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Article about single women over 40:
When Newsweek ‘Struck Terror in the Hearts of Single Women’ Thirty years ago, the magazine declared that single women over 40 are more likely to be killed by terrorism than to get married—prompting a nationwide crisis whose anxiety still lingers. “ It’s easier to be killed by a terrorist than it is to find a husband over the age of 40,” a co-worker informs Annie (Meg Ryan) in Sleepless in Seattle . “That statistic is not true!” Annie protests.
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Becky (Rosie O’Donnell) settles the debate. “That’s right—it’s not true,” she says. “But it feels true.” It feels true is, in retrospect, a perfect way to sum up the thing that gave the grim statistic its staying power, both in the canonical ’90s rom-com and in the culture at large: an article that graced the cover of Newsweek in early June of 1986. The piece, inside the magazine, carried the headline “Too Late for Prince Charming?” But it was presented to the public, via Newsweek’ s cover, in more alarmist tones. It looked like this: Thirty years later—the publication date of the article was June 2—it’s easy to forget that the so-pervasive-as-to-be-Ephroned marriage-and-terrorism stat was plucked from a single piece of journalism that was in turn based on a study that was, at the time of the story’s publication, unpublished. It’s also easy to forget, given its resonance, that the stat comes from an article that has since been so thoroughly debunked, by demographers and sociologists and media outlets alike, that Newsweek , 20 years after the fact, retracted it. And yet: It felt true . The empirical reality, as so often happens, became unmoored from the hazier human one. “For a lot of women,” The New York Times put it, wearily, in 2006, “the retraction doesn’t matter. The article seems to have lodged itself permanently in the national psyche.” The original version of “Too Late for Prince Charming?”—which was more than 3,000 words long, and named six different reporters in its byline—is available today, best I can tell, only in spectral form: You can find it online not through Newsweek ’s site, but through a Lexis-Nexis search (and the hackily copy-pasted results thereof). That makes some sense. On one level, the piece is very much a product, and a reflection, of its time—a time when Americans were navigating the consequences of the baby boom and the women’s liberation movement and the sexual revolution and the advent of the birth-control pill and economic recession and economic prosperity and the many, many other events that made the ’70s and ’80s times of simmering cultural anxieties. But what’s perhaps most striking about the story, 30 years later, is how oddly fresh it still feels, how urgent its anxieties still seem. The piece’s core message— panic, ladies, because your professional goals will undermine your personal ones —lives on, in its way, in every current news story about the difficulty educated women face in the “marriage market,” in every blithe reference to the “biological clock,” and indeed in every piece of media that gazes upon women’s bodies and sees, in their fleshy fallibility, some form of social determinism. The Newsweek story, to be sure, was framed as an attempt to quell—or at least to put anecdotes and data behind—anxieties about marriage and biological-clock-ism that had long run rampant in the culture. “Her sister had heard about it from a friend who had heard about it on Phil Donahue that morning,” the piece begins, leaving both the “her” and the “it” in question initially mysterious. It continues: Her mother got the bad news via a radio talk show later that afternoon. So by the time Harvard graduate Carol Owens, 23, sat down to a family dinner in Boston, the discussion of the man shortage had reached a feverish pitch. With six unmarried daughters, Carol's said her mother was sounding an alarm. “You’ve got to get out of the house and meet someone,” she insisted. “Now.” It goes on in that way—pitch and panic and many faceless she s—for several paragraphs: The traumatic news came buried in an arid demographic study titled, innocently enough, “Marriage Patterns in the United States.” But the dire statistics confirmed what everybody suspected all along: that many women who seem to have it all—good looks and good jobs, advanced degrees and high salaries—will never have mates. According to the report, white, college-educated women born in the mid-’50s who are still single at 30 have only a 20 percent chance of marrying. By the age of 35 the odds drop to 5 percent. Forty-year-olds are more likely to be killed by a terrorist: They have a minuscule 2.6 percent probability of tying the knot. Within days, that study, as it came to be known, set off a profound crisis of confidence among America’s growing ranks of single women. For years bright young women single-mindedly pursued their careers, assuming that when it was time for a husband they could pencil one in. They were wrong. “Everybody was talking about it and everybody was hysterical,” says Bonnie Maslin, a New York therapist. “One patient told me, ‘I feel like my mother’s finger is wagging at me, telling me I shouldn’t have waited” What the piece neglects to say, until several more paragraphs of “traumatic news” and “wrong women,” was that the study it was addressing was “still unpublished” at the time of the story’s own publication. (That study, conducted by a trio of academics at Yale and Harvard, made news in the first place, Newsweek noted, via “an interview with a small Connecticut paper.”) But the cover art the magazine chose for its story—not to mention the piece’s quotes and anecdotes and “data,” all of them peppered with references to “her diminishing chances” and “the anguish of being single”—elided that significant caveat.
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