Better Off Married
An interview with author Maggie Gallagher.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez, NR associate editor
February 10-11, 2001

aggie Gallagher is co-author of The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially, with Linda J. Waite. Gallagher, a syndicated columnist and also author of Enemies of Eros and The Abolition of Marriage.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: You and Linda Waite write that we're living in a post-marriage culture. Is the tide turning back to marriage?

Maggie Gallagher: I think there are many hopeful signs on the marriage front, including that it's now more than clear that we have the world's highest divorce rate and rate of family fragmentation. In Europe and Canada you do not see the basic signs of a marriage movement such as you see here. I do think that there is a shift in opinion among elites, among family experts, among scholars, even among politicians. You know, it is making a difference. I guess I would say that I think a bigger effort is necessary if we're going to restore the strength in marriage and I do think that we do not know of any civilization that has survived over the long run without a reasonably well-functioning marriage system. So the stakes are very high but I'm optimistic that as Americans, when we organize to solve a problem, we tend to figure out ways to solve it.

Lopez: Since writing the book, have you been surprised by some of the people whose minds have changed or who have entertained the idea that many of our problems may be based in our marriage problems?

Gallagher: I think there has been a definite shift. I know there was a meeting of family policy-makers who consider themselves on the left a few months back. When the subject of divorce and family fragmentation came up, they said, all things being equal, divorce is harmful to children, and we should just throw in the towel and drop the idea that it's not. Yes, I think this is a change. I think if you look at the difference in the reception of Dr. Judith Wallerstein's…earlier book, Second Chances: Men,Women & Children After Divorce, and her most recent book, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce — which she was on Oprah with — you see a powerful new willingness, a heartening willingness, to entertain what the truth is on these matters.

Lopez: Does it help policy-wise that Bush is president and not Gore, and not Clinton, and that Bush is open to these ideas and, even, symbolically, that he has a strong, loving marriage?

Gallagher: Your readers may not like to hear this, but Bill Clinton was the first Democrat in quite some time who was willing to say that two married parents is better than one and I think he deserves credit for that. It may be an obvious truth, but, for a long time, Democrats weren't willing to say that.

I do think there is going to be a very large political debate, especially in connection with reauthorization of welfare reform, Welfare reform has done same marvelous things to increase the work of and reduce the dependency of welfare mothers. It has made very limited strides toward its other goals, which include increasing the proportion of children who grow up in married, two-parent families. So, yes, I do think there will be an effort to come up with new policy initiatives to figure out how to strengthen marriage, particularly in low-income communities, to reduce divorce, and to reduce unmarried child bearing, and I'm hopeful that the administration will be helpful and that it will be easier than in the past. I'm sure that President Bush is very sympathetic to the objectives of marriage, I have no reason to think Bill and Hillary Clinton were unsympathetic. The question is, can we come up with credible ideas that will make a difference and will the president support them? I certainly hope so.

Lopez: Is there any hope of getting feminist groups to catch on to the benefits that marriage has for both men and women?

Gallagher: Linda Waite, for example, would consider herself a feminist, so I guess the answer to that is "yes." I see some evidence that there is a growing awareness that it's hard to figure out how a "low-marriage regime," as one feminist scholar I was reading recently described it, is good for women. If the problem is, as feminists define it, that men don't do enough to help women with the costs of raising children — both the labor and the financial costs — then a high divorce and high unmarried child-bearing regime just means that women do even more of the share.

So I think for people who are primarily concerned with gender equity, there is at least a small and growing number of women leaders and scholars who are willing to entertain what I think is a really obvious truth, which is that large numbers of single mothers is not a pathway to power, prestige, or even a decent standard of living for women. I wouldn't say it is a massive trend and there still seems to be this theme of independence, of making the individual independent, including the individual woman, even though she may have to be dependent on government in order to be independent of men, seems to make a more powerful appeal to mainstream feminists at this point.

Lopez: Does the rise in the "single by choice" types show some kind of sign of a growing respect for marriage — i.e., they actually respect marriage because they know that they are not ready for it?

Gallagher: I don't really agree with that. Of course, people are always free not to marry, and there has never been a society in which every single person marries. But the growth of what you might call "the baby backlash" — the Elinor Burkett argument — first of all, I think it is overblown. The reason that it gets so much play is that it appeals very much to people in the media who are often single without children, and they seem to find this an endlessly fascinating argument.

Secondly, to the extent that it does reflect a real underlying demographic trend, 20% of women in their early forties, according to the latest Census data, do not have children, so you are seeing a growing trend toward permanent childlessness. Along with good things like longer life-spans, and bad things like reductions in durable marriages, you see the potential for the lessening of political support for the married family. Because the married family is the main vehicle for carrying on the social and physical reproduction of the society, it's a pretty worrisome trend. One of the problems is that we tend to think about children as the equivalent of a private hobby, instead of as a great public good. There's all this talk about human capital and education. We import a lot of people through immigration, but the people who marry and have children, they are the people who are carrying on the important task of making sure that America goes on. The fact is, if you think America is a good thing, that it should go on in the future, then you have to care about the strength and functioning of the married family. It's not interest group politics, it is the public good.