In 1860, something remarkable happened. The California Supreme Court ruled that, in the case of divorce, mothers should be granted custody of their children. Prior to this, courts awarded custody—by default—to the fathers.1 In their decision, the justices affirmed what had only just become the prevailing wisdom: mothers are caretakers, fathers breadwinners. However, at the start of the eighteenth century such a clean division of labor was foreign to the typical American family; in an agricultural, trade-based economy, men, women, and children shared many responsibilities—on and off the field.2 What changed?

Industrialization and urbanization forever altered the makeup of the American family. As fathers led their wives and children off the farm and into the cities, families no longer tilled the soil, side by side. Mothers could not accompany their husbands into the factories to work, and fewer fathers were teaching trades to their sons. Instead, the wife’s realm became—exclusively—the home, and the responsibility to shepherd the children fell directly on her shoulders. Husbands, meanwhile, put food on the table—their daily existence increasingly distanced from hearth and home.3 This basic family arrangement marked American life for the next 150 years.

The first great challenge to this pattern came with the Great Depression (1929-1939). As many men lost their jobs, they also lost, in effect, their manhood. While the women kept up their end of the bargain—managing the home—countless men could not provide for their family’s most basic needs. It left them hopeless, and the number of men charged with abandoning their families in 1931 was 134 % higher than in 1928.4 Cultural responses to this crisis only made matters worse. Mothers consulted “experts” instead of their husbands for parental wisdom. The federal government, for the sake of the children, played a more intrusive role in family life, weakening a father’s authority even more. He became, as one historian put it, “a citizen without courage, a husband without the moral support of his wife, a father without control over his children.”5 Not surprisingly, birthrates and marriages were down, divorces up.6 It appears that emasculated men produced dilapidated marriages.

World War II brought the next great reversal, this time strengthening the husband’s role. First, the government exalted the family. It “was seen to be the very symbol of democracy, freedom, and the good life—the basis of all national strength. Its possible loss was reason enough to fight a war on distant soil.”7 Second, full employment meant every able-bodied male had a job; men could once again fulfill their end of the bargain. After WWII, a booming economy helped husbands regain the prestige of the sole breadwinner. As a result, marriages and birthrates rose while divorces declined, on into the 1960s.

Today the economic roller coaster moves on, still dictating the makeup of the American family. Specifically, materialism is pushing both husbands and wives into the workforce: “[M]en and women have come to realize that the satisfaction of their families’ ever-changing, ever-expanding needs requires two paychecks.”8 In fact, by 1988 almost half of two-parent families were so overcome with these “needs” they were also double-income families.9 Women might still control a household’s domestic affairs, but fewer and fewer men could claim to be the sole breadwinner. What is the effect on marriage? As the economics of materialism prods both spouses to work, marriage is increasingly inconvenient and divorce judicious. Sadly, today’s statistics speak for themselves.10

God’s design for the family is not captive to this economic roller coaster. His Word advances timeless family truths, e.g., a husband who loses his job is no less the head of the home; the desire for material bounty is no excuse to abandon the children to others; both parents are essential educators and nurturers. In short, faithful spouses will protect their marriage and their family, refusing to allow life’s circumstances to drive a wedge between them. After all, God’s overarching purpose for the family transcends economics.11
 
Footnotes:
 
1  Robert L. Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 30.
 
2  David Popenoe, Life without Father: Compelling New Evidence that Fatherhood and Marriage are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 81. “With its household production, limited-exchange system, self-sufficiency, community moral surveillance, and family hierarchy, the corporate household economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provided a world in which fathers worked in close proximity to their children.” Griswold, 13.
 
3  Popenoe, Ibid., 92. Popenoe described the negative consequence of this readjustment: “[M]any men became ever more remote from the daily exigencies of family life. In time, fathers even came to be depicted in American popular culture as ‘incompetent’ around the home compared to mothers. Left with breadwinning as their only clear-cut family role, it should come as no surprise that fathers would flounder and not know what they should be doing when, late in the twentieth century, even that role on an exclusive basis was lost to them.” Ibid., 115. In his work Shawn Johansen warned against stereotyping the nineteenth-century family: “[B]y dichotomizing the roles of men and women into public and private spheres, historians have oversimplified the complex family and gender relations of nineteenth-century America.” Family Men: Middle-Class Fatherhood in Early Industrializing America (New York: Routledge, 2001), 8. Nonetheless, in this case, the exception still proves the rule.
 
4  Griswold, 151.
 
5  Ibid.
 
6  Popenoe, 124.
 
7  Ibid.
 
8  Ibid., 223.
 
9  Griswold, 220.
 
10  For example, the CDC (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) reports that for every 7.8 marriages, there are 3.4 divorces—a rate of nearly 50%. See the National Center for Health Statistics Website, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/divorce.htm (accessed July 7, 2006).
 
11  See Kairos Journal article. “The Biblical Marriage World View.”
 
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article from Kairos Journal

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