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Interviews
December 27, 2002
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, the author of Why There Are No Good Men Left, discusses the challenges facing today's single women, and argues that the contemporary courtship system needs to be transformed by Sage Stossel In Search of Mr. Right
Odds are that the pulled-together young woman you encounter riding up in the elevator, emerging from the gym, or riding the subway wearing sleek professional attire but no wedding ring is struggling to meet someone to spend her life with. The thirty-something woman of today is three times more likely to be single than her counterpart of the 1970s. Indeed, both women and men—particularly those with high levels of education—are staying single far longer into their adult years than in previous eras. For both groups this delayed search for a spouse is a deliberate choice, but the effect of that delay on the two sexes is dramatically different. For men, the change in timing is merely an incidental matter with few repercussions. For women, however, the delay makes the search more difficult, fraught with anxiety, and shadowed by the possibility of ultimate failure. It is this pervasive anxiety on the part of unmarried young women that explains the current popularity of such movies, television shows, and books as Bridget Jones' Diary, Sex and the City, and Cowboys Are My Weakness, all of which feature thirty-something women struggling to find men. In a new book, Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman, the social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead considers the challenges facing the contemporary single woman in her search for a mate, and argues that the prevailing courtship system must be transformed. Inspired in part by the fact that both of her own thirty-something daughters are single, Whitehead (who is the director of a scholarly organization called the National Marriage Project) undertook an informal study of the issue—poring over demographic studies, surveys, focus-group transcripts, self-help books, and popular fiction, and personally interviewing sixty single women in their late twenties and early thirties. What she found was that at the time in their lives when they feel ready for a partner, young women are at a loss as to how to find one. Contemporary young women, she points out, have been raised to seek fulfilling careers rather than husbands. And upon college graduation they want to spend time out on their own, making their mark on the world, rather than pairing off right away and exchanging their independence for family life. The problem, she explains, is that when these women reach their late twenties or thirties and at last become interested in settling down, the large pool of eligible young men to which they had access in college—with backgrounds and ambitions similar to their own—has disappeared. A woman at this stage in her life is likely to be trapped in a somewhat narrow routine that includes work, working-out, and socializing with a circle of friends. Her odds of encountering her future spouse in these limited spheres are extremely low. The difficulties of the woman no longer fresh out of college are compounded by the fact that, as time passes, she is increasingly faced with competition from younger women. And if her life goals include not just marriage but children as well, then she must keep in mind that her time frame is limited. Many women in this situation begin to feel a growing sense of panic, as they fear that their chances for the life they envisioned for themselves are slipping away. Though conservative commentators have argued that the obvious solution is for women to go back to looking for their spouses while still in college, Whitehead dismisses such views, pointing out that women who wait longer to marry are more mature, more financially secure, and have a better sense of who they could happily spend their lives with than those who marry earlier. Moreover, studies have shown that later marriages tend to be unusually stable and long-lasting. What needs to change, then, she suggests, is not the contemporary woman's postponement of the search for a spouse, but the courtship system itself. A well-functioning courtship system, she emphasizes, should succeed in bringing a society's eligible young people into appropriate partnerships. But today's courtship system fails on that count, leaving singles who have aged out of the college scene to fend for themselves. She expresses confidence, however, that given the urgency of the need, new courtship mechanisms—tailored to fit the needs of busy professionals with limited time (both in the day and in their window for finding appropriate partners)—will spring up to fill the void. Already, she points out, such innovations as online introduction services and "SpeedDating" events have emerged on the scene and appear to be flourishing. It will take some creative ingenuity, she argues, and a good understanding of the aspirations of today's single women, but with a concerted effort, society should be able to "revive [women's] flagging faith that it is possible to find lasting love and to integrate a loving marriage into a life of individual career achievement." Barbara Dafoe Whitehead holds a PhD. in American social history from the University of Chicago. She has written for a number of publications, including Slate, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe. Her previous book, The Divorce Culture (1997), was an expansion of her controversial Atlantic Monthly article "Dan Quayle Was Right" (April 1993). She has three adult children and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts with her husband. I spoke with her recently by telephone.
—Sage Stossel
Their life experience certainly influenced my thinking. I have a big extended family, and in addition to my two daughters, I have four nieces, ranging in age from their mid-twenties to their mid-thirties, who are also single women, living and working in big cities. I couldn't help but notice how different their early adult lives are from the early adult lives of women of my generation. So I guess in that way my daughters helped to draw me to the topic. Your previous book is about divorce, and you're a director of a scholarly organization called the National Marriage Project at Rutgers. How did your interest in family issues develop? It really began with my interest in the social history of women and children back in my graduate school days. I realized back then that socially and culturally things were changing pretty fast in American family life. Gradually, as part of my work, I got interested in divorce and marriage and the whole question of how people choose their mates. The book looks at the contemporary mating system and why some of the most accomplished women of our day are finding it a struggle to find the right man at the right time in their lives. Is it your sense that society as a whole suffers in some way if highly educated professional women must struggle to find mates—and that society should therefore (for its own good) take it upon itself to change the situation? Or is the problem more one of personal angst for the individual women directly affected? The book isn't about a social problem. It's about an important set of social changes. The impact of divorce on children, which I wrote about in my previous book, is a social problem. But the reason I write about the romantic plight of the new single woman isn't because society is going to be damaged if she doesn't find the right man on the right time on the right terms. It's because college-educated women have been the authors of social change. For example, college-educated Baby Boom women were the focus of huge social interest and concern in the past—particularly with respect to their progress in the work place. This was not because society was going to collapse if Baby Boom women didn't get good careers but because they were creating social and cultural change. That's what this book is about—it's a look at a recent and important set of social changes and the women who are part of it. What audience is the book intended for? It's written for three audiences. One obviously is the people I'm writing about: college-educated single women in their twenties and thirties who are experiencing some of the circumstances I'm describing. A second audience is the parents of the young women who are in this life stage. A third might be those with some scholarly interest in the changing patterns of dating, mating, and union formation. Sage Stossel is executive editor of The Atlantic Online and draws the cartoon feature "Sage, Ink." Her children's book, We're Off to Harvard Square, was published in 2004.
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