Behind The Nyt Happy Single Women Story

GOOD show for the New York Times. Their story on single women reported by Sam Roberts—that 51 percent of women are not living with husbands—required them to do a bit of massaging. They lumped single teenaged girls and women whose husbands are on assigment into the “single” column, reports Jennifer Roback Morse. Then they could write a headline:

“51% of Women Are Now Living Without Spouse.”

And to back it up they interviewed marriage radical Dr. Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We nNever Were.

“This is yet another of the inexorable signs that there is no going back to a world where we can assume that marriage is the main institution that organizes people’s lives,” said Prof. Stephanie Coontz

No doubt the single liberal women interviewed by the Times are as happy as clams. But Jennifer Roback Morse hears from other people, like the single professional woman in her forties. She’d like to get married,

But all the men of suitable age and educational level insist on sex on the first date, and she’s not interested. I hear from young people who would love to get married and stay married because they don’t want to put their own children through the misery of divorce that they endured.

Morse says she hears from women “whose husbands abandoned them and their children, for no particular reason.” And then there are the women.

Some divorced women leave their husbands with huge credit-card debts and three screaming children. I hear from these men all the time. And we’re supposed to just celebrate women’s freedom?

Let’s get real shall we?

Marriage is the most basic form of social cooperation. It is the institution in which children are born and reared.

If the New York Times, its radical experts, and its liberal readers want to replace marriage with something else then it’s about time they told us what that something is. And I’d say that the burden of proof is on the liberals to prove that their alternative is better.

Some people have suggested that the reason that liberals are so down on marriage is that they all work for the government. Failed marriages equals more government, so failed marriages means more jobs for liberals.

But I do not believe that liberals think that way. I think that the liberal distaste for marriage is visceral, instinctive. And, of course, it is a matter of liberals getting with the Zeitgeist.

UPDATE: In the New York Times Sunday review of the single women story by Kate Zernike they had this to say.

The last 30 years have seen a huge shift in educated women’s attitudes about divorce. Mr. Martin, who has written about women and divorce, said that three decades ago, about 30 percent of women who had graduated from college said it should be harder to get a divorce. Now, about 65 percent say so, he said.

But for less educated women and for men, the numbers have not changed; only 40 percent — a minority — say it should be harder to get a divorce.

That ties into Kay S. Hymowitz’s findings in Marriage and Caste in America, interviewed here by Kathryn Jean Lopez.

But with that big a change in public opinion, someone is going to find themselves in a buzz-saw pretty soon.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

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In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

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E. G. West, Education and the State

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Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
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