If you caught my post on Friday, you know I've got love and marriage on my mind, so I read with interest Kate Bolick's tale of not marriage in The Atlantic. Now, the piece has its problems. For instance, it is a little heavy on the "we" talk, suggesting that every woman's experience in the romantic sphere is like that of a white, upper-middle class, white woman. But I admire the piece for the way it makes clear the myriad choices that accompany the modern single life, and the ambivalence and contradiction of it all. I appreciated Bolick's article for not presenting unmarried women as somehow broken. She even considers that singleness can be *gasp* a choice for women.
I also appreciated this:
As Hanna Rosin laid out in these pages last year (“The End of Men,” July/August 2010), men have been rapidly declining—in income, in educational attainment, and in future employment prospects—relative to women. As of last year, women held 51.4 percent of all managerial and professional positions, up from 26 percent in 1980. Today women outnumber men not only in college but in graduate school; they earned 60 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded in 2010, and men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma.
No one has been hurt more by the arrival of the post-industrial economy than the stubbornly large pool of men without higher education. An analysis by Michael Greenstone, an economist at MIT, reveals that, after accounting for inflation, male median wages have fallen by 32 percent since their peak in 1973, once you account for the men who have stopped working altogether. The Great Recession accelerated this imbalance. Nearly three-quarters of the 7.5 million jobs lost in the depths of the recession were lost by men, making 2010 the first time in American history that women made up the majority of the workforce. Men have since then regained a small portion of the positions they’d lost—but they remain in a deep hole, and most of the jobs that are least likely ever to come back are in traditionally male-dominated sectors, like manufacturing and construction.
The implications are extraordinary. If, in all sectors of society, women are on the ascent, and if gender parity is actually within reach, this means that a marriage regime based on men’s overwhelming economic dominance may be passing into extinction. As long as women were denied the financial and educational opportunities of men, it behooved them to “marry up”—how else would they improve their lot? (As Maureen Dowd memorably put it in her 2005 book, Are Men Necessary?, “Females are still programmed to look for older men with resources, while males are still programmed to look for younger women with adoring gazes.”) Now that we can pursue our own status and security, and are therefore liberated from needing men the way we once did, we are free to like them more, or at least more idiosyncratically, which is how love ought to be, isn’t it?
My friend B., who is tall and gorgeous, jokes that she could have married an NBA player, but decided to go with the guy she can talk to all night—a graphic artist who comes up to her shoulder. C., the editorial force behind some of today’s most celebrated novels, is a modern-day Venus de Milo—with a boyfriend 14 years her junior. Then there are those women who choose to forgo men altogether. Sonia Sotomayor isn’t merely a powerful woman in a black robe—she’s also a stellar example of what it can mean to exercise authority over every single aspect of your personal life. When Gloria Steinem said, in the 1970s, “We’re becoming the men we wanted to marry,” I doubt even she realized the prescience of her words.
And...
Our own “crisis in gender” isn’t a literal imbalance—America as a whole currently enjoys a healthy population ratio of 50.8 percent females and 49.2 percent males. But our shrinking pool of traditionally “marriageable” men is dramatically changing our social landscape, and producing startling dynamics in the marriage market, in ways that aren’t immediately apparent. Read more...This may be the first time I've seen an achievement gap between men and women presented as something other than an aberration of African American relationships--the product of uppity, emasculating black women and no-good, lazy black men. Of course, this gap is often cited in discussions of low marriage rates among high-achieving black women. But it's a fact mostly danced around as the cause of changes in matrimonial habits. It pleases the patriarchy more to believe there is something intrinsically wrong with black women.
Bolick makes a good case that our society (Yes, white folks, too.) is undergoing a cultural shift away from what we believe are "traditional" views of marriage. The reasons for this are myriad, but include shifting gender roles and equality. Perhaps black people are simply at the leading edge of the transformation.
The Atlantic article definitely helped cement something I've long thought about the so-called black marriage crisis--that our energy would be better spent figuring out how a society without marriage at its foundation can work, rather than trying to shame black women and govern their romantic and life decisions.
