Marriage-Lite : The Rise of Cohabitation and its Consequences

Rating:
Summary: The family way.
Review: You have to admire Patricia Morgan, the author of this research paper into the rise of cohabitation and it's consequences. Clearly an excellent piece of scholarship where she argues very persuasively why the institution of marriage is a far superior choice than cohabitation which has the added disadvantage of having negative externalities to go with negative attributes.

I was an avid reader of this particular volume in the series which appears to have the avowed aim of maintaining the family as constituted in the conservative press and other media as the central institution of our society upon which all else is built.

I do find in odd that such a reactionary conservative agenda originates from a think tank which began life as an integral part of the free market Institute of Economic Affairs in London. The theme of the family as the bedrock upon which all society rests is a recurring one in their publications and here in this little report the trend toward cohabitation as a lifestyle choice is critically attacked as somehow undermining that sacred institution.

Morgan writes very persuasively and marshalls her facts and arguments to portray cohabitation as a very inferior choice which does untold harm to the very fabric of our socity. Connecting this with the sexual revolution she sets out to undermine the story of cohabitation as a longstanding tradition within Britsh society going back hundreds of years and instead portraying it as a modern aberration. She argues that individuals who cohabit tend to be from the lower strata of society, tend to be less educated and tend to do less well in life and she uses the emotive argument of children suffering through cohabitation and being disadvantaged in life through being reared in cohabiting family units.

However, Morgan is disengious in her attack. The subtext of her contribution is that we are somehow all better off in families but she never really shows how everyone in a family is better off. Now, of all things I may be, I do not consider myself to be a leftwing believer in female liberation. I do consider that women are individuals too and that their choices are just as valid as a man's. If we examine the basis of Morgan's view then surely women in marriage must gain to some extent if they are participant in it voluntarily. The problem is that women are voting with their feet. They may want to marry but they might want to defer that action until a time of their own choosing. Morgan undertakes some reverse engineering to show how the reasons people give for cohabitation fail the test in comparison to marriage regardless of which indicator is chosen.

What Morgan seems so outraged about is the fact that traditional societies are changing to more individua;istic ones where women have their own earning power and greater control than ever before over their own lives. Not all changes will be for the better but there will be a learning process, a trial and error process and in the meantime there will be dislocating effects. I am not arguing that these effects prove Morgan's points but I am arguing that the choices which many millions of individuals are making will produce different results and different patterns of family structure to those which have been around for centuries.

The point, clearly lost on Patricia Morgan, is that those choices are for the individuals involved to make and not hers. The conservative reactionary agenda she espouses is one from which women were not able to participate in because they did not have the economic or political power necessary to participate.

Marriage-Lite is certainly a book that anyone interested in debates over social policy should be reading with a critical eye but especially women.