new blog post on marriage rates and public policy

[martasfic]

In case, anyone's interested, I wrote and posted a blog post last night:

in Search of *Real* Family Values Policies

My blurb from FB:

A while back Love, Joy, Feminism talked about Matt Walsh talking about marriage rates. Basically, Matt Walsh claimed Americans are getting married at later dates than ever before and Libby Anne made the case that he's wrong, that it was the 1950s (our usual reference point for whatever reason) that's a bit of a blip in historical terms.

This post isn't about that whole argument, though. Libby Anne made an interesting side note, that the age at first-marriage was lower in the 1950s than it has been before or since because we had policies that made it easier to get married at a younger age. Basically, if you want people to get married at a younger age, there are much more effective ways to encourage that than just castigating young people for not growing up.

So this is me talking about Libby Anne talking about Matt Wash talking about why people don't get married early. Specifically, in my case at least, about just what kind of issues are most clearly "family values" and what it would take to encourage more people to get married earlier if that's the direction you want to push.

Comments welcome there or here, if you're interested.

Comments

[fractalwolf.livejournal.com]

This makes me think of the PBS documentary, "The Pill". http://vimeo.com/76197438

At one point, one of the people being interviewed reminisces about how the vast majority of the women in her class (possibly college class, I don't remember for sure) got married very quickly after graduating. As she put it "We weren't looking for Mr. Right. We were looking for Mr. Right Now". It also discusses the social and personal/hormonal pressures towards early marriages.

[marta-bee.livejournal.com]

Oh, that does sound interesting. I'll have to check it out.