85
Unit Five Seven Tenets for Establishing New Marital Norms
Seven Tenets for Establishing New Marital Norms
Preparing to Read 1. Do you have a girlfriend or boyfriend now? What’s your expectation about marriage and family? Will you marry? When will you marry? Do you want to have children? How are you going to rear your children?
2. The following is a comparison of statistics about American marriage and family of the year 1960 and 2005. Study these figures carefully, and then describe the marriage and family
trends of the past four decades in the United States. Do you think these trends are positive or negative?
Unit Five 86
新视角研究生英语 读说写 2 1960 2005
Percentage of all persons aged 15 and older who 69.3% for males 55% for males were married 65.9% for females 51.5% for females Median age of first marriage 23 for males 27 for males 20 for females 26 for females
Percentage of all persons aged 15 and older who 1.8% for males 8.3% for males were divorced 2.6% for females 10.9% for females
Number of cohabiting, unmarried, adult couples 0.439 million 4.855 million of the opposite sex
Percentage of households with a child or children 48.7% 32.8% under age 18 (in 2000)
The number of bir ths that an average woman 3.654 2.049 would have (in 2004)
Percentage of women, aged 25-29, who had 73.6% 48.7%
already entered their child-rearing years and (in 1970) (in 2000) were living with one minor child of their own in the household
Percentage of women in their early forties who one out of ten one out of five did not have any biological children (in 1976) (in 2004) Percentage of children under age 18 living with a 9% 28% single parent
Percentage of live births that were to unmarried 5.3% 35.7% women (in 2004)
Number of cohabiting, unmarried, adult couple of 0.197 million 1.954 million
the opposite sex living with one child or more under age 15 87
Unit Five Seven Tenets for Establishing New Marital Norms
Text
1 2 3
Seven Tenets for Establishing New Marital Norms
by David Popenoe
David Popenoe (1932– ) is a Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and co-director of the National Marriage Project. He has written numerous scholarly and popular articles and a number of books, including War over the Family (2005), Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence that Fatherhood and Marriage are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society (1996, 1999), Disturbing the Nest: Family Change and Decline in Modern Societies (1988) and Housing and Neighborhoods (co-ed. 1987). This article is excerpted from Promises to Keep: Decline and Renewal of Marriage in America (1996).
I propose as a remedy for society’s confusion over marital gender-role
expectations, a pattern of late marriage followed, in the early childrearing years, by what one could call a “modified traditional nuclear family1.” The main elements of this pattern can be summarized as follows. (I recognize, of course, that this pattern — being a set of normative expectations — is not something to which everyone can or should conform.)
(1) Girls as well as boys should be trained according to their abilities for a socially useful paid job or career. It is important for women to be able to achieve the economic, social, and psychic rewards of the workplace that have long been reserved for men. It is important for society that everyone be well educated and that they make an important work contribution over the course of their lives. (2) Young people should grow up with the expectation that they will marry only once and for a lifetime and that they will have children. Reproduction is a fundamental purpose of life, and marriage is instrumental to its success. Today, close to 90 percent of Americans actually marry, and about the same percentage of American women have children: Although these figures have been dropping,
the social expectation in these respects is currently quite well realized. Lifetime monogamy is not so well realized, however, with the divorce rate now standing at over 50 percent.
(3) Young adults should be encouraged to marry later in life than is common now, with an average age at time of marriage in the late twenties or
4
1 traditional nuclear family: A nuclear family consists of a mother, a father and their biological children, without
any other
people in the household. In a traditional nuclear family, the father earns a living by working outside the home, and the mother
stays home to care for the children. 传统的核心家庭，传统的小家庭
88
新视角研究生英语 读说写 2 6 7 8
early thirties (the average ages currently are twenty-six for men and twenty-four for women). Even later might be better for men, but at older ages than this for women who want children, the “biological clock2” becomes a growing problem. From society’s viewpoint, the most important reasons why people should
be encouraged to marry relatively late in life is that they are more mature, they know better what they want in a mate, they are more established in their jobs or careers, and the men have begun to “settle down” sexually (partly due to a biological diminution of their sex drive). Age at marriage has proven to be the single most important predictor of eventual divorce, with the highest divorce rates found among those who marry in their teenage years. But we must also recognize that both women and men want to have time, when they are young, to enjoy the many opportunities for personal expression and fulfillment3 that modern, affluent societies are able to provide.
We should anticipate that many of these years of young adulthood will be spent in nonmarital cohabitation, an arrangement that often makes more sense
than the alternatives to it, especially living alone or continuing to live with one’s family of origin. I am not implying, much less advocating, sexual promiscuity here, but rather serious, caring relationships which may involve cohabitation. (4) From the perspective of promoting eventual family life, however, the downside to late age of marriage is that people live for about a decade or more in a nonfamily, “singles” environment which reinforces their personal drive for expressive individualism4 and conceivably reduces their impulse toward carrying out eventual family obligations, thus making the transition to marriage and childrearing more difficult. To help overcome the anti-family impact of these years, young unmarried adults should be encouraged to save a substantial portion of their income for a “family fund” with an eye toward offsetting the temporary loss of the wife’s income after marriage and childbirth. (5) Once children are born, wives should be encouraged to leave the labor
market and become substantially full-time mothers for a period of at least a year to eighteen months per child. The reason for this is that mother-reared infants appear to have distinct advantages over those reared apart from their mothers. It is desirable for children to have full-time parenting up to at least age three, but after eighteen months — partly because children by then are more verbal — it is appropriate for fathers to become the primary caretakers, and some men may wish to avail themselves of the opportunity. At age three, there is no evidence that children in quality group care suffer any disadvantages (in fact,
2 biological clock: an innate mechanism in plants and animals that controls physiological activities which change
on a daily,
seasonal, yearly, or other regular cycle 生物钟，生理钟
3 personal fulfillment: the act of fulfilling oneself—gaining happiness or satisfaction by fully developing one’s own abilities or
character 完全实现自己的抱负，充分发挥自己的才能或特点，感觉满足/满意
4 expressive individualism: the belief that the pursuit of personal fulfillment is the cornerstone of life and the chief criterion for
evaluating personal relationships such as marriage. Valuing personal pleasures such as sensuality and leisure above all else, it
disdains the ethic of duty in favor of flexible choice based on current personal satisfaction. 表现型个人主义 5
89
Unit Five Seven Tenets for Establishing New Marital Norms
for most children there are significant advantages). Once children reach that age, therefore, the average mother could resume working part-time until the children are at least of school age, and preferably in their early to middle teen years, at which point she could resume work full-time. Alternatively, when the children reach the age of three the father could stay home part-time, and the mother could resume work full-time.
For women, this proposal is essentially the strategy known as “sequencing5.” The main difficulty with it, as sociologist Phyllis Moen6 has noted, “is that child-nurturing years are also the career-nurturing years. What is lost in either case cannot be ‘made up’ at a later time.” Yet I would argue that it is possible to “make up” for career loss, but impossible to make up for child-nurturing loss. To make it economically more possible for a family with young children to live on a single income, we should institute (in addition to the “family fund”) what virtually every other industrialized society already has in place — parental leave and child allowance programs. And, to help compensate women for any job
or career setbacks due to their time out of the labor force, we should consider the development of “veterans benefits7” type programs that provide mothers with financial subsidies and job priorities when they return to the paid work force. In general, women must be made to feel that caring for young children is important work, respected by the working community.
(6) According to this proposal, the mother and not the father ordinarily would be the primary caretaker of infants. This is because of fundamental biological differences between the sexes that assume great importance in
childrearing, as discussed above. The father should be an active supporter of the mother-child bond during this period, however, as well as auxiliary homemaker and care provider. Fathers should expect to spend far more time in domestic pursuits than their own fathers did. Their work should include not only the male’s traditional care of the house as a physical structure and of the yard and car, but in many cases cooking, cleaning, and child care, the exact distribution of such activities depending on the individual skills and talents of the partners. And, as noted above, after children reach age eighteen months it may be desirable for the father and not the mother to become the primary caretaker.
This means that places of employment must make allowances for substantial flex-time and part-time job absence for fathers as well as for mothers.
9 10
5 sequencing: a term coined by Arlene Rossen Cardozo in her 1986 book Sequencing: Having It All But Not All at Once A New
Solution for Women Who Want Marriage, Career, and Family. It refers to the three clear stages that women go through as they
meld working and parenting: first have a full-time career, next devote their energies to full-time childrearing at home, and then
carefully and purposefully reintegrate paid or volunteer work back into their lives. 人生排序 6 Phyllis Moen: 菲利斯·莫恩（美国明尼苏达大学社会学教授）
7 veterans benefits: a wide range of benefits and services provided by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for veterans
of the U.S. Armed Forces and their families, including compensation, pension, health care, vocational rehabilitation and
employment, education and training, home loans, life insurance, and burial 退伍军人补助金
90
新视角研究生英语 读说写 2 (7) It should be noted that there is some balancing out of domestic and paid-work roles between men and women over the course of life. Under current socioeconomic conditions, husbands, being older, retire sooner than their wives. Also, in later life some role switching occurs, presumably caused in part by hormonal changes, in which women become more work-oriented and men become more domestic. Given current male-female differences in longevity, of course, the average woman can expect to spend an estimated seven years of her later life as a widow.
Later marriage, together with smaller families, earlier retirement, and a longer life in a society of affluence, provides both men and women in modern societies an historically unprecedented degree of freedom to pursue personal endeavors. Yet what David Gutmann8 has called the “parental imperative9” is also a necessary and important part of life, and during the parental years expressive freedom for adults must be curtailed in the interest of social values, especially the welfare of children.
Male breadwinning and female childrearing have been the pattern of
social life throughout history, albeit not always in quite so extreme a form as found in modern societies over the past century and a half. Except perhaps for adult pair-bonds in which no young children are involved, where much social experimentation is possible, it is foolhardy to think that the nuclear family can or should be entirely scrapped. When children become a part of the equation, fundamental biological and social constraints come into play — such as the importance of mothers to young children — and central elements of the nuclear family are dismissed at society’s peril. Rather than strive for androgyny and be continuously frustrated and unsettled by our lack of achievement of it, we would do much better to more readily acknowledge, accommodate, and appreciate the very different needs, sexual interests,