Sarah MacLanahan and Lynne Casper

Growing Diversity and Inequality in the Family

1. An exposition on the trends in post WW II American family and marriage, focusing particularly on the question of why the institution of marriage declined and the single mother families increased in number. Regarding this question, several theories have been reviewed and examined using empirical data. They are: welfare policies reducing the incentive to marry; decline in the number of marriageable men; economic independence of women, and changes in cultural values and norms. The author's conclusion is that the greater economic independence of women theory has the best explanatory potential in terms of its statistical association with the decline in marriage. As far as the welfare theories and the decline in marriageable men theories are concerned, while these may not be irrelevant factors regarding their effects on marriage, the authors conclude that in the context of the post WW II U.S. they have little explanatory power since trends in these two factors moved in counter direction to their respective expected effects on the decline in marriage. That is, the value of welfare benefits declined in the years 1970 to 90 when the single mother families increased greatly in number, while the availability of marriageable men in terms of quantity and quality did not change significantly in the same time period. However, two considerations may be noted of regarding this conclusion. One, though statistical associations may be established between the decline in marriage and economic independence of women, the direction of causal arrow cannot be established by this association alone. The economic independence may be the cause, or the consequence, of the decline in marriage, and the research conducted in this paper do not tell of the causal direction - this is not a criticism of the paper, since the authors are fully aware of this point. Secondly, regarding the cultural values and norms theory, how this theory can be incorporated remains unclear. The proponents of this theory would probably like to claim that the association between economic independence of women and the decline in marriage is a spurious effect of the change in values and norms - yet it is also certainly possible to make a counter argument that economic factors do have independent effects. It would be an interesting topic for the future research to investigate as to which viewpoint may be more correct. The authors themselves make a rather interesting conclusion that to the extent values and norms are the determining factor, it would be more likely so for blacks more than whites as the association between economic independence and decline in marriage is much weaker for blacks than whites.

Outside of their grappling with this question of why the decline in marriage occurred, the rest of the paper is largely descriptive. It pays a fair and rich attention to details regarding the trends in marriage and family in the latter half of 20th century U.S., and as such, is a good textbook read.

2. 4 major demographic trends have been identified as profoundly affecting the institution of post WW II American family. They are the trends of the delay in marriage, the increase in marital instability (naturally, th focus is on the increasing divorce rate), the shift in marital and non-marital fertility (it is important to note that the increasing proportion of children born out of wedlock is not due to the rise in the non-marital fertility, but rather to the decline in marital fertility and the delaying of marriage), and the increase in mother's employment.

3. Cross-National comparisons reveal that these trends are not unique to the U.S. but rather the commonly shared trends among Western industrial nations, albeit the degree of change of course mediated by cultural, social and political distinctiveness. Here, the particular lesson that might be of help to the policy formulation in the U.S. is drawn from the Swedish experience. Sweden have been able to largely eliminate the poverty among single mother families with large welfare support while containing the number of single mother families - a fact the U.S. policymakers should take heed of, for they tend to associate large welfare benefits to single mothers as discouraging marriage.

4. Greater diversity in family patterns resulting of the 4 identified demographic trends has also resulted in greater inequality in income and standards of living. Dual-earning couples enjoy the highest incomes among all types of family arrangements, while single-mother families are under the greatest economic stress - this trend largely matches with that of the "feminization of poverty" as identified by many researchers. Because white children are more likely to be in the dual-earning couple family, and the black children are more likely to be in the single-mother family, this trend also has led to the greater racial disparity in income and standards of living. Regardless of race or ethnicity, it is also found that marriage and employment are associated with a higher standard of living, whereas motherhood was associated with lower standards of living. However, it is also noteworthy that for black women the economic benefits of marriage are much smaller than white women. Likewise, although among both white and black women the economic disparity between the wealthy and the poor increased, the way this gap has increased has been different - while white women improved their standards of living by moving into dual-earner families, black women improved their position by moving into nonfamily statuses. In turn, the authors note that (p. 23) the difference in family statuses account for little more than half of the poverty gap between whites and blacks.