U.Va. sociology professor and Jefferson Scholar alum W. Bradford Wilcox is the director of the National Marriage Project. Founded in 1997, the National Marriage Project is a nonpartisan, nonsectarian and interdisciplinary initiative located at the University of Virginia. The project provides research and analysis on the health of marriage in America (including the annual “State of Our Unions” report) to analyze the social and cultural forces shaping contemporary marriage, and to identify strategies to increase marital quality and stability.
December 7, 2009 — It’s a bad time to be a working-class man with no college education. Such men have borne the brunt of job losses since 2007, and new research finds that men are 61 percent less likely to be happy in a marriage if they work fewer hours than their wives.
The study predicts that the so-called “mancession” will undercut marriage in working-class communities, furthering a “divorce divide” that has been growing since the 1980s between couples with college degrees and those with less education.
