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January 2001

It’s no mystery why Harvard suddenly reneged on its commitment to this important book, according to many observers. The school made a political decision about “domestic partnerships,” which has become a very important issue on Beacon Hill and to many of the leaders at Harvard, including feminists, homosexuals, libertarians and others.

The powerful at Harvard do not like the fact that this book points out the many benefits that accrue to our entire society from the institution of marriage and the serious problems with just “living together,” as is summarized in the following paragraph from the book:

“[T]he recent public arguments made for extending ‘domestic partnership’ benefits to all cohabiting couples are based on a myth. Extending marriage benefits to cohabiting men and women who have refused to marry sends a message social scientists now know to be dangerously false – that cohabitation is the functional equivalent of marriage. Cohabitation is not just like marriage. On average, cohabiting couples are less sexually faithful, lead less settled lives, are less likely to have children, are more likely to be violent, make less money and are less happy – and less committed – than married couples.”

The authors state kinder comments about Harvard than most observers:

MassNews:  What is the story of Harvard’s refusing to publish the book?

LW:  The social sciences editor at Harvard University Press, Michael Aronson, had approached me. He had heard me give a talk, as president of a small professional association, and the talk had the basic structure of the book. He suggested I write the book. He was wonderful.

I had been working on pieces of the research for about ten years (I started from other more academic work that I did) and had been working on the book in one way or another for about five years. I had the basic idea, the argument, the structure, the contract with Harvard and drafts of about three chapters. I decided I wanted to get this book to the general public. I think academics write very well for other academics, but I think that very often we don’t write so well for the general public. I wanted somebody who could do that - who could take what I was doing and polish it and make it sing. I think Maggie did a wonderful job of that. That was Maggie’s primary role. I did a lot of the translation but she took my pretty-good writing and made it wonderful.

MassNews:  Where was the book when Harvard changed its mind?

When Harvard said no, the book was in final form. Like any review procedure it was supposed to be confidential. I’m sure I know who it was who was responsible for killing the book, but I just can’t confirm it. It’s like being off the record.

In a Village Voice article [11/8/00 by Norah Vincent], Harvard spokesmen are paraphrased as saying “the tone was too strong and its evidence too meager.” The reporter demolishes that premise by looking at the tone of things they have published. [Including In a Different Voice by Catharine MacKinnon. She was criticized in the media and in sociology journals for “drawing sweeping, highly subjective conclusions from meager evidence.”]

MG:  I’ll just tell you what I know. It was very odd, although the fact that we ended up with Doubleday instead of Harvard has been very good for the book. We submitted a draft. It was sent out, as is Harvard’s fashion, to anonymous scholarly reviewers. One of them was wholly enthusiastic, the other had some reservations, but both were positive reviews. They said, “Important book. Publish.” Scholars often have disagreements but the bottom line is they were two positive reviews.

Then it was sent before the Board of Syndics. Normally, if the editor wants to publish and both of the scholarly reviews are positive, it’s fairly routine for the faculty to approve, but in our case it was rejected. It was not sent back for revisions, they simply refused to publish the book. The Board of Syndics is a faculty oversight board. It is an anonymous board. We don’t know who or why. The things we were told about why the book was turned down just don’t make a lot of sense to me. For example, they mentioned that they didn’t like the fact that we used illustrations from qualitative researchers’ work, and we footnoted it but didn’t mention the name of the researcher up front. You know, the kind of things that if you’d wanted to publish a book, you could easily have said, “Fix these things.” So, fundamentally, they just didn’t want to publish the book. It was rejected outright.

MassNews: How do you feel about what was said by Harvard?

I think the aspersions that several Harvard spokesmen in media accounts cast on the scholarly quality of the book are really absurd. First of all, let me say this. It was intended to be a “trade book” (meaning it was written for a general audience, as opposed to an academic book written for scholars), which is why the tone of it was supposed to be accessible to the average intelligent reader. Secondly, both of the scholarly reviewers commended the quality of the work. Thirdly, Linda Waite is, in fact, one of the top family scholars in America. The book is really her amazing intellectual tour de force, synthesizing a body of literature amounting to literally thousands of studies on the consequences of marriage, across a dozen intellectual and scholarly disciplines. Most of the books Harvard publishes have nothing like that kind of research base.

Occasionally we spend time speculating on who really killed the book, but we don’t spend a lot of time on it because, fundamentally, although it was an odd decision on the part of Harvard, quite quickly there was enormous interest in this book and we are very happy to have ended up with Doubleday, with Adam Bellow as our editor. We’ve reached a lot more people and have gotten a great deal more attention than we would have if Harvard had gone ahead and published the book.

MassNews:  I know you said you don’t like to attribute motives to people, but I have to say that “politically correct” is written all over this.

MG:  I’ve never received any coherent explanation of why this book would be rejected, and the things that are being said publicly are obviously not true.

MassNews:  Did Harvard violate the contract?

MG:  No, there is no contract violation because it is in the contract that it [the book] has to be approved by the Board of Syndics.

MassNews:  Did Harvard fund any of the research?

MG:  We had a small advance from Harvard for the book, typical of university presses. Linda is a full tenured Professor at the University of Chicago. They are basically the funders of her research. In terms of the synthesis of the marriage literature, she really did that on her own. This is really the result of ten years’ work. She developed an interest in marriage and adult well-being and she spent the better part of a decade doing original research herself, crossing many disciplines to gather the information. One of the reasons I think this research is not well known is that there isn’t one place called “marriage studies” where people do all this research and know it all. For instance labor economists knew about research on the marriage premium and psychologists knew something about the relationship between marriage and mental well-being and demographers had an idea of the relationship between marital status and longevity, but I don’t think anyone before Linda had ever put it together in one place.