Rachel’s Musings

The Alternatives for Marriage Project has been fighting to get marriage promotion out of TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) for years. Unfortunately, it looks like the new HHS Budget not only continues with this practice from the Bush era but increases the funding:

The Budget includes an extension of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant and related programs, including the Contingency Fund and Supplemental Grants, through FY 2011. The Budget also includes $500 million for a new Fatherhood, Marriage, and Families Innovation Fund. The fund will provide competitive grants to States to conduct and rigorously evaluate comprehensive responsible fatherhood programs, including those that incorporate healthy marriage components and demonstrations geared towards improving child outcomes by improving outcomes for custodial parents with serious barriers to self sufficiency as a mechanism for improving outcomes for children in these families. The Budget also includes an increase of $2.5 billion for the TANF Emergency Fund for FY 2011 and makes several program changes focused on strengthening States’ efforts to enhance employment related assistance to low-income families.

Let’s stop this nonsense because letting them eat wedding rings does nothing to reduce poverty! Help get marriage promotion out of TANF!

Via the Facebook page of the National Sexuality Resource Center, I found a report from the Pew Research Center on marriage and how wives are rising (whatever that’s supposed to mean). Reading the first paragraph, I decided that I needed to change my evening plans and respond to this.

The institution of marriage has undergone significant changes in recent decades as women have outpaced men in education and earnings growth. These unequal gains have been accompanied by gender role reversals in both the spousal characteristics and the economic benefits of marriage.

The first part of the first sentence is correct: The institution of marriage has undergone significant changes. They have been very well documented by historians like Stephanie Coontz. But these changes were not driven by the outpacing of women’s eduction and earnings. These changes go back a bit further to the mid 1700s when love entered as the primary reason for marriage. Most of the changes in the last century were driven by changes in the laws that, first, set husbands and wives on equal footing (prior to that wives were covered by the husband) and, then, by changes in divorce law.

The rest of the paragraph suggests that women have made big strides in income. The wage gap between men and women has primarily closed because men’s earnings have stagnated or went down. Additionally, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research reports that the closing of the earnings gap has “slowed considerably since 1990.” Hardly something to celebrate.

Pew compares data from 1970 and 2007. In 1970, 4% of husbands were married to women with higher income. In 2007 that percentage had risen to 22%. Although these numbers are based on incomes adjusted for inflation, they should also be adjusted for labor force participation rate and the wage gap. In 1970, a woman earned less than 60 cents for every dollar a man earned; by 2007 that gap had narrowed to 78%. Or put differently – and this is based on a table in the full Pew report on page 8 – in 1970, a women who graduated college barely made more than a man with less than a high school degree (about $2,500 more). By 2007, a female college graduate made slightly more than a man with some college (less than $4,000 more; whereas a male college graduate made more than $20,000 more than a woman with the same level of education). Hardly something to celebrate.

Also, did they adjust for the change in age at first marriage? Pew is looking at 30- to 44-year-olds. In 1970, this age group was more likely to be married than their 2007 counterparts, especially the women.

But wait, here’s another interesting paragraph (from page 10 – as I was trying to get to Appendix B):

For married adults with some college education or married adults with a high school diploma, men’s median household incomes also grew more than women’s from 1970 to 2007. Recall that during this same period, median earnings of men in these education groups declined, while those of women in those education groups grew.

Huh? Let’s unpack this a bit. The first thing we need to find out: Exactly what is a household? Pew used IPUMS data, which is based on Census data. According to an IPUMS report, households can be made up of married couples and people living alone. And on page 7 of the Pew report is this note: “’Household income’ refers to household income adjusted for the number of members in the household.” Appendix B (page 35) reveals that this is not a simple calculation since there are economies of scale. Okay, fine. But a household can still consist of one or more people. Are we comparing household income to individual earnings? If so, maybe the household adjustment factor skews the data… (It’s not clear to me if the earnings are also based on a household).

What about income vs. earnings? Okay, I got tired of trying to find definitions on the IPUMS site and went to the Census bureau instead. According to definitions that were a bit easier to find, earnings are what you & I get paid on the job (see page 53). Income is earnings plus things like interest, dividends and public assistance. So, income is likely to be larger than earnings for a person who has at least some money in the bank in an interest bearing account. Maybe men made up the gap between earnings and income with investments? Whereas women relied more on earnings? And note that the whole wives rising celebration is based on the hair splitting between income and earnings. If we include all money (potentially) available to a person, men are still ahead of women. Hardly something to celebrate.

Now the table I find most interesting is in the Pew report on page 28. If women have made such terrific strides, outpacing men in education and earnings growth, wouldn’t they start contributing more to a household income? Yes, they would – and they do! In 1970, they contributed 6% and in 2007, they’re contributing 36%. Men’s shares are 99% and 72% for the two years. Okay, that’s roughly 1/3 from women and 2/3 from men in 2007. The rise of wives?!?

Incidentally, the chart on page 3 shows another interesting story that Pew totally missed because they were so set on presenting the myth that women are doing so well in marriage: Median adjusted household income for our 30- to 44-year olds has risen steadily IF these folks were married. For unmarried men and unmarried women, the income growth came to a halt in 1990 when both men and women had lower incomes when they were unmarried (note that this could be a factor of several things, not just marital status discrimination: Age – younger people are more likely to earn less and be unmarried – and the impact of the other income in a household – maybe married women’s household income is so much higher because men earn so much more).

There is lots of interesting stuff in the Pew report but, as happens so often, the rising wives story seems to be small changes blown out of proportion to bolster marriage. So what if wives earn more than their husbands? In an equal world this would happen about 50% of the time – it happens 22% of the time (and note, too, that $1 more could tip the balance…). Most of the touted rise by wives is simply catching up with men… Hardly something to celebrate. The real stories in the data – such as the gaps between men and women, black and white, married and unmarried – don’t make the headlines.

UpdateHere is a really cool video put together by newsy.com that gives a summary of news coverage on this study. It’s interesting that they say that the number of wives outearning their husband has more than quadrupled. Well, yes 22% is more than four times 4% but it still means that more than 2/3 of husbands earn more than their wives… But the matrimania award goes to ABC news!

Another update: The Council on Contemporary Families has also done some myth busting on this study.

(Let me add a quick disclaimer: I did not read the report word for word, so I might have missed other gems or bloopers. I read the intro paragraph and got mad. After that, I looked at the charts and tables. Having worked in data analysis for over a decade, I know that numbers are harder to manipulate than their interpretation. I did read Appendix B on the methodology and looked in vein for the critical definitions, which I then located elsewhere. From what I’ve seen in the report, the claim that wives are rising is unfounded, as I have outlined above.)

As the rainy season starts in earnest, the thought that the fight for equality pushes us singles out into the rain becomes even more real. Many of us supporters of going beyond conjugality have had trouble with the single issue fight for the right to marry for people in the LGBT community. On the one hand, exclusion from marriage is clearly discriminatory. On the other hand, this fight implies a normalization, which is scary, and prevents us from questioning marriage itself and thus enshrines it even more into our culture. I have fought against Prop 8 because I felt it violates the separation of church and state (interestingly enough, as I was calling people to confirm their participation on election day, many backed out, including one person who was getting married while she could). But there has always been some unease because I felt that I was fighting to have the red dividing line between the married and unmarried moved, rather than removed. Ultimately, I felt, I was pushing myself out into the rain.

With this as background, it is even more disturbing to read about the pro-marriage rhetoric from the Prop 8 trial (the link brings you to a create commentary by Nancy Polikoff). Mind you, it is not coming from the religious wrong, from where I usually expect it. Rather supporters of same-sex marriage are spouting the same old myths about marriage. It is no longer a fight against discrimination. It is a fight for the perpetuation of the glorification of marriage. These leaves out all of us who are not married because we choose not to, which would include a large number of people in the LGBT community could they make that choice. Ultimately, this feels like a white upper-middle class fight. It is not about getting fairness, it is about access to privilege. If it were about fairness, the fight would move us beyond conjugality, which would value all forms of families, no matter what constellation they take. Ultimately, this would value all people, as individuals, respecting and supporting our choices.

I’ve been spending way too much time since the beginning of December reading, rereading, and rerereading Kant’s Prolegomena, a work that attempts to summarize his Critique of Reason, Kant’s important contribution to philosophy in general and metaphysics in particular. It is impossible to understand his writing without total immersion, which means reading the same thing over and over again. I am beginning to understand what he is saying but that’s not what this post will be about. This post will be about a fact from Kant’s life: Kant died a virgin. This fact seems to conjure up all the prejudices we like to impose on single people, all of them boiling down to: There is something wrong with us. There are certainly things wrong in Kant’s philosophy (or lets put it less harshly, there are some things that we certainly need to question). But dying a virgin isn’t one of them. Kant imposes his puritanical view of sex onto us by claiming that marriage is necessary because only then can we have morally right sex (see an excellent article by Elizabeth Brake who refutes this position using Kant’s own ethical position). But this has nothing to do with his choice of remaining a virgin. Sure, maybe he was disgusted by sex. Maybe he thought it was morally wrong (interestingly, his view on the morality of sex might have been similar to some feminists, as Brake points out). But maybe he just chose to remain single because his life’s work was not to produce umpteen children. He would rather spend his time developing his own philosophy than mating and recreating as society demanded from him.

It is interesting – and rather sad – how the focus on Kant’s virginity and the associated pathologizing of his decision reflects our couplemanical stance. Unless you are coupled – or at least have had sex – there must be something wrong with you. It is time to question this conclusion! There are many reasons that a person might not be couple, or might not have sex, that are entirely valid and far from pathological. These reason include simply choosing to do so or is just simply not sexually attracted to anybody. Choice and biology can underlie not being on the beaten path. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I was already saddened when Gloria Steinem bend over backwards to try to justify getting married. In my eyes, she was forgetting all the feminist analysis that had critiqued marriage. As D. A. Clarke has pointed out “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Just because feminists marry doesn’t change marriage, the patriarchal and privileged institution that still traps so many women (and men) in unhappy lives.

I was pretty disturbed when Steinem listed this in her list of wishes in celebration of her 75th birthday. It is one thing she’d like to see in the next 25 years.

I want any two adults to be able to marry-as long as they don’t hit each other.

There are so many things wrong with this sentence!

Here are a few that came to my mind – feel free to add more in the comments:

• It ignores the reality of non-physical abuse, which can be just as devastating, sometimes more so, as physical abuse.
• Why two adults? Yes, I know, polyarmory is a dirty word now but when did that ever stop feminists?!?
• She is ignoring and devaluing any other relationship. How about wishing that our society equally values every relationship that we as human beings value?

I am deeply disturbed that the poster-woman of American feminism is forgetting so many of us in her quest to be normal, which apparently is a rather strong influence in the feminist movement as well, just like it has turned the queer movement into the marriage-equality movement.

With the holidays upon us once again, I am faced with the annual question: what do I offer my coupled, family-committed friends? Should I offer them a replacement spouse/partner so that they can take the long weekend off to contemplate in solitude? So that they can join the scores of us singles who use these times to renew and refresh because we do not have the obligation to rush from one partner’s family’s house to the other? I feel so sorry for my poor coupled friends! As if the holidays aren’t stressful enough – now they have to do everything in duplicate. It is so draining to have to go to the dinner with family instead of kicking back with a pizza and watching old movies. A house filled with noisy kids and adults getting drunk can really depress that holiday spirit. My heartfelt condolences to all those who cannot just stroll through the woods enjoying the wonders of solitude.

So, around this time of year, I approach my coupled friends and tell them: “You poor soul, it must be so hard to be coupled around this time of year. You not only have to put up with your own family’s holiday frenzy but, no, that’s not enough, your partner’s family piles on the demands and stresses. I am sorry that you can’t just do what you want to and sleep all day!” How often I glean a shimmer of a tear in their eyes when they recover from the shock that I – the single person – am so lucky. They quickly swallow down the jealousy and pretend that I am really the poor slop. But I know better than that: All the attempts to make me feel lonely are just weak cover-ups of their need for solitude. They could not possibly admit that what they want more than anything else is hide from the masses and have a carefree holiday. And, yes, they won’t admit that they are jealous of my freedom!