Marina Adshade revisits a 1986 Newsweek cover-story:
Accompanying this eye-catching headline was a graph that illustrated the bad news for women who had spent their youth in a classroom when they should have been busy finding themselves a husband – their chance of now marrying was shockingly low. The report warned that a college-educated woman who was still single when she turned 30 had an only 20% chance that she would ever marry. If she hadn’t married her Prince Charming by the age of 35, the chance she ever would fell to 5%. If, heaven forbid, a woman was still single at age 40, well the probability was incredibly small (although probably significantly more likely than being killed by a terrorist).
So how did they do?
By 2010, 75% of college-educated women who were exactly 30 years old and single in 1986 had married at some point in the intervening 24 years. 69% of women who were exactly 35 and single in 1986 married their Prince Charming and even the old maids, the women who were 40 at the time that Newsweek made these dire predictions, were more likely than not to marry before their 65th birthdays – 68% married.
If you are a woman over 40 and single I am willing to bet you have heard the line "more likely to be killed by a terrorist" over and over again. And I wonder how many women’s lives were affected by willingness of society to accept these ridiculous predictions.
The Dish 