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Our unequal, marriageless, feminist future

By Conn Carroll
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The Wall Street Journal published two stories this Labor Day that paint a dark picture of our nation’s future.

The first, “A Generation of American Men Give Up on College,” documents how women now make up 59.5% of college students compared to just 40.5% who are men. Because women also complete college degrees at higher rates than men, the Wall Street Journal reports that “in the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man.”

The second story, “More College-Educated Women are Having Babies Outside Marriage,” reports that “nonmarital childbearing has increased significantly among women of all educational levels” over the past 25 years but that “the sharpest increase has been among women who hold a bachelor’s degree or more.”

These stories are connected. They feed off each other. And they point to a dark future for the American family unless public policy changes drastically.

We’ve known for a long time that the less education a woman has attained, the more likely she is to have children outside of marriage. Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin, the author of the study featured in the second story, wrote this 15 years ago:

A half-century ago, the family structures of poor and nonpoor children were similar: most children lived in two parent families. In the intervening years, the increase in single-parent families has been greater among the poor and near-poor. Women at all levels of education have been postponing marriage, but less-educated women have postponed childbearing less than better-educated women have… Among the less educated, early childbearing outside of marriage has become more common, as the ideal of finding a stable marriage and then having children has weakened, whereas among the better educated, the strategy is to delay childbearing and marriage until after investing in schooling and careers.

With this new study, Cherlin seems to suggest that the family instability that had been confined to less-educated women is now creeping up to the college-educated as well.

But so what?

A majority of Americans (53%), including 73% of Democrats, believe unwed parents can raise children just as well as married couples. If more single women want to start families on their own without a husband, the more power to them. Marriage is, at best, just a tool of the patriarchy designed to control women’s bodies, or worse, a form of racist oppression.

So why should Americans care if more and more families are being formed without husbands?

Well, it turns out that marriage matters. A lot. As MIT economist David Autor and UCLA economist Melanie Wasserman recently noted:

It is widely documented that children of single-parent homes fare worse on a broad range of outcomes relative to children of dual parent homes. In comparison to children living with both biological parents, children living with a single mother score lower on academic achievement tests, have lower grades, have a higher incidence of behavioral problems, and display a greater tendency to engage in risky behaviors such as drug use and criminal activity. Notably, the effects of even relatively short periods of parental absence are detectable in children’s test scores.

But it turns out that the disadvantages of single parenthood don’t affect genders equally. In fact, while girls from single-parent homes seem to have almost equal outcomes to their married parent peers, boys do a lot worse. Autor and Wasserman write:

Although male and female children within a given household are theoretically exposed to the same environment—including schools, neighborhoods, and adult guardians—the increasing prevalence of female-headed households implies that the majority of girls continue to cohabit with their same-sex biological parent who will likely serve as a same-sex role model. By contrast, male children raised in female-headed households are less likely to have a positive male adult household member present that serves an analogous role. A growing body of evidence, summarized below, indicates that the absence of stable fathers from children’s lives has particularly significant adverse consequences for boys’ psychosocial development and educational achievement.

This gap between male and female outcomes from single-parent homes is driving a doom spiral for family formation.

Women understandably want a mate who is at least as educated or has an earning power equal to theirs. But the more single-parent households there are, the fewer of these marriageable men are available for women seeking husbands. The fewer women who can find husbands, the more single-parent households that are formed. The more single-parent households that are formed, the gap between women’s and men’s educational and professional outcomes only gets worse. The greater the gap between men’s and women’s earnings, the more single-parent households that are formed, and on and on.

The end game is a highly unequal and stratified society where only the wealthiest Americans live in married households while the vast majority of Americans either live alone, without any family, or in single-parent households with little to no hope of ever getting ahead.

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