Defending the Family through Social Science
March 5, 2024
Anti-marriage ideologies increasingly dominate late modernity, and each generation needs to relearn how to defend marriage in a culture that is hostile to it.
Social science research in the late 1990s and early 2000s largely focused on the problems with divorce, shacking-up, and nonmarital births. James Q. Wilson’s The Marriage Problem, David Popenoe’s Life without Father, and Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially were typical of this trend. Waite and Gallagher’s book, for instance, compared marrieds to cohabitators for happiness, health, life expectancy, wealth, sexual satisfaction, children’s health, etc. The data reveal that married people are better off on most scores.
