The percentage of married American women dropped below 50 in 2009, and for the first time in American history, single women outnumbered married women. Even more striking, writes Rebecca Traister, the number of young adults who had never been married shot up to 46 percent.
And today, only around 1 in 5 Americans ages 18–29 are married, compared to nearly 3 in 5 in 1960.
“We are living through the invention of independent female adulthood as a norm, not an aberration, and the creation of an entirely new population: adult women who are no longer economically, socially, sexually, or reproductively dependent on or defined by the men they marry,” says Traister, and this has massive social and political implications.
Read more at New York Magazine
