Joanna Grossman on Common-Law Marriage: A Nineteenth-Century Relic with Continuing Relevance
We pick up Joanna Grossman's article at this point ...
Common-Law Marriage Today
Today, common-law marriages can be established in Alabama, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and the District of Columbia. Moreover, six additional states recognize common-law marriages that were established prior to the date that the relevant state's legislature abolished the status. Thus, for example, common-law marriages established in Oklahoma prior to November 1, 1998 are valid.
(Readers who watch the ABC drama Grey's Anatomy might note that Washington State is not on this list. Thus, Derek and Meredith, who purported in last year's season finale to get married by "post-it note" because they couldn't find the time to sneak away from the hospital to Seattle's city hall, are not, even in TV-land, actually married.)
But common-law marriage sometimes reaches even further – for most states that have abolished common-law marriage nonetheless will give effect to such a marriage if it was validly established elsewhere. This is consistent with the general principles of interstate marriage recognition, which I have discussed in many previous columns, including here and here. The "place of celebration" rule, which every state follows, provides that a marriage is valid everywhere if it is valid where celebrated.
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The Pew Research Center's New Economics of Marriage: The Rise of Wives
by Richard Fry and D'Vera Cohn
We pick up this report at the following point:
Educational attainment plays an important role in income, so a central focus of this report is to analyze economic data by level of schooling. Through this lens, too, married people have outdone the unmarried. The higher their education level, the more that adults' household incomes have risen over the past four decades; within each level, married adults have seen larger gains than unmarried adults. Among married adults at each education level, men had larger household income increases than did women. Those who gained most of all were married male college graduates, whose household incomes rose 56%, compared with 44% for married female college graduates.
For unmarried adults at each level of education, however, men's household incomes fared worse than those of women. Unmarried women in 2007 had higher household incomes than their 1970 counterparts at each level of education. But unmarried men without any post-secondary education lost ground because their real earnings decreased and they did not have a wife's wages to buffer that decline. Unmarried men who did not complete high school or who had only a high school diploma had lower household incomes in 2007 than their 1970 counterparts did. Unmarried men with some college education had stagnant household incomes.
Unmarried men with college degrees made gains (15%), but the gains were not as great as those for unmarried women with college degrees (28%). In fact, household incomes of unmarried men with college degrees grew at half the rate of household incomes of married men with only a high school diploma — 33% versus 15%.
There is an important exception to the rule that married adults have fared better than unmarried adults from 1970 to 2007. Married women without a high school diploma did not make the same gains as more educated women: Their household incomes slipped 2% from 1970 to 2007, while those of their unmarried counterparts grew 9%. The stagnant incomes of married women without high school diplomas reflect the poor job prospects of less educated men in their pool of marriage partners. These less educated married women now are far less likely than in the past to have a spouse who works — 77% did in 2007, compared with 92% in 1970.
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