The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [45]
At the same time, men and women discovered that the things family had been designed to provide—dinner, laundry, sex, and kids—could be had without it. By 2007, about 40 percent of births in the United States occurred out of wedlock. In the early 1970s there were eleven marriages for every one thousand Americans. By 2006 there were seven, the lowest in history. Divorce rates shot up. And having lots of kids, the principal purpose of the archetypal family unit, became less popular. The share of women who had four or more children dropped from 36 percent in 1976 to 11 percent in 2006. Over a fifth of women are now childless.
Both men and women had trouble adjusting to the new deal. A few years ago, I wrote an article about a slowdown in the labor supply of women that was showing up in American employment statistics. After four decades of growth, it seemed that women’s rate of entry into the workforce had stalled sometime in the mid-1990s. I remember talking to Cathy Watson-Short, a thirty-seven-year-old former executive from Silicon Valley, who pined to go back to work but couldn’t figure out how to mesh the job and caring for three young daughters. Most interesting was her shock at not being able to do it all: “Most of us thought we would work and have kids, at least that was what we were brought up thinking we would do—no problem.” But her bottom line was that despite all the revolutionary changes unleashed by women’s march to work, the relations between the sexes hadn’t changed enough. “We got equality at work,” she told me. “We really didn’t get equality at home.”
Surveys in the United States about the use of time confirm that women spend more than twice as much time as men tending the kids; men spend 50 percent more time working outside the home. But men too had a tough time navigating changes in the balance of power between the sexes. Over the past five decades the share of prime-aged women, aged twenty-five to fifty-four, who had jobs rose from under 40 to around 70 percent. Over the same period, the share of men in their prime who were employed dropped from 93 to 81 percent. When unemployment peaked in 2009, the share of men in their prime who lacked a job was at its highest since the end of World War II. That proved devastating in the marriage market too. Having lost their edge in the financial contribution to the household, many men were left with little to offer.
RESEARCHING AN ARTICLE about the decline in marriage rates among American men, I came upon a relatively new market taking shape on the Internet: online marriage brokerages to help frustrated American men find a wife in countries like Colombia and the Ukraine. The men I met were mostly middle-aged; some were well educated and financially successful. Some just wanted quick sex with exotic women abroad. But others were legitimately searching for a lifelong mate. They wanted one who would play by older rules, closer to the 1950s Doris Day template. Sam Smith, a former insurance salesman in Houston who set up the service I Love Latins, told me: “It all started with women’s lib. Guys are sick and tired of the North American me, me, me attitude.” BarranquillasBest.com, which offered Colombian brides, had tips on how to prevent foreign women becoming Americanized: “Let her have constant contact with her family in Colombia. Phone cards and 2 trips home a year are important.”
Sam offered two-day package tours to Barranquilla for $895, including airfare, hotel, and mixers where a group of 17 American men would be introduced