Republicans who claim to want stable, happy families should strive to provide what strong partnerships actually need—like financial stability, gender equality and parental support.
This story originally appeared on Jill.substack.com, a newsletter from journalist, lawyer and author Jill Filipovic.
There are a great many differences between blue America and red America, and between Democratic voters and Republican ones. The Democratic base has long been racially diverse, and is increasingly college-educated, secular, urban and female. The Republican base is overwhelmingly white and largely male (although Trump has made a bit of progress with Black and Hispanic men), much more religious (mostly white evangelical Christian), less educated and more rural.
And while married people—and especially married men—are more likely to vote Republican, the Americans with the most stable family set-ups tend to be members of the Democratic base, and live in blue states.
Conservative politicians are complaining about childless cat ladies, declining marriage rates, unstable families and single-parent households. Their strategy so far has been to ban abortion, offer families no real support, do nothing to help struggling Americans find greater financial stability, promote a deeply misogynistic worldview to young men, and then yell at young women that they need to get married and have babies. Shockingly, this is not working very well.
If Republicans want stability for children and healthier American families—not just patriarchal hierarchies, from the family up to the presidency—they should take note.
On the other side, liberals have de-emphasized marriage and the nuclear family as the primary organizing unit for society, while offering women and men alike more choices about when, how and if to start families, and more support if they do. And while marriage and childbearing rates are down generally, the prototypical Democratic voter—the college-educated woman working for pay, in or near a large city in a blue state—is more likely to find herself in a happy, stable marriage than the prototypical Republican voter.
This isn’t a coincidence; it’s a product of real policy choices, as much as social and cultural norms. And if Republicans want stability for children and healthier American families—not just patriarchal hierarchies, from the family up to the presidency—they should take note. Because there are a few things that make the marriages of educated liberals so strong, and none of them are that college-educated liberals are somehow naturally more committed or stable or moral or fit for marriage.
The reasons college-educated liberals tend to have more stable marriages could be more broadly offered to everyone: financial stability and opportunity; gender parity; and a culture of optional parenthood, paired with deep obligation toward children who are brought into the world.
Financial Stability
In the United States, marriage is increasingly a middle- and upper-class institution, and having children within the confines of marriage is increasingly tied to money and education.
It’s an undeniable fact that children raised in two-parent married households tend to do better than children raised in single-parent households. But a big part of that comes down to time and money: Two parents have double the time to spend with their kids, double the resources, and double the earning potential. Of course kids do better when there are two deeply-invested adults caring for them; of course they do better when their parents aren’t struggling to keep the lights on or keep food on the table, and can pay for things like tutors and summer camp and high-quality childcare.
But that’s not the only way that financial stability—which is strongly tied to education—works in favor of marriage and children. When a couple is not constantly stressed out about money, there’s less for them to fight about; when fundamental needs are met, couples are better able to focus on building their relationship and attending to their children’s many non-material (emotional, educational, psychological) needs.
Financial stress—and poverty in particular—short-circuits the brain, making it much more difficult to think long-term. That’s disastrous if part of what you’re trying to do is build a long-term partnership and maintain a functional family unit. Poverty doesn’t just mean an empty bank account; it often means an empty emotional well, and a diminished ability to manage conflict and weather other stressors.
Outside of fairly small very religious communities, marriage has also been overwhelmingly recast as a capstone of adult life rather than a cornerstone: something you do once you’re financially stable and adult enough. For those with college degrees, most also see marriage as something you do before you have children, and this is pretty rational: Delaying childbearing until after marriage, and delaying marriage until one feels fully launched as an adult, gives a person time to figure out who they are before attaching themselves to someone else, maximizes earning potential, and sets up parenthood (a difficult endeavor no matter what) to be minimally arduous, given the presence of two stable mutually invested adults.
But if financial stability seems unlikely to ever come, and if the other adults you could pair up with bring more burden and chaos than usefulness and steadiness, then the incentives look very different. Why not, then, have a child—something that will bring a sense of purpose and adulthood that isn’t easily found elsewhere? Why not do it whenever one feels ready, and especially when one is still young enough that one’s parents can help out, rather than holding out for a decent, stable man who may never materialize?
Financial stress short-circuits the brain, making it much more difficult to think long-term. That’s disastrous if part of what you’re trying to do is build a long-term partnership and maintain a functional family unit.
Part of this is cultural: Sexism and entitlement are chief reasons so many men are such unsuitable partners (more on that below). But I suspect that part of why college-educated men tend to be slightly more egalitarian and feminist-minded in their marriages is that they have many sources of purpose and identity, and their ability to find dignified, respected, male-coded, decently paid work (a cornerstone of masculine identity across class lines) doesn’t feel threatened. They can, in other words, afford to be magnanimous.
And yet it’s not the pro-marriage GOP that is pushing policies that would provide greater financial stability for families. The same Republicans who claim to want strong marriages also argue that individuals have to pull themselves up; the GOP routinely opposes all manner of poverty-alleviation programs, favoring instead tax cuts for the rich.
If you want people to feel stable enough to get married in the first place, and if you want women to have a pool of marriageable men, and if you want those marriages to last, people cannot feel financially out of control. They need to be able to provide the basics—food, housing, healthcare—for themselves and their kids.
This isn’t just out of reach for far too many Americans. It’s out of reach for a higher proportion of Americans in Republican-run states, where poverty rates (including child poverty rates) are higher, health outcomes are worse, and many more people are struggling.
Gender Parity
One argument you often hear from conservatives is that feminists destroyed marriage—and they’re not totally wrong.
Feminists did indeed argue that marriage should not be the primary organizing unit for society; that women should not be subsumed into male heads of household they married; that it should be easier for women to leave bad and especially abusive marriages; and that marriage should be optional and not legally or socially compulsory. Feminists also armed women with a much greater ability to provide for themselves, which in turn freed women up to decide whether they wanted to marry or not.
(Editor’s note: Readers may also like “Click! The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” from Ms.’ first issue in Spring 1972.)
In my view, this made marriage much better: Instead of being economically and socially coercive, marriage could be centered around love and relationship-building, one way to choose to move through the world in tandem with a beloved, not a necessity to avoid starvation, deprivation, and isolation.
One result of this is that the marriages that do exist are better for those in them. Another result is that there are fewer marriages. We’ve collectively defaulted to quality over quantity.
But that’s partly because women on the lower end of the educational and economic spectrum really struggle to find quality men who see and treat them as equals. Among wealthier and better-educated Americans, ideas around gender parity are more widely accepted; money also means that couples who might have conflicts over things like the gendered division of childcare or household labor can afford to outsource it and keep the peace. But it is true that college-educated dads, for example, spend much more time with their kids than dads without college degrees, even though college-educated dads are more likely to be employed and to work longer hours.
That isn’t because non-college educated dads are bad, inherently sexist people, or because college-educated men are mostly enlightened feminists (they are … definitely not). But it is the case that when people feel threatened, they tend to retreat into more conservative positions, and a lot of working-class white men are pretty upfront about the fact that they feel threatened by both outsiders and women (whether those feelings are grounded in reality is a different question).
Conservatives, too, have created a culture of misogyny and one in which male purpose and identity are tied to dominance and gender hierarchy. It’s no surprise that the men steeped in this culture wind up as pretty sexist, and that when they don’t even bring what they claim is their obligation to the table (provision), many of the women around them—including and perhaps especially those who share their views on gender roles—don’t find them particularly appealing, at least not when it comes to marriage.
The prototypical Democratic voter is more likely to find herself in a happy, stable marriage than the prototypical Republican voter.
I know it’s extremely uncool to mention Sheryl Sandberg these days, but one point she’s often made is that who a woman marries is among the most important career decisions of her life. And that is 100 percent absolutely correct. But the math does not work out: There are not equal numbers of men and women who want supportive, egalitarian relationships in which the men do their fair share of the labor at home; there are even fewer men who will still strive for equality when the going gets tough and they have to make sacrifices to get there. Wealthier couples may be able to paper over these inequities with paid domestic labor. Struggling ones don’t have that luxury.
One conservative project has been to convince women that we’re wrong for wanting more and expecting better. The theory seems to go that if we just yell at women enough, or shame them out of out-of-wedlock pregnancies, then they’ll get married and all will be good. But we’re where we are culturally because all has not been good. And in my view, far too many women still have far too low of expectations when it comes to their male partners. I don’t see a universe in which women roll back our own ambitions and expectations just so we can marry men who provide very little tangibly or emotionally. Frankly, it’s men who need to change.
But again, it’s conservatives who push the traditional gender roles that are, outside of conservative religious communities, making men intolerable marital partners, and making women unwilling to marry them.
Parenthood Is Optional, but the Obligations are Greater
One thing that perhaps best categorizes liberal college-educated parenting norms is chosen parenthood, which often means very-delayed parenthood. The average age of first birth has risen dramatically across the U.S., owing in large part to big decreases in teen pregnancy. In liberal metropolises, the rise has been even more dramatic. If you’re a college-educated woman in New York or San Francisco, it’s much more likely that you’re having a baby after your 30th birthday than before, say, your 25th. Pregnancy in your late 30s or early 40s is less “geriatric” than “normal enough to not even merit comment.”
Nationwide, most people do still have children, but a growing number do not. In liberal college-educated enclaves children are had later in life and are carefully planned—by using birth control, by ending unwanted or mistimed pregnancies, and often by using fertility medicine. And abortion really is part of the calculus here. While lower-income women are much more likely than wealthier women to have abortions generally, that’s because they are much more likely to get pregnant unintentionally. Among higher-income women (and among young women in college or who are college educated), unintended pregnancies are much rarer, but these women are more likely to opt for abortion when those unintended pregnancies occur, especially if they occur when these women are young.
Better-educated and higher-income women have fewer children and have them later, but those children tend to do much better—they have better outcomes, and they have many more resources devoted to them, including parents who spend more time with them. This, too, is basic math: Fewer kids means more time, money and other resources that can be devoted to each one. Wealthier families both have a larger resource pie to divide up, and by virtue of having fewer kids, can give each child a larger share.
And so a big part of this also goes back to money. But part of it is also cultural. College-educated liberals don’t tend to think of childbearing as an obligation, and having a big family does not usually bring with it significant social rewards; it’s just a pain in the ass, and a recipe for not doing right by your kids. There is a social expectation that parents will invest in their children; that by bringing kids into the world, the parents owe those kids their best, and no one can do their best for each of six, seven, eight or more children. The obligations run one way—from parent to child—and because children are a choice, the responsibilities are high and what parents owe their children fairly expansive.
But if you see the obligation as not toward your individual children’s wellbeing but toward insuring their existence as a service to God—the view held by most conservative religious traditions—then of course you’re not going to invest as much in each child, or worry about whether having another child is responsible or financially feasible. Of course you’ll be willing to pawn off caring for the youngest children on the oldest; of course this view also tends to dovetail with authoritarian and often cruel and sometimes abusive parenting techniques that simply favor keeping kids in line rather than helping them thrive as individuals. The obligation is in the bearing and begetting.
The problem with this view is that it’s fallen out of favor across class lines. Working-class parents also want to be able to invest significant resources in their children, and being told, Don’t worry about it, it’ll all work out, it’s God’s plan, sounds pretty hollow to everyone outside of the dwindling number of the extremely devout. But this remains the Republican message, in both word and policy.
Abortion is banned across Republican-led states. These same states have made no effort to expand contraception access (and in some states they’ve curtailed it); they have made no effort to pass paid leave laws or fund high-quality childcare or do anything to allow more adults to make the reproductive choices that most people now want, which is children when they’re ready and significant investments in each of them. It is, again, liberals who have fought for the policies that allow people to become parents by choice, not by force, and to raise their children with greater resources in safe communities—to meet the obligations that many parents (in my view rightly) feel toward the beings they bring into the world. But right now, it’s really only people with resources in liberal states who can easily live out that ideal.
Feminist Marriages Are Better Marriages. Conservatives Should Promote Them.
It’s worth saying here that I’m personally glad marriage is not the only game in town anymore, and I don’t believe that a child must be born into a married two-parent household in order to thrive. Unlike many conservatives, I don’t think marriage is ideal simply because God said so (did she?) or because I take it as a given that marriage is ideal because it’s been the traditional way; I think there are a lot of ways of organizing society and family that could work well, and that the kinds of traditional, patriarchal heterosexual marriages conservatives promote have historically been pretty bad deals for most women and a lot of men, too.
But I do believe that people need people, that we need deep and lasting ties to other people, and that marriage is one very effective way of creating those ties. Marriage should not be the only way to build a family or the only socially accepted relationship within which to raise children. But I think if you take sexism out of it—admittedly hard to do!—marriage is a pretty good option to keep on the menu.
Getting married often creates a psychological sense of permanency in addition to a legal one; it culturally registers as the end of seeking out other romantic and sexual options, and the beginning of building a deeply committed pair-bonded relationship. Marriage assumes and helps create a sexual bond, a romantic bond, a financial bond and a friendship bond. Obviously not every marriage looks the same (not every marriage is monogamous or permanent or sexual or romantic or a whole slew of other things). But as a general rule, marriage in its modern liberal form encourages two people who love each other to tie their financial lives together, to have sex for pleasure (and sometimes for procreation), to see each other as best friends, to devote their romantic feelings primarily or solely to their spouse, and to see themselves as part of a unit—a third thing that is bigger than each individual. Marriage stretches us emotionally and relationally; the legally binding nature of marriage encourages us to put aside the disposable-relationship culture of “this no longer serves me” and to instead seek to build and maintain a profound kind of love that isn’t just a spark of emotion, but a devotional life-long practice. A good marriage, I believe, isn’t simply a relationship you are in; it is a space you create and fortify and shelter within.
That is powerful stuff.
Is the problem really marriage? Or is the problem the misogynist men who too many women marry, and subcultures that suggest misogyny and unequal marriages are not just okay, but desirable?
It’s also not the only relationship within which these lessons can be found. And it’s not exactly the stuff of traditional marriage, which was more of an economic arrangement and patriarchal reproduction than anything else. Tons of marriages still look like these traditional ones, even as they also take on the trappings of romance and friendship and mutual devotion and even feminism. A lot of marriages sound pretty miserable, more about power and control and performance than two individuals choosing to merge their lives without ceding themselves, and without defaulting to pre-determined roles that have little to do with any individual’s actual strengths or weaknesses.
This is something I thought of often when reading the many reviews and responses to the various divorce books that came out earlier this year, especially Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex Wife. Reading about her gender traditional marriage to a conservative Christian who she knew was an anti-feminist who had no intentions of entering into an equal partnership and how divorcing him (good for her!) led her to conclude that marriage is a crap institution, I kept thinking: Is the problem really marriage? Or is the problem the misogynist men who too many women marry, and subcultures that suggest misogyny and unequal marriages are not just okay, but desirable?
The task as I see it is not to get everyone married. It’s to allow more people to enter into the marriages they want, if they want.
Marriage are more egalitarian than ever, but that isn’t really saying much.
Overwhelmingly, women still take their husbands’ names when they marry, quite literally ceding their individual identity to his; even those who don’t take his name usually find that when they have kids, the patriarchal naming conventions return and the kid gets dad’s name.
Overwhelmingly, when one half of a married couple drops out of the workforce, it’s the woman, and overwhelmingly, the wage-earning partner does not actually see her contributions as equal to his no matter what words come out of his mouth (just ask any stay-at-home mom who has ever gone through a divorce whether her ex truly valued her labor and his equally, when it came time to put an actual value on that labor).
Overwhelmingly, women do more of the at-home and child-related labor than their male partners, a dynamic that explains much of the gender pay gap.
Most Americans still aspire to get married. And declining marriage rates have not been countered by significant upticks in other social arrangements, with the exception of more young adults living with their parents (and even that has not come close to paralleling marital declines). It’s not that people are forgoing marriage but creating other lasting ties. People are forgoing marriage, and they’re just more alone. And that’s why I am, to my great surprise, something of a marriage evangelist, because I am more broadly a deep human connection evangelist: I think creating a familial, romantic tie to another human being is a gorgeous and powerful thing, and could provide tremendous benefits for many, many people.
But that requires not just having a person, any person, to tie oneself to; it requires a pool of people who envision a similar kind of relationship. And it requires having the tools to make that relationship work.
To be clear, even with all the resources on offer, we are not going to go back to a nation in which nearly all adults get married and nearly all children are born within the confines of marriage. That cultural ship has sailed, and I don’t think that’s an inherently bad thing. The task as I see it is not to get everyone married. It’s to allow more people to enter into the marriages they want, if they want; to make relationships better for the people in them, no matter what those relationships look like; to build more opportunities for connection and creative and novel family formations well outside of the traditional nuclear mold; and to create more stable foundations for children, who have no say into which circumstances they are born.
The college-educated liberals who have among the nation’s most successful marriages aren’t thriving because they’re morally, intellectually or constitutionally superior to everyone else. The factors that have made marriage more stable for this cohort can be shared more broadly, and doing so would have enormous benefits for the married and unmarried alike—but that would require pro-marriage conservatives to decide they care more about the well-being of families and children than shaming the single and defining success as the simple existence of more married couples.
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