(Scooped! Just as I was preparing this post, the N.Y. Times printed a detailed story on the same topic titled, in its print version, “Marriage is Valued, but in Decline. Economics and Culture May be Culprits.”)
Marriage is over. That was the comment–roughly in those terms–that I heard tossed out at a panel discussion among many eminent sociologists. No one demurred; a few concurred. Is it really over? Much of the public, 39 percent according to a 2010 Pew survey, agrees that marriage is “becoming obsolete.” And yet, I will argue, the facts are more complex and the prospects for marriage brighter than that capsule comment suggests.
This post presents a bunch of data that allow us to look at marrying and to look at Americans’ feelings about marrying since about 1970. (For an earlier discussion of the topic, see this post from 2012.)
Experiencing Marriage
It is important, first, to remember the historical background: The couple of decades before 1970 were unusual, probably the most marrying era in U.S. history. The median age at which women married (for the first time) had been dropping for decades; it fell from 22.0 in 1890 to 20.1 in 1956.[1] After World War II, earlier marriage brought a sudden upsurge in births, what later became known as the “Baby Boom,” and an unusually familistic mid-century. Then came a turnaround: American women started marrying later–the median age rose back to 22 by 1980–and later–25 by 2000–and later–27 by 2015. So, Americans from the 1960s on were increasingly putting off marriage. But were they marrying not at all?
I address the question by asking what percentage of American women reached middle age either unmarried or never-married. The results are below.[2] The top pair of lines indicate the percentage of American women aged 45 to 55 who had ever been married in each year[3] and the bottom pair of lines show the percentage who were married at the time of the census survey. The red lines represent women who had graduated college, the blue lines those who had not.
The message is clear. For college graduates, there was at most a five percentage point drop between 1970 and 2015 in the percentage who were currently married, but for non-graduates there was a 20-point drop. For the graduates, there was no net change in ever having gotten married, while for the other women, there was nine-point drop in the percentage who ever married (and obviously a big increase in the percentage currently divorced[4]).
In 2015, many more American women were not college graduates (16.7 million) than were (7.7 million), so the declining marriage rate was indeed more typical nationally. The point of making the comparison, however, is that the ideal of marriage would appear to have been pretty constant among those who had the most choice in deciding to marry or not–the better-off, the college graduates. The pattern supports the argument that marriage remains valued, but that for economic reasons fewer Americans can attain or sustain it.[5]
(This splitting by class, by the way, is not news. The widening class division in marriage could be see a decade ago [6], but it has gotten wider. And Andrew Cherlin has shown, in Labor’s Love Lost, that such a class gap was common in the late 19th century. Here, too, the the mid-twentieth century may be the anomalous era, not ours.)
Valuing Marriage
I have scrounged around for more direct data on how much Americans value marriage and how that might have changed. I found two series of surveys that can help: one on whether the unmarried say they want to get married and another on whether Americans disapprove of breaking marriage vows by adultery.
Unfortunately, the series on wanting to get married is pretty choppy. There are three comparable points. In 2007, 2010, and 2017, the Pew organization asked people who had never been married, “Thinking about the future, would you say you want to get married someday, don’t want to get married, or are not sure if you want to get married?” The three black points in the figure below show the percentage who said they wanted to marry: basically a steady 58 percent or so. (Each year about 13 percent said no and the rest were unsure.) The other points in the figure come from surveys that targeted somewhat different populations and had somewhat different questions, but are still useful.[7] It is hard to see any lessening of the desire to marry over about the last quarter-century.
A longer, richer series on marriage is the General Social Survey’s question, “What is your opinion about a married person having sexual relations with someone other than the marriage partner– always wrong, almost always wrong, sometimes wrong, not wrong at all?” If marriage is becoming obsolete,” then so should condemnation of straying from marriage. The graph below shows that the trend is exactly the opposite–more defense of marriage. (A similar Gallup Poll series, 2001-16, shows 90 percent disapproval of extramarital affairs and no trend.[8]) The graph shows that growing, strong disapproval is true for both educational groups, suggesting that non-college graduate Americans may be increasingly failing at marriage but they seem to still embrace making a try of it.
All this is consistent with the view that, although Americans fear that marriage is over–for others–they continue to embrace it. The issue is how much harder it has become for some groups to enact and sustain it.
I’ll soon address a related topic–Americans’ general valuing of family (unless I get scooped by the Times).
1953
=== NOTES ===
[1] Bureau of the Census, Table MS-2. Estimated Median Age at First Marriage: 1890 to present.
[2] Calculated from IPUMS archive: Ruggles, Genadek, Goeken, Grover, and Sobek. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 6.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015. http://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V6.0.
[3] I topped the category at 55 to minimize the effects of changes in widowhood.
[4] A 16-point increase for the non-graduates; a 10-point increase for the graduates.
[5] The argument that cultural shifts are responsible was most recently forcefully raised by Charles Murray. My critique is here.
[6] See, e.g., Fischer and Hout, “The Family in Trouble: Since When? For Whom?” in Tipton and Witte, Jr. (eds.), The Family in Interdisciplinary Perspective, 2006.
[7] 1990: Asked of unmarried 18-29 year-olds: “In looking ahead, do you definitely want to get married, probably want to get married, or definitely not want to get married?” (Yankelovich) — percentage who say definitely. 1993: Asked of unmarried respondents, “Do you want to get married some day?” (Scripps/Ohio University). 2006: Asked of unmarried, “In looking ahead, do you definitely want to get married, probably want to get married, probably do not want to get married, or definitely do not want to get married? (Pew) – percentage “definitely.”
[8] Gallup: “(Next, I’m going to read you a list of issues. Regardless of whether or not you think it should be legal, for each one, please tell me whether you personally believe that in general it is morally acceptable or morally wrong.) How about… married men and women having an affair?” – percent wrong.
MADE IN AMERICA 