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Title: The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families by James Q. Wilson ISBN: 0-06-093526-X Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.17 (6 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Worth your time - no matter your feelings about marriage
Comment: A good balanced view of marriage in a modern social context and analysis of how the family unit has been affected over time.
Wilson covers a lot of ground here - and the only complaint I have is that it didn't feel very cohesive - lots of skipping around. But there is a lot of meat that will keep you thinking. Wilson is fascinated with marriage rates over time, across cultures, and among different races - but he's concerned with the plight of children. His argument of why children do much better in a marriage setting, like all of the book, is heavily documented and well written.
His analysis of the sex ratio (number of men per hundred women) I found totally interesting. The ratio has changed a lot over time because of wars that kill off men - immigration which usually means that more men than women will move to another country - prison populations which draw men out of society - etc. Wilson looks at how differing sex ratios effect family arrangements like polygyny as well as general sexual behavior between men and women and mating patterns.
The author examines the role shame & stigma played in the past in ensuring that marriages last and that families care for their children, and compares that with today's more open attitude towards personal decisions. "Our society has managed to stigmatize stigma so much so that we are reluctant to blame people for any act that does not appear to inflict an immediate and palpable harm on someone else. We wrongly suppose, I think, that shame is the enemy of personal emancipation when in fact an emancipated man or woman is one for whom inner control is sufficiently powerful to produce inner limits on actions that once were controlled by external forces. A truly free man or woman is a person whose actions are controlled by gyroscopes rather than opportunities."
He has a very even-handed section on the effects of day-care on children involving differing scientific studies.
Subchapters include "If marriage is good, why is it in trouble?", "Jealousy", "The Effects of Divorce Laws", "The Shotgun Marriage", Does Welfare Cause Dependency", and "The Victorian Interlude" among others.
Wilson's bent can be summed up in his words - "Family, though the smallest and seemingly most fragile of institutions is proving itself to be humankind's bedrock as well as its fault line."
Rating: 5
Summary: An Excellent Book!
Comment: Wilson's excellent book sumarizes the findings of virtually all of the factual studies of the consequences of divorce and illigitmacy for children and for American society done over the past decade and more.
Those reviewers who have traduced the author are precisely the kind of ultra feminist ideologues who for over a decade have been denying the facts, ignoring the consequences, touting the tired old 60's rhetoric of rights without responsibilities, continuing to insist against all the empirical evidence that divorce is good for the children, and, all in all, burying their heads in rhetorical sand because the reality of the world they have made doesn't square with the prognostications of their ideology.
Rating: 3
Summary: Interesting work, but needs more rigor
Comment: Wilson's work is a rather impressive synthesis of the current empirical social-science research on family, children, and the social forces affecting them. He rightly notes that children are being adversely affected by the decline in the strength of marriage, and attempts to fashion why this decline has occured in the first place. (To the above reviewers, who obviously read the book from a ideological and political perspective, nearly ALL rigorous social-science research has shown that children are better off in almost every way in two-parent families. This cannot be denied.) His analysis is cogent, coherent, and, moreover compelling enough to require some reflection on the matter.
In essence he sees the decline of marriage resulting from an interplay of three variables -- the sex ratio, economic development, and the steady liberalization of Western culture.
He does not, in any way, say that economic growth or liberal culture is bad, but, rather notes that the slow death of marriage in the west is a cost we've paid for the many benefits we've derived from our particular economic and cultural arrangements.
While his synthesis is impressive, what he lacks is a sophisticated method for testing his theory. At best, he uses a loose, journalistic, comparative case study method in examining his theory. This, unfortunately, does little to provide the reader with conclusive evidence that Wilson is right.
At best, Wilson's work is a great read for the interested layman, at worst, a half-finished social-science tome that needs more rigorous methodological tools to prove his thesis. It nonetheless is an intersting analysis of why marriage has declined in our society.
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Title: The MORAL SENSE by James Q. Wilson ISBN: 0684833328 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Divorce Culture: Rethinking Our Commitments to Marriage and Family by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead ISBN: 0679751688 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 February, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Moral Judgment: Does the Abuse Excuse Threaten Our Legal System? by James Q. Wilson ISBN: 0465047335 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem by David Blankenhorn ISBN: 006092683X Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 February, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce : The 25 Year Landmark Study by Judith S. Wallerstein, Julia Lewis, Sandra Blakeslee ISBN: 0786886161 Publisher: Hyperion Pub. Date: 19 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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