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The Abolition of Marriage
by Maggie Gallagher
The more philosophical parts of The Abolition of Marriage are pretty good. Maggie Gallagher, a syndicated anti-child, anti-parent activist, argues for the personal, social and erotic importance of lasting love. Marriage is a social good—other citizens benefit from married couples, though she does not give much evidence for how much of a public good it is for non-childrearing purposes. Marriage helps socialize men. Those who make “lifestyle choices” are not the only ones affected by those choices. Children exist for more than gratification.
She claims that well-meaning cultural and policy changes wrecked marriage and caused paradoxical consequences. Marriage once meant safety and shelter. Now marriage is considered dangerous and too risky, but nonmarriage is no solution. Nonmarriage is even more risky and dangerous.
Gallagher analyzes the soft marriage market. She argues that courtship and marriage have been replaced with perpetual rounds of half-hearted dates and relationships. What was solid has melted into lost rivers. “Without roles, there can be no plot.” Duties done with honor are essential to a good life. Humans need a life story and marriage is an important part of that story. The author argues for eros, the intense desire to love and be loved in return. Love that is only half the equation stinks.
Young individuals, she writes, are propagandized with shallow pleasure seeking norms from peers, experts and celebrities alike. Toys and game playing have status. Marriage and children do not. Depth and intensity in relationships are shunned. Adults who should know better are afraid of looking uncool. Sex has become the pre-eminent goal of dating and marriage is something that may happen if things magically progress. Men and women look for love in the wrong places, then become cynical about the other gender, ignoring their own terrible choices. Individuals get in the habits of short-term experimentation, never developing the skills or willingness to shift into something committed.
Family roles are in disregard, she argues, yet many who imagine themselves as great, independent thinkers and actors are little more than blind beings who change with and are manipulated by cultural fads. Marriage develops men. Recently hired married men are 50 percent more likely to receive a high performance rating than single men, controlling for location, education and prior experience and, apparently, nothing else. Having husbands who are quality breadwinners, increases the number of alternatives available for women. Low-income single women have few options.
She argues that elites favor covering up problems with euphemisms and other rhetoric such as appeals to the traditional practices of tribes and irrelevant claims about imperfections of the 1950s. “Ozzie and Harriet never existed. So what?” The value of a goal does not depend on the fact that some people do not live up to it.
Media-types, she opines, constantly sermonize about dress, food, toys, dating, entertainment and so on, yet they excoriate those who mention marriage, family and morality in the same sentence.
Couples should work to find ways to make marriages better. Lasting marriages, she offers, take more than spontaneity and personal insight. Partners should not view their spouses as merely objects for pleasure and consumption. Therapeutic ideologies offer little more than a mask for selfishness.
“Family values is an empty slogan, a perfect politicians’ phrase, committing no one to any serious actions.” She claims the marriage contract has weakened to the point that it is worth less than the proverbial paper it is printed on. The legal benefits of marriage have decreased while its responsibilities remain. She claims that no-fault divorce shifts power to those who want to break commitments more than it increases freedom. She argues that we evade serious social problems of family and marriage, mistakenly believing that family and marriage are purely private issues. We have a bizarre belief that society and policy have little impact. “If there is supposedly no solution, there is no problem.”
She points out the error of many researchers who divide marriage into many pieces—”social and economic support” and so on, then conclude that it’s all the little pieces that make a social difference, never marriage itself that is a causal factor. We cause unrecognized destruction by our “decision to privatize marriage and withdraw public, legal, and cultural support.” The belief that we don’t need to do anything about family policies because most people get married or belong to families is like saying we don’t need to do anything about work, wage and tax policies because most people engage in them.
She takes therapeutic goals to task for thinking primarily of personal well-being. “[W]e are never so deluded as when we imagine we are creating ourselves out of nothing.” (Actually, those who think they should invade nations having powerful allies are more deluded.) Those who believe themselves completely self-made creators are often merely faddish. Those who are most against moralizing often moralize the most. The list they moralize about is merely different.
Gallagher argues that some people are drifting toward the pole that all sex is acceptable—”sluts for the revolution”—while others increasingly view all sex as rape. The norms of adolescent boys are becoming the norms of the nation. She cites a scary, albeit small and unrepresentative, poll that found 84 percent of teenage girls think that the most important thing sex education can teach them is how to say no without hurting feelings. Many women, she writes, are alienated from sex. Power, casualness and manipulation stand in place of love.
Letting others know you are seeking a spouse is a major faux pas.
Rules are easy to break, especially when the most popular rule is there are no rules. “The ideal serves to make that for which we strive for more visible and to collect the disparate moments of consciousness into a story in which we can find the meaning of our lives.” She calls premarital counseling and waiting periods a “white flag of surrender.” Why? Perhaps because she sees marriage as a mandatory permanent institution, no matter how foolishly it is entered into, no matter how much destruction bad marriages cause. The author aims for prevention, but she ends up in the damage control department and all she has in her hands is dynamite. Her ideas treat citizens as merely a means to serve the institution of marriage rather than using the institution of marriage to serve citizens.
Among the many weaknesses of this work is her version of a nurture assumption. She argues that moderately strict parents are best at preventing teen pregnancy, neglecting the facts that moderately strict parents have similar genes, healthy incomes, low residential mobility and helpful cultural environments.
Many of the better points in here are similar to those made in Growing up with a Single Parent. Children and adults benefit from pooled resources. AWOL parents and stepparents do not contribute much to children. The wages of the young have declined. According to the Census Bureau, between 1973 and 1997 the median income of men in the 25 to 34 age group declined from $34,303 to $25,996 in 1997 dollars. (It has since increased somewhat.) And that doesn’t include increasingly regressive taxes.
Things have changed. Elsewhere the 1993 General Social Survey reports that 75 percent of never married young men think getting married is important. Only 66 percent of young women report the same belief. I read elsewhere that 96 percent of Americans say they want to marry; yet ever-greater numbers never marry. Controlling for other factors, marriage appears to improve happiness. The sample of unmarrieds excludes more who were extremely dissatisfied with their roles. They are not counted because they are dead. They committed suicide.
The science portions of this book are terrible; the policy recommendations are not much better. The research she offers alleging that divorce does lots of psychological damage is faulty. It is based on nurture assumptions and flawed comparison groups. To determine the amount of damage done by divorce, one should compare children having unhelpful heredity in homes having bad marriages who divorce with children having unhelpful heredity in homes having bad marriages who do not divorce—as well as keeping all other relevant factors the same. One should not compare children in bad homes who divorce with children in better homes who do not divorce because genes and other environmental factors make those children more psychologically well off.
Abolition is more damage control than prevention, albeit poor damage control. Gallagher quickly dismisses premarital counseling and waiting periods. She focuses on the evils of no-fault divorce and not enough on more important preventative strategies. Gallagher seeks to eliminate no-fault divorce. Ending no-fault divorce would keep a few of the worst marriages together and would have little impact on children, except for slightly increasing their financial resources and making their home lives more abusive. Universal at-fault divorce would also make adults more wary of marriage than they already are. About half of marriage break-ups involve no minor children. Almost nothing would be gained from requiring at-fault divorces from them.
The author’s examination of the tiny shift in resources from the married to the single—whoops!—misses the larger picture of the colossal shift in resources from families with minor children to adults without minor children. Marriage is shifting toward an institution for childfree adults, ultra-liberals, ultra-conservatives and so-called libertarians to pool resources and gang up on parents and children. According to the General Social Survey, 30 percent of households are married without children—the highest figure in American history—compared with 26 percent of households that are married with children. Policies that shift more resources to married couples are poorly targeted and undeserved. The social benefits of married childfree couples are not humongous or near humongous. Governments should not distribute thousands of dollars per couple to ensure that the percentage of married childfree couples increases a few percentage points.
The weak status of marriage should be addressed with better legal and social policies, not economic policies. Married couples without minor children are the wealthiest family group in America. They have a mean of six times the disposable income of families with children. (Discretionary or disposable income is the money left after paying taxes and basic items.) Actual figures are higher for major groups. Food is considered basic whether it’s a two-dollar meal or a 90-dollar meal. Those who make these measurements broadly define basic.
They don’t need a windfall merely because some of the money will benefit a minority of families with minor children.
She believes that the burden of child rearing is a good reason for spousal health coverage. But for the burden of child rearing to be a good reason for spousal health coverage, one of the conditions has to be the actual presence of children. The majority of married adults have no minor children.
The author complains about politicians who deliver pro-family rhetoric and anti-family policies, but when it comes to policies and social science, the author’s argument is... well, you fill in the blank. She recommends an unspecified wage increase for single men. Bad idea. Bachelors and bachelorettes have huge amounts disposable income. More income for them is poorly targeted and most of it will end up as disposable income.
Policies that give money and hope individuals start doing right things have a terrible record. Policies that reward for doing right things have an excellent record. Policy should be directed toward families that have children. An arbitrary raise for single men will achieve as much as a raise for drunken sailors. The money will be wasted on status conferring rubbish.
She delivers pro-middle-class and pro-lower income rhetoric while proposing pro-rich policies. She proposes an $8,000 dependent exemption, then oddly notes “that happens to be almost exactly the amount the government estimates each child costs a middle-class family[.]” The author either does not know the difference between an exemption and a tax credit, or she knows and she is manipulating middle-class readers. An $8,000 dollar dependent exemption would be worth over $3000 dollars to rich families and much less or nothing to most families.
The non-rich generally pay 15 to 30 percent of their incomes in regressive payroll, state and local taxes. Federal income tax exemptions are no help with these types of taxes. The rich pay zero to 12 percent of their incomes on these types of taxes depending on where they live and how they earn their income. Because of declining marginal utilities, non-rich working parents would benefit much more from policies targeted toward them. They are also owed because their children are entered into contracts they never agreed to.
“There are few short-term supply-side returns to family tax cuts,” she asserts, “which is why economic conservatives tend to oppose them.” If we pretend supply-side tax cuts are beneficial, she is badly mistaken. Look up the stats. Wealthy two-parent families with minor children have the highest rates of employment and entrepreneurship of any group of individuals. They would seem to be the ideal targets of a supply-side tax cut. If you were a supply-sider, you should give a tax cut to Bill Gates and his family rather than a playboy heir. Here are some guesses why supply-side tax cuts are not targeted to families with children: Ultra-conservatives want to maintain a surface illusion of “equality” and “fairness” by agreeing with everyday Eleanor Burkett intuitions of “equality” and “fairness,” which means semi-equality for adults. ultra-conservatives are clever hedonists who would much rather have money in their pockets to frequent prostitutes at political conventions than give capital to parental entrepreneurs ultra-conservatives know and care so little about public policy that anything beyond “across the board” for the rich is too complex and boring to get their attention.
The “best” recommendation she makes is some form of covenant marriages for those who freely choose to enter them, though she offers no details. Even if the Gallagher program became popular, it might make matters worse. It offers a barrage of anti-family policies matched by a barrage of pro-family rhetoric. It would increase ritual and internecine warfare among parents. Pro-family neoconservatives align themselves with plutocrat populists. Plutocrat populists do not return the love to pro-family neocons, but the plutocrats harm non-rich parents and children thanks to the neocons. The billion dollar boys probably laugh at people like Maggie Gallagher. Marriage is important, but it is not the most important institution on the planet. Moral education, civics education, primary education, political institutions, economic institutions, and child rearing matter far more. Not recommended.
320p (H) 1996
Book review by J.T. Fournier.
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