Authors: James A. Michener
A white American man aged sixty-five will probably live 15.2 more years, but a white woman who has reached that age will probably live 19.1 years. So if their lives proceed in accordance with statistics, she can anticipate four years of widowhood. However, since men tend to marry wives younger than themselves, the period of probable widowhood is extended by a substantial number of years. Suppose that a man has married a woman five
years younger than himself; when he is age sixty-five he has a probability of 15.2 more years; but his wife, who is then only sixty, will have a probability of 23 more years. She can look forward to eight years of widowhood.
There is, therefore, in the human equation so far as longevity is concerned, a marked advantage in being a woman, but this carries an obligation. She must prepare herself emotionally and financially for some years of widowhood. Now let us consider the nonstatistical factors that make the later years of life precarious.
One of the classic problems, and the most brutal, is the case of the capable young professional who, working hard for little pay, falls in love and marries. The early years of the couple’s family life are idyllic. He is establishing himself in his career and she is helping; they are saving money, for she has helped him to pay off the debts he accumulated while getting his degree and building his reputation.
But now, in hundreds of cases across the nation, the husband is in his forties and a leader in his community. He associates with men his age who are like him professionally, but who married later young women who had been to college or who even had advanced degrees. His wife, who was so vitally important when he was being trained and establishing his credentials, has no advanced education, and day after day he sees painful evidence that she has not been able to keep up with him in his new life. He begins to see her as a drudge, a burden, as someone who is holding him back, and he divorces her so that he can marry an attractive woman who is highly educated and more socially adept.
I have observed at close quarters several such marriages and was appalled at the callousness with which the men disposed of their onetime helpmates, often leaving them without adequate funds to maintain a decent life. I have cheered when in recent
years judges have begun awarding the abandoned wife substantial shares in the husband’s accumulated wealth. I think of those decisions as American jurisprudence at its best.
Observers are apt to describe this situation, in which middle-aged men slough off their wives of many years in order to marry younger women, as a male mid-life crisis or, sometimes jocularly, as ‘the male menopause.’
But women, too, will end marriages but for a different reason: they come to a point when they can no longer tolerate a bad marriage. There is a cartoon of a bewildered man telling a friend: ‘I’m completely baffled. I thought we had a perfect marriage because in forty years she never once talked back. Then she up and walks out, still not sayin’ a word.’
America’s shift from being a producing society to a consuming one has had a destructive influence on family life. Husbands and wives alike, not only older couples who should know better but also younger couples enthralled by the idea of plastic money, have gone consumer-crazy with disastrous results: mounting debt, abuse of the credit card and its 18 percent interest on un-paid balances, wasteful buying of unneeded goods and, in some cases, the psychological destruction of the wife who becomes a shopping addict. Neighbors said of one woman who could not stop buying junk and charging it to her credit card: ‘She’s committing suicide by plastic poisoning.’ Even children are vulnerable to this mania. Young girls must have clothes as good as or better than those of their friends; young boys insist on expensive basketball shoes as being vital to their self-respect.
When a newspaper carries the headline
G
.
M
.’
S NEW DEVELOPMENT PLAN WOULD CUT
5,000
ENGINEER JOBS
, terrible reverberations from that decision strike ordinary families that had probably not anticipated such a frightening turn in their family finances. Two consequences become almost inevitable: the husband can
find only some job paying a near-minimal wage of five dollars an hour or even less, and the wife is driven to accept any kind of low-paying work. This means she will be out of the house most of the day. The obvious result is that their children become latchkey children who receive little supervision or discipline. Unemployment and underemployment have a devastating effect on all members of a family and often lead to divorce, and the phenomenon of the freewheeling child, usually a boy, who joins a gang is common even in middle-class suburban communities.
Because of research I had to do for my writing, I came to know three different married couples in their sixties in which the husband had behaved with a dignity and compassion I would not have believed possible. Each couple had occupied a position of some importance in our national life. One had been an ambassador to important nations, one had been the president of a large bank, one had been the president of a well-known university, and each had watched his wife, veteran of many years of happy married life, slip gradually into Alzheimer’s disease. In each case the wife could not remember who her husband was, but she was convinced that she was in trouble because she believed he had stolen her money from her in a scam of some kind. The husbands never wavered. Remaining as true to their wives as on the day they took their marriage vows, they became round-the-clock nurses and companions and tried to keep in reasonable serenity the closing years of their lives. When you add the deaths of wives from cancer, husbands from heart attack and sons and daughters from AIDS, you realize that marriage is an institution that exists under cruel pressure.
And yet, in the numerous retirement centers in the nation, one finds many happy couples who are living together into their late eighties and nineties. They are beautiful to watch, for they are a
reassurance to us all. Happy families can not only exist but also endure.
Assault on the family: the growth of nontraditional families.
In recent years the stability of traditional family life has been threatened by the sudden growth of a custom that has existed on the edges of American life since Pilgrim days. It occurs when a man and a woman fall in love, but are wary of the confinements of a legal marriage. Aware of the radical step they are about to take, they decide to live together ‘without benefit of clergy.’
The census figures on this trend, when combined with the results of several major research efforts, are staggering to an old traditionalist like me. One specialist reports that 49 percent of Americans between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine cohabit. Another study says that for people ages fifty to fifty-four the rate has constantly grown. The U.S. Bureau of the Census reports that of the nation’s 93 million households, about 3.5 million consisted of cohabitants in 1993. These figures are far larger than I would have guessed.
At first glance they seem to threaten the family, but on closer inspection—and here I am reporting my own investigations—substantial families can result from cohabitation. There is a man, a woman and, in many cases, children. The partners are bound together by affection, not legalisms, and the children appear as stable as the children of divorced parents who find themselves with two mothers and two fathers. Carefully comparing the two conditions, one might easily conclude that except for legal difficulties, cohabitation is slightly to be preferred.
It is difficult for the purist to admit that the word
family
should cover cohabiting adults, but the majority of society appears willing to accept just that. Loving people living together in a stable union constitute a family, whether we approve of the idea or not. Does cohabitation threaten the old definition of family life? Yes.
Does it conform to the scientific definition of the word family? Yes. Do I recommend cohabitation? A qualified No, unless marriage would involve financial hardship. Do I respect it when it functions for others? An equally firm Yes.
Special problems arise when one asks that the word
family
also include unions of two homosexual men or two lesbian women. The best of these unions constitute a family in the extended sense of that word, and I have found no difficulty in accepting them as the equal of my own family.
W
hat politicians must do and not do.
It is not enough for me to catalog the ills that beset the American family; I must also recommend specific actions by our political leaders.
It is understandable, but nevertheless ridiculous, when our new congressmen and congresswomen preach that most of the ills of society can be cured by a return to the stabler family that assumed a responsibility for the proper training and education of its children. I must state, sadly and regretfully, that I do not think this can be done—the facts are that in 50 percent of all cases, a traditional family does not exist and has little chance of staging a comeback.
But with the resounding triumph of the young Republicans in the 1994 elections, we had an opportunity to change at least some of the old laws that worked against family stability and to pass new ones that gave married couples assistance. We may not be able to reverse the trend toward nontraditional families, but we
should
be able to provide assistance to couples who
do
desire the traditional forms of marriage, and I was heartened when the programs proposed by the new leaders of the nation clearly showed that they were strongly pro-family. But I was dismayed when the first bits of legislation they tried to enact were not so much a program to assist families but savage attacks on mothers
and hurtful to programs that assisted babies and children. Their proposed legislation also suggested tax laws that penalized the poor and the middle class but provided tax bonanzas for the already rich upper classes.
When the barn-burning young Republicans and their religious right-wing leaders enthusiastically tout family virtues, they are really talking about discipline, adherence to a rigid morality, obedience to leaders and the stifling of any tendency toward intellectual exploration by either the parents or especially the children. My ideal version of the family, as I explained before, consists of a gathering of people around the dinner table discussing various topics and satisfying their intellectual curiosity. But I fear that the kind of family promoted by the extreme right will stifle the inquiring spirit that has animated American life. It is perhaps unfortunate, but reality dictates that we must accommodate nontraditional families. Rigidity of mind and suppleness of spirit do not go well together, and total reliance on the former tends toward dictatorship.
But I do grant that the young Republicans of Congress are right when they argue that remedial steps must be taken nationally to strengthen the family. They are also right that in the field of legal decisions more responsibility should be vested in the family and less in the hands of absentee governmental agencies. The useful steps that should be sponsored and enacted are these:
Clean up old income tax laws that penalize couples when they marry. This could be accomplished in a single session of Congress if the lawmakers put their minds to it.
Scrutinize the entire income tax structure to see where present laws penalize the middle-class family and divert tax advantages to the pockets of the already rich and favored classes.
Ensure that adequate funds supervised nationally by the central government are provided for the care of babies and children.
Provide national health insurance, and ensure that pensions already earned in Company A are transferable to Company B; the same transferability should be available in the field of health insurance.
Inspect and modify current laws governing both permanent adoption and temporary foster-home care.
When these essential improvements have been made, the government can attend to the more conspicuous manifestations of parental failure: criminal misbehavior of children; teenage pregnancy; dropping out of school prematurely; and gang membership.
I have been impressed by the good results the kibbutzim have had in Israel, where children have lived in community centers in which many families cooperate in sharing household chores, money management and the rearing and disciplining of children, but I cannot recommend such an institution in America because our traditions are so different from Israel’s. However, I took seriously Speaker Newt Gingrich’s early suggestion that America might consider placing abandoned children in what would amount to modern orphanages in which they could receive attention and develop good habits that would save them in later life. His proposal was ridiculed as soon as it was given a test run by the Speaker, but it was not dismissed by me, because it contained the germ of a good idea. Additionally, something like the old Civilian Conservation Corps could well be reinstituted with salutary results in salvaging youths who would otherwise be at risk. I would favor such an effort.
But inevitably any solution to the problems of the disintegrating family must hinge upon the creation of jobs or the imposition of some kind of system that would enable the very poor to gain some income so that they can spend the money to aid not only themselves but also the entire economy. Many will find this
proposal distasteful, but the reality is that we must engineer some device whereby we can circulate money downward. The economic imperative, if we want to save the family, is to provide jobs of some kind for all. If the young Republicans and their allies on the Christian right are willing to confront this obligation I would support their battle cry that ‘the family must be saved,’ but if their program affects only unwed mothers and underprivileged children I see little chance for it to be effective. Under the bleak programs they have so far put forward I can see only the further destruction of the family. I refer specifically to their cuts in aid to depressed families, their almost brutal treatment of girls who become pregnant and their reduction of aid to children.