"Get Married" wants you to believe that patriarchy will save you and civilization
Despite all evidence to the contrary, marriage promoters insist: "marry a man and life falls into place."
The author of the new book “Get Married,” who is making rounds in the media right now, argues that the problems created by patriarchal capitalism—poverty, inequality, existential ennui—are best solved by, what else? Men.
Marry a man and life falls into place, he argues. If not, face the consequences of financial ruin, unhappiness, and nothing less than civilizational collapse (hyperbole not mine; the phrase “save civilization” is actually in the book’s subtitle.) Another new book, by economist Melissa Kearney, makes a similar case.
If this sounds like an argument cooked up by right-wing conservatives who want to keep traditional gender roles and patriarchal capitalism in place, that’s exactly what it is.
The author, Brad Wilcox, is professor of sociology and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, an organization that, as the name implies, is dedicated to promoting traditional marriage. Which is not exactly a neutral and scientific approach to the study of “social science.”
Brad Wilcox and his ilk are one of the reasons that I started this newsletter to report better narratives on issues that face women and children, actually. An inspiration, if you will.
Several years ago when I was a full-time reporter covering poverty-related issues I followed major social scientists for interviews, and read their research for stories. And Wilcox’s research often seemed—off. It seemed to leave out evidence, and spin findings one way when they could easily point in another. It seemed biased. Yet, he was one of the biggest—and loudest—names in the field.
I’m not an investigative reporter, but I found pretty easily that his “research” is backed by big money from conservative donors.
His institute, The National Marriage Project, is funded by the very conservative William E. Simon foundation for one, and the the Witherspoon Institute, which funded wonderful projects like the notorious Wilcox/Regnerus research that tried to make spurious claims that children of same-sex couples had more “negative outcomes” in order to undermine same-sex marriage legislation.
(That project has been roundly debunked by peer review, resulted in formal complaints of scientific misconduct, and became a poster child for why private donations to fund research is a bad idea.)
Some of Wilcox’s peers have dedicated blogs to trying to call out, correct, or reject his research, but alas, Wilcox persists. Like patriarchy and oppressive gender role expectations and the right-wing urge to blame society’s problems on women, Wilcox, too, persists.
Other donors include everyone you would expect to fund a message that patriarchy is the solution to our problems: The Hoover Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and other conservative and Christian activist organizations.
In other words, “Get Married”(!) is brought to you by many of the same people that brought us the fall of Roe and instituted abortion bans that force people into giving birth—including children and rape victims.
These are the same kind of people that brought us a Missouri law that doesn’t allow pregnant women to get divorced, and that, last week, halted IVF access in Alabama where frozen embryos in a lab were declared “children” because one justice thinks that a clump of cells outside a human body are “made in god’s image.”
Right-wing Republicans are also now launching an attack on “no fault divorce,” which would force women to stay in marriages that they don’t want to be in.
It used to feel like shaming and benevolent patriarchy were the primary tools to coerce women into patriarchal gender roles. Now I have this haunting feeling that our girls are becoming property of the state as soon as they ovulate.
Which is why “Get Married” at one time would have felt almost cutely out of touch, but now feels a little more sinister.
Wilcox continues his long-time habit of spinning data in “Get Married,” and not in especially new ways.
For example, he claims that marriage will make people happier. Yet this ignores the obvious fact that nearly half of marriages split up, proving that half of people who get married are actually not happier.
In fact, according to the GSS research that he draws from, never-married people are more likely to be very happy (17%) than people who are separated, divorced, or widowed (13%).
The Family Equality Project does a great job of breaking down how Wilcox spins the “happiness” data—essentially the data really only shows that people who are generally happy have happier marriages, but Wilcox tries to use this to argue that things are the other way around—that marriage is what creates the happiness for these generally happy people.
“Get Married” also ignores clear recent research that marriage benefits men more than women. Married fathers receive an earnings boost while mothers receive a penalty receiving significantly less pay and fewer promotions. Women are disproportionately likely to end marriages, in part because even if they work outside the home, research shows women still do hours more of the housework while married men enjoy more leisure time.
Marriage promotion leaves out the stats showing that men abuse their female partners in the U.S. in startlingly high numbers—1 in 4 women report abuse from their partners, and 1 in 7 are injured, according to National Statistics on Domestic violence. Wilcox leaves out that heterosexual partnership is a key driver of homicide: 72% of all murder-suicides involve an intimate partner; 94% of the victims of these murder suicides are female.
In this light, marriage doesn’t seem like the rosy proposition that marriage-promoters try to spin. This is in keeping with Wilcox’s entire body of work, which never seems to be interested in the real lives of women and children.
When I was a reporter, Wilcox and his institute released research on how fertility rates were down. The problem is that young women are just waiting too long to have kids, was one of their findings. “Too hedonistic” Wilcox wrote about young women in the study. Women should have kids younger!
But why are young women waiting longer, I wondered. I noticed that their own research contained data that indicated that many women said they wanted more children than they were able to have—could it be that some chose not to have children for personal reasons (“hedonistic” as Wilcox says; I say yay for them). But others were held back by structural issues like high cost of living and lack of necessary services like healthcare and childcare that are available to parents in other wealthy countries?
I messaged the institute. Hmm, they noted. Interesting. That is a curious detail that could merit more research.
That was their whole answer—and they did not seem interested in doing this further research themselves. They had conveniently left out any data they found that pointed to structural problems, and that didn’t conveniently fit into a narrative of enforcing traditional gender roles.
And this is why Wilcox and marriage-promoters in general irk me—because they have not been in the service of actually solving the critical and urgent structural problems that families face, they have only been in the service of helping conservative narratives that derail progress on those problems.1
So, I started writing the kinds of pieces that I publish in this newsletter to counter these narratives, made by people who don’t seem to be in touch with what families and caregivers and younger people, especially women, are going through. And sometimes don’t seem to care.
In fact, I would argue that the conservative-backed researchers like Wilcox are harming children and families by selling false individual solutions—personal choices like marriage and whether to have children—as solutions to serious systemic problems like child poverty and educational access.
The old “Get Married” arguments undermine progress by trying to blame parents for large-scale inequality (remember the old “welfare queens” and “single moms” arguments?), and keeps families and kids hungry and struggling instead of advocating for the basic necessary services that allow families to thrive. Marriage-pushers would rather push gender roles than feed and clothe kids.
Let’s take a look at how Wilcox makes his case for marriage in his recent book-promoting article for the Atlantic, for example. He begins by noting that “73 percent of students at elite colleges nationally were born to married parents.”
He tells us that “Single-mother homes are are five times more likely to be poor than kids raised in married homes.” And that young men raised in single parent homes, according to his research, are “more likely to land in jail than graduate from college.”
Or, said another way: evidence shows that rich kids have much better outcomes than poor kids in the U.S., and kids that have more money (two incomes from two parents) do better.
This is not news.
Wilcox tries to recast well-known problems of structural inequality as a problem of “marriage”—when it’s a matter of money, policies that provide necessary services to families, and allocating resources.
There is a proven solution to child poverty and inequality that is evidence-driven and straightforward—the U.S. all but eliminated child poverty during the pandemic with small cash transfers for parents. No one knows this better than a professional sociologist, but again, marriage-pushers would rather push gender roles than feed and clothe kids.
Likewise, if college is so expensive that only those with double incomes can send their kids, let’s invest to bring down the cost of college.
If only kids from double-income families are getting into elite colleges, let’s invest in public schools so it’s not just families with double incomes who can afford to live in good school zones and get a good education (as research shows), while those with less money are left with failing schools.
If raising children is so expensive in the U.S. that it sends single parents into poverty (having a child is the biggest predictor for bankruptcy for women), let’s have ready access to birth control and abortion, and affordable healthcare and subsidized childcare, like other wealthy nations.
If boys raised by single parents (read—households with less money) are more likely to land in jail, let’s bring back the small cash transfers that eliminate child poverty—to make sure that children are fed and housed for proper brain development, and are less likely to land in foster care or eventually jail.
Wilcox offers you none of these things in the article—he doesn’t even mention most of them and glosses over others, as though the structural problems don’t exist. Nothing to see here! He glides to door #4: Marriage! Your pathway to having a double income and avoiding abject poverty that could easily be avoided by other means!
Years ago, journalist Katherine Boo wrote an iconic piece for the New Yorker on “The Marriage Cure,” a real government experiment that took place about 20 years ago. This so-called “marriage cure” was an initiative by the Bush administration that proposed marriage-promotion programs nationwide for America’s poor. Specifically these were aimed at the black urban poor, by offering free relationship classes intended to get people to tie the knot as a way to escape poverty, to the tune of $300 million.
Boo follows two hopeful and perky women who take the government up on their offer by regularly attending class, but Boo then details how their day-to-day lives are upended by constant structural failure: one can’t afford a car and is recently unemployed, but she is thwarted in her attempt to find work because city buses pass her by all day because they are too full, or as is often the case in her area of Oklahoma, skip stops in poor neighborhoods. Boo follows her desperate attempts spending hours just trying to get a ride until she’s exhausted and in tears. Another woman can’t afford college for her son with perfect test scores—can “marriage” help her with that?
The whole piece is a detailed account of women trying to hold up the sky for themselves and their children, while the world crumbles around them and offers them nothing but “marriage class.” The marriage cure program failed, and was scuttled shortly after Boo wrote the piece.
This is the real slick cynicism of the “Get Married” narrative. It looks at America’s current landscape, where capitalist forces have created an an economy where people of child-bearing age can’t afford a house, and increasingly can’t afford children or as many children as they want; where Americans have a lower quality of living because patriarchal biases have prevented us from passing laws that make families thrive in other countries—necessary services like subsidized childcare, maternal and child healthcare, and family leave. Then, it tells you that patriarchy, which created many of these problems in the first place, is your only recourse.
“Get married” they say—not because it’s a good policy that allows the most people to thrive, but because we’re not offering anything else. Women better stay in their place, because we will withhold everything we can to make them struggle.
“Get married” starts to feel like: “Get married…or else.”
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Further reading:
The wonderful @Ruby Warrington, author of “Women without Kids” wrote an excellent critique of Melissa Kearney’s new pro-marriage book, “The Two-Parent Privilege”, that you can find here. It’s absolutely worth your time.
Further Reading: Women Need Their Own Damn Money
Further Reading: America can’t afford kids anymore, but we have a chance to change that
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Plus, one time I found a bunch of marriage-promoter male academics tweeting about Wilcox’s fertility rate research, and they went on a long, gee-whiz thread about, did you know that IVF can cost $10k-15K a pop? Wow that’s really expensive, had no idea! Did you know that women usually have to pay out of pocket?!” I texted my editor: THE SO-CALLED FOREMOST SOCIOLOGISTS ON FAMILY RESEARCH DON’T EVEN KNOW THE COST OF FERTILITY TREATMENTS. AAAAAHHH.
I’ve been married for 7 years. Every facet of my life is worse now, especially finances.
Thank you for writing this