Social scientists never endorse any social arrangement as a panacea. In order to safeguard their reputation for intellectual sophistication, they hedge every assertion and every evaluation with caveats and disclaimers. Nonetheless, when researchers from Pennsylvania State and Ohio State Universities recently addressed the question, "Is Marriage a Panacea?" they came remarkably close to answering with a simple affirmative.
Writing in Social Problems, the Penn State and Ohio State researchers remark that in contemporary America "promoting marriage among low-income single mothers is increasingly viewed as a public policy strategy for reducing welfare dependency and encouraging economic self-sufficiency." But because "empirical evidence is limited" as to whether wedlock actually produces the desired effects, many analysts have viewed with skepticism the new policy initiatives to encourage marriage. The authors of the new study, therefore, set out to measure how much marriage actually does ameliorate the economic plight of disadvantaged women. The researchers perform their measurement by parsing social and economic data collected in 1995 from a national probability sample of 10,847 women ages 15 to 44. Their results provide strong indications that policymakers who are promoting wedlock are indeed serving the public good.
The Penn State and Ohio State team highlight a "strong and statistically significant" correlation revealing that - when compared to never-married peers - "ever-married women are substantially less likely to be poor, regardless of race, family disadvantage, nonmarital birth status, or high school dropout." The researchers calculate that "ever-married women have a poverty rate that is roughly one-third lower than the poverty rate experienced by never-married women." In other words, "marriage matters economically."
Indeed, the data collected by the authors of the new study indicate that "the deleterious effect associated with a disadvantaged family background is completely offset by marrying and staying married (i.e., disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged women who marry have similarly low odds of poverty)." This means that "marriage ... offers a way out of poverty for disadvantaged women. The odds of living in poverty when disadvantaged women marry are similar to odds experienced by low-risk women who marry and are lower than the odds for low-risk women who remain single." What do such findings suggest? The researchers do not shrink from the clear indications of their investigation: "This kind of statistical evidence supports the 'marriage as a panacea' view."
Strong evidence of the economic benefits of marriage also turns up when the focus shifts to welfare receipt. The researchers report that "currently married women are roughly one-fifth as likely to receive food stamps as all other women." Further, "currently married women are only one-fourth as likely to receive food stamps as never-married women." In sum, "marriage is strongly and negatively associated with the receipt of food stamps." Once again, the evidence supports something like a marriage-as-a-panacea view.
Of course, the researchers do ultimately put some distance between themselves and the marriage-as-a-panacea view by qualifying, limiting, and nuancing their findings. Even the most fervent advocates of wedlock will want to pay attention to some of these qualifications. For instance, the researchers stress that "becoming married ... does not significantly attenuate the negative effects associated with unwed childbearing." Rather, the harmful effect of unwed childbearing is merely "offset by the economic benefit from marriage .... Thus, unwed mothers who ever marry fare better economically than those who never marry, but they do not fare as well as women who avoid nonmarital childbearing in the first place." In other words, wedlock can largely cancel the harmful effect of an out-of-wedlock birth, but to confer a positive benefit, marriage must occur before the birth of any children.
The Penn State and Ohio State scholars also emphasize that "for women who marry, but later divorce, poverty rates are substantially higher than for never-married women. Without also strengthening fragile marriages, marriage-promotion initiatives are unlikely to provide a long-term solution to poverty; indeed, they could make matters worse."
