The Fractured Working Class Family
Women without college degrees now delay marriage but not childbirth, and working-class families resemble those of the inner-city poor.
The American working class seems destined for the dustbin of history. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared into a global diaspora; the work that is left involves mostly low-paying service jobs without health care and pensions. Watching their wages stagnate, men are going AWOL from the labor market. Meanwhile, the stolid, churchgoing working-class family is imploding, with divorce and nonmarital births now as routine as a high-school football game. Such dysfunction has rekindled a 50-year war between liberals who believe that family breakdown is the inevitable effect of economic injustice and conservatives who spy yet more evidence of a post-1960s loss of traditional bourgeois values.
Andrew Cherlin tries to bring some sense to these competing claims in “Labor's Love Lost.” A sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, Mr. Cherlin is also the author of “The Marriage-Go-Round” (2009), which showed him to be an especially astute analyst of the contemporary family. Now he adds economic and cultural history to his tool kit, with mixed success.
Americans tend to envision blue-collar America frozen in its mid-20th-century glory, when men proudly took home a paycheck and benefits that rivaled those earned by, say, accountants. But as Mr. Cherlin shows, it took more than a century for America to transform itself from a struggling agricultural society into a prosperous industrial one. Only after the Greatest Generation returned home from a war that had disabled the competition from abroad did productivity increase, the “family wage” become commonplace and the lunch-pail worker emerge as a star in America's story of progress.
The contours of family life shifted as well. In the past, husbands and wives worked as a team running the farm or shop, or women took in piecework or boarders to add to their husband's income. But the family wage gave workers the means to adopt the middle-class model of “separate spheres.” Men spent the day at the factory; women became “homemakers,” in the parlance of the time.
The new arrangement might not have suited everyone. With fewer children and more labor-saving devices, women would soon become restless. Still, Mr. Cherlin observes, marriage and fertility rates remained robust through the early 1970s, and, most important, American children grew up, on the whole, well fed and in relative stability.
By the late 1970s, that pattern had changed. An oil crisis, resurrected foreign industries and new technologies all corroded the foundations of midcentury factory and family life. Unions lost their leverage as jobs moved to cheaper labor markets and as foreign competition increased. By 1996, the average 30-year-old male high-school graduate earned 20% less than his father had 20 years earlier. Today, Mr. Cherlin notes, we have an “hourglass economy” whose two poles are defined by education. The college-educated, on average, live in stability and relative comfort. But those with less than a college degree struggle—and not just financially.
Men without degrees, already less competitive as husband material, have become even less so as the economy has created an abundance of “pink collar” clerical jobs that have allowed women to support themselves. Starting in roughly 1980, women with a high-school diploma and perhaps a year or two of college began to put off marriage, much as their college-educated sisters were doing. But unlike the college-educated group, they did not delay motherhood. By 2010, their rates of nonmarital childbearing had doubled; their families looked more like those of the inner-city poor than the “respectable” quasi-bourgeois of the working-class golden age.
This history gives Mr. Cherlin the material to devise a third-way explanation for family decline: Economic change—the loss of manufacturing jobs—collided with a profound cultural shift: the decoupling of marriage and children. By itself, the loss of jobs can't explain the family implosion, he says; if it could, we would expect to see a similar shift during the Depression. But people of that era saw joblessness as a reason to put off marriage and children; white fertility declined 13% between 1930 and 1936 alone. Mr. Cherlin quotes one Depression-era parent: “It is a crime for children to be born when the parents haven't got enough money to have them properly.”
Marriage today, Mr. Cherlin notes, has been redefined as a capstone of middle-class young adulthood, one that is only tangentially related to raising children. For groups below the middle class, a capstone marriage seems unreachable. As one unmarried father tells a researcher: “You need to have way better reasons than having a kid to get married.”
Mr. Cherlin is less than convincing when he tries to affix the blame for the cultural shift. Relying on gender theory more than the anthropological record, he blames working-class men for confining women in a domestic prison and failing to help with the children—thus making marriage an unappealing option to women whether prospective husbands have a job or not. But the charge feels much too severe. Female responsibility for young children has been near-universal for much of human history. Except in some elite homes in the West, the expectation of mother-based child care is still broadly in place, most obviously among single mothers.
In previous generations, working-class men went off to dull or dangerous jobs—not to mention battlefields—because they were seeped in a culture of duty, not because they wanted to show their macho cred. Today they are in thrall to “expressive individualism,” a trend that Mr. Cherlin greets hopefully because, he says, men will be “freer to be loving, nurturing figures in the lives of their partners and children.” That is unlikely when the conditions of today's competitive labor market demand the sort of grit and self-discipline that Mr. Cherlin and so many other scholars reject in the name of gender justice.
This piece originally appeared in Wall Street Journal
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal