rls and boys, and prohibitions on child labor, raised the cost of raising children, altered family dynamics for the male. Technological improvements in birth control led to a declining birth rate, and freed women to join the workforce. The "housewife family" declined from the mid 20th century on. Marriage as a social order is an ideal rather than a norm. Women are now emancipated from their social and institutional inferiority to men, and while the power of fathers and husbands has decreased, the power of the pimp has increased.
The University of Chicago published an article on marriage and the American family in the new century2. They believe families will continue to move away from the model of the stay-at-home mother, working father and children because of divorce, cohabitation and single parenthood, which suggests the majority of families in the US in the next century will not include the children's original parents, and thus changing the role of the married man. Marriage rates are changing, with middle-class individuals more likely to marry and remarry than working-class individuals, who are now more likely to cohabit or remain single. From 1972 to 1977, 80 percent of both middle-class and working-class individuals were married, but in the 1994 to 1998 period, 78 percent of middle-class and only 62 percent of working-class individuals were married. People are marrying later, cohabiting, and divorcing more, and a growing number of children are born outside marriage. As more and more women have entered the work force, gender roles within marriage have changed and become more homogenous between husbands and wives, bringing more changes to the role of the married man.
Though many traditional values continue to influence people's attitudes, the changing roles in marriage are changing the way Americans think about family life2. One of the biggest changes in this generation, according to a study conducted by the Nationa...