Cultural Lag

The United States is unquestionably a pro-marriage society. The observation that marriage is a more desirable status than singlehood has been trumpeted in recent popular books including The Case for Marriage (Waite & Gallagher, 2000), Creating a Life (Hewlett, 2002), and What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us (Crittenden, 2000) and has guided the implementation of pro-marriage social policies including “covenant marriage,” and economic and tax policies that favor married couples (e.g. Nock, Wright, & Sanchez, 2002). Popular “reality” television shows, situation comedies, and films owe a posthumous screenwriter’s credit to Jane Austen, as their final scenes often fade to a dreamily enamored heterosexual couple at (or on their way to) the altar (Wetzstein, 2001).
Few observers would question that cultural images, public policies, and personal attitudes elevate the status and value of heterosexual marriage relative to single life in the United States today. DePaulo and Morris take this observation one important leap further. They argue that pervasive and largely uncontested support for the Ideology of Marriage and Family has quietly generated a more pernicious yet barely acknowledged phenomenon called “singlism,” or prejudice and discrimination targeted against the unmarried. The persistence of singlism, they argue, is evident in multiple studies documenting negative attitudes towards unmarried persons (e.g., Morris, DePaulo, Hertel, & Ritter, 2004). Of even greater concern to DePaulo and Morris is that uncontested beliefs about the supremacy of marriage as a cultural ideal are perpetuated (unintentionally) by the social scientific community. Social science research often begins with the unacknowledged and uncontested assumption that a comparison between “married” versus “unmarried” persons is a meaningful and important contrast. Similarities between the two groups
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are often ignored, and differences (particularly those differences where the single fare worse than the married) are attributed to the less desirable aspects of singlehood or, worse yet, to personal deficiencies of the single persons themselves.
DePaulo and Morris provide a timely, compelling, and exciting springboard for further investigating the ways that civil (marital) status shapes human experience. Rather than critiquing their argument, we hope to push it in new directions by evaluating more rigorously the claim that single persons are the target of stigmatization. To do so, we will first revisit classic and contemporary conceptualizations of stigma, and will evaluate the extent to which singles both meet and depart from the criteria set forth by Goffman (1963) and others. Second, we will challenge the notion that prejudicial beliefs toward single persons are sufficient evidence that single persons are stigmatized. Rather, we propose that single persons themselves must perceive that they are the targets of mistreatment (regardless of their attribution for it) to demonstrate stigmatization. Third, we conduct empirical analyses, based on the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study, to evaluate whether unmarried persons differ from married persons in their perceptions that they have been the target of interpersonal and institutional discrimination. Fourth, we explore possible explanations for our empirical finding that single people report interpersonal mistreatment but not institutional discrimination. We propose that singles are caught in a “cultural lag” (Ogburn, 1922) between macrosocial changes that encourage and sustain singlehood as a desirable option, and slow-to-change cultural ideals that still elevate marriage as the ideal state. Pro-marriage ideology (and consequently, single stigma) will persist until scholars and laypersons (a) recognize and question the privileges afforded to married persons, (b) acknowledge that problematic aspects of marriage and family life are indicative of “public issues” rather than “private troubles” (Mills, 1959), and (c) investigate more fully the
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adaptive and creative ways that unmarried persons construct their own unique sets of “family” relationships. Finally, we propose that the development of “singleness studies” as a field of academic inquiry may be an important step in chipping away at singlism both in science and society.