Why Marriage Work Reinforces Commitment to Marriage

I propose both structural and cultural explanations for the way women's marriage work reinforces their commitments to marriage. To begin with the structural factors, which appear to be at once simpler and more determinative, women reinforce each other's commitment because they are dependent upon marriage for survival or mobility.

Despite the fact that women increasingly work for pay, their salaries, relative to men's, have remained depressed over several decades. This fact means that marriage is still the best means of economic mobility for women. The median earnings of full-time working women are much closer to the poverty line than to the line of median family income.^[11] For unemployed or low-income women, marriage might be the only decent avenue of survival; public assistance, varying by state, in no state awards even a poverty-level income. Nearly half of all female-headed families live below the federally established (and some argue, unreasonably low) poverty line. And poverty is much greater among minority women: in 1983, 63 percent of families headed by black women lived in poverty.^[12] Moreover, in three out of ten impoverished female-headed households, the mother is employed. The employment ghetto of "women's jobs" and the fastest growing sectors of the employment market feature jobs with low wages, few or no crucial benefits, and short ladders of advancement (increasing numbers are part-time as well)—all conditions that are adding large numbers of women to the ranks of the working poor.^[13]

Thus, for virtually all women, leaving a marriage—or being

left—means economic hardship. Half of divorced mothers do not receive the child support awarded to them, studies project; and the average yearly payment to those who do is around $2,000.^[14] (These figures exclude, of course, the four of ten single mothers who are awarded no child support at all.) To the women I interviewed the gist of these facts is apparent. Many women are in age groups for which nearly haft of all marriages end in divorce. Most have kin or friends who are divorced; and they see their situations clearly. A majority of women stated flatly that their biggest problem if their marriage ended would be economic survival. Several spontaneously mentioned the "lessons" they learned watching divorced friends manage. Only the divorced women, not the married ones, could see anything other than disadvantages in going it alone.

As heads of families and as friends, women experience the economic liabilities of gender. A woman might offer a divorcing friend emotional support, advice, a certain amount of daytime child care, and the like, but probably not money, room, or board. The most violent account of a husband's resentment of his wife's friendship involved an offer of temporary shelter to a divorcing friend. "She had left her husband and needed a place to stay for awhile. . .. Maybe she was intruding, but all I could think of was I was glad I was there. . .. He said she was breaking up our marriage, and he literally threw her out of the house. . .. It was my first bad experience with my husband. . .. She never came out here again."

A friend might offer information about how to apply for welfare aid, or she might have contacts at her own workplace who can get her friend a job; but whatever important role a woman plays for a friend whose marriage is dissolving, that role is not likely to in-elude economic support. Women are likely to see marriage as the most certain source of economic security for themselves and for their friends.

The economic liabilities of gender might explain why women recommend marriage to their friends, but why do they reinforce commitments to existing marriages? Why don't women simply ratify the statistical trend toward serial monogamy and urge a friend with marital problems to try again and better luck next time? My respondents suggested that women surveyed the options available to themselves and their friends and concluded that the prospects

were grim for better luck next time. Nancy summarized it quite plainly: "When I've just about had it, Annette will say, 'Stick it out, 'cause it could be a whole lot worse.' With all my friends, we look at how bad things could be. They just remind me, 'Hey, look around. . ..'"

Besides their economic options, Nancy and her friends look around at the marriage-market opportunities divorced women encounter. Divorcing young is not very damaging to women's chances of remarrying. Once they are in their thirties, however, women are less likely than men to remarry; and they take longer to do so. With increasing age at divorce, their remarriage opportunities drop drastically, compared to men's.^[15] (Recall that the largest part of my sample was over thirty.) Since men tend to remarry much younger women, the years women have spent in a marriage subtract directly from their chances of remarriage. But women do not need statistics to assess the situation. Again, divorced friends and kin are poignant evidence that divorced women have no easy time of it. "I have girlfriends who are back out in the single world. I don't think I could take it." I suggest that these structured opportunities influence the algebra of marriage work among friends, weighting it toward making peace with existing circumstances.

The cultural factors shaping the content of marriage work are, on the one hand, too obvious and, on the other, too complex to review in detail. Suffice it to say that religion, secular philosophy, marriage counseling, and popular culture still elevate lifelong commitment and fidelity, in spite of the phenomenal growth in divorce. These cultural prescriptions apply to men as well as women, of course; but the gender structure of cultural production and consumption shapes the character and impact of these prescriptions. Quite simply, women are more extensively and more frequently exposed to these culture shapers. Because they are more religiously active than men and larger consumers of services, literature, and media dealing with marriage and family, women are often explicitly the audiences for whom the cultural messages are created.

The effects of this arrangement flow in both directions. Social-relations reformers must appeal to the desires or interests of women if they wish to build an audience and influence the behavior of women or men. Even themes of "male revolt" from marital

commitment, like those Barbara Ehrenreich identified in the ideas of the human potential movement,^[16] were transformed and harnessed to themes of marital struggle and redemption in the larger bulk of popular culture represented by marriage counseling and women's magazines.

Cultural messages about the best interests of children may also influence marriage work in favor of commitment. Yet my interviews showed women so acutely aware of the social privileges of children in two-parent versus single-parent families that their own independent assessments seemed to shape their behavior much more than cultural messages did. Children's evident material and emotional suffering in divorce and women's identification with the needs of children are enough to reinforce women's commitment to stability in marriage. I suspect that the popular transliterations of expert theory, which continue to link adequate nurture with female nature and adequate authority with male nature, operate more on alternate visions of the distant future than on considerations in the present. Women do not need to believe that women alone nurture children to know that if they do not nurture their children, no one else will.

I propose that these structural and cultural arrangements form an interest in stable marriage. The ethics of motherhood and marital fidelity, where marriage is a precondition of economic well-being for women and their children, create an interest in stable marriage that is greater for women than men. Further, this interest favors a moral order that appears to be eroding. To attempt to save other marriages by reinforcing one's highest commitment to stability is to attempt to shore up the cultural base of one's own marriage. If stable marriage is crucial to women's perceptions of survival or well-being, one of the few ways they can deny alternatives to men is to discourage them to other women.

Men's strongest interest in stable (as opposed to serial) marriage is their attachment to wives and children. In the wildfire spread of "fascinating womanhood" seminars, "fathering" workshops, and "marriage communication" theology, we can see how quickly women seize upon plausible means of increasing male attachments (and husbands' participation in the curriculum). Similarly, in the considerable female opposition to feminist and civil libertarian reforms like abortion rights and the ERA, we can see how dearly

many women hold their interest in a moral order that disallows others' choices for an easy exit from marriage.^[17]

What of the valuation of individual aspiration and autonomy that the last chapter showed to be characteristic of women's culture of friendship? Friends clearly draw upon these values in encouraging the expression of feelings and in collective strategizing for marital influence. Still, they more strongly emphasize individuality in treating other matters. In treating problems in marriage, they stress communal responsibility.