Wifework by Susan Maushart, prominently reviewed in The Australian Magazine (State of the Union) and in Monday's Focus, gives a personal, jaded and extremely misleading account of marriage. Maushart accurately anticipates that others will find her book, as one critic reported finding it, "a hate filled diatribe". For a woman who believes marrying twice and divorcing twice and who now lives as a sole parent with three children is some sort of epiphany, this is not surprising.
She herself raises a central question, "What's wrong with using personal experience?" Well, the answer is, almost everything. The problem with such personal anecdote is that it cannot be used in any rational or meaningful way for evaluating marraige in our society. Many of Maushart's claims are quite false and dangerously misleading.
On balance, marriage has overwhelmingly beneficial effects. It should also never be forgotten that marriage breakdown and divorce come at a massive economic and social cost, not to speak of emotional upheaval and untold damage to children, with the consequent flow-on effect to the community.
The most thorough analysis to date of marriage comes from Linda Waite, sociology professor from the University of Chicago and 1999 Chairman of the American Sociological Association's family committee in a book co-authored with Maggie Gallagher. Using a statistical analysis rather than a moral one or an anecdotal one like Maushart, the authors claim that marriage is a bargain, for both men and women and few of us can afford to pass it up. The benefits derive from economies of scale -- two people living together for the cost of 1.6 people -- from the specialised division of labor within the household and the measurable positive effects on health, parenting and sex life.
Maushart claims that marriage "can erode mental health, reduce leisure time, triple unpaid domestic labour and increase the odds of physical assault or murder". One of the most interesting revelations in the Waite and Gallagher research is that marriage does precisely the opposite. Especially with children involved, the interdependence that marriage brings is its biggest boon. The expectation of permanence and mutual reliance provides real, measurable advantages, including better mental health, increased leisure time, less domestic labour and actually decreases the odds of physical assault or murder.
One danger in media reporting of views like those of Maushart, with the approving media commentary alongside, is that it strangely skirts the serious and urgent debate needed in Australia on the family as central to the most cost effective and successful way of bringing up the next generation of citizens.
We are familiar with the alarming statistics on the effects of divorce on our society, but they are absent from Maushart's account. The damage and cost to us all of single parent -- most often fatherless -- households should be intolerable. In America, official departmental figures show that 90% of all homeless and runaway children, 80% of rapists, 75% of all adolescent patients in drug abuse centers and 85% of all youths sitting in prisons, grew up in fatherless homes.
Maushart also simplifies the significance of conflict in marriage. The silly legal nicety of "irreconcilable differences", used by so many as a quick way out, is a cop-out. Research shows that irreconcilable differences are not only inevitable, but a natural part of all successful and happy marriages. In any case, research shows that behavioural problems from single-parent families are far worse than in unhappily married families as far as children are concerned, scotching the alibi that it is always better for disputing couples to separate.
Even Hilary Clinton favours reducing divorce by making people with children wait several years for a non-consensual no-fault divorce, as is done in many European countries. She believes that we need to reassert the normal family as the norm, and be willing to express social disapproval of people who create abnormal families without compelling or unavoidable reasons.
Negative publicity about marriage clearly influences people contemplating divorce. In many American cities, divorce rates have fallen from 20 to over 300 times where a so called community marriage policy has been implemented. The successful technique depends heavily on local church groups and also requires convincing municipal authorities, state marriage guidance councillors and the media to participate. These places provide clear evidence that it is possible to turn a divorce culture into a pro-marriage culture.
The English commentator, Theodore Dalrymple, blames the rise of the divorce culture on liberal intellectuals. He claims, "The destigmatisation of illegitimacy went hand in hand with easy divorce, the extension of marital rights to other forms of association between adults, and the removal of all the fiscal advantages of marriage. Marriage melted as snow in sunshine".
Clearly the will must be found to turn this all around. The media might be one place to start.
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