Are Elites Marriage Hypocrites?

Maybe it's not values around marriage that are unequal, but opportunities.

Photo by Antonio DiCaterina on Unsplash

Elites, conservative writer Brad Wilcox argues, are marriage hypocrites. Affluent and well-educated Americans say they’re open and accepting of a wide variety of family formations, but when it comes to forming their own families, they’re strikingly traditional, overwhelmingly adopting what Wilcox and some other social scientists call the “success sequence”: As Wilcox puts it, “(1) getting at least a high-school degree, (2) working full-time in your 20s, and (3) marrying before you have children.” Just doing these three things, he argues, radically decreases your odds of winding up impoverished, and is a pathway to the middle class. That elites are doing this but less-educated and lower-income are not is somehow the fault of… elites.

This is mostly based on the implication that what elites say has some huge influence on what the less-elite actually do, which is why it’s so offensive that elites say diverse family formations are great, when their own families look pretty homogeneous with two married parents. This is pretty facially ridiculous. There are a lot of explanations for the decline of marriage among less-educated and poorer Americans, but as far as I can tell there’s scant evidence supporting the contention that “highly-educated progressives are increasingly nonjudgemental about other people’s families” is among among them. What Wilcox seems angry about is that elites are generally doing the more-conservative thing, but they aren’t demanding that everyone else live like they do, or engaging in a shaming campaign against those who don’t. Elites, the argument seems to be, shouldn’t just live according to a particular set of values; they should do as conservatives do and demand that everyone else hew to their moral rules, too.

(It is worth noting here that many groups with more conservative views on marriage also have higher rates of single parenthood and divorce, and that red states with the country’s highest proportions of conservative and traditionalist voters generally have higher rates of both than blue states — suggesting that, maybe, the problem isn’t liberal values but conservative something).

Americans across the board have become less judgmental about diverse family arrangements. We have become moderately less obsessed with getting married and having babies, both in our actions and in our ideals. But I don’t think the huge shifts we’ve seen in marriage and family formation — and the shifts are indeed huge, and some of them have indeed been pretty bad for many children — are only the result of changing cultural norms. I think they’re the result of cultural norms that have changed in several different directions, both away from marriage as mandatory and also toward higher expectations of marital relationships, and of real shifts in material circumstances that leave even a lot of people who want to get married asking, to who?

Conservative Outcomes, But Liberal Means

I am one of the liberals Wilcox resents, who thinks families can and should look a lot of different ways, but also personally wouldn’t have had a kid without being married (for the record, I am married, but I don’t have kids). My own views on childbearing, vis a vis my own life, are pretty conservative, but the means of how I’ve gotten there are very liberal. I used contraception to avoid pregnancy, including the kind many conservatives say are “abortifacients.” If I had gotten pregnant when I didn’t want to be, which was basically any point in the last 20 years, I would have had an abortion. A lot of other college-educated women with liberal values do the same. While more-affluent and better-educated women are a lot more likely to use contraception and therefore a lot less likely to become pregnant unintentionally compared to poorer and less-educated women, they are a lot more likely to end unwanted pregnancies: When faced with an unwanted pregnancy, roughly a third of the wealthiest women had abortions; fewer than 10% of low-income women did.

And yet you don’t see a lot of effort from pro-marriage conservatives to expand contraception and abortion access, and decrease stigma around both, so that lower-income women can behave similarly to wealthier and better-educated women in how we delay childbearing until marriage.