African American Marriage Patterns

1 African AmericanMarriage PatternsDOUGLAS J. BESHAROV andANDREW WESTin 1968,the Kerner Commission declared that the UnitedStates was moving toward two societies, one black, one white separateand unequal. 1 Happily, many of the Commission s most distressing pre-dictions have not come true. But with respect to Marriage and child rearing,black and white Americans do live in substantially different worlds. Overthe past fifty years, for all Americans, Marriage rates have declined whiledivorce rates and out-of-wedlock births have climbed. But the negativechanges have been greatest among African Decline of MarriagenonmarriageCompared with white women, African American women are 25 percentless likely ever to have been married and about half as likely to be currentlymarried.

2 According to the Census Bureau s Current Population Survey(CPS), in 1998, about 29 percent of African American women aged fifteenHoover Press : ThernstromDP5 HPTHER0600 08-01-01 rev1 page95and over were married with a spouse present, compared with about 55percent of white women and 49 percent of Hispanic women are estimated to spend only half as long as white womenmarried (22 percent vs. 44 percent of their lives).3In the 1950s, after at least seventy years of rough parity, African Amer-ican Marriage rates began to fall behind white rates. In 1950, the percentagesof white and African American women (aged fifteen and over) who werecurrently married were roughly the same, 67 percent and 64 percent,respectively.

3 By 1998, the percentage of currently married white womenhad dropped by 13 percent to 58 percent. But the drop among AfricanAmerican women was 44 percent to 36 percent more than three declines for males were parallel, 12 percent for white men, 36percent for African American Hispanics, the decline in Marriage rates appears to have beenless steep, but only because we have no information on Hispanics prior to1970. From 1970 to 1998, the percentage of currently married Hispanicwomen dropped 13 percent, from 64 percent to 56 percent (see Fig. 1).5 Even more significant has been the sharp divergence in never-marriedrates. Between 1950 and 1998, the percentage of never-married whitewomen aged fifteen and over rose from 20 percent to 22 percent, a 10percent rise.

4 But the percentage of never-married African American womenabout doubled, from 21 percent to 41 Hispanics, the databegin only in 1970; since then, the percentage of Hispanic never-marriedwomen has risen from 24 percent in 1970 to 29 percent in 1998, about a21 percent Marriage among African Americans accounts for only some ofthis difference. For example, between 1950 and 1998, the percentage ofnever-married white women aged forty and over actually fell from 9 percentto 5 percent, a 44 percent drop. But the percentage of never-married AfricanAmerican women aged forty and over rose by 200 percent, from 5 percentto 15 (Thus, even adjusting for age at first Marriage , marriagerates decline after about 1970 for whites and 1960 for African Americans).

5 9 Among Hispanics, there has been almost no change in the percentageHoover Press : ThernstromDP5 HPTHER0600 08-01-01 rev1 page9696 Douglas J. Besharov and Andrew WestFig. trends, 1890 1998. Although the 1890 data have not beenanalyzed, results from 1910 indicate that about 2 percent of black womenclassified as widows in that year were actually never-married or divorced. SeeSamuel H. Preston, Suet Lim, and S. Philip Morgan, African -AmericanMarriage in 1910: Beneath the Surface of Census Data, Demography29(February 1992): 1 15. Data for 1890 1990 from decennial census data for thoseyears; data for 1998 from Bureau of the Census,Marital Status and LivingArrangements: March 1998, by Terry A.

6 Lugailia (Washington, : Printing Office, 1999), p. 1, table never-married women. In 1970, about 7 percent of women forty andover were never married. By 1998, that figure had risen by only one per-centage and separationAt the same time that African American women are half as likely tomarry as whites, they are more than twice as likely to divorce . AlthoughAfrican American divorce rates have long been higher than those of whites,Hoover Press : ThernstromDP5 HPTHER0600 08-01-01 rev1 page9797 African American Marriage Patternsthey are now more so. For example, in 1890 (the first year for which nationalcensus data are available) the number of divorced women per thousandmarried women was 45 percent higher for African Americans than forwhites, 9 vs.

7 Are relatively small numbers, but they suggest thateven when families were on the whole much stronger than they are today, African American women were still much more likely to face marital early divorce figures may not be completely accurate, only was divorce highly stigmatized before the 1960s, making it likelythat divorces were underreported in early census years, but also, as Frazier pointed out sixty years ago, divorces among rural AfricanAmericans were most likely informal agreements (between two marriedpeople or two people living together) or the de facto result of , it is likely that formal divorces among African Amer-icans were much lower, and perhaps much lower than among of the reliability of earlier census data, however, the racialdifference in divorce is now quite large.

8 By 1998, the African Americandivorce rate was more than twice as high as the white rate (422 per thousandcompared with 190 per thousand). The divorce rate for Hispanic womendoubled between 1970, the first year for which data are available, and 1998,from 81 to 171 per thousand (compared with a quadrupling of the AfricanAmerican rate and a tripling of the white rate over the same time period).13 Separation is about four times more common among African Ameri-cans than among whites and about one and a half times more commonthan among Hispanics. In 1998, according to CPS data, over 20 percent ofmarried black women aged fifteen and over had an absent spouse, com-pared with 5 percent of married white women and 13 percent of marriedHispanic women of the same experts question whether theblack separation rate is really this high, speculating that black womenconsider the breakup of a long-term cohabitation (an informal common-law Marriage , if you will) to be a separation.

9 15 Hoover Press : ThernstromDP5 HPTHER0600 08-01-01 rev1 page9898 Douglas J. Besharov and Andrew Westnonmarital birthsAlong with the weakness of Marriage , there has been an increase innonmarital births, especially among teenagers. Once again, African Amer-icans have experienced the greatest increases, although they have also beenresponsible for most of the recent decline in both teen births and non-marital teen births. According to Larry Bumpass and Hsien-Hen Lu, anAfrican American child is three times more likely to be born out of wedlockthan a white child and, on average, will spend only six years in a two-parentfamily, compared with fourteen years for a white child and thirteen yearsfor a Hispanic proportion of births to unwed mothers has risen steadily since1950, so that now almost one-third of all American children are born outof wedlock (see Fig.)

10 2). From 1950 to 1997, the proportion of births tounmarried white women (non-Hispanic) increased almost twelvefold,from 2 percent to 22 percent. The African American proportion increasedfourfold, from 18 percent to a striking 69 percent. (The African Americanrate could not have risen much more because it was already so high.) Theproportion of births to Hispanic unwed mothers has also increased by 5percent between 1992 and 1997, rising from 39 percent to 41 major factor driving these rates has been the decline in the birthratesfor married couples rather than an explosion of births outside of Marriage (Fig. 3). As Thernstrom and Thernstrom point out, In 1987 the birth ratefor married black women actually fellbelow the birth rate for unmarriedblack women, the first time that has ever happened for any ethnic group.