Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle

NY Times: "For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one." I'm not sure I understand how this conclusion is materially different from the recent finding that married couples are now a minority of all households, but it's probably a good opportunity for someone or other to muse on the Decline of the West or something.

It should be said, however, that a big factor here seems to be that life expectancy, health, and aging trends are increasing the proportion of widows in the general population which is pretty different from the other factors (delayed marriage, more divorces, more never-marrieds) contributing to the relatively decline of married people.

Comments

I'm not sure I understand how this conclusion is materially different from the recent finding that married couples are now a minority of all households

If 40% of all households include a married woman, that would hardly suggest that the other 60% of households consist of single women.

Posted by Steve | January 16, 2007 12:03 PM

I would have thought there were more widows in the past when the wars were bigger.

Posted by JP | January 16, 2007 12:09 PM

The quoted phrasing includes women who are married, but who are not living with their husbands. This may include couples separated for job reasons, but probably more commonly couples who are in the process of getting divorced and who are living separately, but who have not yet finalized the proceedings.

Either that or its just inexact phrasing.

Posted by Patrick | January 16, 2007 12:26 PM

What I found interesting about the NYT graphic associated with the article was that while 49% of women are married and living with their husband, that percentage is 53% for men. I didn't realize that there were so many more adult women in the U.S. than adult men. (The article doesn't provide a comparison, for context, in the text.)

Posted by RSA | January 16, 2007 12:27 PM

Can I just say that as a woman I am sick to death of these articles (mostly in the NY Times it seems) that scrutinize women's lives and the choices they make? Where are the articles on the number of unmarried men? Or the faintly hysterical headline that men are marrying later than they used to? Or a half-hearted survey of undergraduate men at one college with resulting anecdotes that in the future these men might want to quit their job and stay home with their children? Why is it only women that are the subject of these "trend" articles?

Posted by jn | January 16, 2007 12:28 PM

If you wade through it, the article does say the figure includes women separated temporarily for job reasons. But the real clue that this is a trumped up story comes from the fact that the statistics refer to "women" over the age of FIFTEEN. I'll bet that 70 percent of "women" over the age of six aren't married, either.

Posted by RAM | January 16, 2007 12:34 PM

Re: I would have thought there were more widows in the past when the wars were bigger.

American casualties in most of our country's wars were pretty minimal, creating barely a blip in the widowhood rate (and soldiers tend to be disproportionately single young men). About the only exception was the Civil War in the South.

Re: What I found interesting about the NYT graphic associated with the article was that while 49% of women are married and living with their husband, that percentage is 53% for men.

Maybe women are less likely than men to define themselves as "married" to pollsters if they are living with a long-term partner without benefit of clergy.

Posted by JonF | January 16, 2007 12:36 PM

Matt grows increasingly insecure :)

Posted by anne | January 16, 2007 12:48 PM

"Where are the articles on the number of unmarried men? Or the faintly hysterical headline that men are marrying later than they used to?"

There was a NY Times front page article a few months ago on just this topic. Truth is, though, men's sex lives seem to be of less interest to the public than women's (e.g. your not noticing the previous article on men). It perhaps has something to do with men being less reproductively essential.

Posted by MQ | January 16, 2007 12:49 PM

The Times ran an article a while back about middle-aged unemployed men voluntarily staying unemployed. So there's your trend article on men.

Posted by Conor | January 16, 2007 12:49 PM

It's true that working women face a lot of unfair scrutiny regarding their choices. But to tell you the truth, the social stigma might be even worse for men who choose to stay at home. It's certainly not as simple as saying that only women get pigeonholed, while men are free to make whatever life choices they like. Society creates expectations for all of us.

Posted by Steve | January 16, 2007 12:51 PM

I'd like to file a Title IX claim on the basis that women live longer than men. The government ought to be taking some kind of action to equalize the length of mens and womens' lives.

Posted by Al | January 16, 2007 12:59 PM

I do actually remember the article on middle-aged men being voluntarily unemployed, and I remember that it got a fair bit of discussion around the web. But I still think the ratio of these types of articles tilt heavily towards women. (And this is not to say that men don't have societal pressures -- obviously they do.) But someone would need to do an actual survey of these articles to get some real comparisons.

Posted by jn | January 16, 2007 1:00 PM

I recall seeing numerous studies showing that men are happier and healthier married, and women are healthier and happier single. So if the marriage rate is dropping, it's probably due more to womens' choices than men's. Whatever societal pressure to get married that women feel today, I suspect it was a couple of orders of magnitude worse before feminist wave of the 1970s.

That of course has an economic cost, since aside from the extra living space required, it is much harder to share goods and services across households than within a household.

I wonder if sharing a household with an unrelated person with whom there is no romantic relationship is more of an option in other deveoped countries than in the US.

Posted by applecor | January 16, 2007 1:10 PM

The studies applecor is referring to were pretty much debunked in the 1990s when there was better and more systematic data available. Both men and women benefit on average from marriage, although men seem to benefit somewhat more. Divorce has very bad effects, though, so one's ex ante benefit from marriage should probably figure in the likelihood of divorce.

Posted by MQ | January 16, 2007 1:32 PM

What's that line from Wagner? That which is too stupid to be spoken can be sung.

Or something like that.

It sure hasn't hurt Bono.

That said, I propose that the universe is orderly in an awful and sadistic sort of way and that any number of the women actually getting married today probably shouldn't, and that the ones who aren't getting married in many cases want and deserve to be happily married but won't be.

The few rich happily married women prove that God is a dick.

Posted by Linus | January 16, 2007 1:33 PM

The government ought to be taking some kind of action to equalize the length of mens and womens' lives.

Cigarettes are starting to have that effect, now that smoking's becoming a chick thing.

Posted by Peter | January 16, 2007 2:31 PM

JonF --

The casualties in the North during the Civil War were pretty high too, particularly in the sections of the population that bore the brunt of the fighting (small town rural Protestant vs. big cities). Just check any of a thousand monuments that have more dead from a place than you would have thought lived there.

But I think the result wasn't more widows as much as a very large number of women who never married. My mother spent a good part of her adolescence caring for two maiden aunts who were still in mourning for their brother who was killed at Stones River -- not to mention the other men who were missing from their community.

Posted by JonF | January 16, 2007 2:38 PM

Al: federally funded stem cell research, coming right up!

Posted by neil | January 16, 2007 2:49 PM

That headline gave me hope until I realized it probably meant widows and bitter divorcees.

Posted by aleks | January 16, 2007 3:51 PM

I believe that the most recent research has called into question whether marriage means longer lives for either men or women. In particular, I believe it is the Terman Life Cycle Study which has shown that marriage has little effect on lifespan.
Many studies of marriage are underwritten by conservative individuals and organizations, so you should take them with a grain of salt.

Posted by Alan | January 16, 2007 4:54 PM

I think the reason for the different percentages of married people is in the different age pyramids. There are more young men than young women but more old women than old men.

But obviously the odd thing about the article is its focus on marriage as something women do. Men hardly enter the story at all. This is an attempt at one of those faux trend things, I suspect, focusing on the old myth that the goal of women should be the veil and the ring whereas marriage is a maintenance task for men. In the myth, I mean.

Posted by Echidne | January 16, 2007 5:31 PM

Nice use of U2 lyrics for title: "a woman needs a man, like a fish needs a bicycle . . ."

Posted by Cal | January 16, 2007 6:14 PM

jn--why are there more articles about women than men? Could be that women's lives are changing more than men's; that women read more newspapers/magazines than men; that women put more heat on publishers than men; that men find women more interesting than men, while women also find women more interesting than men (why lesbian porn sells so well--spme women will watch it, and all men will watch it). I suppose it could also be a nefarious plot to demean women, though it is hard for me to pencil this one out.

Posted by Buce | January 16, 2007 7:47 PM

Contra Matt, I suspect that widows are a smaller share of the population today than in the past. What creates a lot of widows (as well as widowers) was sudden death at younger ages, typically due to infectious diseases. Now that more people are living c to their full lifespans, the number of years of widowhood on average would be reduced versus a time in the past when it was common for a husband to drop dead of an infection at age 40, leaving a widow who might stay a widow for many decades.

Posted by Steve Sailer | January 16, 2007 7:52 PM

Nice use of U2 lyrics for title:...

I think it's a pretty well known feminist slogan that predates U2 by at least a good decade or two.

Posted by benny | January 18, 2007 2:05 AM