Feminism's American Caste Society

Feminists were dead wrong: The single-motherhood revolution "has been an economic catastrophe for women," writes Kay Hymowitz, who calls it the makings of a caste society.

Defenders of the single-mother revolution often describe it as empowering for women, who can now free themselves from unhappy unions and live independent lives. That’s one way to look at it. Another is that it has been an economic catastrophe for those women.

Poverty remains relatively rare among married couples with children; the U.S. Census puts only 8.8 percent of them in that category... But over 40% of single-mother families are poor [and] of the two-fifths of bottom-quintile households that are families, 83% are headed by single mothers.

The Brookings Institution's Isabel Sawhill calculates that virtually all the increase in child poverty in the United States since the 1970s would vanish if parents still married at 1970 rates..."

Hymowitz highlights several studies that show married mothers (including 'shotgun' unions) are economically better off than single or co-habitating mothers. So are married fathers, it turns out. 

Marriage itself, it seems, encourages male productivity. One study by Donna Ginther and Madeline Zavodny examined men who’d had “shotgun” marriages and thus probably hadn’t been planning to tie the knot. The shotgun husbands nevertheless earned more than their single peers did.

College-educated women, who "still tend to see children and marriage as a package deal" and never really bought the feminists' lie, tend to marry college-educated men. The income inequality between these power couples and single-mother families is huge.

So the single-mother revolution has left us with the following reality. At the top of the social order is a positive feedback loop, with kids raised in stable, high-investment, and relatively affluent homes going to college, finding similar mates, and raising their own children in stable, high-investment, and relatively affluent homes. At the bottom is a negative feedback loop, with kids raised by single mothers in unstable, low-investment homes finding themselves unable to adapt to today’s economy and going on to create more unstable, single-mother homes.

Not only do we have more poverty, inequality, and immobility; we have the makings of a caste society, with an inherited elite and an entrenched proletariat. That’s not an America that anyone finds very attractive.