T
he decline of American marriage
has been a favorite theme of so-
cial commentators, politicians,
and academics over the past few
decades. Clearly the nation has
seen vast changes in its family system—in
marriage and divorce rates, cohabitation,
childbearing, sexual behavior, and women’s
work outside the home. Marriage is less domi-
nant as a social institution in the United States
than at any time in history. Alternative path-
ways through adulthood—childbearing out-
side of marriage, living with a partner without
ever marrying, living apart but having intimate
relationships—are more acceptable and feasi-
ble than ever before. But as the new century
begins, it is also clear that despite the jeremi-
ads, marriage has not faded away. In fact,
given the many alternatives to marriage now
available, what may be more remarkable is not
the decline in marriage but its persistence.
What is surprising is not that fewer people
marry, but rather that so many still marry and
that the desire to marry remains widespread.
Although marriage has been transformed, it is
still meaningful. In this article I review the
changes in American marriage, discuss their
causes, compare marriage in the United States
with marriage in the rest of the developed
world, and comment on how the transforma-
tion of marriage is likely to affect American
children in the early twenty-first century.
Changes in the Life Course
To illuminate what has happened to Ameri-
can marriage, I begin by reviewing the great
demographic changes of the past century, in-
cluding changes in age at marriage, the share
of Americans ever marrying, cohabitation,
nonmarital births, and divorce.
Recent T
rends
Figure 1 shows the median age at mar-
riage—the age by which half of all marriages
occur—for men and women from 1890 to
2002. In 1890 the median age was relatively
high, about twenty-six for men and twenty-
two for women. During the first half of the
twentieth century the typical age at mar-
riage dropped—gradually at first, and then
precipitously after World War II. By the
1950s it had reached historic lows: roughly
twenty-three for men and twenty for
women. Many people still think of the 1950s
as the standard by which to compare today’s
families, but as figure 1 shows, the 1950s
were the anomaly: during that decade young
adults married earlier than ever before or
since. Moreover, nearly all young adults—
about 95 percent of whites and 88 percent
of African Americans—eventually married.
1
During the 1960s, however, the median age
at marriage began to climb, returning to and
then exceeding that prevalent at the start of
the twentieth century. Women, in particular,
are marrying substantially later today than
they have at any time for which data are
available.
What is more, unmarried young adults are
leading very different lives today than their
earlier counterparts once did. The late-
marrying young women and men of the early
1900s typically lived at home before marriage
or paid for room and board in someone else’s
home. Even when they were courting, they
lived apart from their romantic interests and,
at least among women, the majority ab-
stained from sexual intercourse until they
were engaged or married. They were usually
employed, and they often turned over much
of their paycheck to their parents to help rear
younger siblings. Few went to college; most
had not even graduated from high school. As
recently as 1940, only about one-third of
adults in their late twenties had graduated
from high school and just one in sixteen had
graduated from college.
2
Andrew J. Cherlin
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