WASHINGTON POST: …Though she is a Democrat and a former Clinton administration official, [Isabel V. ] Sawhill’s staunch defense of marriage has often put the economist at odds with some thinkers on the left who have dismissed the institution as an oppressive vestige of patriarchy…
In “Generation Unbound,” a book released this past fall that has opened a new front in the culture wars, Sawhill, who works at the Brookings Institution, argues that it is high time we stopped trying to revive marriage. Instead, she says, we need to figure out what will replace it if we are to stem the rise in single-parenting that has done more in the past few decades to increase child poverty than some of the biggest social programs, such as food stamps, have done to decrease it.
“Maybe some people will be married, or have some kind of commitment to each other, but they’ll live in separate places,” she speculated in an interview. “Or maybe there will be marriages with upfront time limits. Not, ‘We thought we were going to be married forever and decided in the middle to get divorced.’ But marriages where you say to the other person upfront, ‘How about a five-year contract to be committed to each other, and then reassess?’ ”
… (more)
EDITOR: Sixty years ago, as a college freshman, I recall making the same argument to my mother. Of course it was wrong then when men were the primary bread winners. But now after seven decades, such an arrangement may well suit couples and encourage marriage. Of course the parties could achieve the same goal with a pre-nuptial property settlement agreement. But how do you divide up the children?
