Customer Reviews

Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age

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In writing this easy-to-read, but hard-to-swallow little book, Kay Hymowitz has done more to show the route out of poverty and despair for inner city black children than all the nanny-state prescriptions of "child advocacy" organizations like the Childrens' Defense Fund (now there's a misnomer). She describes well the fundamental difference between middle class families--with both father and mother living in the same house--and single mothers with absentee fathers in the inner city. In middle-class families, the child's development--"emotional, social, and...cognitive--takes center stage. It is the family's raison d'etre, its state religion." It is a lack of understanding of what she labels the "mission" of the family for the child, that perpetuates the underclass. It hit me between the eyes when a nurse, working with poor, young, first-time mothers, is quoted as saying that when she encouraged such mothers to talk to their babies, they often reply, "Why would I talk to him? He can't answer me." Throwing more money at government programs like Head Start haven't been able and never will be able to overcome such a view of the role of the "family" in developing a self-reliant, productive and, yes, happy child and young adult. And unfortunately, for more and more central cities of the US, there are no longer any models of middle class behavior for young people to learn from. No one can show how a full-time father living in the home acts--because there are none.

The good news from this book is that Gen X young people, having seen and felt the horrific effects of easy divorces by Baby Boomer parents, are becoming more and more committed to staying together in traditional marriages. The bad news, as Hymowitz demonstrates, is that American society is becoming more and more bifurcated. As the time and education required to succeed in a more information-intensive world increases, the gap between success (and yes, personal fulfillment) and failure (and despair) will continue to grow. And such success or failure will be determined more and more by that venerable, but elite-scorned institution--the marriage of one man and one woman. How did we ever come to think otherwise?

This is a well written and accessible look at some of the research surrounding marriage and poverty. In the first chapter Kay Hymowitz shows that the breakdown of marriage has not been a universal phenomenon. Instead divorce and single motherhood are concentrated among the poor. The result is that the breakdown of marriage entraps another generation into poverty. This shows up clearly in the statistics, Only 20% of children in families earning under $15,000 live with both parents, compared to 92% for children whose parents make over $75,000. This also shows up in surprising ways. In a world in which divorce rates are nearly fifty percent, only 10% of students in elite colleges come from divorced families.

Affluent families are governed by what Hymowitz dubs "The Mission." Affluent parents invest tremendous amounts of time and energy into their children in order to prepare them for a successful life. Even socially liberal women recognize the importance of enlisting fathers in the process of raising children. Heartbreakingly, this is not emulated in the broken homes of the underclass. There is an adage that goes, "When America catches a cold, black America catches pneumonia," and this is sadly true when it comes to the breakdown of the family. Hymowitz describes childrearing in the black community, where in many inner cities the rates of out of wedlock childbirths are nearly 80%. Unmarried parents may start out with good intentions, but over time they drift in different directions. When the black mothers try to get the fathers to invest more time and energy into their children, they are derided for "actin' white."

Other books that people who read this will like are The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families by sociologist James Q. Wilson. It is a more thorough treatment of much of the same material, including the current research, history, and sociology of marriage. Also check out No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, which is a rigorous examination of the problem of black poverty and education. It debunks various progressive arguments such as a lack of school funding or self-fulfilling prophecies, and argues the need for a cultural readjustment.

If you don't already read Kay Hymowitz's essays in City Journal, you will after reading this book. She's that rare writer who manages to be bold without being bombastic. Her take on the crumbling institution of marriage is at once sobering and smart. Her thesis: marriage matters. In language that is simple without being simplistic, she reveals how marriage is the ultimate "anti-poverty program," and how so much that ails our nation's youth derives from absentee fathers. She delivers a heavy message with a hopeful conclusion: in the end, many of the challenges our nation's families face aren't all that hard to solve, they just take the moral courage and individual initiative to do so.

What are we going to do? That's the question Hymowitz asks as she surveys the wreckage of marriage in America.

"In 1960 ...the percentage of high school dropouts who were never-married mothers barely hit 1 percent...Moreover, almost all women stayed married" (p 18). How things have changed. Now our illegitimacy rate hovers at 37% and the majority of children spend at least part of their childhood without both their natural parents.

A huge number of young women have simply lost the life script that would lead them to marriage. And the result is tragic.

Children of single mothers are at huge risk for emotional problems, drug abuse, suicide, sexual abuse, and school problems. There are only a tiny minority of prisoners in our prisons who grew up with both their natural parents.

Worse, these problems do not go away after a few years. They are lifelong, rolling like waves through years of further troubled relationships and poverty. And even worse than that, none of the palliatives most people suggest have helped. Head Start is a failure. As research in Sweden shows, no matter how much money the government spends, children of single mothers tend never to do as well as the children of married parents.

Nor can the presence of a father figure later on help much. In fact, statistics show that second marriages or later father figures tend to increase, not decrease, the amount of trouble for the child.

It's apparent even among the elite. "Cornell professor Jennifer Gerner was baffled some years ago when she n noticed that only about 10% of her students came from divorced families' (p 24).

So if our breezy modern attitude toward marriage is harming a huge number of children, what can be done?

Anyone interested in this subject will want to read the best book on the subject, "The Abolition of Marriage" by Maggie Gallagher.

Hymowitz' book collects data from a wide range of sources, including her own experience in the inner city, to argue for the importance of marriage. While she draws on many sources, the book isn't written in an academic manner (i.e., no footnotes), which may either please or annoy different readers. What she does is offer a clear, multi-faceted picture of the importance of marriage and explains why a culture which is indifferent to elective single parenting (or casual cohabitation) is going to cause itself phenomenal heartache. The author ends the book on a positive note. Hymowitz looks for -- and finds -- evidence that the cultural landscape is shifting in favor of more traditional family structures.

Hymowitz' support of tradition causes her to see support for gay marriage as a mistake, though she never spells out why her pro-marriage stance can't embrace it. Her main argument for marriage is that a committed two-person partnership is a minimal requirement for the well-being of children. While other arrangements might work in theory, that's what works in practice.

At any rate, the book is well-written and makes its case on many different levels. It's especially valuable for those who think that a father in the home can be replaced by appropriate government programs.

This is a very powerful book. There are couple of concepts that really jumped out at me.

1) The modern notion that the primary purpose of marriage is personal happiness and expression, as oppose to child rearing. She really made some good arguments about why child rearing has to be the primary focus of marriage in a free and democratic society. In a society where the citizens are the final authority government should not be `raising' our children. Yet, with single parenthood on the rise and the inevitable burdens it puts on our social structure government is taking an increasingly larger part in the rearing of the next generation of citizens. Marriage has a truly positive material effect on the lives of children. What material effect (if any) does marriage really have on people declaring love for each alone?

2) The fact that alternative family structures are the last thing the African American community needs. African Americans have had alternative family structures for the last 30 plus years. Has it helped the dynamics and effectiveness of the black family over that time? African Americans have to be careful when we take on certain attitudes of the mainstream culture. We can not dismiss the positive effects marriage has on children as easily as other cultures can. Truthfully, I do not think other cultures should either. But as Ms. Hymowitz shows, the aftermath of that dismissal is much more devastating to a community where over 70% of the children are born to unmarried parents.

All in all, this is a powerful book that most American should read. There comes a point when we must become truly concerned about the generations coming behind us. Once we have had all our fun, what kind of society will we be leaving them? At what point do we sacrifice some personal desire for the good of our nation as a whole? The book may not be flawless, but it can ignite a great conversation that needs to take place in our current debates.

This book gives an honest and detailed discussion about how marriage affects social standing and class in society. There were parts that I disliked and that left a bad taste in my mouth but, overall it's an important book for generation Y and X-ers to read. Most people don't realize how we are jeopardizing our children's future and the future of this country by forgoing marriage. She outlines the importance of fathers and shows threw example how fatherless children often become absentee fathers thus creating multigenerational poverty and illegitimacy.

Hymowitz takes a critical look at the institution of marriage in America, why it failed during the 1960s, and how future generations are effected today. Each chapter examines a different aspect of marriage as an institution for raising intelligent and ambitious children. This mission was essential for carrying on the American principles of liberty and self-government.

The book discusses how divorce and sexual irresponsibility has bisected the country into separate and unequal families. The inner city life style presents a different "life plan" than the typical suburban, middle class family. To clarify, the author references case studies from ghettos on how commitment is viewed as oppressive, child-bearing is viewed as a badge of honor, and how the community condones this type of lifestyle. As a result, low-income children have fallen drastically behind their middle class cohorts, will continue to live in poverty as the become adults, and ultimately produce future generations that maintain this trend.

Hymowitz also examines the lack of "Dads in the Hood" and problems that arise when a father is absent from his child's life. Further topics include: teen mothers, the change in feminism, and how the marriage mission as evolved today.

There is commentary from Bill Cosby lecturing black families to take responsibility with their home life: "We did not have the Civil Rights Movement for our children to become thugs and hos." Follow that with a quote from Professor William Sampson, author of Black Student Achievement: "The neighborhood is not responsible for the difference. Neither is race. Neither is income. No, only the parents."

An excellent book that directly assesses the excuses for family dysfunction, and the generational gap with the nuclear family.

These essays make an argument about life and class in America. Kay Hymowitz points to a tremendous increase in births of illegitimate children over the past four decades. She suggests that the children of the non- married have poor chance of success in subsequent life. They do not have models and examples which teach them the meaning of discipline, work, delay of gratification for a long- term goal. She indicates that there is a growing multigenerational underclass in America. And she in effect makes a strong argument that married parents are the best thing for the children.
While she does not provide a mass of statistical data to support her case she does write in a reasonable, clear and convincing way.
This is an alarming book for all those who care about the future of America.

Her book clarifies the psychology of the urban or inner city drift that characterizes so much of what Thomas Sowell hammers on in his own writings about "cultural capital." This is a good read.

Concerns:

1. It cites numerous other sources, but doesn't have a bibliography. I use bibliographies often to find other materials to read on a subject. Granted it would make the book several pages longer, but it would still be a good idea for the paperback edition.

2. She does not cite statistics about the prevalence of desire among homosexual folks to tie a legal knot even though she leads the reader to believe that part of her thesis is that the idea of homosexual marriage threatens the Founding Fathers' definition of marriage in the USA. My guess is that their numbers and percentages are so low that they would not make it onto the radar screen. But even if they are higher, she still does not try to explain why a legal union (why not call it a marriage?) that cannot produce children is anything like the threat from those who fail to inculcate the "american life script." In the instances when gay couples adopt from outside eithers' experience or raise each others' children, she fails to enumerate their results; my guess is that they are pretty good. Certainly I'd bet that gay couples rate higher than average on her other indicators of being likely to succeed in today's society.

3. In the last chapter, the one with reasons for hope, she does not connect her reasons to be hopeful to the inner city situation that she spent a great deal of time describing and explaining. All of her hopeful evidence strikes me as more likely to be psychologically relevant to those who were raised where the life script was at least being rebelled against instead of lost all together from the collective experience. Gen-Xers have a different culture than inner city, poor, young, single African-Americans. It is not clear that any of her cited evidence is relevant to the latter group.