The panic about Americans having fewer babies continues unabated. But we know this: Marriage and fertility rates in this country and across much of the world have been declining for years, with no signs of reversing. Prominent American conservatives keep saying that the problem is that it’s not 1950. That’s when it was typical to get married in one’s late teens or early 20s, to someone only of the opposite sex, and a majority of families had a male breadwinner with more legal rights than his wife.
In a commencement speech to Hillsdale College, a Christian liberal arts school with moral guidelines that state that the only “responsible sexual acts” are “those occurring in marriage and between the sexes,” Erika Kirk told 2026 graduates that if her late husband, Charlie Kirk, had been there, he would have encouraged them to get married young.
Erica Kirk, the chief executive of Turning Point U.S.A., went on, “He’d also say: Have more kids than you can afford.” Americans of many different backgrounds have cited the cost of living as a reason they are delaying or forgoing parenthood. The backlash I have seen to her statement on social media shows that her message is not landing well in the middle of a grocery price emergency. She continued: “To the men, you are called to provide. You are called to lead, to anchor your families in strength and consistency. To the women, you are called to nurture, to build to shape lives with wisdom and endurance.”
Kirk pitches her message as countercultural, and in a sense, it is. A 21-year-old married speaker at Turning Point’s Women’s Leadership Summit in June said she was going against the culture by proclaiming her husband as the head of her household and feminism as a “psyop.” But a young marriage isn’t what most Americans want. Only 10 percent of Americans in a survey said that getting married at 20 to 24 years old was ideal, and most people believe it’s better to wait until you’re more established and responsible. (Kirk did not get married until she was in her 30s).
A good friend of Charlie Kirk, Vice President JD Vance, reveals a similar obsession with the falling birthrate in his new book, “Communion”: Babies are mentioned 33 times. Vance believes the decline in religiosity and its influence is to blame. “Our abandonment of Christian culture has coincided with an apparent decline in our collective will to live,” he writes.
Some Republicans are even trying to turn back the widespread acceptance of homosexuality and the legality of gay marriage. In Tennessee the state legislature rebranded Pride Month as Nuclear Family Month. The resolution “just states the importance of the nuclear family and how it was foundational from the very beginning, all the way back to Adam and Eve,” said State Representative Bud Hulsey when he introduced the bill this year.
Encouraging more Americans to have families doesn’t have to involve a stubborn, unwanted return to a patriarchal, midcentury Christian idea of marriage. Stephanie Coontz, one of the pre-eminent historians of marriage, has written a new book, “For Better and Worse,” that exposes the loopholes in this thinking. She explains how the 1950s version of marriage in the United States — when two-thirds of children under 15 were in households that were led by a male breadwinner and only 6 percent of Americans who came of age in that decade were unmarried by age 35 — was an anomaly created by specific historical and economic conditions and had considerable downsides.
“The gender arrangements, sexual norms, interpersonal dynamics and acceptable numbers of partners allowed in marriage have all varied enormously over the ages, not just across cultures but also within them,” Coontz writes about the myths about traditional marriage. She notes that in the first five books of the Bible, the kind of marriage mentioned most often is polygyny, which is one man with many wives. She mentions societies where you could legally marry a ghost.
Our notions about men’s and women’s innate behavior have also been fungible. The idea that women are risk averse, fragile and morally pure is pretty new. Coontz points out that in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe and an expanding United States, while women were thought of as subordinate to men, they were also “considered more prone to ambition, greed and sexual excess than men.” She adds, “They needed to be controlled not so much for their own protection as for the protection of men.” When women would cross-dress to pass as men in the colonial era to do brave things, like join the military, they became the subject of heroic ballads.
The word “breadwinner” to refer to the man of the house did not appear until the 19th century, Coontz explains, when industrialization and urbanization began. Before then, most men and women lived, worked and cared for children together. But once labor became primarily something one did outside the home for pay, the public sphere was designated for men, and the domestic sphere was for women. Stripping women of some of their agency demanded a new explanation for women’s essential nature, one that made them vulnerable and “required them to be protected from society rather than for society to be protected from them,” according to Coontz.
The 1950s to ’70s was the fullest expression of the fragile-domestic-woman, strong-breadwinner-male marriage in the United States. Coontz explains that this was made possible by the rapid economic growth of the post-World War II era that guaranteed that most families could sustain a modest yet stable life on one salary and by a series of laws and norms that kept women trapped in marriages whether they wanted to be in them or not. Divorce was hard to come by and made you a pariah, homosexuality was criminalized, child and spousal abuse were mostly ignored, and many women — who married at the age of 20, on average — did not have access to good careers or their own sources of credit.
I agree with Coontz that part of what people are appropriately nostalgic for is the first piece: In 1960 the median price of a home was around twice as much as the median annual income; now it’s closer to six times as much. It was simply easier to support a family, and she notes that financial stress makes marriage formation far more difficult.
By casting the ideal 21st-century relationship in antiquated terms, conservatives are ignoring the glaring reality of how Americans actually want to live and are living their lives. According to a 2023 poll from Pew Research, 77 percent of Americans said that “when children are being raised by a mother and a father, they are better off if both parents focus equally on their job or career and on taking care of the children and the home.” Dads are happily spending more time with their kids than fathers did in previous generations. While support for L.G.B.T.Q. rights and marriage has declined over the past few years, according to Gallup — in part because of Republicans bashing the community — 65 percent of Americans surveyed still said they favored gay marriage.
I take conservatives at their word that they want more people to get married and for those people to have more children than they are currently having. But it makes absolutely no sense to create a definition of marriage that excludes the desires and ideals of a substantial majority of Americans. While there are many factors that contribute to any individual getting married or having a child, 43 percent of respondents to Brigham Young University’s 2025 American Family Survey said that “insufficient money” was their “primary barrier to having children.”
I believe that good marriages are good and that if we want more of them, we need to help young people attain stable economic footing in adulthood first and foremost, rather than shove them back into a ticky-tacky box.
End Notes
-
In the same way that Coontz punctures stereotypes about the past, Ryan Burge’s latest Graphs About Religion newsletter surprised me with some data about the present. Burge, a professor at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University, found that though rural America is considered highly religious, there are a lot of younger Nones — atheists, agnostics or believers in nothing in particular — living outside cities. He writes, “Among millennials living in small towns, 40 percent are nonreligious, and 48 percent of Gen Z claim no affiliation. Those rates are just as high (if not higher) than younger adults living in urban areas.” As a longtime chronicler of Nones, this is fascinating to me.
Feel free to reach out if you’re a rural none, or drop me a line about anything else here.
