"[T]he 1.4 million active duty personnel have 1.3 million dependent children under age 18, 345,000 of whom are under age three. Sixty percent of this force is married (compared to only 30 percent during the supposedly family-friendly 1950's); and 68 percent of spouses are employed outside the home. Indeed, nearly 10 percent of this force were "service couples," with both husband and wife in uniform.

Accordingly, in the words of the 1987 Army Family Action Plan, "quality child developmental care" has become "a crucial [military] program." While the number of combat divisions has been slashed by half over the last decade, direct and indirect military expenditures for child care have tripled. Among the three services, 800 child care centers, some offering 24-hours-a-day service, embrace 200,000 little Americans, making the U.S. Department of Defense the nation's largest child-care provider."

"I would be shallow to say that I fell in love with the soldier I married because of his uniform, but it would also be partly true. It's Cupid's oldest trick: dress a man for war and love walks in.

...In the beginning, I favored the B.D.U. because it acutely highlighted the differences between us as individuals, but over time, it has also come to underscore the contrast in our roles.

Spouses don't experience firsthand the bombs-and-bullets Army - we see only the ceremonial ribbons-and-medals Army, the workaday pack-and-move-every-few-years Army - and my husband's B.D.U.'s were my connection to the viscera of soldierdom. They were honest. They built the first bridge between my duties and his, a reminder of what he is trained for - the brutality of combat, the elegance of tactical maneuver"

When President Johnson submitted the Civil Rights Act to Congress in early 1964, the White House was hoping in part to shore up the foundations of the black family by removing employment barriers that prevented African-American men from being good fathers, husbands, and breadwinners. How and why this landmark legislation-with the help of the courts-became more of a cheerleader for the employment of women of either race is a complicated story, but a study exploring the benefits of marriage for African Americans by the Institute for American Values in New York confirms that the Johnson Administration had the right idea.

Explaining their findings that black women appear to benefit less from marriage than do black men or white women, five family scholars commissioned by the Institute speculate that the documented overall lower quality of black marriages contributes to this gap. They further speculate that the lower stability of black marriages is in turn due to the "contradictory and conflictual gender roles among African Americans," particularly the reduced likelihood of black husbands, relative to their white peers, to function as primary breadwinners in their households.

Citing another study, they write: "American wives are happier when their husbands earn more than 66 percent of the couple's income, something which is much less common in African-American households," even as African Americans often uphold traditional sex roles as the ideal. Therefore, "the relative lack of complementary gender roles might very well also undercut one of the benefits typically associated with marriage: namely, that marriage provides a couple with a set of norms that guide their behavior in productive ways."

Yet even with this qualification, the researchers unequivocally conclude that "marriage typically and substantially improves the well-being of African-American women, men, and children," based upon an extensive review of scholarly articles, reports, and books on marriage and race published between 1990 and 2004, as well as data from the 1973 through 2002 waves of the General Social Surveys conducted at the University of Chicago. They also conclude that "marriage is particularly important to African-American males at all stages of the life cycle," largely because marriage benefits black males "even more" than black females. They note, for example, that for young black males, "having one's father in the home, and particularly one married father, appears to be a crucial determinant of better outcomes in a range of important areas, including levels of parental support, risks of delinquency, self-esteem, and school performance."

Not only do they find that marriage matters for improving the well-being of African Americans, they also claim that marriage matters more than the extended family, often hailed by social workers as a valid substitute for marriage. Black single parents-even those living with extended family-are still more likely to be poor than their married peers, who actually report feeling closer to extended families than do single parents. Finding no evidence that kinship factors have offset the decline in marriage, the researchers observe, "Kin support and extended families promote the well-being of single-parent black families in important ways, but do not compensate for the marriage advantage."