The more women are paid, the less eager they are to marry. A 1982 study of three thousand singles found that women earning high incomes are almost twice as likely to want to remain unwed as women earning low incomes. “What is going to happen to marriage and child-bearing in a society where women really have equality?” Princeton demographer Charles Westoff wondered in the Wall Street Journal in 1986. “The more economically independent women are, the less attractive marriage becomes.”
Men in the ’80s, on the other hand, were a little more anxious to marry than the press accounts let on. Single men far outnumbered women in dating services, matchmaking clubs, and the personals columns, all of which enjoyed explosive growth in the decade. In the mid-’80s, video dating services were complaining of a three-to-one male-to-female sex ratio in their membership rolls. In fact, it had become common practice for dating services to admit single women at heavily reduced rates, even free memberships, in hopes of remedying the imbalance.
Personal ads were similarly lopsided. In an analysis of 1,200 ads in 1988, sociologist Theresa Montini found that most were placed by thirty-five-year-old heterosexual men and the vast majority “wanted a long-term relationship.” Dating service directors reported that the majority of men they counseled were seeking spouses, not dates. When Great Expectations, the nation’s largest dating service, surveyed its members in 1988, it found that 93 percent of the men wanted, within one year, to have either “a commitment with one person” or marriage. Only 7 percent of the men said they were seeking “lots of dates with different people.” Asked to describe “what concerns you the day after you had sex with a new partner,” only 9 percent of the men checked “Was I good?” while 42 percent said they were wondering whether it could lead to a “committed relationship.”
These men had good cause to pursue nuptials; if there’s one pattern that psychological studies have established, it’s that the institution of marriage has an overwhelmingly salutary effect on men’s mental health. “Being married,” the prominent government demographer Paul Glick once estimated, “is about twice as advantageous to men as to women in terms of continued survival.” Or, as family sociologist Jessie Bernard wrote in 1972:
There are few findings more consistent, less equivocal, [and] more convincing, than the sometimes spectacular and always impressive superiority on almost every index—demographic, psychological, or social—of married over never-married men. Despite all the jokes about marriage in which men indulge, all the complaints they lodge against it, it is one of the greatest boons of their sex.
Bernard’s observation still applies. As Ronald C. Kessler, who tracks changes in men’s mental health at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, says: “All this business about how hard it is to be a single woman doesn’t make much sense when you look at what’s really going on. It’s single men who have the worst of it. When men marry, their mental health massively increases.”
The mental health data, chronicled in dozens of studies that have looked at marital differences in the last forty years, are consistent and overwhelming: The suicide rate of single men is twice as high as that of married men. Single men suffer from nearly twice as many severe neurotic symptoms and are far more susceptible to nervous breakdowns, depression, even nightmares. And despite the all-American image of the carefree single cowboy, in reality bachelors are far more likely to be morose, passive, and phobic than married men.
When contrasted with single women, unwed men fared no better in mental health studies. Single men suffer from twice as many mental health impairments as single women; they are more depressed, more passive, more likely to experience nervous breakdowns and all the designated symptoms of psychological distress—from fainting to insomnia. In one study, one third of the single men scored high for severe neurotic symptoms; only 4 percent of the single women did.
If the widespread promotion of the Harvard-Yale marriage study had one effect, it was to transfer much of this bachelor anxiety into single women’s minds. In the Wall Street Journal, a thirty-six-year-old single woman perceptively remarked that being unmarried “didn’t bother me at all” until after the marriage study’s promotion; only then did she begin feeling depressed. A thirty-five-year-old woman told USA Today, “I hadn’t even thought about getting married until I started reading those horror stories” about women who may never wed. In a Los Angeles Times story, therapists reported that after the study’s promotion, single female patients became “obsessed” with marriage, ready to marry men they didn’t even love, just to beat the “odds.” When Great Expectations surveyed its members a year after the study’s promotion, it found that 42 percent of single women said they now brought up marriage on the first date. The Annual Study of Women’s Attitudes, conducted by Mark Clements Research for many women’s magazines, found that the proportion of all single women who feared they would never marry had nearly doubled in that one year after the Harvard-Yale study came out, from 14 to 27 percent, and soared to 39 percent for women twenty-five and older, the group targeted in the study. The year after the marriage report, news surfaced that women’s age at first marriage had dropped slightly and, reversing a twenty-year trend, the number of family households had grown faster between 1986 and 1987 than the number of nonfamily households. (The increase in family households, however, was a tiny 1.5 percent.) These small changes were immediately hailed as a sign of the comeback of traditional marriage. “A new traditionalism, centered on family life, is in the offing,” Jib Fowles, University of Houston professor of human sciences, cheered in a 1988 opinion piece in the New York Times. Fowles predicted “a resurgence of the conventional family by the year 2000 (father working, mother at home with the children).” This would be good for American industry, he reminded business magnates who might be reading the article. “Romance and courtship will be back in favor, so sales of cut flowers are sure to rise,” he pointed out. And “a return to homemaking will mean a rise in supermarket sales.”
This would also be good news for men, a point that Fowles skirted in print but made plain enough in a later interview: “There’s not even going to have to be a veneer of that ideology of subscribing to feminist thoughts,” he says. “Men are just going to feel more comfortable with the changed conditions. Every sign that I can see is that men feel uncomfortable with the present setup.” He admits to being one of them: “A lot of it has to do with my assumptions of what it is to be a male.”
But will his wife embrace the “new traditionalism” with equal relish? After having recently given birth to their second child, she returned immediately to her post as secondary education coordinator for a large Texas school district. “She’s such a committed person to her job,” Fowles says, sighing. “I don’t think she’d give up her career.”
THE NO-FAULT DISASTER: A TALE OF TWO DIVORCE REPORTS
In the 1970s, many states passed new “no-fault” divorce laws that made the process easier: they eliminated the moralistic grounds required to obtain a divorce and divided up a marriage’s assets based on needs and resources without reference to which party was held responsible for the marriage’s failure. In the 1980s, these “feminist-inspired” laws came under attack: the New Right painted them as schemes to undermine the family, and the media and popular writers portrayed them as inadvertent betrayals of women and children, legal slingshots that “threw thousands of middle-class women,” as a typical chronicler put it, “into impoverished states.”
Perhaps no one person did more to fuel the attack on divorce-law reform in the backlash decade than sociologist Lenore Weitzman, whose 1985 book, The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America, supplied the numbers quoted by everyone assailing the new laws. From Phyllis Schlafly to Betty Friedan, from the National Review to the “CBS Evening News,” Weitzman’s “devastating” statistics were invoked as proof that women who sought freedom from unhappy marriages were making a big financial mistake: they would wind up poorer under th
e new laws—worse off than if they had divorced under the older, more “protective” system, or if they had simply stayed married.
If the media latched on to Weitzman’s findings with remarkable fervor, they weren’t solely to blame for the hype. Weitzman wasn’t above blowing her own horn. Until her study came along, she writes in The Divorce Revolution, “No one knew just how devastating divorce had become for women and children.” Her data, she asserts, “took years to collect and analyze” and constituted “the first comprehensive portrait” of the effects of divorce under the new laws.
This is Weitzman’s thesis: “The major economic result of the divorce-law revolution is the systematic impoverishment of divorced women and their children.” Under the old “fault” system, Weitzman writes, the “innocent” party stood to receive more than half the property—an arrangement that she says generally worked to the wronged wife’s benefit. The new system, on the other hand, hurts women because it is too equal—an evenhandedness that is hurting older homemakers most of all, she says. “[T]he legislation of equality actually resulted in a worsened position for women and, by extension, a worsened position for children.”
Weitzman’s work does not say feminists were responsible for the new no-fault laws, but those who promoted her work most often acted as if her book indicts the women’s movement. The Divorce Revolution, Time informed its readers, shows how forty-three states passed no-fault laws “largely in response to feminist demand.” A flurry of anti-no-fault books, most of them knockoffs of Weitzman’s work, blamed the women’s movement for divorced women’s poverty. “The impact of the divorce revolution is a clear example of how an equal-rights orientation has failed women,” Mary Ann Mason writes in The Equality Trap. “[J]udges are receiving the message that feminists are sending.”
Actually, feminists had almost nothing to do with divorce-law re form—as Weitzman herself points out. The 1970 California no-fault law, considered the most radical for its equal-division rule, was drafted by a largely male advisory board. The American Bar Association, not the National Organization for Women, instigated the national “divorce revolution”—which wasn’t even much of a revolution. At the time of Weitzman’s work, half the states still had the traditional “fault” system on their books, with no-fault only as an option. Only eight states had actually passed community property provisions like the California law, and only a few required equal property division.
Weitzman argued that because women and men are differently situated in marriage—that is, the husbands usually make more money and, upon divorce, the wives usually get the kids—treating the spouses equally upon divorce winds up overcompensating the husband and cheating the wife and children. On its face, this argument seems reasonable enough, and Weitzman even had the statistics to prove it: “The research shows that on the average, divorced women and the minor children in their households experience a 73 percent decline in their standard of living in the first year after divorce. Their former husbands, in contrast, experience a 42 percent rise in their standard of living.”
These figures seemed alarming, and the press willingly passed them on—without asking two basic questions: Were Weitzman’s statistics correct? And, even more important, did she actually show that women fared worse under the new divorce laws than the old?
• • •
IN THE summer of 1986, soon after Lenore Weitzman had finished testifying before Congress on the failings of no-fault divorce, she received a letter from Saul Hoffman, an economist at the University of Delaware who specializes in divorce statistics. He wrote that he and his partner, University of Michigan social scientist Greg Duncan, were a little bewildered by her now famous 73 percent statistic. They had been tracking the effect of divorce on income for two decades—through the landmark “5,000 Families” study—and they had found the changes following divorce to be nowhere near as dramatic as she described. They found a much smaller 30 percent decline in women’s living standards in the first year after divorce and a much smaller 10 to 15 percent improvement for men. Moreover, Hoffman observed, they found the lower living standard for many divorced women to be temporary. Five years after divorce, the average woman’s living standard was actually slightly higher than when she was married to her ex-husband.
What baffled Hoffman and Duncan most was that Weitzman claimed in her book to have used their methods to arrive at her 73 percent statistic. Hoffman’s letter wondered if he and Duncan might take a look at her data. No reply. Finally, Hoffman called. Weitzman told him she “didn’t know how to get hold of her data,” Hoffman recalls, because she was at Princeton and her data was at Harvard. The next time he called, he says, Weitzman said she couldn’t give him the information because she had broken her arm on a ski vacation. “It sort of went on and on,” Hoffman says of the next year and a half of letters and calls to Weitzman. “Sometimes she would have an excuse. Sometimes she just wouldn’t respond at all. It was a little strange. Let’s just say, it’s not the way I’m used to a scholar normally behaving.” Finally, after the demographers appealed to the National Science Foundation, which had helped fund her research, Weitzman relented and promised she would put her data tapes on reserve at Radcliffe’s Murray Research Center. But six months later, they still weren’t there. Again, Hoffman appealed to NSF officials. Finally, in late 1990, the library began receiving Weitzman’s data. As of early 1991, the archives’ researchers were still sorting through the files and they weren’t yet in shape to be reviewed.
In the meantime, Duncan and Hoffman tried repeating her calculations using her numbers in the book. But they still came up with a 33 percent, not a 73 percent, decline in women’s standard of living. The two demographers published this finding in Demography. “Weitzman’s highly publicized findings are almost certainly in error,” they wrote. Not only was the 73 percent figure “suspiciously large,” it was “inconsistent with information on changes in income and per capita income that she reports.” The press response? The Wall Street Journal acknowledged Duncan and Hoffman’s article in a brief item in the newspaper’s demography column. No one else picked it up.
Weitzman never responded to Duncan and Hoffman’s critique. “They are just wrong,” she says in a phone interview. “It does compute.” She refuses to answer any additional questions put to her. “You have my position. I’m working on something very different and I just don’t have the time.”
Confirmation of Duncan and Hoffman’s findings came from the U.S. Census Bureau, which issued its study on the economic effects of divorce in March 1991. The results were in line with Duncan and Hoffman’s. “[Weitzman’s] numbers are way too high,” says Suzanne Bianchi, the Census Study’s author. “And that seventy-three percent figure that keeps getting thrown around isn’t even consistent with other numbers in [Weitzman’s] work.”
How could Weitzman’s conclusions have been so far off the mark? There are several possible explanations. First, her statistics, unlike Duncan and Hoffman’s, were not based on a national sample, although the press widely represented them as such. She drew the people she interviewed only from Los Angeles County divorce court. Second, her sample was remarkably small—114 divorced women and 114 divorced men. (And her response rate was so low that Duncan and Hoffman and other demographers who reviewed her work questioned whether her sample was even representative of Los Angeles.)
Finally, Weitzman drew her financial information on these divorced couples from a notoriously unreliable source—their own memories. “We were amazed at their ability to recall precisely the appraised value of their house, the amount of the mortgage, the value of the pension plan, etc.,” she writes in her book. Memory, particularly in the emotion-charged realm of divorce, is hardly a reliable source of statistics; one wishes that Weitzman had been a little less “amazed” by the subjects’ instant recall and a little more dogged about referring to the actual records.
To be fair, the 73 percent statistic is only one number in Weitzman’s work. And a 30 percent decline in women’
s living standard is hardly ideal, either. Although the media fixed on its sensational implications, the figure has little bearing on her second and more central point—that women are worse off since “the divorce revolution.” This is an important question because it gets to the heart of the backlash argument: women are better off “protected” than equal.
Yet, while Weitzman’s book states repeatedly that the new laws have made life “worse” for women than the old ones, it concludes by recommending that legislators should keep the new divorce laws with a little fine-tuning. And she strongly warns against a return to the old system, which she calls a “charade” of fairness. “[I]t is clear that it would be unwise and inappropriate to suggest that California return to a more traditional system,” she writes.
Needless to say, this conclusion never made it into the press coverage of Weitzman’s study. A closer reading explains why Weitzman had little choice but to abandon her theory on no-fault divorce: she had conducted interviews only with men and women who divorced after the 1970 no-fault law went into effect in California. She had no comparable data on couples who divorced under the old system—and so no way of testing her hypothesis. (A later 1990 study by two law professors reached the opposite conclusion: women and children, they found, were slightly better off economically under the no-fault provisions.)
Nonetheless, Weitzman suggests she had two other types of evidence to show that divorcing women suffered more under no-fault law. Divorcing women, she writes, are less likely to be awarded alimony under the new legislation—a loss most painful to older homemakers who are ill equipped to enter the work force. Second, women are now often forced to sell the family house. Yet Weitzman fails to make the case on either count.