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

~ (Author) "For a while it looked like Hurricane Katrina would accomplish what the NAACP never could: reviving civil rights liberalism as a major force in American..." (more)
Key Phrases: unequal families, republican marriage, ghetto family, Head Start, The Mission, Moynihan Report (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Marriage and Caste in America should provoke serious thought about how marriage has become a class issue-and what we can do about it." -- New York Post

"Hymowitz has the gift of being able to convey complicated ideas, theories, and history in lucid and witty language." -- Lisa Schiffren, Commentary

"Hymowitz provides an arresting diagnosis of American social ills." -- Cheryl Miller, American Conservative

"Powerful...unflinching...analysis of this crisis of the black abandonment of marriage." -- GREGORY J. SULLIVAN, Evening Bulletin

"The most fascinating (but grimmest) sections...deal with child-rearing skills in unmarried America." -- Charlotte Hays, Wall Street Journal

"[A] fascinating and informational [book] that you ought to read." --Dr. Laura Schlessinger

A short and readable volume.... Hymowitz has surely contributed...to creating the present hopeful moment for mainstream America. -- Claudia Anderson in Weekly Standard

America could save itself a lot of trouble by paying attention to what she writes. -- Theodore Dalrymple, author of Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

Essential. -- David Brooks in New York Times

Hymowitz...has concluded that the family revolution [is both] bad news for children [and] has had the effect of stratifying the country as a whole. -- Steve Goddard, History Wire

The answers are here in Carroll's well-researched, fact-filled book. -- San Diego Union - Tribune

Product Description

A generation ago Americans undertook a revolutionary experiment to redefine marriage. The results of this experiment separating marriage from childrearing are in, and they are bad news for children and for the country as a whole. The family upheaval has hit African-Americans especially hard. We forgot what American marriage was designed to do: it ordered lives by giving the young a meaningful life script. It supported middle-class foresight, planning, and self-sufficiency. And it organized men and women around The Mission--nurturing their children's cognitive, emotional, and physical development. It is The Mission that separates middle-class kids from their less-parented and lower-achieving peers. In fact our great family experiment threatens to turn what the founders imagined as an opportunity-rich republic of equal citizens into a hereditary caste society.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher (November 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566637090
• ISBN-13: 978-1566637091
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #510,120 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inner City Black Children Could Use More Bill Cosby's and fewer Marian Wright Edelman's, December 28, 2006

By	Mark MacGuidwin (Bloomfield Township, MI, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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?

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The unequal distribution of marriage, February 12, 2007

By	Hagios (Rhode Island) - See all my reviews

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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.

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hymowitz is a Treasure, December 17, 2006

By	Wynton C. Hall (Bainbridge, GA United States) - See all my reviews

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.