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Will Marriage Disappear?

The origins of marriage in human history are murky. In the West, religiously sanctioned weddings were restricted to the wealthy and privileged until the Catholic Church began to rethink its policy of confining the sacrament of matrimony to the aristocracy and the propertied classes during the Renaissance. Before then, common-law arrangements were honored by the community, but it is difficult to determine just how widespread and longstanding marital bonds existed among commoners. The colonization of marriage by the church was an historical and political process that culminated in a Western model of matrimony that varied somewhat in form and function by place and over time. The timing of marriage was markedly different, for example, in Eastern and Western Europe. Patterns of co-residence among generations differed in Southern and Northern Europe, influencing the degree of autonomy permitted to young people in mate selection.Contrary to popular belief among Americans, marriage practices have always been adapted to fit prevailing economic and demographic conditions in particular localities; there is no distant past in which so-called "traditional" marriage prevailed in the Western world. Even in the United States, where it is sometimes claimed that a conjugal-based marriage system (i.e., strong emotional bonds between husband and wife) has existed since our founding, abundant evidence exists of regional, religious, and social class variations in marriage patterns from the colonial period onward. To take but one example, rates of premarital pregnancy have varied greatly depending on location and historical period.Needless to say, this historical perspective is frequently absent in contemporary discussions of what is happening to marriage and, more broadly, the way that family life is organized today. Political observers from both the left and the right tend to impose a moral perspective on how families should operate, and discussions of changing marriage practices have been tinged with erroneous or partial impressions of both marriage past and marriage present. For example, premarital chastity was widely promoted but only partially adhered to throughout the history of the United States.It is irresistible, but very hazardous, to project into the future a view of marriage and family life based on what exists today. No sociological or demographic data permit us to forecast what the family will look like at the end of the current century. We (social scientists) must be modest in our ability to imagine, much less project, the future of the family.The central aim of the current essay is to provide an account of how we got from the model of the twentieth-century family that prevailed in the post-war era (1945-65) to the present time, when many observers are lamenting the changes that have taken place during the final third of the last century. In a matter of five decades, we have gone from an era when almost everyone got married and had children to the present when marriage has become ever more selective and childbearing ever more elective. As many as one-quarter of young adults today will never enter formal marriage and nearly that many (whether they marry or not) will be childless. How did this rapid and dramatic shift come about, and is it likely to continue in the near future?Until the end of the nineteenth century, most Americans continued to work in agriculture, and the family remained a center of both production and reproduction. Fertility continued to be quite robust until the nineteenth century, when it began to decline both here and in virtually all Western nations. Multigenerational households were never a common family form in the United States, although parents and children often co-resided for a time and often late in life. Marriage launched young adults into separate households, a practice that remained fairly standard after World War II.During the Depression and through World War II, family formation was constrained first by economic conditions and later by the mobilization of young adults. …