Saturday, September 20, 1997
The Toronto Globe and Mail
Marriage by the book
By Margaret Wente
HERE'S a sociological insight you're probably familiar with: Marriage makes men happier, but not women.
Single men are the most miserable creatures in the world, while single women rate themselves the happiest.
And married men are happier than married women.
My friends and I have been swapping this bit of conventional wisdom for years. It's standard dinner-party
fare. Someone brings it up, and we all laugh knowingly. Why, it's perfectly obvious! We all conjure up the
same mental image of the stock Lonely Guy, eating his Spaghetti-Os by the light of the cathode-ray tube in
his dusty lonely-guy apartment. For the happy single gal, think Mary Tyler Moore. Then there is the
overburdened, time-starved creature who plays the Modern Wife: briefcase in one hand, Pampers in the
other, cooking and cleaning and nurturing for her kids and that loutish ex-Lonely Guy.
It's obvious. Marriage is a rotten deal. And a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
The only trouble with this beloved old story is that it's exactly half wrong. Think about it. Do most married
women you know honestly wish they were single again? Do you?
In fact, the most credible studies of family life have one consistent finding: Marriage benefits both men and
women, in about equal measure, for pretty much the same reasons. Married people are less lonely and
stressed than single people and report themselves to be happier with their lives; and marriage is a large
part of the reason they feel that way. (Married people also have higher living standards and better sex. So
there.)
Where did the myth of the miserable wife come from? And why is it so persistent?
THE origins of the myth lie in an influential book written 25 years ago by sociologist Jessie Bernard, called
The Future of Marriage. She found from national surveys that married men reported themselves to be
much happier than single men. From this, she concluded that marriage benefits men.
Those same surveys showed almost identical findings for women. But the author did not draw the same
conclusion. Why? Because, she explained, married women only say they are happy because society expects
them to say so. Despite what women said, she concluded that the effects of marriage are typically opposite
for men and women. He wins. She loses.
Most family scholars now consider Bernard's core thesis to be wrong. But it has assumed a life of its own.
The theory lives on, not only around your dinner table and mine, but in dozens of sociology textbooks that
are used in thousands of college and university courses across North America to teach students about
family and married life. The books are used as well by social workers, therapists, counsellors, and teachers.
Here are a few examples of what they're reading.
From Changing Families (1994): "Bernard's investigation showed that the psychological costs of marriage
were great for women."
From Sociology of Marriage and the Family (1995): "We do know, for instance, that marriage has an
adverse effect on women's mental health."
From Diversity in Families (1996): "If marriage is so difficult for wives, why do the majority surveyed judge
themselves as happy? . . . Happiness is interpreted by wives in terms of conformity. Since they are
conforming to society's expectations, this must be happiness."
So that's us, according to the textbooks: Stepford Wives, one and all.
THIS amazing tale is laid bare in a new report called Closed Hearts, Closed Minds: The Textbook Story of
Marriage. It was published by the Institute for American Values, a nonpartisan organization devoted to
research on major issues of family well-being and civil society. (It's chaired by the widely respected scholar
Jean Bethke Elshtain.) The report reviews 20 leading sociology textbooks, many of which are also used in
Canada. It concludes that these books are "a national embarrassment."
Using plenty of gruesome examples, the report argues that almost every one of these books is marred by
shoddy research, bad writing, intellectual dishonesty and major omissions. Most of them ignore the current
debates on such issues as the adverse effects on children of divorce and the adverse impact of the high
divorce rate on society. They don't bother to mention that single parenting is hard on everyone. They paint
marriage as more of a problem than a solution for women. And all of them are overwhelmingly
adult-centred, devoting far more space to adult problems and relationships than to issues of child
well-being. Several of them pay more attention to swinging as a lifestyle choice than to the connection
between family disruption and juvenile crime.
These textbooks perpetuate a myth more dangerous than the one of the miserable wife. It is that family
structure doesn't really matter, and that family disintegration doesn't really have consequences. The
authors discount those who take these issues seriously as old-fashioned, out-of-date and misinformed.
Actually, it's the other way around. Too bad the next generation of social workers, teachers, counselors,
and therapists will have to learn that on their own.