The other day I touched on some of the changes that have occurred with woman and work over generations. Of course this has had a huge impact on marriage as well.
Looking back to the early seventies, and in particular 1972, here are some of the differences the women’s movement has made in marriage. These statistics are taken from the Time magazine article by Nancy Gibbs based on –’a statistical look back at the journey of American Women,’ by Andréa Ford and Deidre Van Dyk.
In 1972 women over the age of 15 who were married was 62%. These days it is 53%
The median age at which women are marrying for the first time has gone up from 21 back in 1972 to 26.
The number of women aged 45-54 who have never been married has increased from 5% to 10%.
Despite all that we often hear about the likelihood of marriages ending in divorce, the divorce rate has in fact gone down from 4.1 to 3.5 per 1000 population in 2008. I admit I found this hard to believe, especially when compared with the increase of children living with a single mother which has gone up from 13% to 23%.
While on the subject of children. In 1972 the number of birth to unmarried mothers was 12%. Today it is 39%
As for woman with children under the age of 18 who are in the work force, this figure has jumped form 47% in 1975 to 71%. Of these 60% of women have children under 3. Recently I heard of a man who ended up distraught when his child was put into child care for the first day. He felt so guilty and figured that he must be a bad husband and father for his wife to be going out to work and his child being put in child care.
America has 3.3 million married couples where there wife is the sole income earner. A staggering 2.4 million more than in 1970.
If you went back even further than 1970-1972 the changes would be even more pronounced.
So you can see there are lots of changes, just in the above statistics and not all are for the better.
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