Enduring Bonds: Inequality, Marriage, Parenting, and Everything Else That Makes Families Great and Terrible

By Philip N. Cohen

In Enduring Bonds, Philip N. Cohen, renowned sociologist and blogger of the wildly popular and insightful Family Inequality, examines the complex landscape of today's diverse families. Through his interpretive lens and lively discussions, Cohen encourages us to alter our point of view on families, sharing new ideas about the future of marriage, the politics of research, and how data can either guide or mislead us. Deftly balancing personal stories and social science research, and accessibly written for students, Cohen shares essays that tie current events to demographic data. Class-tested in Cohen’s own lectures and courses, Enduring Bonds challenges students to think critically about the role of families, gender, and inequality in our society today. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Feb 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9780520965959

Philip N. Cohen

Philip N. Cohen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change and the Family Inequality blog. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic.  

Book preview

Enduring Bonds

Enduring Bonds

INEQUALITY, MARRIAGE, PARENTING, AND EVERYTHING ELSE THAT MAKES FAMILIES GREAT AND TERRIBLE

Philip N. Cohen

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2018 Philip N. Cohen

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cohen, Philip N., author.

Title: Enduring bonds : inequality, marriage, parenting, and everything else that makes families great and terrible / Philip N. Cohen.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017025976| ISBN 9780520292383 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520292390 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520965959 (e-edition)

Subjects: LCSH: Families. | Equality.

Classification: LCC HQ503 .C64 2018 | DDC 306.85—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025976

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1.Modernity, Parenting, and Families

1. Why Don’t Parents Name Their Daughters Mary Anymore?

2. Parenting through the (Only Very Recent) Ages

3. How Do They Do It?

4. Parenting Survivor Bias

5. Santa’s Magic, Children’s Wisdom, and Inequality

Chapter 2.Marriage, Single Mothers, and Poverty

1. What Does It Take to Eliminate Poverty?

2. Reducing Poverty through Marriage

3. Single Mothers and Crime

Chapter 3.Marriage Promotion

1. We Can’t Build Our Social System around Marriage Anymore

2. Marriage (Not) Promoted

3. Turns Out Marriage and Income Inequality Go Pretty Well Together

4. Marriage Promotion and the Myth of Teen Pregnancy

5. The Marriage Movement Has Failed (Long Live the Marriage Movement)

6. Getting Serious about Promoting Marriage to End Poverty

Chapter 4.Marriage Equality in Social Science and the Courts

What Regnerus did Wrong

Sociology Responds

The Coalition

Replication Results

Court Cases Closed

Saving Private Gender

Chapter 5.Doing Dimorphism

1. Gender Wars and the Defense of Difference

2. Pink and Blue

3. Braced for Beauty

Chapter 6.Gender Inequality

1. Gender Segregation at the New York Times

2. The Gender Gap Gets It from All Sides

3. Gender Shifts in Families

4. That Feminist Viral Statistic Meme

Chapter 7.Race, Gender, and Families

1. Black Is Not a Color

2. Black Women’s Educational Success

3. Detroit’s Grueling Demographic Decline

4. What They Say about Race When They Don’t Say Anything about Race

5. Race, Racism, and Missing Marriages

Chapter 8.Feminism and Sexuality

1. Not Your Feminist Grandmother’s Patriarchy

2. Does Sleeping with a Guy on the First Date Make Him Less Likely to Call Back?

3. Is the Price of Sex Too Damn Low?

4. Getting beyond How The Factual Feminist Is Wrong about the Prevalence of Rape

5. Why I Don’t Defend the Sex-versus-Gender Distinction

6. Does Doing Difference Deny Dominance?

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

All the essays here have been revised and updated from their original appearance on the blog. In many cases I found errors in the old posts or changed my mind about things. In addition, while updating and editing these, I often added new material that was never on the blog (such as the Mary name trend back to 1780). I haven’t specified how the essays changed so as not to burden the text, but where there are conflicts I prefer the book version. I’m a little embarrassed at the prospect of people finding places where I now contradict myself or turned out to be wrong, but that’s the price I pay for the great privilege of having conducted this work in public, with all the benefits that entails.

The data sources for the analyses in the book are in the footnotes, which sometimes point to blog posts for more detail. There isn’t much complicated programming involved, but in a few cases I provide links to data and computer code for that as well. I made most of the figures using Microsoft Excel, which despite its annoying qualities seems to be the most efficient and versatile tool for data presentation that I happen to know how to use; I’m happy to share the underlying data files for any of these if I can find them, so feel free to ask.

I was lucky to write a blog during a time when academic blogs were gathering places for critics and like-minded readers alike. The essays that form the basis for this book benefited directly or indirectly from the exchanges that came out of that milieu. Some people regularly responded in the comments section (almost always a friendly and civil place, I’m happy to say), while many others discussed these ideas with me in other settings. At the risk of offending more people than I impress, I list some of the names that come to mind here. I hope they and many other readers will carry on these conversations, which have made my career, and my life, so interesting and rewarding for the last few years: Syed Ali, Esping Anderson, Andy Andrews, Karl Bakeman, Bill Bielby, Khiarra Bridges, Tristan Bridges, Neal Caren, Karen Carr, Megan Carroll, Carrie Clarady, Stephanie Coontz, Carolyn Cowan, Phil Cowan, Emily Danforth, Paula England, Myra Marx Ferree, Tina Fetner, Gary Gates, Claudia Geist, Jennifer Glass, Ted Greenstein, Jessica Hardie, Amy Harmon, Heidi Hartmann, Mike Hout, Matt Huffman, Michelle Janning, Jeehye Kang, Meredith Kleykamp, Rose Kreider, Beth Latshaw, JaeIn Lee, Jennifer Lee, Lucia Lykke, Scott Matthews, David Meyer, Joya Misra, Laura Beth Nielsen, Pam Oliver, CJ Pascoe, Lisa Pearce, Joanna Pepin, Andrew Perrin, Allison Pugh, Rashawn Ray, Vanesa Ribas, Barbara Risman, Virginia Rutter, Liana Sayer, Meg Austin Smith, Chris Uggen, Reeve Vanneman, Ashton Verdery, Lisa Wade, Joanie Weston, Kristi Williams, and Moriah Willow. I am also very appreciative of Naomi Schneider at the University of California Press for embracing this project and for her help in getting it done. Copyeditor Elisabeth Magnus did exacting and patient work on the prose, for which I’m grateful

I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have the family I do. I’m grateful to my parents, Avis and Marshall Cohen, as well as the larger family—consanguineous, affinal, and fictive—for making me, and this book, possible. I have tried to keep my wife, Judy Ruttenberg, and daughters, Charlotte and Ruby, out of the essays, but as I look back at this work, the presence of these truly wonderful people is deeply felt and immensely appreciated.

Introduction

I started writing my blog, Family Inequality, in 2009. My purpose was to engage with people around the social trends and events that were dramatically shifting the landscape in which I worked. These were stark: Economic inequality increased, with those at the top pulling away from everyone else and progress stagnating or worse in the middle. Marriage rates fell and the proportion of children born to parents who weren’t married rose. And inequality in access to marriage ramped up, in particular the gap in marriage rates between rich and poor, and between Black and White. These three trends are all interconnected, and each became a part of the cultural and political debates of the day on everything from parenting styles and poverty rates to election demographics and the future of economic growth.

Then, in 2012, same-sex marriage erupted into academic sociology with the publication of an incendiary study claiming children were worse off if their parents were gay or lesbian—just as the issue was working its way toward the Supreme Court. This raised the possibility that social science, wielded by religious conservatives for political ends, would derail the very visible progress toward a possible breakthrough in equality for gay and lesbian couples. Most of us who had already been arguing about marriage and poverty and inequality were now drawn into the tumultuous dispute over what came to be known as marriage equality. In my case, I was arguing for marriage, or at least access to marriage, for gays and lesbians, as I was also arguing against reliance on marriage as a solution to our society’s growing economic inequality. And the cultural warriors on the other side—the ones who were always complaining that the decline of marriage was eroding the social foundations of civilization itself—were now fighting to block the extension of marriage rights. In other words, it was a great time to be a family inequality blogger (plus, I had tenure).

The debate over marriage and inequality has tended to feed the worry that individualism, and the individual freedom it begat, has weakened social bonds and increased insecurity—and may ultimately increase inequality. In the clucking voice of the cultural conservative, this comes out something like this: Well, you wanted sexual freedom, with no constraints, and now you’re surprised when you end up single, or sort of single, without economic security—and your children grow up to be rudderless cultural relativists, playing video games in your basement before eventually producing undisciplined children who put a drag on the prosperity created by previous generations.

On the other side, I and most academic social scientists usually argue that freedom in—and from—relationships is essential for fuller human development and that the marriages (or other relationships) that survive in such a context are better for everyone involved. When people don’t have enough money to take care of themselves and their children, we should all chip in to help give them the security and stability that everyone needs to thrive. In that way freedom and equality don’t have to be at odds, and everyone benefits.

Marriage equality took on an outsized role in this debate, partly because of what I like to call, somewhat dramatically, the Regnerus Affair, after the author of the infamous 2012 study, sociologist Mark Regnerus. To some, including Regnerus, gay marriage represents the ultimate individualist decadence—the kind of freedom-first approach that undermines the very concept of society. To others, marriage equality is the culmination of a civil rights struggle for equal protection under the law, the social recognition of family diversity, and the beginning of a society that embraces, respects, and supports families regardless of their structure and composition. The issue ultimately put on the table—at the center of the table—the question of gender itself, the existence or desirability or necessity of two gender categories in our families and between our individual selves. This confluence of conflicts is why the debate over marriage equality became so encompassing, raising strong emotions far beyond the relatively small proportion of people intimately affected by the legal battle. And that’s why marriage equality ended up in the center of this book. The timeliness of the issue, the intensity of the cultural and political battles it set off, and the pertinence of the issues raised for broader questions related to gender and inequality all came together.

For academic social scientists, who were already engaged in a search for greater engagement with the public, the marriage equality debate was a case study and a rallying point. It raised many of the big questions at or near the surface of our work. What is the proper role of social science in political and legal debates? How do we express our moral and political (and even religious) selves without compromising the integrity of our work as researchers and academics? In short, how do we make ourselves relevant and useful without becoming partisan hacks? These questions took on a fiercer intensity after the election of Donald Trump (which occurred after most of this book was written), raising the specter of a post-truth society in which a fear-driven, nationalist politics supports an autocratic ruler who mocks science and its practitioners in the academy. The soul-searching and political struggles over these issues will no doubt require another volume.

ENDURING BONDS

As I sat down to compile the best essays from my blog, I saw that marriage equality tapped into the broader questions about inequality I had wrestled with for years. But it was just one core aspect of the multilayered social organism that is our system of inequality. And social bonds are a vital component in the cellular architecture of that organism.

Bonds can be good (like love) or bad (like slavery). So what are the bonds of family? Some of both. In the evolution of our species, the emotional bond between parent and child meant mothers took care of babies, which enabled us to keep developing outside the womb without having to feed and care for ourselves. That prolonged infancy meant our heads (and brains) could grow bigger, which we would eventually need to play Pokémon Go. So family bonds are great. But family bonds are also the building blocks of social hierarchies, of which families historically were the first, with the power of men over women and adults over children.

Put one way, we need bonds—or, maybe, discipline—to have freedom. (It’s probably no coincidence that some people find they can achieve true emotional release only through the experience of sexual bondage.) That may be a banal observation about the human condition, but it’s directly relevant to the problem of families and inequality. We want to encourage and develop and cherish the bonds we think are good but release the bonds that are harmful—and both types are highly salient in and around families.

In the 2015 Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges, which granted marriage rights to same-sex couples, Justice Anthony Kennedy described the historical emergence of new dimensions of freedom within marriage, marking deep transformations that have strengthened, not weakened, the institution. He was referring to the extension of legal rights to women and the end of state bans on interracial marriage. On the theory that love is the strongest leash, Kennedy held that an institution governed by freedom and equality was stronger than one held together by coercion and dominance. That’s an optimistic vision of freedom, but it’s not an obvious view of institutions. What is a strong institution—one that persists over a long time, one that has a lot of members, or one that reflects the value we put on freely chosen relationships?

Kennedy wrote, The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality. It took the late justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative Catholic, to point out that marriage isn’t really about freedom. In his furious dissent, Scalia mocked the idea that people find freedoms in the enduring bond of marriage. One would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage, he scoffed. Ask the nearest hippie. Scalia had a point. It may seem self-evident to us that the right to personal choice regarding marriage is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy, as Kennedy wrote, but marriage does represent a self-imposed, contractual limit on individual autonomy. Still, Scalia need not have feared Kennedy’s opinion as some sort of radical tract. When Kennedy wrote that marriage is a keystone of the Nation’s social order, he extended the notion of enduring bonds to the societal level. He meant the good kind of bonds, but that’s not a simple option to exercise. And did gay and lesbian activists fight for marriage rights so they could fortify the social order, which still in many ways marginalizes them? There are conflicting visions at work here. The enduring bonds of family are neither all good nor all bad.

FAMILY INEQUALITY

Of the nine hundred or so posts on my blog, I really only considered a few hundred for inclusion in this book, working with those that might fill a coherent set of categories around common themes. It’s clear that my overriding concern was with the place of families in the system of inequality, with a recurring emphasis on the question of who gets what kind of family, and the consequences of that social ordering. I addressed that issue from all directions and distances and with different degrees of focus—always drawing on whatever skills and knowledge I happened to have handy, and inspired by whatever I was reading. These are the chapters that emerged.

The role of families in perpetuating inequality frequently drew me to questions about parenting: the observable or invisible practices that help shape children’s personalities, resources, and relationships. Chapter 1 looks at the broad cultural sweep of parenting practices—such as the demise of the name Mary—as well as contemporary controversies over corporal punishment and religion. Of course, in the case of children, the parental bond is a key element of their security and a precondition for the eventual exercise of freedom and liberty. But such bonds also become weapons in the hands of abusive or exploitative parents. Further, families are just one element in the system of inequality, and nothing they do can overcome some more structural features of the system. So the essays on parenting tee up an exploration of family structure and inequality. Focusing on poverty and crime, chapter 2 pushes back on the idea that the rise of single mothers is the underlying cause of growing inequality and its consequences.

The focus on single mothers with respect to poverty and crime has led our national policy makers into an unhealthy obsession with promoting marriage as a solution to poverty, crime, and almost any other problem they can think of. This is not just an innocent mistake in interpreting social and demographic trends, however. Single mothers are the visible expression of the historical trend toward both gender equality and more diverse family structures, which have had the effect of decentering the married, man-woman, breadwinner-homemaker nuclear family. Chapter 3 puts marriage promotion and its promoters in the context of this historical change, branding them as retrograde defenders of what should be a bygone era of uniquely segregated and unequal gender relations. From a pose as supporters of the good kind of enduring bond—the loving, harmonious, supportive, married-parent family—they emerge as surprisingly mean-spirited, doing more shaming and blaming than assisting and uplifting (and their programs don’t work).

Ironically, but not really, marriage promotion and marriage denial are bedfellows in our historical moment. Some of the most influential people who want to make poor parents get married also wanted to prevent gays and lesbians (and their children) from accessing this esteemed social and economic status. Chapter 4 is a retelling of the Regnerus Affair, the dumpster fire that burned in academia as political and legal debates over marriage equality were occurring nationwide. Besides airing a lot of academic dirty laundry, that episode helped expose the gender paranoia at the heart of the marriage promotion movement: the fear that modern society no longer needs gender itself, at least in its traditional binary expression.

The end of gender as we know it seems at odds with another trend, the apparent increase in gender differentiation in the cultural milieu of children, as seen in the tendency to divide toys and clothes, and entertainment, by gender. My sensitivity to this issue was heightened as a result of the prolonged debates over gender and marriage, and as my own daughters went through the Disney Princess ages this hypergendering became an irritant as well as, I have to admit, an entertaining diversion. So chapter 5 discusses the accentuation of gender differences with an emphasis on culture and parenting, including not just children’s movies but also bathrooms, orthodonture, and color preferences.

Gender difference is a key cognitive element of gender inequality—if we don’t create gender differences in our minds, and enforce them in our social behavior, then the inequalities associated with gender might lose traction and slip away. That also means that gender distinctions matter more when they reinforce the social hierarchy. Chapter 6 addresses gender inequality through the core issues of occupational segregation, economic inequality, and the division of labor. Chapter 7 is the parallel set of essays on the intersection of race and gender inequality. In both cases, there are thorny issues of definition and measurement, but we have a strong imperative to master enough of the facts to give us a knowledge base for addressing persistent inequality. This chapter includes case studies in inequality, on women’s educational attainment, Detroit, and marriage—the essays where I thought my contribution turned out to be useful.

Finally, chapter 8 focuses on feminism and sexuality. I argue that US society (like every other society) is still a patriarchy—a case, I admit, that became a little easier to make after Trump’s election. And I attempt to buttress the case for feminism, using that perspective to critique some of the common tropes of the propatriarchy intellectual establishment. These include sexual shaming and rape denial. The chapter concludes with a return to gender difference questions, which continue to bedevil feminism both theoretically and practically—as we see in the disputes over young women’s vocal fry and uptalk and in gender-segregated sports, to name just a few examples.

Families are great, families are terrible, and families are everything in between. No simpler, more idealized summary will be as true as that overbroad nonconclusion. But whether our view is ultimately positive or negative, families emerge both as the linchpin of our system of inequality and as the best hope for many of its most vulnerable victims. For better and for worse, their bonds are enduring, in our individual lives and in the historical development of our modern societies. And understanding how that works can only help.

IN THE CLASSROOM

One of the great things about my job is I get to choose what subjects I teach, but for most of the past decade I felt it was important to keep the family sociology classroom experience in mind when I was blogging so that I could keep my writing focused and stay on task. And since I usually blog about whatever is right in front of me, a lot of this book takes off from what was happening in that classroom, and I’ve used a lot of this material in my own courses. If you are considering using this book to accompany a family course, here are some suggestions, put in terms of common themes or chapter headings. Chapter 1 is introductory material, especially relevant if you, like me, focus on modernity and its attendant identity questions. Chapter 2 may help with discussions of social class and economic inequality. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with marriage but also might contribute to conversations about research methods, research ethics, and the integration of research and policy work. I’ve used the material in chapters 5 and 6 to supplement my syllabus on gender, concerning both children (as in the case of gender socialization) and adults (especially when the subject is work and inequality). Chapter 7 should be useful for the section on race, especially with a focus on African Americans and demographic trends. Finally, chapter 8 may pair well with teaching about sexuality, particularly for those interested in discussing feminism in relation to sexuality. We who teach families need to stick together, so I hope this helps—and please let me know how it goes.

1

Modernity, Parenting, and Families

My research career began with an interest in modern inequality, and especially in how different kinds of inequality intersect (in the 1990s, this concern often went under a list that now seems quaintly short: race, class, and gender). My first project as an intern was to examine large demographic data sets from the US Census Bureau and figure out how many unmarried couples were living together.¹ That and a few other projects eventually made me a family demographer, but my interest in inequality persisted. I started pulling families and inequality together—and increasingly saw families as one of the key pieces of the intersecting inequality puzzle. To get into that requires more than the simple observation that children inherit the wealth or poverty of their parents—although that is a good deal of the point. It requires unearthing what happens within families, the gender and age and power issues that percolate behind the closed doors of the family household. And to see the overall effect of families on inequality, we need to tackle the less obvious—and hard to track—problem of who get to have the families they want, which (as the marriage equality debate taught us) turns out to be the crux of many matters.

In this chapter I start with several essays on what we now call parenting, the uniquely modern practice of transforming the raw material of humanity into interlocking—even if disordered—pieces of the social order. Nothing in this process is as obvious as it seems, from the individual yet profoundly social decision of what to name a child through the immediate imperative to keep children safe. From sudden infant death syndrome to Santa, from vaccine exemptions to screen time, parenting is a complicated performance that both reflects and builds identities in the family, and between families. Inequality is not the only product of this performance, but it’s one of the most important.