Not Just Roommates

Cohabitation after the Sexual Revolution

Elizabeth H. Pleck

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780226671048, 9780226671031
• eBook ISBN: 9780226671055
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The late twentieth century has seen a fantastic expansion of personal, sexual, and domestic liberties in the United States. In Not Just Roommates, Elizabeth H. Pleck explores the rise of cohabitation, and the changing social norms that have allowed cohabitation to become the chosen lifestyle of more than fifteen million Americans.

Despite this growing social acceptance, Pleck contends that when it comes to the law, cohabitors have been, and continue to be, treated as second-class citizens, subjected to discriminatory laws, limited privacy, a lack of political representation, and little hope for change. Because cohabitation is not a sexual identity, Pleck argues, cohabitors face the legal discrimination of a population with no group identity, no civil rights movement, no legal defense organizations, and, often, no consciousness of being discriminated against. Through in-depth research in written sources and interviews, Pleck shines a light on the emergence of cohabitation in American culture, its complex history, and its unpleasant realities in the present day.

NOTES

CHAPTER ONE

1.Steven Ruggles estimates the 1960 figure for opposite-sex households as 230,000, using sampling from public use census data. The US Census Bureau puts the figure for 1960 at 439,000. Ruggles believes the higher estimate reflects boarders and domestic servants rather than cohabitors. UC-1, Unmarried Partners of the Opposite Sex/1, by Presence of Children/2: 1960 to the Present, http://www.census/gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/UC1.xls (accessed September 1, 2011); Daphne Lofquist and Renee Ellis, “Comparison of Estimates of Same-Sex Couple Households,” 2011, http://www.census.gov/population/www.socdemo/files/2011Final_PAA_Postu.pdf (accessed September 1, 2011). The thirty-five-fold increase is based on opposite-sex households, since no figures for same-sex couples were available in 1960.

2.For estimates about children, see Larry L. Bumpass and Hsien-Hen Lu, “Trends in Cohabitation and Implications for Children’s Family Contexts in the United States,” Population Studies 54, no. 1 (2000): 29–41; and the follow-up study, Sheela Kennedy and Larry Bumpass, “Cohabitation and Children’s Living Arrangements: New Estimates from the United States,” Demographic Research 19 (2008): 1663–92; CBS News/New York Times poll, 1977, http://Webapps.roper.center.uconn.edu/; Connie de Boer, “The Polls: Marriage—a Decaying Institution,” Public Opinion Quarterly 45, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 265–75; Linda Lyons, “The Future of Marriage: Part II,” www.Gallup.com/poll/64Gallup poll, Marriage, 2007 (accessed December 15, 2009); Rose M. Kreeder and Diana B. Elliott, “The Complex Living Arrangements of Children and Their Unmarried Parents,” http://www.census.gov/population/www.socdemo/complex-abstract.pdf (accessed July 1, 2010); http://www.gallup.com/poll/117328/Marriage.aspx (accessed May 14, 2010); National Health Marriage Resource Center, “Attitudes toward Cohabitation,” 2007, http://www.healthymarriage.info.org (accessed May 15, 2010). The CBS News/New York Times poll asked about the “increase in number of couples living together without being married.” The question was “do you think this is okay, is it something that’s always wrong, or doesn’t it matter much to you?” African American public opinion in 1980 was less disapproving, but even so, 61 percent of a nationally representative sample of blacks disapproved of couples living together. Morris Dresner and Tortorello Research Poll: Data Black Study No. 2, March 13–April 9, 1980, http://webapps.ropercenter.uconn.edu (accessed March 14, 2010); Arland Thornton and Linda Young-DeMarco, “Four Decades of Trends in Attitudes toward Family Issues in the United States: The 1960s through the 1990s,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 63, no. 4 (2001): 1024; Monitoring the Future: A Continuing Study of American Youth (12th-Grade Survey, 1976–2008), “Thirty Years of Change in Marriage and Union Formation Attitudes,” 1976–2008,” http://ncfmr.bgsu.edu/pdf/family_profiles/files83691-pdf (accessed March 15, 2011). For figures about cohabitation prior to marriage, see Finn Christensen, “The Pill and Partnerships: The Impact of the Birth Control Pill on Cohabitation,” Working Papers, Department of Economics, Towson State University, 2010; Larry Bumpass and James A. Sweet, “National Estimates of Cohabitation,” Demography 26, no. 4 (1989): 615–25.

3.“Bedroom Privacy—Repeal Intrusive States Law Banning Cohabitation,” Detroit Free Press, December 23, 2005; Rochelle S. Swan, Linda L. Shaw, Sharon Cullity, and Mary Roche, “The Untold Story of Welfare Fraud,” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 35, no. 3 (September 2008): 142; “Documenting Discrimination on the Basis of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in State Employment,” Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, 2009, http://www.escholarship.org/uc/ (accessed April 25, 2010); www.foxonline.com/dpp/news/education/local_iuk_appleton_teacher_fired_for_
sleeping_over_B200905181714.rev1 (accessed May 19, 2009); “Former Inmate Files Suit, over anti-cohabitation Law,” Charleston West Virginia Record, October 5, 2006.

4.Susan L. Brown, “Marriage and Child Well-Being: Research and Policy Perspectives,” Journal of Marriage and Family Policy 72, no. 5 (September 2010): 1072. David T. Evans first used the term “sexual citizenship” in Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1993).

5.Larry Bumpass, “What’s Happening to the Family: Demography and Institutional Changes,” in Focus on Single-Parent Families, ed. Annice D. Yarber and Paul M. Sharp (New York: Greenwood Press, 2010), 17.

6.Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 219.

7.Maynard v. Hill, 126 U.S. 190, 211 (1887).

8.The Personal Work and Responsibility Act of 1998, 8 U.S.C. 1612 (1996).

9.Michelle A. Krowl, “‘Her Just Dues’: Civil War Pensions of African American Women in Virginia,” in Negotiating Boundaries of Southern Womanhood, ed. Janet L. Coyrell, Thomas H. Appleton, Jr., and Anastasia Sims (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 61; Brandi Clay Brimmer, “All Her Rights and Privileges: African-American Women and the Politics of Civil War Widows’ Pensions” (PhD diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 2006), 161, 188; Changin Lee, “Beyond Sorrowful Pride: Civil War Pensions and War Widowhood, 1862–1900” (PhD diss., Ohio University, 1997), 100–101. For the higher rejection rate of black applicants for Civil War pensions, see Donald R. Shaffer, “‘If I Do Not Suppose That Uncle Sam Looks at the Skin’: African Americans and the Civil War Pension System, 1865–1934,” Civil War History 46, no. 2 (2000): 132–47. African Americans in Mississippi and North Carolina were the targets of increased policing of laws against unlawful cohabitation during Reconstruction. Katherine M. Franke, “Women Imagining Justice,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 14 (2002): 309.

10.Stephen Robertson, “Making Right a Girl’s Ruin: Working-Class Legal Cultures and Forced Marriage in New York City, 1890–1950,” Journal of American Studies 36, no. 2 (2002): 207. On shotgun marriage of cohabitors, see Ellen Messer, Back Rooms: Voices from the Illegal Abortion Era (New York: Prometheus Books, 1994), 57. There are some cases in which government benefits encourage people to divorce. One spouse can become eligible for Medicaid (the government program that pays for medical costs, including nursing home costs) if the other spouse secures a divorce so as to avoid being subjected to the requirement that a couple’s assets must be depleted to be eligible for the program.

11.Ariela Dubler coined the term “marriage cure” for what I am calling state-imposed shotgun marriage. Immigration officials often presume that couples marry for fraudulent means, so that, with respect to residence in the United States, government policy does not promote marriage. For her analysis of sham marriages in relation to the marriage cure, see Ariela R. Dubler, “Immoral Purposes: Marriage and the Genus of Illicit Sex,” Yale Law Journal 115 (2004): 756–812; on the significance of family statutes in criminal law, see Dan Markel, Privilege or Punish: Criminal Justice and the Challenge of Family Ties (New York: Oxford University Press, 2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• ONE / Introduction
• TWO / Night Falls in Miami Beach
• THREE / Welfare Rights
• FOUR / Coed Facing Expulsion, 1968
• FIVE / From Sheboygan to Madison
• SIX / Alternative Lifestyle
• SEVEN / Palimony
• EIGHT / Mothers on Trial
• NINE / Get Married or Move Out
• TEN / Domestic Partnerships
• ELEVEN / Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index