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Marriage in Men's Lives by Steven L. Nock, Oxford Univ. Press, 165 pp., $29.95
Anyone in search of contemporary miracles need look no farther than the field of sociology. In the last decade, some of the most vocal and articulate proponents of life-long marriage have emerged from top sociology departments around the country-from Norval Glenn at the University of Texas to Linda Waite at the University of Chicago. This development is particularly miraculous since many of these social scientists were once equally vocal and articulate advocates of a laissez faire approach to family life. This laissez faire approach held that increases in divorce, illegitimacy, and the like amounted to changes in the form but not necessarily the quality of American family life-at least after controlling for factors like income disparities between single- and two-parent families.
What accounts for this intellectual sea change? This development has largely been driven by sustained quantitative research on child well-being by family scholars possessed of an admirable liberality of mind and a commitment to follow the data wherever it may lead. For instance, in one of the most influential books on the topic, Growing Up With a Single Parent (Harvard Univ. Press, 1994), Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur found that children who grew up in single-parent-families and step-families were significantly more likely to drop out of high school, get pregnant, or drop out of the labor force than children who were raised in an intact two-parent home. Moreover, differences in income between different family types accounted for only 50 percent of these negative effects.
These findings led McLanahan and Sandefur to a conclusion that could easily be translated into the language of natural law:
If we were asked to design a system for making sure that children's basic needs were met, we would probably come up with something quite similar to the two-parent family ideal. Such a design, in theory, would not only ensure that children had access to the time and money of two adults, it also would provide a system of checks and balances that promoted quality parenting. The fact that both adults have a biological connection to the child would increase the likelihood that the parents would identify with the child and be willing to sacrifice for that child, and it would reduce the likelihood that either parent would abuse the child.
Having demonstrated the merits of lifelong marriage for children, sociologists are now taking another look at its value and function for adults. Steven L. Nock's perceptive and provocative Marriage in Men's Lives is one of the first contributions to this endeavor. Taking a cue from Jessie Bernard's observation that every marriage has a "his" and "hers" component, Nock focuses his attention on "his" marriage in an effort to explain how and why marriage benefits men.
Nock begins by making a point that will strike many in our individualistic society as counterintuitive: marriage benefits men by functioning as an institution of social convention that limits personal freedom. The institution of marriage limits male freedom. Nock argues, by relying upon norms that guide personal and public behavior as well as symbolic boundaries that signal to the couple and to society that their relationship has acquired a unique social status. Marriage restrains men from slavery to "otherwise uncontrollable impulses" by focusing their desires, attentions, and affections on one woman. Marriage's symbolic status as a permanent relationship fosters emotional security.
Marriage also furnishes men with a "template" for their interactions with wives, friends, and coworkers that helps them negotiate the transition from bachelorhood to family life. And despite marked changes in gender role attitudes and practices, most American marriages continue to be characterized by a gendered exchange of labor that builds dependency into the warp and woof of married life. Specifically, men receive household labor (on average, women perform two-thirds of the domestic labor in families) in return for their breadwinning (on average, men earn about two-thirds of the household income).
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