Research shows that marriage promotion advocates promote the largely faith-based ideology that all parents should marry, that once married even distressed couples should stay together for the sake of the children, and that committing to marriage and reducing divorce would improve family life and alleviate poverty for women and children. In addition, government policies promote marriage with funding for programs designed to promote the institution of marriage. Given the prevalence of domestic violence, there seems to be a substantial basis to question whether divorce rates present a social problem of sufficient dimension to warrant governmental intervention pursued by marriage promotion advocates. Marriage promotion advocates are viewed as glossing over the real social issues of class, poverty, and domestic violence in order to impose a highly traditional and patriarchal view of the proper family mode. This article describes the recent history of welfare reform and marriage promotion policies, reviews the arguments in favor of such policies, critiques marriage promotion through the eyes of social science research on domestic violence and how advocates ignore or misrepresent the research, and discusses the need to ground policy formation in the voices of those women whose lives these policies ultimately affect. References