Money, Marriage, and the Economic Downturn: Are Marital Storms Ahead? 

The nation’s recent economic woes have led Americans to question many aspects of their lives that, until recently, they likely took for granted. Can they afford their homes? Will they have a job next week, let alone a secure retirement? Will their personal relationships, and especially their marriages, withstand the new pressures that couples are facing on a daily basis? How, in other words, will American marriages work given this new economic reality?

On these latter questions, history offers us some guidance. Consider the Great Depression, which is quickly becoming the point of reference for the current situation. In the 1930s, the divorce rate did, in fact, slow. This deceleration was no small feat, given that the rate had been rising ever since the late 1880s, when the government first started to track the annual number of divorces in the United States. Some social commentators in the 1930s looked at the numbers and expressed satisfaction that Americans were finding strength in their families. Several historians, for instance, have pointed to a newspaper editorial that boldly asserted, “Many a family that has lost its car has found its soul.” That some families were able to use hard times as a rallying point, rather than as an excuse to fall apart, seemed to offer proof that many husbands, wives, and children would survive the Depression with a strong family orientation in tact.

Not all social commentators, however, agreed with this optimistic point of view. First, there was dismay that many couples simply did not have the economic resources to get married. Some estimates, in fact, suggest that as many as one million couples postponed their trips to the altar during the Depression. At a time when becoming a wife was the pinnacle of achievement for most women, this development meant that hundreds of thousands of women would essentially be forced to live their adult lives as “failures.” Plus, the longer that couples did not get married, the more likely they were to engage in premarital sexual activity, a possibility that struck fear in religious leaders, marriage experts, and parents alike.

Second, not all was not well with those who were already married. Divorce may have been down, but desertion was up. Historian Michael Parrish, for example, cites this typical story, told by a wife to a social worker: “My husband went north about three months ago to try his luck. The first month he wrote pretty regularly . . . For five weeks we have had no word from him . . . Don’t know where he is or what he is up to.” Her husband, in other words, was gone and unlikely to be heard from again. Desertion was, in some respects, worse than divorce, especially because those left behind (most often women and children) often had few resources to fall back on. Of course, it was much easier to disappear into the ether in the 1930s than it is in the Internet age. Thus, the possibility that a deserter would remarry some time in the future, thereby committing bigamy, was also more of a possibility. Extralegal solutions to ending marriages, in other words, were even more problematic than divorce in their disregard for the sanctity of marriage and the law.

Finally, many Americans were deeply worried that the nation’s husbands would not be able to recover from the debilitating blow to their sense of manhood following the loss of their jobs. In the 1930s men’s worth was very much tied up in their ability to be breadwinners, just as their wives’ prided themselves on their housekeeping and parenting skills. On this point, writer T.H. Watkins quotes famed sociologist Mirra Komarovsky, who linked Depression-era joblessness to sexual impotence. Komarovsky asserted: “The feeling of disturbance and humiliation apparently exists irrespective of the intellectual convictions of the man . . . in his own estimation he fails to fulfill . . . the very touchstone of his manhood—the role of family provider.” But if men were no longer able to support and to lead their families, who would do so? Marriage experts and government officials did not celebrate the possibility of loosening gender roles. Rather, they looked for ways to shore up husbands’ sense of responsibility. New Deal programs focused on the family wage (the idea that a man should make enough money to support his entire family), for instance, sent a clear message to the nation’s citizens that breadwinning should remain primarily a husband’s job.

What can the Great Depression tell us about the current situation? The most obvious conclusion would be that bad economic times are generally bad for marriages. This assumption makes sense. Otherwise happy marriages can crumble under new financial strains, which often contribute to heightened conflict between spouses. The fact that divorce is expensive certainly may keep couples together who otherwise would have dissolved their unions.  But as the Depression experience demonstrated, we should be careful to interpret any sign of a falling divorce rate as a sign that marriage is somehow becoming stronger in the face of tough times.

Furthermore, today, as in the past, losing a job can undoubtedly lead to a diminished sense of self-worth. A recent piece in The New York Times, for instance, highlighted the problems confronted by couples that had previously followed a breadwinner/housewife pattern when the husbands found themselves unemployed. The men generally expressed great concern that they were not going to be able to support their families and the wives voiced resentment that they had to go to work to support their families and that their husbands did not make a similar contribution to housework and childcare.

But we should not push the historical comparison between the 1930s and the early twenty-first century too far. If the Depression era witnessed a mix of old and new trends, as well as old and new fears, so too is the United States during its present crisis. Far fewer women today, for example, define themselves solely as wives and mothers. Plus, the above example aside, it is clear that many couples have never been able to follow the breadwinner/housewife model and that others have no desire to do so, even if finances allow. As historian Stephanie Coontz has noted, there is now, more than ever before, less of a stigma for women who work and for men who stay home and/or do housework and childcare. Perhaps the flexibility of marital roles will help couples survive if the husband, in particular, loses his job.

Another key difference between the Depression era and today is the availability of resources for couples who are experiencing marital problems. The marriage counseling profession, for instance, was in its infancy in the 1930s. (The first marriage counseling clinics in the United States were established in the late 1920s and early 1930s.) Marriage advice books and magazine columns, as well, were in relative short supply. While paying for counseling sessions may be difficult, if not impossible, in this economic climate, marriage advice is available from any number of sources, from television shows to the Internet. I have little doubt that American advice givers are working on new books about how to make your marriage “work” during an economic crisis. Whether or not one agrees with the advice, there is little doubt that a market exists for it, and may even grow in hard times.

It is also important to recognize that, unlike in the 1930s, the United States is presently undergoing an important discussion about the very definition of marriage. Gay couples will in all likelihood face the same challenges and problems as heterosexual ones when it comes to the recession. But the economic downturn may actually help the cause of gay marriage, as the economy takes center stage over other political matters. Even some conservatives, it appears, have accepted this development. According to The New York Times, for instance, former Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani simply stated: “Right now, people are not concerned about gay marriage because they are concerned about the economy.” Fighting over the legality of gay marriage, in other words, has become less important now that saving the economy has become the first priority for politicians and the public alike.

Are there marital storms ahead in the United States? Trying to answer this question is almost as difficult as predicting when the economy will rebound. Ultimately, what we can count on is that some marriages will survive the economic downturn and others will not. How much the economy will have to do with the future of each relationship will depend on the length of the downturn, the ability of Americans to adjust to changing gender roles and expectations, and a host of factors that are personal to individual couples. For those who would like help navigating any brewing storms, the advice giving industry is assuredly ready and waiting. One thing that history definitively tells us is that, in good times and in bad, Americans have proven their dedication to trying (if not always successfully) to make their marriages work.

Kristin Celello, assistant professor of history at Queens College, CUNY, is the author of Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States (UNC Press, 2009).