic of marriage and
family life and is the author of several
prestigious books including the way we
never were American families and in
Australia style the trap and marriage a
history from obedience to intimacy a
howl of Concord marriage her work has
been featured in many periodicals
including the New York Times The Wall
Street Journal Newsweek and vogue as
well as academic and professional
journals including Family Therapy
magazine chronicles of higher education
and Journal of marriage and family she
is appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show
crossfire CNN's talkback live and CBS
this morning Stephanie Coontz a former
Woodrow Wilson fellow has taught at Kobe
University in Japan at the University of
Hawaii at Hilo
honors include the council on
contemporary family visionary leadership
award the Dale Richmond award from the
American Academy of Pediatrics and the
friend of the family award from the
Illinois Council on family relations
before we begin I would like to ask that
the sound be disabled on any electronic
devices in addition please hold any
questions until the end of the
presentation when there will be a short
question and answer session out of
courtesy towards those who may be
hearing impaired please raise your hand
and wait for a microphone to be passed
to you before speaking following the
presentation in the lobby there will be
a book signing session and lunch will be
available thank you for your cooperation
and now please join me in welcoming
Stephanie Kunz
well I know we've got lunch waiting for
us and classes at 1:30 so I can't really
take on all the myths about marriage and
family life and I think I'll just
concentrate today on some of the things
about the way marriage has changed that
maybe we don't completely understand I
mean we all know that marriage is
different than it used to be and that's
absolutely right but it's not entirely
clear that everybody actually does know
how marriage used to be a lot of the
things that we think are new were in
fact extremely traditional whereas a lot
of the things that we think are
traditional were in fact very new and
short-lived adventure inventions
probably the best example of the latter
is dual earner families you know the
Ozzie and Harriet family of so-called
tradition was a very short-lived family
form through most of history women were
Co providers for their family they not
only brought home half the bacon they
raised the pig and butchered it and took
it to market the idea that men were
breadwinners was unknown in colonial
days women were called yoke Medes yoke
mates and meat helps this invention of
the ideal of the male breadwinner only
came in the 19th century and then it was
an ideal that was only attained by a
tiny minority of families it wasn't
until the 1920s because even when the
woman stayed home they sent the kids out
to work so in the 1920s a tiny majority
of families actually ended up being one
where the bulk of the income was brought
by the man the wife wasn't working
beside him in a business or a farm and
the kids weren't out at labor that
receded in the 30s and 40s it roared
back in the 1950s lasted about 15 years
it's probably the most untraditional
family form that you can think of what
about the things that we think of as new
but that are in fact traditional well
the most obvious example of that is one
parent families one parent families were
the norm throughout most of history
because of high death rates in the 19th
cent the beginning of the 19th century
the majority of marriages were ended by
death ten years before the last child
was ready to leave home and it wasn't
actually until the 1970s that more key
became likely to experience a parent's
divorce before they left their teen
years then experienced a parent's death
as a result of that step families
another non-traditional form in fact was
about the most traditional form that you
can imagine and in fact many step
families of the past had many more
problems than the ones that we tend to
think of today because marriage as I'll
talk about later was not about love and
individual relationships who most of the
past but about property and power you
have all of these legends you know the
Cinderella legend the wicked stepmother
stories had a real basis in fact because
the stepfather stepmother might well try
to kill the kids from a previous or at
least get rid of them somehow from a
previous marriage in order to make sure
that the property went to their side of
the family you know today the problems
in step families arise usually because
the new parent wants the that love to
develop too fast and she or he pushes it
too fast you know Cinderella would have
said boy I'll settle for that kind of
problem as for divorce this is also not
new there have been many times in
history when divorce rates have been as
high as they are today in 20th century
Indonesia and Malaysia in many hunting
and gathering societies among the
Shoshoni Indians a woman who wanted a
divorce would simply put her husband's
possessions outside the dwelling and
when he came home he'd say oh okay I
guess this marriage is over
in Japan a man had to write a letter of
just three-and-a-half lines it had to be
exactly that you know I kind of a haiku
would divorce haiku that in order to get
a marriage and a woman had to put in
however two years of special service at
a temple we tend to think of the
Christian tradition as being very anti
divorce and in fact Jesus was the first
religious leader to prohibit divorce
equally to men as well as to women but
for the first ten centuries of its
existence the church didn't enforce this
very much in and even when they did
begin to divorce for example in the
first three or four centuries there were
many regions where churches had an early
version of no-fault divorce you just
signed a little statement saying that
because we can no longer because we
affirmed before God that we can no
longer live together in harmony will
part and even after the church began to
tighten its regulations on this there
were two ways to get out of a marriage
that that I was researching for this new
book and that I thought were kind of
amusing the first was generally what the
upper-class did now in those days the
church had a very peculiar definition of
incest that if you were related to the
seventh degree removed it was incestuous
and you couldn't marry in other words if
you have the same
great-great-great-great
great-grandfather and who didn't in the
medieval world you were technically in
violation of the incest rules so people
just married all the time and violation
of incest rules and particularly the
upper classes who wanted to consolidate
property and marry customs and then if
they wanted to divorce they would simply
say ah my conscience is killing me
turned out I'm married to my cousin it's
incestuous you got it in the you know
the church would usually say okay the
lower class didn't have as much access
to divorce but they had an interesting
outlet that might have been a little
more common than we realize because the
church also had an interesting position
that again violates most of our notions
about traditional marriage the church
did not demand that marriage take place
in a church or be blessed by a priest or
anything like that and in fact through
most of history marriage
the relationship between families it
wasn't enforced by church or state not
til 1754 did the England require a
license to get married well an early
Pope said you know maybe we should make
the validity of a marriage dependent on
it happening in church but the tradition
in the Roman Empire had been that if
people live together and thought they
were married then they were married and
if they lived together and thought they
weren't married then they weren't
married there was no legal or formal
requirement and so his advisors pointed
out to them that if you made the
validity of a marriage dependent on a
Honda on it having them contracted in
church
the majority of Europeans would
instantly end up illegitimate so the
church took the position that you were
married they would prefer it if you had
bands and parental consent in a church
marriage but if you said that you had
exchanged words of consent out by the
woodpile no witnesses no priest then you
were married and the only way to get out
of that and this is something that I
found in my research a surprising number
of people did was to say just like the
upper bath Oh my conscience is killing
me I know I've been living with will for
the last five years but actually I
exchanged words of consent six months
earlier with John newtripper well in
you've got to go live with him so
divorce is not Lou and you know some
people look back nostalgically to the
days before no-fault divorce or the days
before divorce at all but in most
societies that didn't allow divorce all
that meant is that when desertion
happened women and children had no
recourse to get alimony or child support
and as for no-fault divorce there may
have been some problems with its
implementation but I don't think many
people would like to go back to the
kinds of cases that I found in the 30s
and 40s
the courts used to hold that in order to
get a divorce both parties had to come
to the marriage with clean hands that is
no the one wanting the divorce couldn't
have done anything to can now how
realistic is that about real-life
relationships so you would get cases
like the mauers in Oregon where the
judge admitted that the guy was so
violent that his wife and child lived in
fear
the woman had twice throwing things
across the room and therefore since she
didn't come to court with clean hands
even though the marriage was totally
miserable
neither of them deserved relief from it
and it's worth noting incidentally
whatever the problems with no-fault
divorce that in the five years after its
introduction every state that adopted it
experienced a 20% decline in the suicide
rate of wives and an even bigger decline
in the rate at which husbands were
murdered by wives so as for the idea
that sex outside marriage is something
new you know every generation thinks it
invented sex but in fact throughout most
of history there was more adultery than
there is today it was perfectly
acceptable for men to have mistresses
and prostitutes as late as the 18th
century I found that when a wife didn't
make a fuss about this which was very
very rare it was so it was considered so
inappropriate that her own family would
write letters to her husband saying
we're sorry she's behaving this way at
the end of the 19th century on the the
recourse to prostitutes by men in
Victorian England and America was so
great that there was an epidemic of
venereal disease in respectable
middle-class homes because they were
bringing it home to them as for sex
outside marriage by politicians believe
me Bill Clinton did not Ellie wait
started with Thomas Jefferson we now
know right
it went through Grover Cleveland who was
forced to admit that he probably
fathered a child with a department store
clerk he'd seduced so that the political
diddy of the day was mama where's my POG
onto the White House wha ha ha
Warren Harding who not only had a
long-term affair with the wife of a
family friend but fathered a child with
a second mistress a teenage girl and of
course John F Kennedy we now think that
both Roosevelt and Eisenhower also had
more discreet Affairs so sex outside
marriage all of these kinds of things
that we think are new are not in fact
new and although for most of European
and American history marriages were more
stable than they are today one of the
reasons they were stable was because
they were not fair and they were not
loving relationships husband and wife
are ones that Anglo American law that
was a that prevailed until the very end
of the 19th century and that one is the
husband he had the right to make all
decisions for the family he owned and
controlled all of the property even if
the woman brought it from inheritance or
it earned it herself and he they had the
right to physically restrain his wife to
Intel 1890s it was until 1897 that the
British courts ruled that a man didn't
have the right to imprison the wife in
his home also had the right to beat his
wife it was until 1864 that the first
courts in America began to forbid that I
did find one prohibition against wife
abuse in my research and that was in
16th century London wife of beating your
wife was prohibited after 9:00 o'clock
because it would wake the neighbors
but these marriages were not harmonious
in the past and nor did traditional
marriages always protect kids you know
sometimes we think that they did but
actually through most of history the
parents didn't sacrifice their kids kids
sacrificed for their parents the put you
know kids were kids were it was child
labor that provided for the parents
retirement and instead of saving up for
the education parents pulled their kids
out of school and although and right up
until the 1940s we have a budget--
studies malnutrition studies hospital
records that show that in many families
that were actually does slightly
officially above the poverty line there
were in fact two standards of living in
that family
one considerably above the poverty line
for the man who had protein medical care
you know meet for dinner and even
recreational money for beer and one
considerably below it for the women and
children that's no longer true in
America partly because the woman's
movement has made it possible for a
woman to lead a marriage that is so
unfair it remains so true in the rest of
the world that in Africa and parts of
Latin America a woman's biggest risk
factor for AIDS is to be married and
children in single female-headed
families where the wife has where the
woman has a job are often more likely to
be well nourished and to get education
than children in two-parent families
where the wife doesn't control any of
the income so these things I think lead
us to suggest that perhaps we shouldn't
romanticize the past but what is new
what is new today the first thing is
that marriage is today about love it's
about a relationship and as I explained
in a minute this is a very rare thing to
find in history and it was a very new
invention and the second is that both
men and women have the options not to
marry or to leave a marriage that they
find unfair or unloving and I will argue
that this has created this tremendous
historical paradox that the very things
that have made marriage more wonderful
more potentially fulfilling as a
relationship have weakened marriage as
an institution and vice versa the same
things that have weakened marriage as an
institution have strength it as a
relationship what makes for a strong
institution its rigid rules nobody has a
choice you don't have a choice
whether you're a citizen of the United
States and have to obey its laws right I
it you don't make individual exceptions
you don't change the rules over time as
someone ages well those things make for
a very strong institution and if I may
say so they make for a fairly crappy
you know what makes a strong
relationship that it's individualized
that it's negotiated that it's fair that
you can change the rules that you can
change it as you grow older but all
those things make for a less stable
institution so what we have created as a
result of these historic changes is that
a marriage when it works is fairer more
fulfilling more loving more passionate
more intimate than any couple I studied
in history would ever have dared to
dream but it's also more optional it's
more fragile it's less bearable when it
doesn't live up to that potential it's
hard to unfor me to to think of a way
that you could keep the one and get rid
of the other so how did we get here well
as I said for thousands of years
marriage was not about love we now
believe that that contrary to the idea
that marriage was invented to you know
protect women or the feminist idea of
the 70s the obverse that it was invented
to oppress women marriage wasn't about
the relationship between individual men
and women at all it was a way of making
connections between bands that had to be
able to cooperate when they met each
other
it was a way of turning strangers into
relatives many languages have the words
like the ancient anglo-saxon word for
wife the piece Weaver the maori of new
zealand say you can cooperate with
groups in many ways you can have rituals
you can have dances you can have trading
partners you can have feasts to get good
relations but the strongest way to get a
good relation is to make a link that
produces a child with a foot in both
camps so we believe now that marriage
was invented to get in-laws of course
that
yeah I know nowadays we think goodness
we want our in-laws out of our marriage
and that that's yet another good example
of the things that have improved
marriage as a relationship the fact that
your parents don't tell you who you have
to marry and the in-laws can't intervene
have also removed one of the sources of
stability especially after you began to
get more differences of wealth and power
in a community you know if I was a
member of a band and we had to we were
going to exchange spouses you know I
might send my son to marry you know from
the other band and I could allow my son
a little bit of choice in that as long
as you know he knew he had to marry out
or my daughter had to marry out but
let's say now we're in a society where
I'm one of the real upper classes or
almost upper class in that I'm not going
to let my son just marry anybody in that
other group I want to marry someone
equally or preferably more wealthy and
powerful so at that point in history and
it was really where the ancient
civilizations begin to arise marriage
becomes the center of intrigue and
calculation and remain so for thousands
of years I mean we look back at stories
like Anthony and Cleopatra not a love
story you know a self-interested power
play by the to super power by by two
individuals of the two superpowers of
the world attempting to bring them
together there's incest bigamy murder
betrayal false paternity suits you name
it everything I think but love for
thousands of years marriage was about
making these political and economic
alliances for the upper classes it was
the way you consolidated property made
business mergers I laid a claim to
social status so that you could claim to
rule yo you were descended from royalty
on both sides was a way of concluding
peace treaties and making military
alliances for the middle classes it was
also an economic and political
calculation you know the debtor in
Europe of course the dowry than a man
and right up until the 18th century once
they earn maybe God at marriage was the
biggest it was usually the biggest
infusion of cash and property would ever
get at a single time so the dowry was of
a lot more interest than the daughter
and for women of course it was the way
having a dowry was the way your parents
brought you a little economic security
so today of course we in we save up for
college we try to send our kids to
college to give them some Economic
Security and one of the things that
parents say is you don't have a choice
about doing your homework when you're in
high school you know because this is the
providing for your future well that's
the way your parents felt about arranged
marriages at the time you don't have a
choice about who you marriage I'm
providing for your future and often for
ours as well and that's the way it goes
even in the lower classes marriage was a
practical matter you couldn't run a farm
or a business by yourself you needed
someone your neighbors were integrally
concerned is this someone who's going to
fit in with us and neighbors had a lot
of say it turns out over who married
whom your parents were also concerned
what if you why don't why don't you
marry this person because they have
connections at court or they have a
relative where their land holdings are
near to ours and so we find there too
that even in even where individuals had
choice they were more likely to choose
someone who was a good work partner than
somebody you know who they weren't madly
in love with so for centuries what's
love got to do with it could have been
the theme song for most marriages now
that people didn't fall in love but it's
no accident that most love stories
throughout history were tragedies
married wasn't the happy ending to a
love story it was usually the unhappy
ending to a love story when people came
to terms with what their parents would
or what their needs were and got married
and then about two hundred years ago
some circles in Europe and America in
the process of the Enlightenment and the
French and American revolutions began to
spread the radical idea that had been
broached occasional
a tentatively the beginning to spread
over the last couple hundred years but
never had one out you know never the
idea was by the 16th and 17th century
people were saying well maybe you should
marry someone you could learn to love
but marrying someone just for love not a
good idea in the 18th century especially
the Enlightenment had a big influence
here the idea that the state and the
older generation shouldn't dictate to
young people they should maybe be able
to choose their partners for themselves
combine that with the radical idea of
the French Revolution I mean in front
American Revolution Declaration of
Independence pursuit of happiness people
had a right to the pursuit of happiness
and you get this new idea that people
should choose their own marriage
partners and they should do so on the
basis of what would make them happy they
should do so on the basis of love and
one of the funny amusing things to me
and researching this that I didn't
realize was that traditionalists of the
day social conservatives of the day
defenders of what was then the
traditional marriage of political and
economic calculation were horrified they
thought that this was going to be a
disaster
you've opened a Pandora's box they said
look if you say that marriage should be
about love how are you going to get the
right people to marry each other one of
the most am I don't love him you know
how will we make our you know our social
status work how will we prevent the
wrong people from demanding the right to
marry and today of course that is
playing out over demands for gay and
lesbian marriage but at the time they
didn't want poor people to marry you
know today we say oh let's marry them
off and that'll somehow solve their
poverty they said no let's not allow
them to marry or reproduce and that'll
somehow solve their poverty so they said
what do you do if to poor people fall in
love and demand the right to marry what
will we do about people who get married
and then find that they're not happy
won't they demand the right to divorce
and even scarier for them at the time is
what will happen to this male dominance
that has been there for so many
thousands of years if you get people to
marry for love
won't men start giving in to their wives
so they predicted basically that love
would be the death of marriage and
actually it turns out they had a boy but
but it took another hundred and fifty
years for the radical implications of
that to play themselves out because the
instant that the love match was invented
people did begin to demand the right not
to marry if they didn't fall in love and
to get social respect for making that
choice they began to demand the right to
divorce if the marriage was loveless
they began to question female
subordination and they began to question
but it's always been the dark side of
the strong institution of marriage and
that is the notion of illegitimate see I
said earlier that we think marriage was
invented to turn strangers into
relatives but the flip side of marriage
illegitimate see was invented to turn
relatives into strangers and throughout
the centuries millions of gets lost all
access to their husband to it to our
mother and father because the husband
and mother were not in an improved
marriage so people began to question
that it's no accident that illegitimate
children were called love children
people we began to say why do we have
these penalties for legitimacy if they
were conceived in love all of those
things were raised the instant that the
love match was raised so conservatives
were right to be frightened but it took
a hundred and fifty years on to play
themselves out first of all in the 19th
century they developed what they were
very concerned about this because there
was a wave of women's movements and
demands for divorce in in France America
Europe across even demands for
legitimation of gay and lesbian unions
they didn't call them marriage but they
said if people love each other you know
we should recognize a valid relationship
France developed the slogan there are no
bastards in France they wanted to get
rid of illegitimate
in America there were demands for
equality within marriage and free choice
and the right to remain single but these
were pushed back in the 19th century by
a combination of I'm almost conscious
campaign to redefine love and marriage
in ways that made it a little more
manageable and that was this new idea
about the separation of spheres and that
that now men were considered not to be
in charge of women but they were
considered so different that own that
men and women were only halfway human
beings without each other that men were
the ones the only ones who could go out
and bring home the bacon you know in
contrary to you know thousands of years
of evidence to the contrary this new
idea developed that they should be the
ones who protected women and women
should stay home women by contrast were
the ones in charge of nurturing men
weren't capable of that contrary to
thousands of years of evidence to the
contrary where men were the ones who
remembered birthdays and organized
funerals and weddings so these new ideas
about strict gender roles women
passionless sexless again contrary to
the medieval idea that women were the
more sexual sex these kind of developed
to create a sense that men and women
could only reach humanity by combining
in marriage it looks we look back at
those Victorian marriages and
romanticize them they were very stable
and they did have a lot of you know sort
of sentimental rhetoric around them but
actually when you scratch the surface
they were often quite unhappy because
this new definition of men and women as
polar opposites didn't exactly foster
intimacy in marriage you know women
often refer to men as the grosser sex
they were terrified of marriage do to
get with this guy and men for their part
really didn't know how to deal with you
know these virginal pure angels in the
house and often expressed considerable
discomfort about how to be around them
that prostitutes were better company
than the kind of woman that they'd like
to marry and there were all sorts of
sexual tensions in Victorian marriage so
until you had a sexual revolution
18 20s that particular part of radical
implication of the love match could not
play itself out also of course you had
unreliable birth control and despite the
attempt of France to outlaw legitimacy
the strong penalties for legitimacy
remained in in play until the nineteen
1960s and 1970s most people don't
realize this but until it Court Supreme
Court decision in 1968 a child who was
born to and raised by an unmarried
mother did not have any right to collect
on her debts if she died didn't have no
claim on her family for inheritance and
if she was killed by the wrongful act of
an employer or someone else could not
sue for damages
so the harsh penalties against
illegitimate C and the unreliability of
birth control prevented the radical
implications of the love match from
playing out there furthermore there was
the ability of elites and employers to
dictate behavior so even though people
were more and more talking about the
idea that you ought to be able to
divorce if you wanted to and that love
match you know was more important that
actual love was more important than a
marriage license you could get penalized
terribly right up until the 1950s men
who were not married by a respectable
age or who were divorced could be denied
promotions and employment and of course
women were just ostracized if they had a
baby they did have babies out of wedlock
but they usually put them up for
adoption or went and went away and
pretended nothing had happened and then
of course there was the legal authority
of men in marriage despite the fact that
by the light 19th century violence was
not acceptable and women began and
gained their own property rights most
people don't realize that right up until
the 1970s most states in this country
and had head and master laws and all of
Western Europe did which gave men the
final right to make the say they have
the final decision about most things
that went on in the home and marriage
was defined very unequally that men but
not women had a duty to support the
family women but not men have the duty
to take care of the kids
do the housekeeping and provide sex
which is why wasn't it all the 1980s
that it was possible to say that marital
rape was a crime if you were raped even
violently by her husband you had no
recourse up until then because the legal
definition of marriage was that once
you'd said I do you'd said I will
forever so as long as that legal
authority of men in marriage prevailed
it was again a consent of tenth tamped
down the implicate the radical
implications of the love match and then
above all the thing that really held in
check was the economic dependence of
women on men so that you know we tend to
think that that women are the more
romantic sex but actually it was men who
were able to embrace the love revolution
first and in the 19th century I read
diaries and letters and the men are like
oh I'm just madly in love with this
woman I can't wait to marry her and the
women are like well you know my heart
inclines to Harry but you know John over
there has got better economic prospects
it's late as 1967 there was a college a
poll of college students in America and
they found that only 5% of the men but
two-thirds of the women said they would
consider marrying someone they didn't
love if he met all their other criteria
well in the last thirty years all of
those things have been swept away we
have reliable birth control we have
destroyed
we have abolished the old penalties for
a legitimacy important humanitarian
reform but one that has weakened the
ability of marriage to dictate people's
lives in the distribution of resources
we have told people that they cannot
discriminate on the basis of personal
behavior that we use objective behavior
to decide whether you can get into
college or whether you're going to be
promoted at a job again decreasing the
coercive power of elites we've removed
the legal authority of men in marriage
we've allowed women access to education
and above all we've had women enter into
the workforce in terms that make them
more possible to be able to either
refuse marriage even if they pregnant or
to leave a marriage marriage has changed
more in the last thirty years than the
previous three thousand five hundred it
is a worldwide irreversible revolution
that I've come to think of as the
equivalent of the Industrial Revolution
and like the Industrial Revolution it
really shook things up you know I mean
the Industrial Revolution has had some
long-term benefits of course but at the
time there were lots of tragedies you
know for every individual who found a
new way to to move out of the pack and
develop a new entrepreneurial success
there were a dozen who lost their old
ways of living and were displaced from
their farms and had to go into dangerous
factories but you know you really didn't
have a choice you couldn't say well
we're going to shoehorn everybody back
onto self-sufficient farms you had to
say well look if we don't like the way
this is working this industrial
revolution we have to find new routes to
self-employment for people because the
old ways are gone and we have to
recognize that corporations and
factories are here to stay so instead of
you know sitting around cursing at them
we need to reform them right well I
would say the analogy is completely
holds for this change in in marriage we
there is no way we will shoehorn people
back into lifelong universal early
marriage where we can be sure that all
obligations will be contracted in
marriage and all interdependencies will
be taken care of and all child-rearing
will take care of that there's no way
we're going to actually be able to just
completely ignore as we did for
centuries the accidents that that were
outside of marriage the rising you add
these other changes that I've talked
about to the rising age of marriage so
that there's now a 10 to 15 year or
longer period of sexual maturity between
the time that people reach puberty and
the time they get married no Society in
history has ever kept young people
celibate that long say marriage is no
longer the only place for
sex people get initiated into sex the
separation of reproduction means that in
that some people can have children who
never would have been able to have them
before which means that wonderful
wonderful gain from married couples who
are infertile but it also means it's
next to impossible to prevent single
women or gays and lesbians from having
children it also means that more and
more marriages are childless so that the
old equation of marriage with childhood
is broken down you add that the
invention of consumer products that do
away with the need of a full-time
housewife and you have a situation where
this is an irreversible change yes it
causes lots of problems you know these
shakeups are very disturbing you know
and the entry of women into the
workforce in a in a country that has
unlike other the European countries has
not caught up with these changes and
doesn't have subsidized parental leave
policies or good childcare this is a
problem for people the new access to
divorce yes some divorces deliver people
from very difficult situations but in
other cases they're very very painful
and the kids and the adults alike go
through agonizing changes remarriage and
stepfamilies it's hard to blend a family
the ability of women to say no to a
shotgun marriage good in some ways but
also creates economic burdens for them
and of course it's really hard to raise
a kid when you have one parent only you
know having just got my own kid off to
what is now a very successful college
and post college career but he was a
handful I you know think three or four
good parents well would have been a help
far less trying to do it as one but just
as with the Industrial Revolution these
changes are here to stay the question is
not what we wish we could accomplish but
how do we build on the gains that we
have and there have been many gains you
know for the in the position of women in
the improvement of the relationship of
marriage how do we minimize the losses
and there have
losses and challenges to us but that's
the question not how do we turn the
clock back and as it turns out once you
ask that question there is exciting new
research that shows that we can meet
these challenges that dual earner
families don't have to be so stressful
and in fact although there is extra time
there are real time management problems
that when they have access to decent
childcare or leaves these these there's
less likelihood of depression than there
is in more traditional male breadwinner
families there is men whose wives work
are much more likely to become hands-on
fathers and that has tremendous benefits
for the kids it raises boys who are more
empathetic and it raises girls who are
more likely to succeed especially in
non-traditional fields even the use of
child care is not bad when when you
actually look at good child care it
substitutes for the historical loss of
all of these sources of non parental
care and peer socialization outside of
the families that we don't have in our
commuter neighborhoods you know in our
smaller families today and improves kids
social and economic adjustment although
I'm not good unregulated childcare does
not do that we know how to make
marriages work better there's lots of
fascinating wonderful fun new research
on how to make marriages work better but
part of it has to do with weeding out
incompatible couples before they get
marriage so we're not going to get
everybody back into marriage and we're
not going to make divorce disappear it's
been rising in a steady line ever since
the invention of a love match and
although it is leveled off the divorce
rates actually come down by 26% since
1981 there is still going to be divorced
but we know how to teach people to
divorce better and to minimize the
damage that's associated with it that
same is true for single parenthood we
actually know what we can do to minimize
the impacts of that little thing I'll
just I can talk about these more on the
question
if you like but little things dolts and
single-parent families actually read to
and talk to their kids more than adults
and two-parent families if you can
harness that and channel it in
productive ways and make sure that that
talking doesn't become inappropriate
like venting about things that the kids
shouldn't know those kids can turn out
just fine so I don't want to be a
Pollyanna we do face real challenges but
we have to be realists you're not going
to turn the clock back so let's figure
out how we can build on these
possibilities how we can minimize the
weaknesses that every family form
including two-parent families you know
male breadwinner families these families
face tremendous stresses in our society
today and they're not immune proof to
divorce and how do we so how do we
minimize the weaknesses and the
vulnerabilities that every family form
has how do we build on the strengths
that yes every family form potentially
has that's the question today and the
only way we're going to answer it is if
we stop pointing fingers and start
extending a helping hand so I want to
end perhaps since I didn't have an
ending I'm going to make one up right
here in order to have time for the
question period by by telling you my
grandmother's favorite saying when I was
growing up it was well my my father and
my grandmother had two sayings that I
think sum up the argument I've been
trying to make today my father used to
say if wishes were horses then beggars
would ride you know which i think is a
very good thing to remind people of when
they start saying what can we do to make
marriage once again the only option that
people have and then my grandmother used
to say problems are sometimes
opportunities and work clothes but if
you won't sit down with them because of
the way they're dressed you're never
going to find out and that I think is
the theme that we have to have in
dealing with today's families thank you
very much
you