The Marrying Kind: (Ghettoization of the working class)

[HiPointDem]

As we celebrate Valentine's Day, we should be aware that underlying the many stories on the changing nature of marriage and relationships is a central irony: the college-educated middle class that embraced the sexual revolution is now leading the way back into marriage. And this group has more stable families because of the combination of two qualities hard for everyone else to find. The first is a flexible approach to family roles. Men who help with the children and women with six-figure incomes are very much in demand. The second is good jobs: over the last 30 years, the number of men with stable employment has stayed even with women only at the top...

The college educated, for example, marry and bear children later than the less educated, while those with less education have become increasingly likely to bear children first. The non-marital birth rate has stayed at two percent for white college graduates over the last 25 years and risen only slightly for college-educated racial minorities. During the same period, the non-marital birth rate has reached 40 percent for the country as a whole. College graduates enter into any kind of family life significantly later than their less-educated peers and have become even more likely to marry only each other.

The new elite devotes more parental time to their children than their parents did and the ability to do so requires either one high-earning partner or two wage earners with compatible schedules. In commenting on Obama's plans to increase taxes on those with income above $250,000, a University of Chicago law professor complained that it took he and his wife that much income to raise a family in Chicago in accordance with a professional standard of living. What he emphasized less is that it also took a spouse with a six-figure income to afford the nannies, private schools, and college and graduate education that would allow their children to realize opportunities comparable to their own...

For the approximately two-thirds of the population that does not have a college degree, an increasing number of men don't have the steady, adequate-paying jobs that allow them to provide the foundation for a successful family life. Nor are working class men who feel like failures in the job market prepared to play roles backing up their wives and children. College-educated artists or faculty spouses may be willing to dote on their children while their wives take on the "breadwinning" role, but less secure men are more likely to chafe at the domestic tasks. Financially independent women who both earn the bulk of the family income and assume the majority of the domestic tasks don't want -- or need -- men who are unable to support their families, emotionally or financially. While divorce rates plummeted in the '90s for college graduates, they continued to rise among the hard-pressed working class.

The secret underlying these patterns has been the growing divergence in male job opportunities and a change in the gendered wage gap. In 1990, all women, irrespective of education, made about the same percentage of the median hourly wage of the men, with college graduate women making a slightly higher percentage of the male wage than those who did not graduate from college. Today, those figures have changed appreciably. College graduate women are now paid a smaller percentage of the median hourly wage the men earn, while all other women are earning a higher percentage of male income. During the same period, male employment stability, which remained largely unchanged for college graduate men, and improved for most women, became notably worse for working class men...

http://www.nextnewdeal.net/marrying-kind-how-class-shapes-our-search-soul-mate


Further developments in the ghettoization of the working class... now charles murray is extending his "black people are poor because they don't get married" to the white working class...


Blame Marriage Rates on the Family Values of the 1%

Charles Murray is at it again. He burst onto the national scene in the '80s, announcing that he knew why the African-American non-marital birth rate had risen so dramatically: the government made them do it. He explained that welfare and a host of other liberal sins had weakened the moral fiber of the poor, producing disaster. It would take free market discipline to instill the right values once again. Now Murray is back with a new book and a long article in the Wall Street Journal attempting to explain income inequality among whites. His claim: working class whites have lost ground because they have abandoned a commitment to marriage, religion, and hard work. In his world, unemployment is high because those on the losing end of today's economy refuse to work, non-marital births occur because of a lack of emphasis on marriage, and the upper class can assist only by expressing its disapproval and "preaching what it practices" -- presumably investments in Ivy League education, parent-subsidized internships, and marriage between two investment bankers at 32...

Murray can't tell you what really caused the class divide in marriage because the class-based changes in families he laments closely track the class warfare of the 1%. Up through the mid-'80s, upper class and working class divorce rates rose and fell together. Starting in 1990, the lines diverged, with the divorce rates of college graduates falling back to the level of the mid-sixties (before no-fault divorce) while the divorce and non-marital birth rates of everyone else continued to rise. What really happened?

First, the income of college graduate men increased handsomely in the '90s and the incomes of the 1% increased even more through the next decade...Second, the income of all other men declined in real dollar terms (adjusted for inflation). American industry enjoyed impressive gains in productivity, but working class men received almost none of the benefits...

Third, women's employment increased in the same period and women's wages gained the most vis-à-vis men at the bottom of the income scale. As recently as 1990, women of all educational levels earned about the same percent of the hourly wages of men with the same education. To the extent the gendered "wage gap" varied, college educated women enjoyed slightly more parity with men than working class women. By 2007, the wage gap varied dramatically by class. College-educated women earned a smaller percentage of the hourly income of their male counterparts, while the wage gap between working-class men and women shrunk substantially.

Fourth, working-class male employment in the same period became less stable, while employment stability for college graduate men did not change and employment stability improved for women.

The result: a change in family norms...It is time to recognize the real cause of family change. A corporate strategy that destroys unions, raids pension funds, lays off workers, and values speculative or dishonest ventures (i.e. subprime loans) over long-term institutional development may earn six figure bonuses, but it destroys families and communities. It is the values of Murray's elite, not working class values, that should be the focus of family reform.

http://www.nextnewdeal.net/blame-marriage-rates-family-values-1

[Laelth]

1. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth

[Nay]

2. Well, well, well. "Financially independent women who both earn the bulk

Last edited Sat May 4, 2013, 11:45 AM - Edit history (3)

of the family income and assume the majority of the domestic tasks don't want -- or need -- men who are unable to support their families, emotionally or financially" and "Men with stable jobs are harder to find and recently laid off or semi-employed men help out less around the house than those who work full time."

I've made both these points several times on various boards and IRL, and each time I was basically accused of the crime of bashing men. I was then treated to the usual stories from men who insisted they did all the housework and cooking, etc., all of which were anecdotal and totally irrelevant. I mean, I'm glad some men are stepping up to the plate (the dinner plate, that is), but statistics continue to show that many men are not doing that reliably. Survey after survey reveal that unemployed/underemployed working class males (and middle-class males as well), as a group, do not contribute much to the family, financially or logistically, and this is why so many working class women have decided not to marry. It is simply too much work for her, and she knows it. We all have limits to our energy levels.

Does Murray think these women are stupid, or just immoral? Most of them have seen female friends, relatives, and coworkers go through the agony of finding a suitable husband/boyfriend and fail. Rather than contribute to the family unit, a shameful percentage of men suck out all the emotional energy, money and time from it, and women of all classes have become understandably wary. It's not some figment of women's imagination -- it's a real problem. It started when women entered the workforce and found out, to their dismay, that most husbands did not pull their weight in the domestic sphere. Women overlooked this, rationalizing that he worked at a decent job and contributed that way (even though she worked, too), but now, he doesn't even have a job? And he won't watch the kids or make dinner every day, like housewives did in the 50's? What, exactly, would be the purpose of marrying someone like this? To provide a bad example for the male children in the family and a worse example for the female children in the family?

Like I said, women aren't stupid, and Murray's crap about how "family norms" are horrible in the working class should be treated like the shite it is -- it was totally caused by the elite's destruction of decent-paying union-type jobs in this country. Women will accept men who work full time, even if they don't do a lick around the house, although it's not ideal. IMHO, Murray and his bunch should be tarred and feathered. AND run out of town on a rail.

[HiPointDem]

4. Study of various historical 'underclasses' shows one of the predictable tactics of capital

is to undermine the economic & social power bases of the oppressed/'colonized', including the economic bases of family structure through which the next generation is molded and educated. The intent was to atomize all structure and organization which could be a basis for resistance. And this is rather clearly stated in historical documents, for example documents of the colonial period.

The black working class in the US experienced it earlier than the white working class; black working-class men were the first casualties of deindustrialization.

And if you don't have a narrative which counters the narrative promoted by people like Murray, as well as other narratives which misidentify who/what the 'oppressor' is, you are likely to get caught up in all sorts of shite -- destroying your own, destroying yourself, destroying your community.

[Nay]

5. Exactly. They are doing to the white underclass just what they did to the black underclass --

they know that women will have little recourse but to divest themselves of partners who cannot (or who refuse to) carry their weight, and that large numbers of men, culturally unwilling to do anything nontraditional, will simply stand on street corners and get into trouble. That way, the 1% can send in the cops and bust up the community. It would be nice if individuals could recognize that this was going on and change themselves to meet that challenge, but humans don't seem to be able to step away from cultural conditioning very well, and certainly not in large numbers, until some sort of major tipping point is reached.

[HiPointDem]

6. i don't think that it's really "culturally unwilling". i think it's a bit more complicated. when

one has an accepted 'high-class' status, one is not 'declassed' or 'unmanned' by doing what are defined as female or low-status tasks by the larger society (not just one's subculture).

In the same way, if I'm comfortably middle-class, i can do volunteer work which might involve cleaning toilets (as i once did) and not feel my status, identity, power threatened by it in the way that someone might when that was the only work they could get, and it paid shit as well.

There's a reason that 'respect' is such a powerful nexus of meaning in low-income communities. This week in the middle of the night i was awoken by one of the local (white) tweakers screaming at his girlfriend on the street in front of my house: "You don't fucking respect me!.... etc etc. repeated over and over).

Well, no, I wouldn't respect him either, but one of the reasons he's so touchy about it is because he has nothing to hang a sense of self-respect on, & being, as he perceives it, 'under the thumb' of women with more income makes it worse whereas if he had other pegs for his self-respect & identity it wouldn't so much.

I think 'respect' is a key component of people's identity, and it's perverted more and more as society becomes more unequal, with really awful social consequences.

[Nay]

7. I still think 'culturally unwilling' fits, though, because doing women's work seems to make men

feel unmanned, and that's a cultural dictate from larger society. And yes, your neighbor who feels disrespected doesn't deserve much respect because he has done nothing to deserve it, but it's sad that he, and most other men, feel that respect must be demanded from women in the form of deference from women no matter how he acts and no matter what he yells. There are a lot of these guys around, and they need to be put to work on something worthwhile. It's disturbing that they hate being 'under the thumb' of women, yet feel no uneasiness when they themselves want women 'under their thumb.' Just another reason why women, if they have a choice, get divorced or decide not to marry.

[HiPointDem]

9. I think it's a mistake to view things exclusively through the lens of male/female, because the

meaning of male/female is itself conditioned by larger forces. The meaning of male/female including the woman feeling a man is a dead loss if he can't adequately provide & she has liberty to treat him as less than (which women do, I've done it myself) and including the man feeling that he is 'under the thumb of a woman' when pressured to provide in the context of a failed economy, which is the real problem.

A larger analysis sweeps away this level of self-destructive personal pettiness and focuses on real social material conditions for mutual benefit. It also sweeps away socially self-destructive mythology (like the stereotype of the 'rebel,' the 'artist,' the 'criminal' and all such mythologies which offer alluring but often dead-end alternatives when one is frustrated with standard narratives of identity).

The aim of the ruling class is to atomize all social formations of the working class that can provide bulwark against capital, and that includes the relationships between man and woman.

[Nay]

10. I think you have to look at the micro AND the macro. Most people just trying to get along in

the micro (who are the people I have been referring to) have to do whatever is necessary to preserve their sanity and the health of their families, no matter what some 1%ers have decided to do.

Individuals are not going to be influencing the macro EXCEPT by making individual choices that work for them in the here and now. If that means women straining to finish college, staying in oppressive jobs out of a sense of family responsibility, and having children without a man around, that's what will happen. If it means divorcing men who don't have work AND have the nerve to slack off at home while the wife's at work, that's what will happen. Talk about getting no respect! Maybe unemployed men would get the respect they crave if they simply did all the chores, childcare, and cooking they would expect from a wife who stayed home...without the man acting like such things are beneath him... just a thought! If the last 40 years of women's liberation hasn't even gotten a majority of men to realize that women are human, and that traditional women's work won't give men cooties, then the divide still remains between men and women outside of any 1%er shenanigans. If we are to present a solid wall of opposition to the 1%ers, it seems to me that men are the ones who have to heal this divide. I don't know what else women can do.

Although I'm a big proponent of healthy two-parent families that raise well-adjusted children, I don't think that's the be-all and end-all of culture. In fact, one positive (but unanticipated) result of the female head of household trend is that it helps break the back of male supremacy in relationships. It's just too bad it seems to take a whole breakdown of society before women can walk in the world as equal humans. And still your tweaker neighbor doesn't get it, and hollers for respect. Sadly, I don't think he is unusual.

Women, IMHO, are forcing the hand of at least one historically oppressive agent -- men who traditionally held women hostage with the male paycheck and male-only access to decent jobs. Granted, it's because the 1% has decided to impoverish everyone for their own gain, but that's not women's fault. In fact, it is overwhelmingly the fault of -- wealthy men.

It will indeed be a hard row to hoe to get your average Joe to even recognize his real enemy -- wealthy men -- because Joe really wants to BECOME a wealthy man, not shoot other wealthy men. If gun-totin' Joe really knew who his enemy was, there'd be a lot more dead bankers and a lot fewer dead wives/girlfriends/children. And that's a sad fact.

Back in the days of unions, Wobblies, and socialist parties, your average guy knew exactly who the enemy was because his culture told him. Until that union culture reassembles itself and provides a larger analysis and aggressive narrative to Joe so he can figure out who the bad guy is, he will be adrift. But hey, first Joe has to stop salivating over his worship of extreme individual self-reliance to even vote 'yes' to a union....how's that going?

I'm really not trying to be snarky, HiPoint. We agree on almost everything. I just don't see any compelling larger analysis out there, and even if one takes hold, I don't believe women will all of a sudden get respect and equal standing for their efforts to hold things together.

[HiPointDem]

12. "EXCEPT by making individual choices that work for them in the here and now". the choices

that work for any given individual here and now are a product of many variables, but one important one is that individual's conception of their identity & of what 'the world' is and how it works.

i'm not trying to be snarky either, and i think we do mostly agree, but i'm reading your analysis (forgive me if i'm mistaken ) as kind of essentialist. which is a way of looking at things, but not the only one.

[Nay]

13. If by essentialist you mean that men and women have definite characteristics that will always

make them different from one another in every individual case, I hesitate to agree with that. I know so many women who could easily be men and so many men who to me act and react mostly as a woman would. I'm no sociologist, but I have to believe a lot of the so-called differences between men and women are enforced by whatever society we are in. There probably are essential differences between men and women, but societal pressure warps us to the degree that we would have a hard time decoding what those essential differences are. We are seeing massive pressures on whole groups of humans, pressures that use our gender to jerk us around. Most people never make that connection, so it looks like they are acting 'male' or acting 'female' when they are truly just two different groups of humans being manipulated by other factions in society.

Thank you for the wonderful discussion! It's been a rare pleasure. I have so enjoyed it.

[HiPointDem]

14. likewise.

[mythology]

16. You both forgot the name calling and insulting

That was a wonderful back and forth. Thank you both, I enjoyed reading it and you both made me think.

[HiPointDem]

17. easy to forget it when one's co-discussant doesn't lead with it.

[Nay]

21. It is, isn't it? I tend to bug out of threads that get nasty, as so many of them do. Again, I have

really enjoyed our sedate discussion. May DU have many more!

[redqueen]

8. This is the kind of post that makes me wish I could rec individual posts.

K&R for the thread and this, too, which should be an OP.

[Nay]

11. Well, thanks.

When I read interesting essays like the one HiPtDem posted, I just have to discuss certain findings that interest me. I think it's hysterical that researchers are surprised that women have dumped marriage as they become financially independent. It's not that women hate men -- they don't. They just won't hang on to a tradition that has become harmful to them personally. In that way, women ARE different from men. Men will hang on to the stupidest things, just out of ideology, because they get some sort of feeling of superiority or control from it. Until they can let go of that attitude, I don't see things changing much. Researchers discuss men's reactions as if humans can never change, when right in front of them they have proof that humans can make dramatic changes! It's just that the human that is making the bold change is female -- and thus they can't even pay attention long enough to realize that.

Honestly, it's the cooties.

[HiPointDem]

15. "dumping marriage," though, isn't an unalloyed 'good,' just better than the alternative -- maybe,

sometimes. & it doesn't mean they dump men -- what it's often liable to mean is that they cycle through a lot of bad/unstable/dysfunctional relationships.

low-income females aren't 'making the bold change,' change is being forced on them by way of changes in the economic landscape. as a result, they are rearing children with fewer resources than their parents and grandparents had (less money & less family support), and that's the new normal in the world their children inhabit.

high-income females get married and tend to stay married, and their children tend to grow up within a constellation of people they can count on to be there for them.

you seem to be celebrating this bifurcation?

[Nay]

19. Not celebrating it, no, because I think kids do so much better with an intact family.

dumping marriage isn't an "unalloyed good" at all -- I can't speak for low-income females because I'm not one, but if I put myself into their shoes mentally I wouldn't be able to come up with a good reason to marry the men available to me. The fact that the LIF doesn't just go ahead and marry anyway, as she would have done, say, in the 1940's, is the big change. Sure, women married low-life men back then, too, but as you say, families stepped in and helped because people lived near their families. And there was serious pressure on men from the local community to straighten up. Now, for working-class young men, we have rap culture! It's the perfect storm of shit! I have often maintained that we no longer have a culture in the US, but a commercial replica of one. And this commercial culture exists not to form a society that works, more or less, for the humans in it, but to extract the most cash from everyone's pocket. That is not a sustainable way of running a society, and it has all sorts of bad effects.

You're perfectly right about dumping marriage but not dumping men. That cycling in and out of boyfriends definitely isn't a good thing. I don't know how you'd fix that, other than focus on a full-employment society so men could be more stable and be more marriageable. Tragically, I don't see that happening in my lifetime.

I don't know why high-income females get married and stay married, other than they can see that 2 incomes are better than one, and the kids and family unit are put first in the minds of both the parents. Have there been any studies on why people in this income category stay married? Could it simply be that divorce would severely hurt both their lifestyles? That would be a kinda crass reason to stay married, but....historically, money bought you the best wife you could afford, and that was that. Maybe high-income parents focus on helping their kids, and as long as their relationship is not of the throwing-plates variety, they muddle along? It would be interesting to find out.

[Fumesucker]

18. Women hold on to high income men

It's the low income men that are worthless.

[Nay]

20. Low-income men are not always bad marriage partners; Mr Nay and I are high-income, and we know

several couples where the woman is the high earner and the man earns much, much less (one is a local musician, one is an artist who sells on Etsy, etc.) but picks up a majority of the housework, kid's dr appts., etc., because he essentially works part-time. That, to me, is a fine way to distribute the workload, and it proves that at least some men are willing to do what it takes to hang on to a high-income woman.

Now, it is true that these high-income women did not marry low CLASS men; they were all college-educated and from middle class homes. That may have a lot to do with why they react as they do to the idea of being a 'house husband.' HiPointDem is probably on the money when she noted that LIM who never were middle class, never got an education, etc., have an additional problem of low self-worth that makes them walk around demanding respect, services from women, etc. High-paid factory jobs MUST come back for these guys, IMHO.

The difference with the low-income men in the article is that they don't seem to have that mindset. They think that they should be able to sit at home, do nothing (or, disturbingly, make more messes), and wait for the wife to come home and clean up/cook dinner. The studies cited report that men who are unemployed do LESS work around the house than men who work full-time! What makes some low-income men bad marriage prospects is their entitled attitude, not necessarily their low income. In fact, in Rothschild's book "The Second Shift," she interviews a black low-income couple where he was unemployed and had taken over the house, she goes to work, and they are very happy. Women certainly aren't opposed to this sort of arrangement; but there does have to be an acknowledgement by BOTH parties to a marriage that it is indeed a partnership, not a master/slave relationship.

[Fumesucker]

30. Evidently you are now changing your tune..

These are the words you wrote before..

Survey after survey reveal that unemployed/underemployed working class males (and middle-class males as well), as a group, do not contribute much to the family, financially or logistically, and this is why so many working class women have decided not to marry.

I note that you included middle class males in that, now in your last post you tell me it's not middle class males.

You really should make up your mind who you're trying to bash.

[YoungDemCA]

26. +1000

It's not a fair fight: the deck is stacked against working-class people (both male and female).

[galileoreloaded]

29. i've got a great idea...

lets just completely marginalize men and set up "wet dress shirt" contests where contestants can douse themselves in water so women can judge the size of their ...ahem contribution, ahem i'm sorry wallet.... and we can derive all their value by quantifying their ability to provide resources.

or....as a smart man with something to offer in 2013 does.....have a family without a woman. you reap what you sow...

men adapt

[senseandsensibility]

3. I read the whole article

and it is both fascinating and depressing. I'm glad that this was written and it needs to be talked about more. I would like to see this discussed on Ed's new week-end show. The situation is ruining lives.

[PopeOxycontinI]

22. Nothing surprising here...

Conservatives "family values" talk has always been belied by both their economics policies
and their own sex scandals. They are a bunch of hypocritical snotty sadistic
Victorian schoolmasters straight out of a Dickens novel. They also may honestly be
stupid enough or living in a thick enough bubble that they do not see the disconnect.

But as far as unemployed men who have the gall to be unwilling to do housework...um where the hell are they
finding these people? I would not mind being a "househusband" who makes dinner and cleans up
as long as the wife did not go out of her way to make me feel like less of a man for it. As far as kids go,
I never wanted those. And this is one reason low-income people should have easy access to birth control.
Love or marriage when you are low-income is one thing...actually allowing you to pool resources.
Kids, though, makes for a shitstorm.

[hedgehog]

23. Or, as the late, great Daniel Patrick Moynihan got into trouble for saying -

From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history; a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future -- that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder -- most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure -- that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable. And it is richly deserved.

The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965)

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Daniel_Patrick_Moynihan

[HiPointDem]

24. nothing to do with anything the late unlamented pat moynihan ever said.

[YoungDemCA]

27. Community issues are a product of economic circumstances...

Not the other way around.

This needs to be stressed.

[hedgehog]

28. I think Moynihan saw it as a chicken and egg problem or feed-back loop - which enraged people

on all sides of the political spectrum.