Marriage in Men’s Lives by Steven L. Nock, Oxford Univ. Press, 165 pp., $29.95
Anyone in search of contemporary miracles need look no farther than the field of sociology. In the last decade, some of the most vocal and articulate proponents of life-long marriage have emerged from top sociology departments around the country-from Norval Glenn at the University of Texas to Linda Waite at the University of Chicago. This development is particularly miraculous since many of these social scientists were once equally vocal and articulate advocates of a laissez faire approach to family life. This laissez faire approach held that increases in divorce, illegitimacy, and the like amounted to changes in the form but not necessarily the quality of American family life-at least after controlling for factors like income disparities between single- and two-parent families.
What accounts for this intellectual sea change? This development has largely been driven by sustained quantitative research on child well-being by family scholars possessed of an admirable liberality of mind and a commitment to follow the data wherever it may lead. For instance, in one of the most influential books on the topic, Growing Up With a Single Parent (Harvard Univ. Press, 1994), Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur found that children who grew up in single-parent-families and step-families were significantly more likely to drop out of high school, get pregnant, or drop out of the labor force than children who were raised in an intact two-parent home. Moreover, differences in income between different family types accounted for only 50 percent of these negative effects.
These findings led McLanahan and Sandefur to a conclusion that could easily be translated into the language of natural law:
If we were asked to design a system for making sure that children’s basic needs were met, we would probably come up with something quite similar to the two-parent family ideal. Such a design, in theory, would not only ensure that children had access to the time and money of two adults, it also would provide a system of checks and balances that promoted quality parenting. The fact that both adults have a biological connection to the child would increase the likelihood that the parents would identify with the child and be willing to sacrifice for that child, and it would reduce the likelihood that either parent would abuse the child.
Having demonstrated the merits of lifelong marriage for children, sociologists are now taking another look at its value and function for adults. Steven L. Nock’s perceptive and provocative Marriage in Men’s Lives is one of the first contributions to this endeavor. Taking a cue from Jessie Bernard’s observation that every marriage has a “his” and “hers” component, Nock focuses his attention on “his” marriage in an effort to explain how and why marriage benefits men.
Nock begins by making a point that will strike many in our individualistic society as counterintuitive: marriage benefits men by functioning as an institution of social convention that limits personal freedom. The institution of marriage limits male freedom. Nock argues, by relying upon norms that guide personal and public behavior as well as symbolic boundaries that signal to the couple and to society that their relationship has acquired a unique social status. Marriage restrains men from slavery to “otherwise uncontrollable impulses” by focusing their desires, attentions, and affections on one woman. Marriage’s symbolic status as a permanent relationship fosters emotional security.
Marriage also furnishes men with a “template” for their interactions with wives, friends, and coworkers that helps them negotiate the transition from bachelorhood to family life. And despite marked changes in gender role attitudes and practices, most American marriages continue to be characterized by a gendered exchange of labor that builds dependency into the warp and woof of married life. Specifically, men receive household labor (on average, women perform two-thirds of the domestic labor in families) in return for their breadwinning (on average, men earn about two-thirds of the household income).
It is precisely this mix of conventionality and dependence, Nock points out, that gives marriage a clear advantage over cohabitation for men (and women). Cohabiting couples inhabit a relational twilight zone where they lack clear social standing, behavioral standards to guide their interaction with one another, and the emotional security afforded by the ideal of marital permanency. Thus, Nock observes that the “freedom” found in cohabitation “comes with a cost”: “Cohabiting couples are less satisfied than married spouses with their partnerships, are not as close to their parents, are less committed to each other, and, if they eventually marry, have higher chances of divorce.” Moreover, since cohabiters generally try to maintain their independence, they lack the dependencies that lend solidity to marital commitment: “Without dependency, there is little to bind couples together, except their love and affection. Studies of cohabiting couples show that such glue is weak and destabilizes the entire arrangement.”
Nock goes on to show how the conventions and dependencies fostered by marriage are integrally tied to the production and maintenance of a kind of pro-social masculinity. Drawing on anthropologist David Gilmore’s Manhood in the Making (Yale Univ. Press, 1990), which surveys masculinity in more than 20 cultures across the globe, Nock argues that masculinity is an essentially universal identity achieved and maintained in and through agonistic acts that clearly differentiate men from women. This is not to say that masculinity is everywhere the same (one need only look to Sweden and Morocco to see that it is not). As Gilmore observes, “The harsher the environment and the scarcer the resources, the more manhood is stressed as inspiration and goal.” And this environmental law is linked to a larger postulate: socially sanctioned forms of masculinity are erected to encourage men to be socially productive and discourage them from being tempted to fall into sloth, cowardice, and caprice.
Gilmore documents a trinity of pro-social roles associated with masculinity in all but two of the cultures he surveyed. First, pro-social masculinity links manhood to responsible fatherhood. Men are expected to produce children in the context of a socially sanctioned union-i.e., marriage-and stick with their mates for life. Second, manhood is tied to the provision of food and shelter, such that the man who is unwilling to do such work is “scorned and vilified.” Third, pro-social manhood is linked to the protection of women and children. Men are called to demonstrate courage and loyalty in protecting their families from physical harm and in steering them clear of dishonor.
In some cultures, the movement to manhood is initiated by rites of passage that test the mettle of young men. Nock argues that courtship ending in marriage serves a similar function in contemporary America, where “ritualized transitions” of masculinity have fallen into disuse. Among other things, marriage generally signals a measure of romantic prowess, as well as a willingness to stand up and be counted as a man capable of responsible procreation, provision, and protection. In other words, “marriage, at least in its most traditional form, is a socially approved mechanism for the expression of masculinity.”
Nock spends most of the second half of the book fleshing out his argument with an empirical analysis of the ways in which marriage transforms men’s lives. Using a longitudinal design that allows him to look at men before and after they marry, he shows that marriage makes American men “better men” in the following ways: 1) it increases male achievement, 2) it increases their involvement in church and their exposure to kin, 3) it decreases their patronage of bars/taverns and their contact with friends, and 4) it shifts their gift- and loan-giving from friends to family members. Moreover, these effects are generally greater the more that men’s marriages conform to the pro-social masculine model articulated by Gilmore-i.e., where the husband earns most of the household income, has children, and remains married to his first wife.
This is a brave and original book. Nock’s reflections about marriage and men depart from conventional sociological thinking about gender and marriage at almost every turn; moreover, his effort to reflect theoretically and empirically about “his” marriage is largely on target. However, the book is less persuasive in two respects.
First, some of Nock’s claims about the connections between masculinity and marriage might have been qualified had he devoted more attention to testing his claims against the experience of women. For instance, the connection he documents between marriage and male involvement in “public” activities such as churchgoing looks less gendered once one takes into account women’s (higher) rates of churchgoing.
Second, the central arguments in the book seem to be in tension with Nock’s own hopes for the future of marriage. Large portions of Marriage in Men’s Lives could be read as a brief for the restoration of a kind of benevolent Victorian patriarchy. However, Nock explicitly tries to counter such a reading by offering a model of “new normative marriage” that eliminates marital inequities without losing the dependencies that cement the marital bond. This model, which he thinks is now “emerging” in the United States, adapts to changes in women’s labor-force participation by allowing couples to determine their own “freely accepted interdependencies.” Thus, some couples will choose to maintain a fairly traditional division of labor, other couples will be free to split breadwinning and home-making evenly, and still other couples will have the wife concentrate more on breadwinning and the husband focus more on housework. Nonetheless, in a nod to the link between masculinity and marriage, Nock argues that virtually all husbands will be expected to contribute something in the way of material provision to their families.
But Nock’s own arguments about the necessarily institutional character of marriage and marriage’s close ties to pro-social masculinity undercut the plausibility of this new normative model of marriage. His emphasis on freely chosen interdependencies does not easily mesh with his observation that marriage needs to be institutionalized-that is, ordered by rules and principles that furnish couples with a “template” for their lives together. And Nock’s emphasis on flexible roles for men in and outside marriage seems to counter his observation that marriage serves as a venue for pro-social masculine roles that also help men distinguish themselves from women. Indeed, American society’s overwhelming problems with male family flight-from illegitimacy to divorce-may be linked to the cultural and economic forces that make it increasingly difficult for men to play distinctly masculine roles as providers and protectors in their families.
The tension between Nock’s hopes for a new normative model of married life and his argument about masculinity’s ties to marriage prompts two questions: 1) Does marriage need a distinct “his” (and “hers”) component to keep men committed to married life? 2) If so, how can we institutionalize masculine roles in marriage without alienating women? The answer to these questions-if the new sociology of marriage and the family tells us anything-will be of critical import to the institution of marriage, and the well-being of countless men, women, and children, in the new millennium.
W. Bradford Wilcox is a doctoral student in sociology at Princeton University. His dissertation focuses on family practices among Protestant men.
