Patriarchy, Power, and Pay: The Transformation of American Families, 1800–2015

Except where otherwise specified, statistics in this article derive from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (Flood et al. 2015; Ruggles et al. 2015). In many cases, the analyses also appear in Ruggles (forthcoming), which includes additional documentation of sources and methods.

Martin et al. (2014) projected that assuming current marriage rates remain unchanged, 31 % of women and 35 % of men born in 1990 will not have married by age 40.

The 2014 and 2007 estimates come from the Current Population Survey (CPS), adjusted to account for group quarters (Flood et al. 2015). The 1970 estimate derives from the census microdata, adjusted to account for cohabitation (Fitch et al. 2005).

This analysis is confined to the United States because it is presently the only country with a suitable long-run data series. Similar processes, however, occurred in Northern Europe and now seem to be occurring in some East Asian and Latin American countries (Ruggles 2009; Stanfors and Goldscheider 2015).

This graph was inspired by a similar illustration that appears in Stanfors and Goldscheider (2015). The term “Corporate Family Economy” was coined by Ryan (1981), and my characterization of change was informed by Mintz (1998).

The white space at the top—labeled “Not in the labor force”—identifies women without identifiable economic activities, whose effort was probably devoted mainly to housework and childcare. Housework and childcare clearly have economic value (Folbre and Nelson 2000), but do not enable economic independence.

Some theorists argue the opposite, maintaining that that both family change and married women’s employment resulted mainly from the rise of individualistic values (e.g., Lesthaeghe 1983, 2010; Van de Kaa 1987). I discuss this interpretation in Ruggles (forthcoming).

Rising cohabitation can account for less than one-fifth of this overall change; in 2013, 44 % of households included no couple at all, either married or cohabiting (Flood et al. 2015).

Figures 12–14 are inflated to 2013 dollars using the Consumer Price Index Research Series (CPI-U-RS), which was designed to address concerns that the standard Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers (CPI-U) exaggerates inflation, especially in the late 1970s (Stewart and Reed 1999). If I had instead used CPI-U, the decline in young men’s wages would have been even greater (32 % for full-time workers and 48 % for all men aged 25–29). Both CPI series, however, may actually understate inflation as experienced by young adults in the 1970s and 1980s: young adults spent a high proportion of their income on rent; and before 1987, the CPI seriously understated rent inflation (Crone et al. 2006; Gordon and Van Goethem 2007). CPI-U-RS is available only for the period from 1978 to the present; to inflate the earlier years, I calculated the ratio of CPI-U-RS to CPI-U in 1978, and used it to adjust the CPI-U from 1940 to 1977.

Median generation length for men ranged from 27.8 in 1970 to 32.2 in 2013 (Ruggles et al. 2015). To estimate incomes before 1939, I assumed that annual changes in income for young men were proportional to annual changes in the mean income of the bottom 90 % of the population excluding capital gains, as estimated by Alvaredo et al. (2015). Accordingly, the early decades shown in Fig. 13 should be viewed as approximate.

The analysis used the open-source DECOMP software (Ruggles 1989).

The occupational classification is based on the first digit of the OCC1950 variable in IPUMS; the decomposition categories correspond to OCC1950 codes 0–99; 100–399; 400–499; 500–599; 600–699; and 700–970 (Ruggles et al. 2015).

I conducted a series of decompositions using a similar approach to assess the difference in the percentage married between black and white men. The results suggest that at least one-half of race differences in marriage in the 1960–2013 period can be ascribed to race differences in the economic characteristics of young men, lending further support to a structural interpretation (e.g., Wilson and Neckerman 1987).

Among the 36 % of working-age men who did not work for wages in 2013, 10 % were enrolled in school or college; 11 % were in institutions; 15 % were unemployed; 24 % were self-employed (down from 42 % in 1970); and 40 % were not in school, not employed, not institutionalized, and not looking for a job (Ruggles et al. 2015).