The editors of this volume begin with a number of complicated phenomena that define marriage today. Across the industrialized world, the rates of cohabitation and nonmarital births are increasing while the rate of marriage is decreasing. Although marriage rates are at records lows, some gays and lesbians are fighting for the right to marry. At the same time, there is a growing racial and economic divide between those who marry and those who do not. Such trends present difficult challenges for policymakers and scholars. Marriage at the Crossroads is an important contribution at this juncture, offering carefully analyzed pieces on different aspects of these conflicting developments.

This collection of articles, written by both sociologists and family law scholars from Europe and the United States, explores alternative policy paths that address such questions as the following: Is marriage really healthier for people? Should the government promote it? Will same-sex marriage change the institution? Is marriage in decline? How does marriage relate to child-rearing?

The strength of Marriage at the Crossroads is its breadth of analysis and emphasis on empirical social science research. It does three things particularly well: First, it takes up timely political issues in the United States and Western Europe concerning appropriate legal responses to the growing diversity of modern families, as well as the future status of legal marriage more generally. Second, the volume is useful in putting into conversation the conflicting and overlapping issues and concerns regarding marriage and family. Each chapter examines marriage and family from a different angle, offering variant methodological approaches and conclusions, including historical, survey, ideological, and economic analyses. Together, the essays raise the questions: With what criteria do we assess the status of marriage, and what legal and social policies should be implemented? Third, the volume illustrates how marriage and family intersect with broader social and political phenomena, including incarceration rates and welfare. Readers can assess not only how private relationships and dependencies are created today but also how society itself is organized in terms of marriage and the family.

The volume is divided into three sections. The first focuses on the history of marriage laws and regulations and how they have evolved over time, introducing the diverse scope of the issues at hand. In the chapter “Red v. Blue Marriage,” family law scholars June Carbonne and Naomi Cahn examine the regional, class-based, and ideological differences in marriage patterns today. They argue that neither “red” nor “blue” solutions would fully address the needs of children and families without considering the impact of economic inequality directly. Also in this section, sociologist Arland Thornton discusses the impact of Western notions of family and marriage as they migrate into the developing world through what he calls “developmental realism”—a framework for understanding family change, resistance to family change, and cultural tensions within and between societies in a globalized world. Economist Margaret F. Brinig contends that there is a tension between gender equality in marriage and greater stability for children.

The second section, “Empirical Research on Family Change,” explores how changes in family structure affect family well-being and attitudes toward married and unmarried families. Sociologist Paul R. Amato posits three types of marriage: traditional institutional, companionate, and individualistic marriage. While all three are present today, he argues, companionate marriage is the most stable. At the same time, using data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study, Sara S. McLanahan and Irwin Garfinkel argue that policies that work to reduce incarceration and other social policies not directly related to marriage will increase the likelihood of familial stability.

The third section, “Family Policy and Law for the Twenty-First Century,” centers on contemporary policy and legal debates. In this section, legal scholar Suzanne B. Goldberg asks the prevalent question “Why Marriage?” and explores whether marriage equality for gays and lesbians will really transform the institution as claimed by its advocates. Carl E. Schneider analyzes the shift from a language of morality to a language of rights in marriage, while Shahar Lifshitz suggests that rather than formalizing marriage as the only form of intimate relationship, there should be a “pluralist” approach adopted whereby individuals can choose from a range of options.

The suggested tensions and agreements raised across the chapters in Marriage at the Crossroads open up possibilities for future research trajectories and debates. Using a twin-studies approach, Robert E. Emery, Erin E. Horn, and Christopher R. Beam argue that the two-parent marriage is healthier for spouses and children. Conversely, Judith Stacey argues that the two-parent family widely understood as the “normal family” is far from normal, and that her research shows thriving alternative family forms across the globalized world. Stacey questions the assumption that Western and heterosexual notions of marriage are inevitable and the most satisfactory way to construct and define a family. In studying the question of whether marriage should matter, Ira Mark Ellman and Sanford L. Braver found that while marriage carries weight for individuals in their thinking about obligations between adult partners, it is given more weight in American law. Moreover, Katherine Franke questions the link among marriage, equality, and freedom for same-sex couples as she turns to the historical example of the immediate post–Civil War era when ex-slaves were granted the right to marry.

The final two chapters function as conclusions to the preceding ideas. Sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin examines the increasing diversity of two-parent families. He explores how to extend family law to cohabitating couples, same and different sexed, and to same-sex married couples, and argues that in American culture, both married and unmarried couples raising children are acceptable as families.

In their final chapter, editors Marsha Garrison and Elizabeth S. Scott conclude that marriage should remain and be made available to all couples, but that laws that overtly discriminate against nonmarried families should be abolished. In addition, they contend that the government should not directly advance marriage. This is an interesting intervention into the debates surrounding marriage and is a more intellectually provocative way to end the volume, rather than merely a restatement of the chapters’ contents. Cherlin and the editors each attempt to provide answers to the questions posed, making the volume useful to a wide range of audiences, including sociologists, economists, law scholars, and political scientists, as well as policy and legal analysts.

The volume would have had a stronger argument with a more concerted effort to incorporate race, gender, and sexuality categories. Although the last two chapters focus on legal and policy implications, they also lose sight of the larger political issues raised by marriage and family discrepancies, narrowing to the question: Should marriage stay or go? This is a missed opportunity for the editors to make a larger case. That said, the pieces collected here offer the rich opportunity for others to do so.