Marriage (and Dual Incomes) Mattered . . . a Lot

George Washington had diarrhea.¹

Twenty-six and desperate to get rich, he wasn’t going to let that stop him. Wearing his best clothes, he gingerly mounted a horse and rode off to woo the wealthiest single woman in America. Young George made decent money surveying land. Like most young men with good pay, he spent it fast on gambling and booze. Now he wanted more. That is where Martha Custis came in. He was worth a few thousand pounds. She was worth £40,000 (over $8 million today). Sour stomach and all, this first date had a lot on the line.

Apparently, George was quite the charmer. A week later, Martha wrote and invited him to spend the night (a kind of formal come hither text). Soon, no longer single, George Washington was one of the richest men in America. All because he knew the most important piece of financial advice in history: marry well.

Marriage has changed a lot since then. Two families agreeing on business terms became two thirty-somethings tired of swiping left. Obligation transformed into an option. If we marry at all, it’s to make two individuals happy, not to form one joint enterprise. Marriage offers an after-market add-on feature to your career: nice to have if you can afford it.

Yet marriage was, and remains, financial. When it works, it offers three important benefits. First come the network effects: in-laws have an upside. Second comes the power of two incomes, which is not some new invention of the 1960s. Third, marriage offers the less tangible but highly valuable impact of mutuality.

When it doesn’t work, the repercussions are dire. But investing in a good marriage still has outsized returns. Whatever the fate of the institution, you are far more likely to succeed financially within one than without.

We have a lot to learn from the history of marriage about how to Go Ahead. Then and now, it was crucial. Capitalism, it turns out, is a team sport.

* * *

Benjamin Franklin called marrying for money the “abominable Prostitution of Persons and Minds.” Nice words.

Like much of Franklin’s writing, it was good for thee but not for he. Franklin’s own marital arrangements were callous cash transactions. While courting the daughter of a friend, he bluntly informed the family he expected a dowry large enough to pay off his last remaining business loan. His would-be in-laws didn’t have the money, to which Franklin suggested they mortgage their house. The answer was no, and Franklin married someone else.

Dowries, often called the bride price, offend us, as if daughters and cattle were interchangeable. Dowries, though, went the other way. The girl’s family paid someone to marry her, which, again, sounds horrible.

It wasn’t. Dowries were vital financial strategies: the startup funds for life. Early American families didn’t own businesses, they were businesses. If a woman married a brewer, cooper, or tailor she didn’t just become the wife of a guy with that job. She now ran a brewery, cooperage, or tailor shop. Boys’ parents had already paid for years of apprenticeships. Now brides’ families were looking around at which small business to invest in for their daughter’s future. For grooms, dowries were the largest infusion of capital they would ever receive. For wives and their families, it was the largest investment of capital they ever made. Marriage was, at its core, a tiny business startup funded by two families.

A new idea, the companionate marriage became (and remains) the norm: first comes love, then comes marriage. But dowries didn’t go away. They came from a new provider: girls’ labor. Young women left home to work for rich families or factories, raising their own startup funds. Young men did the same, building up skillsets to start their own shop just as soon as a hardworking lady in her fundraising phase picked him.

There are still cute holdovers—sweet and social, not hard and fast—like brides’ parents paying for weddings since they no longer spring for workmen’s tools. Young men sometimes still ask fathers for hands in marriage, but everyone knows the answer.

We are left with an institution created for one purpose being used for something completely different. A system about stability is tasked with making us happy. Talking about money and marriage became icky. It polluted the purity of choosing someone because we finish each other’s sentences.

If fiancés talk about money at all, it usually involves paying for the wedding. That issue first arose in the Victorian period, when couples from Cleveland started behaving like British royalty on the big day. Aghast, home economists tried to rebrand the dowry as a “sunny opportunity fund”² to help couples survive every day after the ceremony. They begged young people to invest more in the marriage than in the wedding. That advice fell on deaf ears. Saving for boozy bridesmaid brunches is a ton more fun; it also inversely correlates to success. A 2014 study of thousands of couples³ found that spending more than $20,000 on a wedding corresponded to a 60 percent increase in divorce.

* * *

In the 1830s, just as companionate marriage was becoming popular, someone turned the marriage market into a fun family card game. Cards described prospective mates by wealth, status, attractiveness, and even bad breath. The game was a teaching tool. Play your hand carefully. Drawing a blank (a spousal “dud” who offered nothing) led to dying unhappy. Wedding vows, the instructions read, could be compared to a lottery.⁴ Strategically maximize your chances for success.

The most valuable asset was assets. In-laws’ wealth, as much as a spouse’s breath, affected outcomes. Marriage doubled your business network, opening doors to loans and job placements for children. Much like today’s movies feature bumbling male sidekicks (from Shrek’s Donkey to Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover), the heroines of nineteenth-century novels always had a foolish friend who married for love. Marrying because “they’re just so cute” was good for a laugh and a hard life lesson.

For everyday people without family wealth, personal traits were good substitutes. Early twentieth-century feminists⁵ advised women that a man with a small salary who was “thrifty, vigorous, self-sacrificing and courageous” had great potential to end with more than he started with. Wealth came first, but in its absence, look for early indicators.

For young men wanting to get rich, you weren’t just picking a sex partner. You were choosing the first person customers saw entering the shop. Top traits for a wife⁶ were in business manuals, sometimes alongside chapters on double-entry bookkeeping. After calm demeanor came thrift, orderliness, and cheerfulness in tough times (since businesses ebbed and flowed). The biggest red flags were despondence (depression) and a girl who liked spending money. “A sprinkle of ugliness” was a trifle to trade for a woman who wasn’t crazy, extravagant, or crazy extravagant. Insensitive, yes, but these aphorisms mattered. When the Panic of 1837 wiped out most American small businesses, one Philadelphia print shop owner⁷ forthrightly explained the only reason his business survived was his wife’s expert management.

Both men’s and women’s guides saw marriage in the 1800s as a partnership, now chosen by the two partners instead of parental angel investors. One brought capital and management skills, the other a skillset and willingness to strive. Singles were instructed to have, between her savings and his, half a year’s pay set aside.

Finally, couples were advised to get married quickly. “I believe in short engagements and long marriages,”⁸ a popular 1903 advice manual for men explained. A guide for would-be merchants sixty years earlier agreed. “We do not approve the policy of deferring marriage till one is very rich . . . No; we are for early marriage.”⁹ This was less a romantic eagerness for love and more the marital math. “Get married,” said an even earlier magazine in 1800s Baltimore. “A wife is cheaper than a house-keeper, her industry will assist you many ways, and your children will soon share and lighten your labor.”¹⁰ Marriage created a business partnership. Sex created new staff.

Our modern noses turn up at this stuff. At the reception, we want the DJ playing Taylor Swift’s “Lover,” not Cardi B’s “Money.” The financial effects of marriage, though, were undeniable. A good marriage was a good investment, and best to invest early. Of course, they also rode to church in wagons. Is partnership marriage a timeless truth, or so last-last century? Before we can answer, we must understand the second historical power law of marriage: dual incomes.

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Women’s work is severely undercounted in the historical record. Couples labored side by side, dividing tasks and responsibilities. It was not uncommon for newspapers to run advertisements from a new widow¹¹ proclaiming that she intended to keep running the family business, so the news of her husband’s death shouldn’t deter customers. Widows occasionally even continued running their husband’s legal firms and medical practices.

Working-class men both expected and needed their wives’ incomes. A 1790s tradesman bemoaned to a newspaper the “Plague of the Learned Wife,”¹² who would rather read and “talk like skollards [scholars]” than find gainful employment. One hundred years later, in the mill town of Brockton, Massachusetts, less than half of the families employed by a local shoe factory had just one wage earner. Women worked full-time, part-time, and seasonal jobs and often registered complaints with management when they didn’t get enough hours.¹³

Meanwhile, the economic value of work at home was pivotal. A typical woman labored fifty-eight hours on housework per week¹⁴ in 1900. If she kept boarders, side hustles, worked in the family business, or at a local factory, those hours were added on top.

The story of women’s work at home has two volumes. In Volume 1, a woman toils constantly, six children of varying ages surround her, water comes from a well, and electrical appliances are science fiction. One observer in Texas remembered the endless chicken coops and butter sales and explained that “women often supported their families through such funds while their husbands learned to farm.”¹⁵ Women ordered books, like the 1866 Money-Maker’s Manual, which included instructions for how to buy a “womb veil” (an early diaphragm) to avoid labor disruption alongside recipes for baked goods that sold well in city streets. It gave a list of small businesses you could start with no capital, including a crash course in dog breeding.¹⁶ Bostonian women encountered a similar pamphlet floating around in the 1890s, arguing women could make “handsome profits” by producing its recipes for colored ink and peppermint lozenges.¹⁷ Your friend making jewelry and scented candles stands in a long line of women crushing the bottom line.

Volume II: Rise of the (Washing) Machines.¹⁸ Our heroine, whose mother lugged seven tons of coal to the stove and nine thousand gallons of water from the well each year, can finally rest. The laundry, a single load of which took her ancestors four vigorous hours of scrubbing in near boiling water and hung outside in the brutal Minnesota cold, whirls in a contraption housed in the garage. In 1945, someone asked a farm wife to wear a pedometer while doing laundry her old way versus the new. What once took her well over a mile and a long day was done in under two hours and she barely moved.

From World War II to now, women’s hours of paid employment per week doubled because their hours worked at home were cut by over half. Birth control was important, too, but more for the added convenience. You could always buy a womb veil.

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The post-war stay-at-home mom phenomenon was more a lull between eras than a long-standing tradition. In conservative middle-class circles, it became celebrated as a golden age. In Betty Friedan’s version, it was filled with budding alcoholics neurotically changing the sheets for the second time this week, waging secret rebellions against insanity.

My family remembers this period somewhat differently than either side: it was the arrival of the new world. In 1939, Paw Paw hitchhiked from his tiny South Carolina town to the New York World’s Fair. He was twenty-seven when he saw “The Town of Tomorrow” exhibit. Wide-eyed country folk encountered a futuristic dreamland: an electric refrigerator with a freezer box, electric stoves, a machine that washed dishes, and another for washing clothes. There was even a strange contraption labeled a “garbage disposal” that took the trash from the sink out via the plumbing . . . plumbing! Clean water came in, dirty water flushed out. A world without hauled water!

By 1959, my grandfather was forty-seven and had fought a war. Baby and wife in tow, they moved from their trailer into a real stick-built home. The bathroom had pink tile. It also had electricity, a telephone, a refrigerator with a freezer box, an electric stove, and a washing machine. They skipped the garbage disposal.

Let’s focus on the washing machine. This saved my grandmother on average 12 hours each week, 624 hours each year, and over 11,000 hours while raising a family. It gave one year of her life back¹⁹ compared to her mother.

The first time I heard Maw Maw curse she was eighty-seven. A fashionable argument arose in academia that these technologies actually made things worse. Now that the family owned robotic servants, there was no need to hire domestic ones. All jobs fell on one woman’s shoulders. Wives worked more, not less, than ever before.

That sounded suspicious. If we’d had servants, no one told me. But, always eager to learn, I called Maw Maw and read her a long passage of these academic treatises to get her opinion. I present her answer, which I had the presence of mind to record, here:

Bullshit. Pardon my French. My mother woke up at five am to start a wood stove with firewood she got from outside. Then she went to the chicken coop to get eggs. She washed our clothes by hand. She made our clothes by hand. My mother, bless her, never played with me a single hour of my life. Not once. She never played with me. She couldn’t. She had no time! I played with your father every day on the floor. Anyone who says life got harder is crazy.

Before you accuse me of mansplaining progress, remember that 1) an old woman said that, and 2) the United States’ power grid was only completed around 1950. We have been a fully electrical nation for just seventy-five years, and in that time most of the large-scale social transformations in American life occurred. For all of us, the world we are living in is very, very, very new.

Growing up where I did, women just worked. All of them. Maw Maw went back to work as soon as my dad went to school. She retired at eighty years old and only then because she got mad at her new boss. My other grandmother sewed clothes in a textile factory. My mother worked. My aunts worked. My friends’ mothers worked. The only kids we knew with completely stay-at-home moms lived across town in two-story houses. For most American families, dual incomes are not new.

* * *

There was more to it than two incomes. Marriage also created joint purpose. A recent survey of nearly 40,000 couples²⁰ found that those with joint checking accounts were happier and less likely to break up. The finding got stronger the less money they had.

Togetherness isn’t for sale at Target. You must commit to a person and get that person to commit to you. Marriage done right is a resilience mechanism. There’s two of you to handle tough times. When one is tempted to do something stupid, the other one is there to warn them. When one wants to take a smart risk, the other can cover that risk. Sure, marriage is hard. Life is harder without it.

Does marriage still work, or is it so last century? At the end of the twentieth century, researchers completed a longitudinal study of economic mobility in 4,000 families.²¹ The single largest factor related to falling down life’s ladder was poor marital relationships. That has been true across all centuries, geographies, races, and classes. You don’t choose the family you start with, so picking the family you start is among the few and most powerful prosperity drivers in your control: at least as powerful as education and income.

As divorce rates rose, fears of failure drove many to step away from the marriage market. Since 1971, the percent of Americans who were married dropped²² from 67 percent to 53 percent. That wasn’t just the rise of “partners.” More than half of people under thirty-five now live without a live-in romantic mate²³ of any kind.

The payouts from marriage, however, rose. The income of both married men and married women grew 13 percent since the 1970s. Meanwhile, unmarried men’s incomes went down 11 percent. For all the talk of high-powered singles skipping the financial line, married mothers under fifty-five²⁴ make twice as much as single women their same age, and at retirement they have three times more in assets ($322,000 versus $100,000). Men who never divorce own ten times more than single men the same age. The highest levels of financial satisfaction²⁵ today are reported by couples. No, it’s not a honeymoon effect.²⁶ The effects get more pronounced the older people get, as the compound returns of life together or alone play out.

Marriage confounds race and class as predictors of success. Married black men make more than single white men.²⁷ A child born poor with two continuously married parents²⁸ has a greater chance of making it all the way to the top 20 percent than they do of staying at the bottom. The effect of marriage on poor kids’ success²⁹ is so strong that it holds up not just for their own parents’ marriage, but also the marriage rates in their zip code. Consider that. Marriage doesn’t just affect your success and your kids’, the institution is so powerful that your marriage affects your neighbors’ kids’ chances of success.

Results are robust for gay couples, too.³⁰ In fact, same-sex married couples earn more on average than straight married couples do. The marriage benefit doubles for lesbian couples. Even twin studies,³¹ where one twin marries and the other stays single, show married siblings live longer, make more, and die happier.

Debates rage amongst academics as to which chicken begets which egg: do happy successful people get and stay married,³² or does marrying help people obtain and retain success? Even so, the lessons of history are clear: marriage mattered to financial success for a host of reasons. It still does.