![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
There's this whole thing going 'round about people trying to post more often. I realize that since sometime in March I've been posting about nothing but television, but hey, this is the public journal and my RL hasn't been that exciting anyway. I read a lot of books, and then I wrote some papers. That's about it. So now that my shows are off for the summer (right, like I'm going to post about So You Think You Can Dance) I was wondering what I should talk about.
And then Newsweek took it back.
You know, that stupid statistic that they put on their cover 20 years ago, that single women over 40 were more likely to be kidnapped by a terrorist than marry? Newsweek put it on the cover and wrote an article that followed a group of single women over 30 in 1986. And then, as famously said by Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle, someone wrote practically a whole book about how that was wrong; Faludi said the article had more to do with politics than statistics, and indeed the study was pushed hard by the conservative Reagan administration.
(The original Harvard-Yale demographic study assumed that women would continue to choose husbands who were older, taller, and made more money than they did. So as unmarried women got older and made more money, they were competing for the six or seven single CEO's, basically, putting the odds of marriage for women over 40 at 5%. The study couldn't have predicted the growing status parity within marriage.)
Well, Newsweek tracked down 11 of the 14 women they'd talked to in 1986 and all but two of them have since married. Oh, and get this: None of them divorced. Turns out that the more highly educated and older you are when you marry, the less likely you are to get a divorce. (As my friend S said, you're just skipping that starter marriage.) Unfortunately it also reflects a steep decline in marriage among low income men and women (there was a great article in the New York Times magazine a while back about this trend and how it seemed to reflect both a hyper-idealization of marriage and the separation of marriage from parenthood).
Check the article and the sidebars that go with it. For good reason we tend to focus on the ways in which modern marriage still isn't equal, but this is one of those "look how far we've come" moments and really, we should savor it. Fuel to move us forward!
And then Newsweek took it back.
You know, that stupid statistic that they put on their cover 20 years ago, that single women over 40 were more likely to be kidnapped by a terrorist than marry? Newsweek put it on the cover and wrote an article that followed a group of single women over 30 in 1986. And then, as famously said by Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle, someone wrote practically a whole book about how that was wrong; Faludi said the article had more to do with politics than statistics, and indeed the study was pushed hard by the conservative Reagan administration.
(The original Harvard-Yale demographic study assumed that women would continue to choose husbands who were older, taller, and made more money than they did. So as unmarried women got older and made more money, they were competing for the six or seven single CEO's, basically, putting the odds of marriage for women over 40 at 5%. The study couldn't have predicted the growing status parity within marriage.)
Well, Newsweek tracked down 11 of the 14 women they'd talked to in 1986 and all but two of them have since married. Oh, and get this: None of them divorced. Turns out that the more highly educated and older you are when you marry, the less likely you are to get a divorce. (As my friend S said, you're just skipping that starter marriage.) Unfortunately it also reflects a steep decline in marriage among low income men and women (there was a great article in the New York Times magazine a while back about this trend and how it seemed to reflect both a hyper-idealization of marriage and the separation of marriage from parenthood).
Check the article and the sidebars that go with it. For good reason we tend to focus on the ways in which modern marriage still isn't equal, but this is one of those "look how far we've come" moments and really, we should savor it. Fuel to move us forward!
