Arlene Skolnick Replies to E. Kay Trimberger

Kay Trimberger and I are not far apart politically. We share a feminist perspective. We agree that “irreversible changes” have occurred to marriage and family life, and we agree that family change does not equate to moral decay. We agree about the kind of policies progressives should support—health care, child care, and so on that have been on the liberal agenda for decades.

We differ, however, on how to describe family change, on what the statistics show—or fail to show—as well as on the historical background to current family trends. Most significantly, we disagree about what political stance progressives should take with regard to family matters in general and marriage in particular—and what language we should use.

Trimberger holds to the view that prevails among pundits of all persuasions, the media, and the general public that marriage and “the family” are in decline, fading away, on the verge of disappearing. If the left does not take this decline as seriously as the right, she argues, we “leave a gap for the fundamentalists to fill.”

In contrast, I argue that something is seriously wrong with the demise and decline thesis. I don’t contend that marriage is “indestructible” as Trimberger puts it, only that it hasn’t been destroyed. Far from it. At a time when 90 percent of Americans marry at some point in their lives, 75 percent of the divorced remarry, gay couples are lining up in droves for marriage licenses, and the “marital industrial-complex” is a multibillion-dollar enterprise, this persistence must be the basis for any serious discussion of life in the United States today. Indeed, the really interesting question is why, now that marriage is no longer compulsory, especially for women, the institution remains so popular.

This is not to understate the pressures and troubles that afflict too many of our families. Indeed, my article focuses on those stresses. I argue that rather than reinforce the right’s “decline” message or pit one family form or lifestyle against another, we should craft a message of our own. It should acknowledge the ambivalence most Americans feel about family change: they don’t like divorce, but also don’t believe people should be made to stay in miserable marriages; they think children do better in two-parent families, but not in abusive or conflict-ridden homes; and they don’t like it when politicians denigrate single mothers or discriminate against gays.

But our message should focus on the major trends affecting Americans’ personal and family lives and the lack of public and private policies to deal with them: the unfinished gender revolution; work-life imbalance and the care crisis it creates; and a high-risk, high-stress economy that has brought new insecurity even to solidly middle-class families.

My article was a response to the conservative drive to make the supposed marriage crisis into a major political issue. Through...