Marriage and Motherhood Do Make Women Happier

But what about all those 'not too happy' women (married, moms, or not)?

Jean Twenge has a nice article in The Atlantic this week reporting the results of a new survey of American women on marriage and motherhood, conducted with her colleagues Jenet Erickson, Wendy Wang and Brad Wilcox. The survey shows that—against so much commentary—the two are strongly correlated with women’s happiness. Here’s Twenge:

What we found contradicts the negative messages that I had come across: Married mothers are actually happier than unmarried women and married women without children. In the survey, 19 percent of married mothers described themselves as “very happy,” compared with 11 percent of married women without children, 13 percent of unmarried mothers, and 10 percent of unmarried women without children. Married mothers were also more likely to say that life is enjoyable most or all of the time than the other three groups. These numbers are controlled for age, family income, and education, so we know that those factors aren’t the cause of the differences.

Twenge’s co-author, Brad Wilcox convened an excellent discussion of the same survey at the University of Virginia last April featuring four women from different perspectives and stages of life: Michel Martin (NPR), Brett Cooper (The Brett Cooper Show), Michelle Goldberg (NYT) and Louise Perry (The Case Against the Sexual Revolution). It’s well worth watching: the content is great, but so is the mutual respect among the diverse participants.

But that’s not why I’m writing today.

To prepare for that evening discussion, Wilcox hosted an afternoon panel of the survey’s researchers to present their findings and encourage some discussion among the keynote participants ahead of the main event. I was invited to participate on that academic panel and share my full remarks below.

Unsurprised as I was by the finding that married women and mothers are happier than women who are unmarried or don’t have children, I discussed how troubled I was by the significant number of women—of all demographic groups—who reported being ‘not too happy.’

In my brief remarks, I offered some thoughts as to why that might be the case —

Really glad to be here and thanks to Brad for convening this event and for foregrounding all this research for the important discussion tonight. As one who studies these kinds of questions from the vantage point of women’s history and legal and political philosophy, I am always interested in making comparisons about reigning ideas about women, men, children, sex and marriage across time and place.

But I also come to these questions as a happily married mother of four girls and three boys who was raised by a mom who married and divorced three times by the time I reached my 19^th birthday. I think it’s important to acknowledge at the outset then that my comments are informed by this rather unusual personal experience as well as my professional work focused on women in the history of ideas.

So I want to say a few things about what I think these data tell us about marriage and women today as well as what most concerns me—in the hopes my co-panelists and our panel tonight might help us—or at least help me—make more sense of these concerns.

First, I appreciate that the various comparisons of married women with unmarried, divorced, and single moms does seem to reveal a ‘marriage premium,’ especially for women with children. Single moms—no surprise—are more exhausted, more time-crunched, more bored, lonely and stressed. And so I want to conclude, and I wish we all might conclude, that it is clearly ‘better’—for both moms and their children—to raise them within a marital union with their children’s dads…all things being equal.

Indeed, I have to admit that I find it bewildering when those who otherwise wish to see the full flourishing of women with children would ever begrudge data that reveals how essential men as fathers are to the enterprise of raising those children. To my mind, conceiving a child is a shared enterprise – in which both women and men bear equal responsibility (and are equally privileged). So ought raising children then be a shared enterprise of responsibility and privilege, a noble endeavor and mission which both mothers and fathers are culturally expected to engage together.

So, first, I want to underscore the goods of marriage for women.

Second, the data reported here today also tells us that becoming a mother itself offers tremendous meaning and purpose to women’s lives—even with the ‘opportunity cost’ in other arenas. It seems that before having children, most women can’t imagine that these obvious material trade-off would be worthwhile. But then after having children, most women see the trade-offs very clearly, and choose, if they can, more time with their children over more money and prestige.

So, second, I want to underscore the goods of motherhood for women.

But what concerns me about the data we’ve heard this afternoon is that vis-à-vis men, women of every single demographic are far more depressed than their male counterparts. And…a meaning deficit; loneliness; subpar physical health are not insignificant for all the women studied as well.

Yes: 44% of unmarried women without children are ‘not too happy’.

But: a hearty 24% of married women with children are also ‘not. too. happy.’

This large a swath of unhappy women in our country should be, for all of us, a major concern. And just getting married and having children isn’t quite the obvious and easy solution—even as it offers tremendous meaning and purpose for those women who take this path.

I want to offer a few thoughts about some potential causes of the real discontent we’re seeing among women across demographic groups in the hopes of hearing the same from my co-panelists, as well as those convening later tonight.

I want to say right off the bat that such unhappiness is no doubt multi-causal. Any of us in this room could rattle off a reasonable list. We know for sure that the new expectations around parenthood: that children are to be not only safe, clothed, fed and taught their ABCs and manners, but also ready to compete for choice spots in elite institutions and then in the global marketplace…all this is totally overwhelming (and just too much).

We also know [from the work of Jonathan Haidt and others] how comparison-inducing social media has impacted girls and women’s self-image and rates of anxiety. And, I suspect many of us worry about the influence of readily available violent pornography and the growing specter of internet misogyny on women’s sense of self too.

All these conditions—and many more—surely negatively impact young women’s interest in marriage and motherhood, never mind the questions of who is available to marry if they even wanted to, and the 60% of American women who, according to reports, are ‘extremely fearful’ of pregnancy itself.

But I think there is more, far more, that requires a historical lens.

My own strong sense in studying these questions over a large historical period has to do far more with what a culture [often through its laws] presents as its norms and what we do about exceptions to those norms.

Before the sexual revolution, the cultural norm was that most people would get married and have children. Most women—but not all—were happy being married and having children, even as many of the same rightly pushed for more (and better) educational and professional opportunities to complement the familial relationships they treasured.¹

From my sense of what [the researchers] all said today, I don’t think we see too much change in the desires of most women in that regard: most find great meaning and purpose in their lives as mothers, as well as essential supports and companionship in marriage. But they generally also do not view their entire identity as women wholly satisfied by these familial roles.

What has changed, then, is the norms around these relations, these opportunities and these identities. What was once ‘normal’ in the lives of women has now become but one ‘choice’ among many others, whether that be career or travel or whatever else.

And of course we know why that happened. The minority of women who were not happily married—or happy as mothers or those expected to be wives and mothers—or who were ill-treated and abused in marriage—those exceptions to the norm—were finally given really important recognition by a norming culture that too often regarded the single or divorced or even abused as failures, as ‘low status’ (as the point is often put today): as unworthy of cultural support.

Justice for those women was long in the coming and very much needed.

But if we look at the difficult experience of single and divorced mothers today—now a half century on from a revolution that sought to afford them dignity and respect—one wonders whether the justice they are due has actually been fully given.

When we look at those women, and their circumstances today—and the basic fact that there are far more of them, far more single and divorced women raising children alone—is the answer to double-down further on the revolutionary project of making marriage one choice among many equally good options? Or has that project—of un-norming of married motherhood to ensure the non-married mothers do not feel disparaged—actually done those non-married mothers more harm than good?

Has the flattening feature of liberal ‘choice’ actually worsened the conditions in which all mothers, especially poor and working class mothers, raise their children? And finally, does the norming elevation of ‘choice’ for mothers, in marriage (and even after conceiving a child too), lower the expectations on men as fathers? I think it does [and wrote a whole book about it]. More and more women and men are, thankfully, beginning to see this.

But there’s another aspect of this un-norming project that may well explain the concerning rates of “not. too. happy” women across these demographic groups.

What was an un-norming project became a re-norming project with a whole new philosophical justification oriented toward individual autonomy.

So now, women caring for children—though not at all exceptional in terms of sheer numbers—are a kind of cultural exception to the new liberal norm of the high earning, professionally successful woman. And with this norming also comes a slate of altogether different women who are regarded, or who often feel, culturally as failures, as ‘low status’: as unworthy of support.

And this—it seems to me—is a big problem when the vast majority of actual women are not high earning, professionally successful women, nor do many women, in their heart of hearts, wish to be. And these women, whose chief desires are, say, a good marriage and happy children now take on a low status—especially when they forego paid labor entirely to dedicate themselves to the goods of care in the home.

Or these women may now find more economic pressure to be pulled away from the little people they actually prefer, and who rely on them, to engage in wage labor they abhor.

And so I wonder, given the goods of marriage and motherhood for women, would it be possible to re-norm and celebrate marriage and children as great goods—as uniquely worthy of deep respect and cultural support too—while also recognizing the dignity and needs of those outside the norm?

From my own reading of the history, this is exactly what the the women’s movement was up to in the decades before the sexual revolution….

I’m so grateful that Jean Twenge and so many others today are recovering this lost vision — many, perhaps, without even recognizing it.

1. Re-read Friedan’s Feminine Mystique and this is basically what you find.