Kay Hymowitz is an American author. Born in Philadelphia, she earned her B.A. at Brandeis University

Brandeis University

Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...

, and her M.A. in English literature from Tufts University

Tufts University

Tufts University is a private research university located in Medford/Somerville, near Boston, Massachusetts. It is organized into ten schools, including two undergraduate programs and eight graduate divisions, on four campuses in Massachusetts and on the eastern border of France...

. She taught English literature and composition at Brooklyn College

Brooklyn College

Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York, United States.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New...

 and at the Parsons School of Design. As of 2010 she was the William E. Simon fellow at the Manhattan Institute

Manhattan Institute

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research is a conservative, market-oriented think tank established in New York City in 1978 by Antony Fisher and William J...

 and a contributing editor of City Journal. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and three children.

Books

• Ready or not: why treating children as small adults endangers their future--and ours (1999)
• Liberation's children: parents and kids in a postmodern age (2003)
• Marriage and caste in America: separate and unequal families in a post-marital age (2006)
• Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys (2011)

Views and reception

In a Wall Street Journal editorial, Hymowitz argues that the widely reported marriage crisis is more evident than real. "[M]arital breakdown is not rampant across the land. It is concentrated among low-income and black couples. Americans seem to have a lot of trouble grasping this fact, probably because so much public space is taken up by politicians, celebrities and journalists with marriages on the skids". She argues that divorce is declining among well educated Caucasians, and that couples are registering increased marital satisfaction, rather than divorcing, once the children leave the nest.

According to Scripps News Service, however, Hymowitz perceives a gap between the education, accomplishments and aspirations of young women and men in today's society. "Hymowitz paints a mass portrait of 20-something men getting drunk and sitting in front of their Play Stations, while 20-something women get great jobs and make families on their own."

Rob Asghar says that Hymowitz "starts shooting like an angered Mama Grizzly at the male species".

Commentary

Commentary (magazine)

Commentary is a monthly American magazine on politics, Judaism, social and cultural issues. It was founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945. By 1960 its editor was Norman Podhoretz, a liberal at the time who moved sharply to the right in the 1970s and 1980s becoming a strong voice for the...

called Marriage and Caste in America a "bracingly clear description of the causes and effects of the breakdown of marriage as the central institution of American society."

Ilya Somin offers a libertarian

Libertarianism

Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...

critique of Hymowitz: "My main criticism of Hymowitz’s essay was that she falsely conflates libertarians’ opposition to government regulation of personal choices with an indiscriminate embrace of 1960s style lifestyle excesses."