Abstract

Why I Hate `Family Values' (Let Me Count the Ways)

It is true that people's ideas about marriage are not what they were in the 1950s-although those who look back at the fifties nostalgically forget both that many of those marriages were miserable and that the fifties were an atypical decade in more than a century of social change. Married women have been moving steadily into the work force since 1890; beginning even earlier, families have been getting smaller; divorce has been rising; sexual activity has been initiated even earlier and marriage delayed; companion marriage has been increasingly accepted as desirable by all social classes and both sexes. There is no evidence that increased poverty decreases family size, and welfare moms aren't likely to meet many men with family-size incomes, or they'd probably be married already, though maybe not for long.