The Divorce Culture
By Barbara Dafoe Whitehead
Knopf, 224 pages, $24
Nothing But You:
Love Stories From the New Yorker
Edited by Roger Angell
Random House, 448 pages, $25.95
In “The Divorce Culture,” historian and social critic Barbara Dafoe Whitehead makes an honest attempt to bridge the gulf between the cleanly rendered paradigms of scholars and the complex negotiations that structure real life and love. Arguing that “ideas are important in revolutions” (and she sees the rise in America’s divorce rate since 1960 as a revolutionary change), she offers an intelligent–though seriously flawed–analysis of the ideological systems that justify divorce today and then takes the leap toward the other side of the chasm.
This book grew out of Whitehead’s controversial Atlantic Monthly article, “Dan Quayle Was Right.” There she used former Vice President Quayle’s infamous condemnation of TV-sitcom character Murphy Brown (who, in what was probably the most-watched pregnancy since Lucy had Little Ricky, chose to have a child outside wedlock) as a jumping-off point for her brief on the importance of the two-parent family. Those who poked holes in her argument then will not be persuaded by this larger treatment. Nonetheless, “The Divorce Culture” is worth reading and debating.
Whitehead begins by claiming the political middle ground. One can almost imagine her paraphrasing President Clinton’s comment about abortion: Divorce should be safe, available and rare. More constructively, she takes on the sorts of questions many of us hesitate to raise: What can a society reasonably expect of its members? What duties and obligations do we incur in forming what is, after all, the voluntary alliance of marriage? In a world of polemics, this one at least reaches for nuance before succumbing to the definitional inconsistencies and troubling assumptions that finally undermine its value.
American divorce, according to Whitehead, finds its roots in some of our best traditions. As the founders of the republic insisted that political bonds must be voluntary, so, too, Americans early accepted the voluntary nature of the marriage bond and the moral legitimacy of dissolving such bonds. An optimistic belief in individual perfectibility also shaped American ideas about divorce. But even as the divorce rate rose in the 20th Century, Americans tended to think of divorce within the framework of family and obligation. The post-World War II rise of a therapeutic culture that emphasized the individual quest for fulfillment and happiness helped shift the paradigm. By the 1960s, Americans no longer saw divorce as an act that affected an entire family. Instead, Whitehead claims, a model of “expressive divorce” was justified in the language of individual rights and promised an illusory freedom to divorcing adults.
Whitehead condemns this “divorce culture” for importing “marketplace notions of unfettered choice, limited warranties, and contingent obligations” into (what should be) the haven provided by the nuclear family. Without a durable, two-parent family, she argues, children will never learn the values of loyalty and obligation (which she says compete with the values of the marketplace) and will never have the security to develop traits of initiative and resilience that are “essential in a pluralistic society and a demanding global economy.” In other words, Whitehead claims that divorce robs children of the social, economic and emotional capital they need for success in a competitive world.
Here is where Whitehead moves from cultural analysis to prescription. In 1990, the U.S. had the highest divorce rate among advanced Western nations; 6 out of 10 of those divorces took place in families with children. Whitehead believes this is wrong. She argues that society must begin to treat divorce as a problem. Therapists and marriage counselors should shift focus from the individual and his or her fulfillment, working instead to strengthen and save marriages. And above all, parents should embrace an ethic of obligation and duty rather than one of individual entitlement. Parents, Whitehead insists, must begin to place the good of the most defenseless members of the family–the children–first. The conflict between such prescription and the more-complex nature of real lives must have been difficult for Whitehead to navigate; she acknowledges the courage of single parents every few pages, while her basic argument is predicated on the specter of the selfish adult, heedlessly destroying family and community ties in his or her individual quest for “happiness.”
Children suffer in divorce. This is a widely accepted belief in our society, witnessed, as Whitehead notes, by the large number of self-help books, social services and therapists dedicated to helping children make it through divorce and its aftermath. This therapeutic assistance is precisely what she opposes. Whitehead is actually writing a polemic against therapeutic culture; thus it is not the “happiness” or adjustment of the child that matters most, but instead the child’s well-being as measured by the economic, social and emotional resources that are dependably and durably devoted to that child. Long-term, stable marriage, she argues in a fairly hard-headed way, maximizes those resources.
This controversial way of measuring child welfare allows Whitehead to expand her condemnation of divorce and its consequences to a troubling critique of all families that fall outside the model of nuclear family composed of married (and thus by definition, heterosexual) parents and their biological or adopted children. No single parent, she argues, can provide the same level of resources as he or she could with a spouse. And alternative family forms, justified on the grounds that a family is defined by the love its members share rather than by its structural organization, Whitehead simply asserts, are predicated on an ideology that offers no compelling ideas about how to maintain stability in children’s lives.
Whitehead exhorts us to see divorce, once again, as a moral problem. In making her case, she appeals not to religion or even “family values,” but to an odd combination of altruism and rationality. Divorce blights the lives of our children, she argues, by depriving them of the resources–social, economic and emotional–that they need for success. Divorce culture is thus immoral (because it harms children) and dangerous (because it undermines our nation’s future by creating a population unprepared to succeed).
By her own definition, what is truly important is to raise children who can function well in a pluralistic society and a global market and who will become responsible parents themselves. She argues that children in families with greater social, economic and emotional resources are more likely to succeed. But such resources are not evenly distributed in our society. Is she not writing off many children by focusing so closely on the resources of individual families? Why does she so quickly dismiss society’s responsibility to all its children? If one is writing a polemic with the virtually impossible mission of shifting us from a therapeutic to a duty-oriented culture, why not dream big? Here Whitehead reveals a political stance obscured at first by her reasonable, middle-of-the-road tone.
Finally, her argument succumbs to logical contradictions. Whitehead laments the intrusion of marketplace values into the family, yet it is to those very marketplace values that she appeals. She calls on parents to make rational decisions aimed at maximizing resources and obtaining the highest yield, measured primarily by the “success” of their children in the economic and social sphere. Perhaps that is because she sees rational self-interest as a more compelling force than either emotional bonds or concepts of duty. But in real life, in the messy details of love and its failure, rationality is rarely what moves us.
The irrationality of love–glorious, heartbreaking or thoroughly banal–is more properly the province of literature. And “Nothing But You,” a wonderful collection of love stories brought together by longtime New Yorker fiction editor Roger Angell, is a more-than-sufficient antidote to polemics and scholarly paradigms. These 38 short stories, all published in The New Yorker from 1965 to 1995, represent the work of many of the masters of the genre. But what makes this collection good is what Angell calls its “sloppy latitude.” Reading these stories, we find that love is more and less than we ever knew.
“Nothing But You” isn’t the Valentine’s gift for those in the first flush of love, when happily-ever-after still seems possible. Give it instead to your best friend, your mother, your partner of many years. Give it to someone with whom you share a painful history. That person will understand it as a gift of love.
