On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 8:21 PM, ss <[email protected]> wrote: > > 1) Can nuclear families and marriages be protected while still ensuring that > women have freedom to choose? Can female freedom be exactly the same as male > freedom? >
Here[1] are some data points. The answer seems to be yes. <quote> Marriages used to depend upon a clear division of labor and authority, and couples who rejected those rules had less stable marriages than those who abided by them. In the 1950s, a woman’s best bet for a lasting marriage was to marry a man who believed firmly in the male breadwinner ideal. Women who wanted a “MRS degree” were often advised to avoid the “bachelor’s” degree, since as late as 1967 men told pollsters they valued a woman’s cooking and housekeeping skills above her intelligence or education. Women who hadn’t married by age 25 were less likely to ever marry than their more traditional counterparts, and studies in the 1960s suggested that if they did marry at an older age than average they were more likely to divorce. When a wife took a job outside the home, this raised the risk of marital dissolution. All that has changed today. Today, men rank intelligence and education way above cooking and housekeeping as a desirable trait in a partner. A recent study by Paul Amato et al. found that the chance of divorce recedes with each year that a woman postpones marriage, with the least divorce-prone marriages being those where the couples got married at age 35 or higher. Educated and high-earning women are now less likely to divorce than other women. When a wife takes a job today, it works to stabilize the marriage. Couples who share housework and productive work have more stable marriages than couples who do not, according to sociologist Lynn Prince Cooke. And the Amato study found that husbands and wives who hold egalitarian views about gender have higher marital quality and fewer marital problems than couples who cling to more traditional views. </quote> The entire series ‘Can Marriage Survive’ published on Cato Unbound is also worth reading [2]. Deepak [1] http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/01/14/stephanie-coontz/the-future-of-marriage/ [2] http://www.cato-unbound.org/archives/january-2008/
