The Real Story of the American Family
Richly researched and compellingly argued, these books show how, in just a few decades, falling wages and increasing job insecurity overturned the family patterns of the archetypical representatives of “traditional family values”—people without any “legacy of slavery” or generational history of family instability. In doing so, the authors demonstrate that current trends in marriage and unwed childbearing are more consequence than cause of America’s increasing economic insecurity and inequality.
.. The postwar white working-class male-breadwinner family was a historical aberration, but it was accompanied by such an improvement in living standards that it’s small wonder it has become the subject of nostalgia. Never before had so many men with a high school education or less been able to get jobs that paid significantly more than their fathers had earned at the same age and that allowed them to comfortably support a family on their earnings alone.
.. During the 1960s, African Americans gained more access to manufacturing jobs, becoming even more dependent than whites on industrial employment for economic security. As a result, deindustrialization in the 1970s was especially devastating to blue-collar African American families.
.. Real-life experiences, not abstract preaching, imbued him with the sense that deferring gratification and sticking it out would end up paying off.
.. He offers a withering critique of Charles Murray’s claim that men have lost the work ethic of the traditional laboring class. Rather, he argues, “the defining problem of high-school educated young adults is that they cannot become working-class.”
.. But now that a woman has at least some earnings potential, it makes less sense to hitch herself to a man who might lose his job, leaving her with one more mouth to feed.
.. Overall, among single adults ages 25 to 34, according to a Pew Research Report released last October, there are only 84 currently employed single men for every 100 single women, and only 51 currently employed single black men for every 100 single black women.
.. Other things being equal, low-income men are not more likely to abuse their wives than high-income men. But when a man has low earnings or no earnings andadheres to traditional gender ideologies, he is especially likely to do so.