The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [48]
College graduates, by contrast, are marrying more. In the 1960 census 29 percent of women in their sixties with a college degree said they had never been married. By the 2000 census the share of never-married women in their sixties with a college degree was 8 percent. The better educated are marrying later, in their thirties and forties rather than their twenties, but they are much more likely to stay married. Twenty-three percent of white women with a college education who married in 1970 divorced within ten years. By 1990 the share had fallen to 16 percent.
These different experiences of marriage have a clear economic rationale. For the poor and less educated, marriage retained the old rationale of the shared production unit—where women and men trade complementary skills in the workplace and at home. Husbands make money in the workforce and trade it with their wives for child care and domestic labor. Marriage couldn’t adapt to the fact that women now often had more stable jobs than men.
For the more educated, the transformation was easier to take in stride. They could allow marriage to be transformed into a partnership built not around production but around consumption. For those who could more easily buy goods, services, and leisure, marriage became more about sharing the fun. Yet the experiences of women like Cathy Watson-Short, the former Silicon Valley executive, suggest that even highly educated American families are still learning to cope with some of the changes. The tension between the workplace and the home seems to be prompting some to reconsider working. The share of prime-aged women in the workforce peaked almost ten years ago, at 77 percent, and has declined modestly since then. The participation rate of married mothers with kids of preschool age in the job market dropped some 4 percentage points from its peak in 1998 to 60 percent in 2005. A 1997 survey by the Pew Research Center found that a third of working mothers said they would ideally work full time. By 2007 the share had declined to about a fifth.
Until the financial crisis of 2008, which put many families under increasing financial strain, fertility rates had been edging up for the first time in many years. Many of the young women who had delayed marriage and childbirth fifteen years earlier to start a professional career had become older professionals considering children for the first time. In the late 1970s only about 10 percent of forty-year-old women reported having a young child at home. By the early years of this century, the share had jumped to 30 percent. Some economists suggested this burst of late childbearing could put a lid on the labor supply of women.
It seems unlikely, however, that this pause means that women have rejected their new identity forged in the workplace. After nearly a century of women marching into work, I don’t see any signs suggesting a wholesale retreat back into the home.
THE CHEAPEST WOMEN
On a visit to India several years ago, I fell into the habit of doodling with a new pastime while I sipped my morning coffee, trying to decipher the matrimonial ads in the Times of India. The ads were mystifying and fascinating. One suitor described himself as a “boy 27/171/4-LPA B.E. Sr S/W Engr in IBM,” which I decoded as a twenty-seven-year-old boy who was 171 centimeters tall, earned four somethings, had a degree in engineering, and worked for IBM.
Another beckoned “handsome Hindu Mair Rajput Swarnkar boy M.Sc. Mtech PhD (IIT) 32/170/23000 pm. Central Government Class 1 Officer,” which probably means the prospective groom was a civil servant and had gotten a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology.
Beyond the economy of words and the similarity in cadence with American real estate classified advertisements, the section underscored just how different mating is in India from, say, New York City or London. I was struck by the chastity of the advertisements, a far cry