Regarding my estimate that 95 percent of people in the early 1960s would have agreed with the GSS item “It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family”:
The 1962 Gallup survey of women asked whether a woman is happier if she is married and caring for a family or if she is unmarried with a career. Ninety-six percent of ever-married women and 77 percent of never-married women said she is happier married and caring for a family, which, given the marriage statistics for 1960, implies that 94 percent of all women in the Gallup age range would have given that answer. It must be assumed that virtually all women giving that answer would (to be consistent) also agree with the statement “It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.”
The Gallup survey was limited to women. We know from answers to the GSS question in the 1970s that (not surprisingly) men were even more likely than women to say that the woman’s place was in the home—there was an average 8-point differential. Given the indirect evidence that roughly 94 percent of women would have agreed with that item in the early 1960s and that an even higher proportion of men would have agreed with it, the 95 percent estimate seems to be a minimum for both sexes combined.
I also examined age differences in the responses in responses to the Gallup question, but they were trivial. The results for women ages 21–29 and 50–60 were within a percentage point of the one for white women ages 30–49.
Regarding the GSS item “What about a married person having sexual relations with someone other than his or her husband or wife?” and my estimate that 80 percent of people in the early 1960s would have answered that it is always wrong:
The item asked in the 1962 Gallup survey specified extramarital sex by wives and the sample consisted exclusively of women. Eighty-four percent of the ever-married sample and 85 percent of the never-married sample said no. The GSS item did not specify which spouse cheats on whom, asking simply about sex with a person other than one’s spouse, and asked the question of both sexes.
In the GSS surveys, there was no significant age-related difference among white women. The gender differential on this item ran at about 7 percent, with more women than men saying extramarital sex was always wrong. My 80 percent estimate assumes that women would have answered only slightly differently in 1962 if the item had been worded to include both spouses, and splits the gender differential observed in the GSS surveys. This estimate also has face validity. In the GSS surveys conducted in 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008, combining the sexes, 78 percent of all whites ages 30–49 gave the “always wrong” answer to this item. It does not seem plausible that more whites ages 30–49 thought extramarital sex was always wrong in 2000–2008 than in the first half of the 1960s, and it is accordingly hard to believe that the 80 percent estimate for 1960–64 is too low.
A plausible hypothesis about Figure 8.3 is that much of the apparent decline in marriage is an artifact of the rising age at first marriage: It reflects the increased number of people in their thirties who are still not married, but will marry eventually. It turns out, however, that even though the average age of first marriage went up from 1960 to 2010, the percentage who put off marriage until after age 30 still constituted a small part of the overall population. Graphs limited to whites ages 40–49 looks almost exactly the same as the trendlines shown in Figure 8.3. Limited to ages 40–49, married whites in Belmont went from 94.5 percent in 1960 to 84.3 percent in 2010, compared to 94.0 percent and 82.7 percent for those ages 30–49. Limited to ages 40–49, married whites in Fishtown went from 83.1 percent in 1960 to 49.6 percent in 2010, compared to 84.2 percent and 48.0 percent for those ages 30–49.
Figure 8.5 includes separated people. The percentage of whites who are married-but-separated in the CPS did not change markedly from 1960 to 2010, remaining in a range from 1.3 to 2.4 percent. Separation usually means divorce. The probability that a separation will result in a divorce is more than 50 percent after a one-year separation, and quickly rises to more than 90 percent for separations lasting longer than that.1
Regarding my estimate that 63 percent of respondents would have said they were in very happy marriages in the first half of the 1960s: In the 1962 Gallup survey, women had been asked how happy their marriages were, and given the options of “extremely happy,” “fairly happy,” and “not so happy.” Fifty-seven percent of the married women said their marriages were extremely happy, while 39 percent said “fairly happy” and 4 percent said “not so happy.” The corrections for gender differential and persons outside the 30–49 age range are small and in opposite directions, canceling each other out.
The imponderable is the difference in the wording of the options: “extremely happy” in the Gallup survey versus “very happy” in the GSS; “fairly happy” in the Gallup versus “pretty happy” in the GSS; and “not so happy” in the Gallup versus “not too happy” in the GSS. The last two pairs of choices seem roughly equivalent. But, in my judgment, asking that a marriage be “extremely happy” sets a higher bar than asking that it be “very happy.” (Extremely evokes for me something in addition to the quiet contentment that could justify a “very happy” answer.) How much higher? Adding just 3 points to the 1962 result to make it an even 60 percent felt like too little. Adding 8 points to make 65 percent felt like too much. So you see 63 (62.5 would have been ridiculous). If anyone has a better idea, I’ll be happy to entertain it.
Table 8.1 adjusts the Vital Statistics data based on education at the time of the birth to the best estimate of the ultimate educational attainment of women who give birth. The case of women with twelve years of education will illustrate the procedure I applied to all the educational levels.
In the 1979 cohort of the NLSY, the nonmarital-birth ratio for women with twelve years of education was 12.10 percent if based on education at birth (the measure given by the National Center for Health Statistics) and 12.83 percent if based on education at age 40 (the appropriate measure for an analysis based on women’s final educational attainment). I therefore weighted the National Center for Health Statistics’ nonmarital-birth ratios for women with twelve years of education by 1.060 (the result of 12.83/12.10) to reach an estimate for women whose final educational attainment was twelve years. I then applied these adjusted figures to the distribution of educational attainment of women in Belmont and Fishtown in a given year.
People with lower levels of education marry at younger ages and have babies at younger ages than people who are busy with school through most of their twenties. If we control for these differences, how much would the apparent class differences in divorce be diminished?
Using the NLSY-79, the chances that a Fishtown child would have experienced a divorce by the time his mother was age 40 was 44 percent, compared to 12 percent for a Belmont child. Suppose that Fishtown women married and had babies at the same ages that Belmont women do (averaging at ages 25 and 31, respectively). Then the chances of divorce would have been 32 percent for the Fishtown child and 10 percent for the Belmont child—still a big difference, but reduced.2
If the question is how children are being socialized in today’s America, it makes no difference. Age at marriage and at giving birth may explain something about why the percentages of children experiencing divorce differ across classes, but the fact remains that people in the upper socioeconomic classes do marry and have their children at older ages than people in the lower socioeconomic classes. If we can figure out a way to change that situation, then we will reduce the future divergence between the ways children of different classes are socialized. But right now, it’s irrelevant.