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by Maxim Kniazkov Sun Oct 15 2006, 1:02 PM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - It is by no means dead, but for the first time, a new survey
has shown that traditional marriage has ceased to be the preferred living
arrangement in the majority of US households.
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The shift, reported by the US
Census Bureau in its 2005 American Community Survey, could herald a sea change
in every facet of American life -- from family law to national politics and its
current emphasis on family values.
The findings, which were released in August but largely escaped public
attention until now because of the large volume of data, indicated that
marriage did not figure in nearly 55.8 million American family households, or
50.2 percent.
More than 14 million of them were headed by single women, another five million
by single men, while 36.7 million belonged to a category described as
"nonfamily households," a term that experts said referred primarily to gay or
heterosexual couples cohabiting out of
formal wedlock.
In addition, there were more than 30 million unmarried men and women living
alone, who are not categorized as families, the Census Bureau reported.
By comparison, the number of traditional households with married couples at
their core stood at slightly more than 55.2 million, or 49.8 percent of the
total.
Unmarried couples gravitated toward big cities such as New York, Chicago, Los
Angeles and San Francisco, while the farm states in the Great Plains and rural
communities of the Midwest and West remained bastions of traditionalism,
according to the survey.
The trend represented a dramatic change from just six years ago, when married
couples made up 52 percent of 105.5 million American households.
It indicated that efforts by
President George W. Bush and his allies, who over the past five years have made
a concerted effort to shore up traditional marriage and families through tax
breaks, special legislation and church-sponsored campaigns is bearing little
fruit.
The shift, experts said, also raises the question about the future
effectiveness of so-called "family value" politics currently played by both
Republicans and Democrats.
Douglas Besharov, a sociologist with the American Enterprise Institute, a
Washington-based think tank, said it is difficult for the traditional family to
emerge unscathed after three and a half decades of divorce rates reaching 50
percent and five decades out-of-we
dlock births.
"Change is in the air," Besharov said in a recent interview with the State
Department journal called US Society and Values. "The only question is whether
it is catastrophic or just evolutionary."
He predicted that cohabitation and temporary relationships between people were
likely to dominated America's social landscape for years to come.
"Overall, what I see is a situation in which people -- especially children --
will be much more isolated, because not only will their parents both be
working, but they'll have fewer siblings, fewer cousins, fewer aunts and
uncles," the scholar argued. "So over time
, we're moving towards a much more individualistic society."
In the opinion of Stephanie Coontz, who heads the Council on Contemporary
Families, growing life expectancy as well as women's earning potential are
impacting the traditional marriage in unexpected ways.
If before World War II the typical American marriage ended with the death of
one partner within a few years after the last child had left home, she pointed
out in the journal, that today couples can look forward to spending more than
two decades together in an empt
y nest.
"The growing length of time partners spend with only each other for company, in
some instances, has made individuals less willing to put up with an unhappy
marriage, while women's economic independence makes it less essential for them
to do so," Coontz wrote.