Marriage, Cohabitation and Parenthood

I’ll be honest – when I saw the YouTube video “The Defenders” I got chills. I also made my roommates stop studying for their midterms to watch it with me. The changing nature of peoples’ attitude towards marriage, cohabitation and parenthood hits controversial nerves as it crosses religious, ethnic and social lines. This weeks’ articles raise a lot of questions and issues, which, while all, interconnected, each profess to hold their own legal, ethical and moral significance.

With regard to the issue of births in cohabiting relationships, I see the recent rise in occurrence rates as a social issue of the near future. Judith Seltzers highlights that there are “substantial racial and ethnic differences,” with an overriding majority of these births occurring in non-Hispanic Black relationships (“Families Formed Outside of Marriage,” 1257). Due to the instability of cohabiting relations and the subsequent legal effects that non-marital births create, such issues as child support, health care benefits and legal responsibility must be highlighted. She points to the fact that currently “the union can be formalized by individual contracts…[but] they are not universally available” to the economically disadvantaged which make up the majority of the cohabiting cohort (1262). Thus, it will be interesting to see how the recent shifts in laws that define what constitutes “family” will affect these unions with careful vigilance that the hegemonic discourse of morality does not sideline already disadvantaged children and mothers. Additionally, because a majority of single-parent households come from low SES, and children of these families “are disadvantaged on a variety of educational, economic and social outcomes,” I wonder the extent of the generational effect, the perpetuation of a cycle of disadvantage (1259).

The issue of cohabitation raises questions of contextuality. In Le Bourdais and Lapierre-Adameyk's article, “Conjugal Life in Canada,” they state that “In Quebec, however, married couples who lived together before marriage formed equally stable families as those who did not” (937). I also found it interesting that “For German couples, premarital cohabitation actually enhances marital stability” (1253). Despite every study that says cohabitation is essentially a precursor to marital divorce, I wonder what it is about German or Quebec culture versus the rest of North American society that creates this difference. I wonder if the difference is due to greater social acceptance, government policies or some other outside factor. This point alone raises issues of how cohabitation is viewed: as a step before marriage or as an end unto itself. Furthermore, in Seltzer’s article she says that when there is an “egalitarian division of labor in marriage…[it] creates strain and conflict” between the partners and “marital solidarity may depend on a specialized division of labor”(1253). Yet, “Cohabiting couples in which partners have similar earnings are more stable than those with dissimilar earnings” (1254). While recognizing issues of independence, I question why this division of labor and stability changes once a marriage certificate is involved. As cohabitation becomes more common and socially accepted, and rates of marriage decrease, it will be interesting to see what will become the defining differences between the two institutions.

Q1: Do you think that society will ever reach the stage which Heuveline and Timberlake describe in which couples would be “indifferent to marrying?” (“Conjugal Life in Canada," 939). What effects would this have on those who do choose to marry?

Q2: With regards to the dichotomy of family life and consumer capitalism that Hochschild discusses, do you see any advantages in the disintegration of the “enchantment” of the family for the creation and acceptance of alternative family types?

Q3: What type of re-organization will government and broader society need to undergo to accommodate the ‘post-modern’ family?