Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84 SMI; site sun.uucp Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!bellcore!decvax!decwrl!sun!falk From: falk@sun.uucp (Ed Falk) Newsgroups: net.women,net.singles Subject: Re: Professional women remaining perpetually single Message-ID: <3300@sun.uucp> Date: Thu, 27-Feb-86 21:41:21 EST Article-I.D.: sun.3300 Posted: Thu Feb 27 21:41:21 1986 Date-Received: Sat, 1-Mar-86 17:39:31 EST References: <1395@decwrl.DEC.COM> Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc. Lines: 99 Xref: watmath net.women:9399 net.singles:10532 > > I found this article in the Living section of the February 25 edition of the > San Jose Mercury News. I did not ask anyone's permission to type (part of) > it in. The brackets show where I have left out paragraphs (through > laziness only) > >MARRIAGE RATE DECLINES FOR WOMEN WHO DELAY > >By William R Greer >New York Times > >Women who defer marriage to go to college and pursue a career are >finding that by the time they decide to marry, the marriage market has >evaporated, according to a new study by two Yale sociologists and a >Harvard economist. etc. I read that article too and didn't like it. The attitute of the writer seemed to be that it was a bad thing that women weren't getting married. The article also seemed to be threatening women "if you try to have a serious career, men won't like you -- so cut it out". In general, the tone of the article was that women wanted to get married, but following a career was stopping them. I suspect that in the real world, women with careers aren't getting married for the following reasons: 1) they have financial security -- they don't need a man to support them. The more successful a woman is, the less of an inducement to marriage is a man's income is. 2) Successful, career-oriented women are more intelligent than non-carreer-oriented women and can perceive more options in life and are less likely to swallow the indoctrination they grew up with. 3) Women who postpone marriage for a few years get more time to mature and get a better perspective on life. A decade or two without depending on a man can teach a woman that she doesn't NEED to depend on a man. That article would have been a lot more balanced if they had done just a few basic things. They should have asked these women if the regretted their choices. They should have made a distinction between "unmarried" and "lonely". I suspect that a lot of these women did not get married, not because the didn't have the option, but because they didn't want to limit their options -- i.e. they have all the male company they want (perhaps more than one lover) and don't feel that marriage would serve any purpose. They should have asked how many professional women WANT to get married. What offended me most was the first sentence of the story where the writer asserted that the "marriage market has evaporated", and then doesn't give one scrap of evidence to show that the "marriage market" is actually an issue. Why assume that all women who aren't married are trying to be. I suppose a gut reaction would be to point out that the writer of this article and all of the researchers quoted were men, but you find these attitudes in writings by women as well. Read anything by Cynthia Heimel or anything at all published in "Cosmo" and you'll get the schlock about what a crisis it is if you're 30 and not married yet. Even "MS" magazine runs something like "How to find love in the classifieds" every few issues. The other semi-feminist magazines such as "New Woman" and "Savvy" look more like "Cosmo" each time I look through an issue. In the 70's, the feminist movement was very adamant about marriage being a raw deal for women -- that women wound up losing from it (time, energy, financial status, independence) and that men wound up gaining from it. By and large, any study done on the subject has backed this belief up. I also agree, having seen the effects of marriage on several women in my life. Another thing that bothers me is that I keep reading things about how how there is a shortage of men and that the situtation gets worse as the woman gets older. I think the New York Times article we're quoting said that by age 40, there are twice as many men as women. Now we're all perfectly capable of reading census reports, and we know that it just ain't so -- the differences are a few percent at most. What these statistics really say is that there are twice as many women who want to get married as there are men who want to get married, and thus the situation for women who want to get married is pretty grim. You might also want to observe that the situation for men who don't want to get married is just as grim. My questions are these: Why do women want to get married? Why do the women's media work so hard to perpetuate the situation? How many professional, educated women ARE there who are having trouble finding a man? It seems to me that in the proffessional, educated fields, there are more men than women. Do women really want to get married all that much? Or am I making a mistake in assuming that Cynthia Hiemel and Helen Gurly Brown speak for anyone but themselves? Why has the feminist movement (as represented by MS) turned around on the issue -- as I said before, they've gone from putting down marriage as a form of repression, to dedicating about a third of their issues to finding a man. -ed falk, sun microsystems