首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
Marriage by the Numbers When Laurie Aronson was 29, she had little patience for people who inquired why she still wasn’t marr
Marriage by the Numbers When Laurie Aronson was 29, she had little patience for people who inquired why she still wasn’t marr
admin
2009-09-12
42
问题
Marriage by the Numbers
When Laurie Aronson was 29, she had little patience for people who inquired why she still wasn’t married. "I’m not one of those unmarried women who sit home Friday night and cry," she said. As she passed 35, however, and one relationship after another failed to lead to the altar, she began to worry. "Things were kinking pretty depressive," she says. But then a close friend’s brother a man she’d known for years—divorced. Slowly their friendship blossomed into romance. At 39, Aronson married him, becoming Laurie Aronson Starr and the stepmother to his three kids. Then, after five years of treatment, she became pregnant with a son who’ll be 4 in July. "My parents are thrilled—it’s a relief for everyone," says Starr, now 49. "I wish I could have found the right person earlier and had more children. But I’m very happy now."
As happy endings go, hers has a particularly delicious irony. Twenty years ago this week, Aronson was one of more than a dozen single women featured in the cover story of the magazine of Newsweek. In "The Marriage Crunch," the magazine reported on new research predicting that white, college-educated women who failed to marry in their 20s. According to the research, a woman who remained single at 30 had only a 20 percent chance of ever marrying. By 35, the probability dropped to 5 percent. In the story’s most infamous line, it is reported that a 40-year-old single woman was "more likely to be killed by a terrorist" than to ever marry. That comparison wasn’t in the study, and even in those pre-9/11 days, it struck many people as an offensive analogy (类推). Nonetheless, it quickly became established in pop culture and is still routinely cited in TV shows and news stories.
Across the country, women reacted the research in Newsweek with fury, anxiety—and skepticism. "The popular media have invented a national marital crisis on the basis of a single academic experiment... of doubtful statistical merit," wrote Susan Faludi, then a 27-year-old reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, who saw the controversy as one example against feminism (男女平等主义).
Twenty years later, the situation looks far brighter. Those odds-she’ll-marry statistics turned out to be too pessimistic: today it appears that about 90 percent of baby-boomer men and women either have married or will marry, a ratio that’s well in line with historical averages. And these days, about half of all women get married by their 20s, as they did in 1960. At least 14 percent of women born between 1955 and 1964 married after the age of 30. Today the median age for a first marriage—25 for women, 27 for men—is higher than ever before.
Not everyone wants to marry, of course. And we’re long past those Jane Austen days when being "marriage-minded" was primarily a female quality; today many men openly hope for a wife just as much as women long for a husband. The good news is that older singles who desire a spouse appear to face far kinder odds nowadays. When the Census last passed the numbers in 1996, a single woman at 40 had a 40.8 percent chance of eventually marrying. Today those odds are probably even higher—and may be only slightly worse than the probability of correctly choosing "heads" or "tails" in a coin toss.
To mark the anniversary of the cover story, the newspaper of Newsweek located 11 of the 14 single women in the story. Among them, eight are married and three remain single. Several have children or stepchildren. None divorced. Twenty years ago Andrea Quattrocchi was a career-focused Boston hotel executive and reluctant to settle for a spouse who didn’t share her fondness for sailing and sushi. Six years later she met her husband at a beachfront bars; they married when she was 36. Today she’s a stay-at-home mom with three kids—and yes, the couple regularly enjoys sushi and sailing. "You can have it all today if you wait—that’s what I’d tell my daughter," she says. "Enjoy your life when you’re single, then find someone in your 30s like Mommy did."
The research that led to the marriage predictions began at Harvard and Yale in the mid-1980s. Three researchers- Nell Bennett, David Bloom and Patricia Craig—began exploring why so many women weren’t marrying in their 20s, as most Americans traditionally had. Would these women still marry someday, or not at all? To find an answer, they used "life table" techniques, applying data from past age group to predict future behavior—the same method typically used to predict death rates. "It’s the important tool of demography (人口统计学)," says Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin. "They were looking at 40-year-olds and making predictions for 20-year-olds." The researchers focused on women, not men, largely because government statisticians had collected better age-of-marriage data for females as part of its studies on birth patterns and birthrates.
Despite the flawed statistics, some observers say the story holds up well. "Once you got over the sensational aspects, there was a lot of substance," says E. Kay Trimberger, a sociologist at Sonoma State University and author of "The New Single Woman." Among other trends the original story identified were the rise in cohabitation, the emergence of single mothers by choice, the fact that many single women were very happy with their lives, and an increasingly out-of-the-closet gay population as factors affecting marriage rates.
Some demographers immediately doubted the odds. Within months Census researchers did their own study and concluded that a 40-year-old single woman really had a 17 to 23 percent probability of eventually marrying, not 2.6 percent. In retrospect, the demographers faced a huge challenge in getting these predictions right. That’s because marital behavior was undergoing a profound shift. Before 1980, a woman who hadn’t married by 30 probably never would. But times were changing. "Women weren’t remaining unmarried because marriage was less appealing, but because it was becoming more appealing to wait," says Steven Martin, a University of Maryland sociologist.
Such unexpected shifts are part of what makes demographic forecasting extremely difficult, not unlike making weather forecasts in the midst of a hurricane. Even though the original forecasts were wrong, today’s researchers remain respectful of Bennett, Bloom and Craig’s work. Their marriage-forecast numbers were only a minor part of their study, and the authors remain proud of their papers’ larger findings on the diverging marriage rates between blacks and whites and the role that education plays in marriage. Today a new generation of sociologists (社会学家) continues to tinker (修补) with the delayed-marriage puzzle.
选项
A、Y
B、N
C、NG
答案
B
解析
定位到文章首段的第三句As she passed 35,however,and one relationship after another failed to lead to the altar,she began to worry.[精析] 细节辨认题[考频:12]。从该句可知,Laurie Aronson 35岁之后,随着一次次交往总是不能步入婚姻殿堂,这个时候她开始着急了。很显然,她因为自己想结婚却找不到心仪的对象而着急,题干说因为不愿意结婚所以她不着急,这与原文相悖。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/Vd37777K
0
大学英语四级
相关试题推荐
Overthepastdecade,Americancompanieshavetriedhardtofindwaystodiscourageseniormanagersfromfeatheringtheirownne
Howdowegetmorepeopletoincreasetheirconsumptionofiron-richfoods?Manynutritionists【C1】________theincreaseofanumb
Howdowegetmorepeopletoincreasetheirconsumptionofiron-richfoods?Manynutritionists【C1】________theincreaseofanumb
MasstransportationrevisedthesocialandeconomicfabricoftheAmericancityinthreefundamentalways.Itcatalyzedphysical
AccordingtoascientificstudypublishedinApril,2015,birdshaveshowntheycanplanforafuturestateofmind.Hoardin
Whatdoestheauthormeanbysaying"the21stcenturyequivalentofbeingcaughtnaked"(Lines3-4,Paragraph2)?Whydo
A、ShewasthefirstwomantoleadabigU.S.publishingcompany.B、ShegotherfirstjobasateacherattheUniversityofChic
Fromthefirstparagraphweknowthatpresent-dayuniversitieshavebecome______.WhatdowelearnaboutSiliconValleyfromt
RobertEllisSmithbelievesidentitytheftisdifficulttodetectandonecanhardlydoanythingtopreventit.Usingaspecial
Aromatherapyis____________(不仅有利于放松,而且对减肥也很有效).
随机试题
简述TPS的功能。
硫脲类抗甲状腺作用的机制是
进行酶活力测定时()。
政府采购工程咨询服务最主要的方式是()。
孔子作为儒家的创始人,奠定了儒家理想的基本格局。孔子理想人格的基本内容是“礼”和“仁”。“礼”是外在的行为规范,“仁”是内在的精神原则。______。填入划横线部分最恰当的一项是:
(2013联考59)今后,技术的交叉与融合会越来越明显,新一轮技术和产业革命的方向不会仅仅依赖于一两类学科或某种单一技术,而是多学科、多技术领域的高度交叉和深度融合。技术融合趋势决定了战略性新兴产业不可能也不应该孤立地发展,而是既要有利于推动传统产业的创新
社会主义法治理念主要内容是依法治国、执法为民、公平正义、服务大局、党的领导。是立法、执法、司法、守法和法律监督等法治领域的基本指导思想。是党的领导、人民当家作主和依法治国思想的统一体,是社会主义法治的精髓和灵魂,是马克思列宁主义关于国家与法的理论与中国国情
以下程序试图把从终端输入的字符输出到名为abc.txt的文件中,直到从终端读入字符#时结束输入和输出操作,但程序有错。#include<stdio.h>main(){FILE*fout;charch;fout=f
存储一个32×32点阵的汉字字形码需用的字节数是
CarnegieHall,thefamousconcerthallinNewYorkcity,hasagainundergonearestoration.Whilethisisnotthefirst,【72】.As
最新回复
(
0
)