Hemingway: Marriage Culture, or Government Culture?

"The more we move away from a marriage culture, the more we move to a government culture," tweeted Mollie Hemingway following the Virginia election in which candidate Ken Cuccinelli won the 'married women' vote but lost the 'single women' vote. She explains more fully in Pick One: Marriage Culture or Government Culture, which is worth reading in its entirety.

The University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project came out with a fascinating report (“When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America by Brad Wilcox“) showing that marriage in America is becoming something of an elite institution, reserved for older individuals. Wealthy white people are getting married and having strong marriages. Other folks less so. Far less so. Delayed marriage has both costs and benefits. It’s worked out well for elite women and helped them have more career advancement. But the failure to marry has had some serious destabilizing effects on non-elite women.

One of those effects on non-elite singles is economic instability. According to the report, "[c]ompared to those continuously married, those who never marry have a reduction in wealth of 75 percent, and those who divorced and didn't remarry have a reduction of 73 percent."  Hemingway concludes:

It’s pretty simple, really. It may be popular to pretend that women and men are identical, but women and the children they love are the most vulnerable to the downsides of a culture where marriage is delayed or forgotten. We bear far more economic risk and suffer through the deleterious effects of instability. Women in strong marriages tend to have their basic needs cared for by their own family unit and the civil society closest to them. Women who are not in strong marriages tend to rely on the government. Voting patterns reflect how women’s incentives change with changes in their marital status.

We should never forget Julia, President Obama’s central character in the “War on Women” campaign. She lived “her entire life by leaning on government intervention, dependency and other people’s money rather than her own initiative or hard work,” as David Harsanyi wrote. And she never married.