The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [46]
In 2008 more than 42,000 foreign women were brought by Americans into the United States on temporary fiancée or spouse visas. In a way, the bargain they entered into was not unlike that of marriages in the past. The man offered a green card and a crack at a relatively prosperous life; the woman offered youth, beauty, and acquiescence. I spoke with several such couples who declared themselves happy—some after years of marriage.
The danger was that the men often did not realize that the Doris Day model was no longer operative in other countries either. “He wants to be the king of the house and buys into the promotional claim that he can get a more traditional woman in Russia—she will cook dinner and have sex and otherwise shut up,” said Randall Miller, a lawyer who has represented foreign women abused by their American fiancés and husbands. “He is taken aback when the woman is outspoken and has opinions and wants to get a job.”
Changes in the marital bargain even seeped into politics. They pushed women to the left, as economic vulnerability increased their support for taxes and government benefits. And they nudged men, who typically earn more and usually don’t have custody of the kids, to the right. In 1979, American women were 5 percent more likely to say they preferred the left than men, according to election surveys. By 1998 the gap had grown to 13 percent. In the 2008 presidential election, women were 30 percent more likely to vote for President Barack Obama than for his Republican rival, John McCain. Men, by contrast, split their vote almost equally.
To some extent, similar dynamics have been at play around the industrial world. In Canada, New Zealand, and the Nordic countries, even more women work than in the United States. And women’s labor supply has soared in traditionally patriarchal countries such as Italy, Spain, and Japan. Between 1994 and 2008 the share of Spanish women at work grew from 32 to 56 percent; in Italy it jumped from 36 to 48 percent.
In these countries too, the traditional family capsized. The marriage rate has fallen to about five marriages per one thousand population a year, on average, across the industrial countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, from eight in the early 1970s. Nowhere has divorce reached the heights it did in the United States in the 1980s. Still, it rose everywhere. And fertility declined sharply, as women decided to delay childbirth to pursue careers, and fewer families were formed. Only 5 of 31 countries in the OECD—the United States, Iceland, New Zealand, Mexico, and Turkey—have a fertility rate at or above 2.1 children per woman, the so-called replacement rate that guarantees a stable population. In Spain women have only 1.5 kids, on average, and in Germany 1.3; in Japan they have 1.4. Fertility is so low that the population in some of these countries is starting to shrink. By 2050, Korea’s population is forecast to shrink 17 percent.
THE NEW MATING MARKET
One of the world’s demographic mysteries is why, considering the current changes in the structure of the family, Americans still have so many kids.
Religion is one possibility. It is more popular in the United States than in pretty much every other wealthy nation. I heard a story on the radio about a small evangelical movement called the Quiverfull, a name based on Psalm 127 in the Bible, which says, “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” The group frowns on contraception. Apparently, its members believe that if they have enough children, they will be able to take over the Congress in a few generations. “The womb is such a powerful weapon,” suggested one of their leaders. “It’s a weapon against the enemy.”
The reason for America’s prolificacy could also be that pensions in the United States are particularly