Why Our Troubled Economic Times May Spell Disaster for Your Marriage

The nation's recent economic woes have led Americans to question many aspects of their lives that, until recently, they likely took for granted. Can they afford their homes? Will they have a job next week, let alone a secure retirement? Will their personal relationships, and especially their marriages, withstand the new pressures that couples are facing on a daily basis? How, in other words, will American marriages work given this new economic reality?

On these latter questions, history offers us some guidance. Consider the Great Depression, which is quickly becoming the point of reference for the current situation. In the 1930s, the divorce rate did, in fact, slow. This deceleration was no small feat, given that the rate had been rising ever since the late 1880s, when the government first started to track the annual number of divorces in the United States. Some social commentators in the 1930s looked at the numbers and expressed satisfaction that Americans were finding strength in their families. Several historians, for instance, have pointed to a newspaper editorial that boldly asserted, "Many a family that has lost its car has found its soul." That some families were able to use hard times as a rallying point, rather than as an excuse to fall apart, seemed to offer proof that many husbands, wives, and children would survive the Depression with a strong family orientation in tact.

Not all social commentators, however, agreed with this optimistic point of view. First, there was dismay that many couples simply did not have the economic resources to get married. Some estimates, in fact, suggest that as many as one million couples postponed their trips to the altar during the Depression. At a time when becoming a wife was the pinnacle of achievement for most women, this development meant that hundreds of thousands of women would essentially be forced to live their adult lives as "failures." Plus, the longer that couples did not get married, the more likely they were to engage in premarital sexual activity, a possibility that struck fear in religious leaders, marriage experts, and parents alike.

Second, not all was not well with those who were already married. Divorce may have been down, but desertion was up. Historian Michael Parrish, for example, cites this typical story, told by a wife to a social worker: "My husband went north about three months ago to try his luck. The first month he wrote pretty regularly . . . For five weeks we have had no word from him . . . Don't know where he is or what he is up to." Her husband, in other words, was gone and unlikely to be heard from again. Desertion was, in some respects, worse than divorce, especially because those left behind (most often women and children) often had few resources to fall back on. Of course, it was much easier to disappear into the ether in the 1930s than it is in the Internet age. Thus, the possibility that a deserter would remarry some time in the future, thereby committing bigamy, was also more of a possibility. Extralegal solutions to ending marriages, in other words, were even more problematic than divorce in their disregard for the sanctity of marriage and the law.

Finally, many Americans were deeply worried that the nation's husbands would not be able to recover from the debilitating blow to their sense of manhood following the loss of their jobs. In the 1930s men's worth was very much tied up in their ability to be breadwinners, just as their wives' prided themselves on their housekeeping and parenting skills. On this point, writer T.H. Watkins quotes famed sociologist Mirra Komarovsky, who linked Depression-era joblessness to sexual impotence. Komarovsky asserted: "The feeling of disturbance and humiliation apparently exists irrespective of the intellectual convictions of the man . . . in his own estimation he fails to fulfill . . . the very touchstone of his manhood—the role of family provider." But if men were no longer able to support and to lead their families, who would do so? Marriage experts and government officials did not celebrate the possibility of loosening gender roles. Rather, they looked for ways to shore up husbands' sense of responsibility. New Deal programs focused on the family wage (the idea that a man should make enough money to support his entire family), for instance, sent a clear message to the nation's citizens that breadwinning should remain primarily a husband's job.