The Divorce Culture - Hardcover

When Barbara Dafoe Whitehead published her article "Dan Quayle Was Right" in the April 1993 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, she caught many pundits, polemicists, and readers on their heels. Her argument provided a bracing wake-up call from the largely complacent attitude held toward the effects of divorce and single-parent families on the lives of children. Through thorough statistics, Whitehead demonstrated the real cost of divorce in terms of the diminished lives of America's children. That original argument is expanded to book length in The Divorce Culture. Her book is a recapitulation of her original (and important) case that the state of families ought to be of vital concern to all of us. Now, however, her fresh approach is hardened into a more partisan temper, and her book provides little beyond moralism to chart a course for improvement. If Whitehead's point is that a moral reform is the only means of saving the family, then she at least owes a bit more sweat over the shape that that movement for moral reform ought to take, as well as some analysis of its likelihood of success. After all, if her diagnosis is correct, her prescription is of the greatest importance.

An eloquent diatribe against divorce as an entitlement in which the interests of other ``stakeholders,'' particularly children, are subordinated to the enhancement of self. Social historian Whitehead (who first advanced her argument in an award-winning 1993 Atlantic Monthly piece) contends that under the prevailing ethic of ``expressive individualism,'' divorce has become the psychologically approved response to marital dissatisfaction and, as such, morally neutralized (``no right or wrong reasons . . . only reasons'') and socially sanctioned. It is, she contends, even applauded, by the likes of liberals, feminists, and psychotherapists, whose agendas conveniently blind them to consequences that have surfaced on reappraisal. If, as Whitehead maintains, the early supporters believed that ``adults were emotionally fragile and need divorce, while children were emotionally resilient and could handle it,'' later studies bear out her own conclusion, felicitously articulated, that married parents have greater capacity to invest in their children both affectively and instrumentally and also ``to recruit other sources of social and emotional capital.'' Whitehead weakens her fine case for ``the norm of permanence'' when she fails to tame her tendency to caricature and accuses straw men of ``eroticizing'' the ``Love Family'' that putatively supplants the broken nuclear unit. These traits betoken a decidedly selective vision, as does the metonymic representation of contemporary American culture by a privileged subculture (one fluent in Friedan and Freud and affluent enough to forsake economic mobility for ``psychological entrepreneurialism''); ditto some idiosyncratic choices of historical reference points (Edith Wharton novels) and psycho- sociological citations. Whitehead's ethical bias in favor of responsible parenting is unassailable, however: Marriage, she says, is ``children's most basic form of social insurance,'' and marriages with children should be considered ``a special kind of trust.'' Her confrontation with that tough reality merits attention and support. (Author tour; radio satellite tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.