Diverse Views on Marriage and Family

For hundreds of years, society has considered marriage as the only legitimate way to beget children. However, as time progresses families and marriage grow farther apart as different social classes have differing opinions as to what constitutes a “good“ family dynamic.

Gerson’s The Unfinished Revolution focuses primarily on three categorical families: egalitarian, neo-traditional, and self-reliant and one of her points states that family ideals are hardly permanent. Gerson notes how the gender revolution changes family dynamics, especially in how marriage focuses not on the form of the relationship but the quality. She argues that the gender revolution actually improves family dynamics, especially the egalitarian families where equality is most promoted. It is possible to infer that Gerson in fact endorses a marriage where both spouses equally commit to the household and family, and is thus the ideal marriage.

Crittenden’s “The cost of delaying marriage” describes how putting off marriage and asserting independence has unwanted outcomes. According to her, with age comes a litany of undesirable men and a ticking biological clock, implying that the best time for marriage was during early to mid-twenties instead of the late twenties to early thirties many women prefer. Crittenden also notes the less obvious consequences of delayed marriage in women; she claims marriage delay does not allow for women to fully mature into adulthood. She asserts that it is in typical roles such as mother and wife that we find our character and “expand our lives”. Crittenden refers to a woman’s biological clock ticking as unmarried women grow older, implying that women often feel the need that in order to have a family she must marry first, which co...

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...age comes at any age, but children (biological children, in any case) depend on the woman, who unfortunately has a biological clock. Therefore, if nothing else, family and marriage have Mother Nature as barrier between them.

Works Cited

Cherlin, Andrew. 2004. “The deinstitutionalization of American Marriage.” Journal of Marriage and Family. 66: 848-861

Crittenden, Danielle. 1999. “The cost of delaying marriage.” What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman. Boundless Webzine. 25 August 2005. .

Edin, Kathryn and Maria Kefalas. 2005. Promises I Can Keep. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Gerson, Kathleen. 2010. The Unfinished Revolution. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.