An Alarming Trend: Why Are American Women “Giving Up on Marriage”? And What Are Its Likely Consequences?
A troubling trend, reported in the Wall Street Journal last March 22-23 and drawing on several studies, noted that “American Women Are Giving Up on Marriage.” That is, a growing number of American women are either contented about or resigned to “staying single,” owing to “huge and growing gender gaps in economic and educational attainment, political affiliation, and beliefs about what a family should look like.” This development should be deeply concerning to anyone who cares about the happiness of both men and women, America’s demographic future, and the well-being of the children who may be born to the country’s women.
As reported in the Journal article, Daniel Cox, director of the survey center at the American Enterprise Institute, “more women than men” are now “attending college, buying houses, and focusing on their friendships and careers” rather than “dating and marriage.” Indeed, a 2024 AEI survey found that “over half of single women … believed they were happier than their married counterparts,” though only a third of single men surveyed felt the same. More radically, a 2022 Pew survey of single women found that “only 34% were looking for romance, compared with 54% of single men.” Cox attributed this historically unprecedented outlook on women’s part to a rise in their “earning power” and a decline in the “social stigma for being single,” which together “allowed more women to be choosy.” In consequence, according to the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, as of 2023, “the share of women ages 18 to 40” who were “neither married nor cohabiting with a partner” was 51% in 2023, up from 41.8% in 2000.”
In more nuanced studies reported by the Journal revealing a divergence in attitudes between the sexes, a 2023 Pew survey found that “48% of women said that being married was not too or not at all important for a fulfilling life, compared with 39% of men,” and a 2024 Journal/ NORC poll found that “58% of women aged 18 to 29 said marriage was at least somewhat essential to their vision of the American dream, compared with 66% of men.” One explanation offered by a (female) University of Maryland economist was that “dating apps make people feel like there might always be a better option” to pair off with. But as the Journal story observed, “men seem more satisfied with their options than women,” with a 2023 AEI survey of college-educated women finding that “half blamed their singlehood largely on an inability to find someone who meets their expectations,” with “less than a quarter of single men” saying the same.
Part of the reason for the difference between men’s and women’s satisfaction with their marital options undoubtedly lies in contemporary differences in educational and economic success: according to Pew, in 2024, 47% of American women aged 25-34 held bachelor’s degrees, compared with only 37% of men. And such a degree, according to a recent Georgetown University study, increases lifetime earnings by $1 million. No less striking is the change in gender participation in the fields of law and medicine. Women have recently attained a slightly higher level of enrollment in medical school than men. In law schools, they became a majority of students in 2016, according to the American Bar Association; by 2020, they constituted a majority of lawyers working for the Federal government, by 2023, a majority of law firm associates; and they were expected to form a majority of law school faculty this year. As Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies (cited in the Journal) points out, the greater success of women compared to men in education and their early years in the work force “creates a mismatch, because people prefer to date in terms of comparable education or income.” (This latter fact itself reflects a change: as social scientist Charles Murray pointed out in his 2013 book Coming Apart, whereas physicians of an earlier time tended to marry nurses, they now prefer fellow physicians; similar changes occurred in the marriage patterns of lawyers, professors, and executives.) But contemporary men’s “economic struggles seem to be having the biggest effect on women without a college degree, whose marriage rates by age 45 have plummeted from 79% to 52% for those born between 1930 and 1980” according to a Cornell economist, since “young men without a degree are struggling so much … that there simply aren’t enough with steady jobs and earnings” sufficient to make them eligible marital partners.
Of course, women’s increased educational and professional success is to be applauded. More troubling, however, are the reasons that individual women surveyed by the Journal give for foregoing marriage – and the way these reasons suggest an even bleaker future for the “traditional” family. One ended a two-year “relationship” because her partner aspired to a marriage in which he was the breadwinner while she stayed “home with the kids,” even though she was earning almost 50% more than he was. Believing that “couples with kids should split household and child care responsibilities equally,” “she was surprised by just how few of the men she has encountered in D.C. share this view.” Similarly, a 33-year-old Georgia resident “broke up with her boyfriend, with whom she shares a 5-year-old son, … because she was tired of doing most of the child care, cooking, and scheduling while also earning almost double her boyfriend’s salary.”
Here, we must pause. Longtime (unofficial) sociological observation, particularly thanks to a 54-year career as a college professor and (more recently) two decades as a grandparent, leaves me doubtful that most men will ever be content with a situation in which they perform as much as half of the household duties – regardless of their wives’ earnings. Of course, like practically all American men (I believe) born since the 1940s, I did a reasonable share of the diaper-changing, school chauffeuring, and other duties that parenthood entails, as well as some amount of dish- and clothes-washing. (Most male homeowners, in addition, typically perform most of the yard work, and some considerable home repair.) But the question arises whether there is not some innate, biological reason for most men’s indisposition towards doing an equal share of domestic duties – and whether women who reject marriage for that reason may not be doing themselves a disservice in the long run.
In the first place, the availability of all sorts of higher education to women no less than to men in the present era, to say nothing of the technologies (starting with, say, dishwashers and microwaves) that reduce the labor required to maintain a household, mean that women interested in pursuing a profession (beyond teaching and nursing, in which they long predominated) no longer face an either-or situation when it comes to marriage and family. If the problem is not that, but rather a demand, in the name of abstract “justice,” for a strictly equal division of domestic responsibilities between the sexes, then women perhaps need to consider the relative importance of having a lifelong partner, and children, compared to such equity. Many women I have known, starting with my own wife and daughters, have achieved remarkable degrees of success in publicly valuable, rewarding professions while being devoted mothers, even though this meant earning less when the children were young, for the sake of spending more time with them. By contrast, to focus on relative spousal earnings as a benchmark for marital success is to adopt what the insightful philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have dismissed as adopting a merely “bourgeois” standard for one’s life, foregoing the natural pleasures of childrearing (along with, admittedly, its burdens) for the sake of merely artificial enjoyments of affording a fancier house, car, or job title, that would earn other people’s admiration.
Admittedly, the problems that working-class women now face in finding dependable mates, and indeed that singles as well as couples now confront in obtaining affordable housing in job-rich environments, are not soluble merely by such a change in attitude. But here we must address a particular irony. The very decline in men’s economic success relative to that of women over the past half-century is the product not only of women’s advancement, but of changes in educational and societal practices that arose at men’s expense in the name of feminism: more precisely, a radicalized, “second-wave” feminism aimed not merely at securing equal rights for both sexes, but at elevating “feminine” over “masculine” personalities and character traits. These changes were highlighted by former philosophy professor (now a fellow at AEI) Christina Hoff Sommers in her 2000 book The War Against Boys.
In an interview summarizing the thesis of the book, Sommers argued as follows:
Boys are politically incorrect. They like action, competition, rough-housing. They are the one group of Americans who do not spend a lot of time talking about their feelings. This worries many people. A group of psychologists—mainly at Harvard—have convinced themselves that boys need to be “rescued” from their masculinity. At the same time, hard-line feminists are persuaded that unless we intervene at earliest possible age to change boys, women and girls will continue to be “oppressed under patriarchy.” My book shows that these two groups—the gender warriors and the New England psychologists—have been astonishingly successful in promoting their male-averse programs in the schools. In the meantime, boys are not getting the help they really need. All the special help has been allocated to girls.
To these observations, one should add the fact that boys are diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed drugs like Ritalin to treat their “hyperactivity” at roughly twice the rate as girls.)
In sum, as Sommers demonstrates, whereas schools and colleges had been engaged for decades in programs designed to raise women’s “self-esteem” by de-masculinizing curricula (say, choosing books at the K-12 level that favored feelings and “relationships” over those involving war or crime), women were already advancing – while boys’ disposition to study was being weakened. This tendency was strengthened by the development of “women’s studies” programs at many colleges – as if women, not men, needed special encouragement. Finally, the aggressive application and broad interpretation of Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act under the Obama and Biden administrations to cover “sexual harassment,” with college students and faculty liable to sanctions including dismissal for even telling scatological jokes, let alone inappropriate “touching,” created an atmosphere that might deter male students from even engaging in what used to be called courtship. To make matters worse, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil rights required colleges to adopt “preponderance of evidence” standards (normally used only in civil suits) in assessing claims by women that they had been “harassed” by men – meaning that a male student could be penalized or even expelled if administrators assigned to judge the allegations thought there was just a 51% likelihood that the woman claiming to have been “victimized” was telling the truth. (These developments are amply summarized in R. Shep Melnick’s 2018 study published by Brookings, The Transformation of Title IX: Regulating Gender Equality in Education.) In sum: the administration of Title IX itself now encourages attitudes of distrust between the sexes, even before they graduate from college.
But there is more. Here I must add a personal anecdote. In the late 1980’s, the estimable Catholic liberal arts college, College of the Holy Cross, where I spent most of my career made the crucial, if fashionable, error of establishing a chair in “social justice.” (Until that time, professorships were not normally defined in terms of particular political goals.) To fill that chair, it made the greater mistake of appointing a militant Australian anthropologist, whose motto was “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” She spent her years at the College inculcating that doctrine in her exclusively female students. (She won complete freedom to indoctrinate them by driving the occasional male enrollee out with insults, so I was told). I often wondered at that time just how many young women’s lives she may have adversely affected through her influence.
A particular event then crystallized the anthropologist’s intentions. A group of Holy Cross alumni, acting independently of the College administration, had arranged for Sommers to give a lecture on campus, based on her 1995 book Who Stole Feminism? That work criticized the transformation of the feminist movement’s goals from securing equal rights for women, a goal she wholly endorsed, into the “gender” feminism I’ve mentioned above, which she opposed. Learning of the upcoming lecture, the anthropologist suddenly announced a special “awards ceremony” for the campus feminist group that she led, scheduled for the same time as Sommers’s talk, obviously with the intent of diverting her followers from even hearing what Sommers had to say.
At this point, events got hairier. The editor of the local newspaper, the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, ran a brief column scolding the anthropologist for trying to curtail campus debate on an important issue. She reacted with such fury as to induce a total surrender on the part of the paper’s management, effectively compelling them to run a full-page, six-column denunciation by her, containing a multitude of outright falsehoods (for instance, the myth that the great eighteenth-century compiler of English law, Sir William Blackstone, had invented the term “rule of thumb” to denote the width of a rod with which husbands were entitled to beat their wives). It was left to me and Professor Sommers (whom I’d not met prior to her talk, but who taught at Clark University, located just a mile or two from Holy Cross) to write brief letters of refutation, just trying to set the record straight.
On January 31 of this year, the Education Department under President Trump announced that it was scrapping the changes that the Biden administration had made to Title IX, not only discrimination protection based on “gender identity” and sexual orientation (something certainly never envisioned by the Civil Rights Act’s authors) but also changing how sexual assault cases are handled on campus, so as to ensure that they are handled with proper due process protections for those accused. But the broader process of indoctrinating students at both the pre-collegiate and college levels in an ideology that alienates boys and men and heightens feelings of hostility between the sexes cannot be fixed by government regulations. Just as with the recent popular reaction against DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs in academia, the corporate world, and government, what is needed is a demand from parents and citizens at the K-12 level, and parents and donors at the college level, to modify the entire academic atmosphere in favor of one that not only treats young men and women equally, but scraps the entire program of altering campus “culture” in the direction that my angry feminist colleague demanded.
But I must close this essay by addressing one “solution” to women’s current disillusionment with marriage, as reported in the Journal column, that is in its own way even more frightening than the danger that increasing numbers of women, and in consequence men, will remain single. This is the growth, reported by the Journal, in the number of women who are “heading into motherhood solo.” One 34-year-old woman interviewed, fearing “running out her biological clock,” has “lately spent hours researching the ‘Single Mothers by Choice’ movement” and has begun “saving for a baby with a high-yield savings account,” having decided that “parenthood and romantic love don’t have to be intrinsically linked.”
One cannot avoid sympathizing with the desire of a woman to become a mother, even when she has been unable to locate a decent and loving father. As I have observed, even among the grown children of friends, the trend is increasing. Yet few people seem to have taken account of what a dangerous social experiment this trend constitutes. Of course, it has always been the case that some children had to be raised by single mothers, thanks to the premature death of fathers (especially in war) or, increasingly, in owing to changes in family law, divorce. But what will life be like when a considerably larger number of young people grow up fatherless? If some women complain now that prospective husbands aren’t willing to shoulder half of the domestic duties, do they really think that parenthood will be easier in the absence of a partner? After a hard day at the office, how much time will they have to devote to their kids? Is hiring a full-time nanny, or relying on a high-quality day care center, an adequate substitute for maternal and paternal attention? (In a few cases I have noted of married mothers who were compelled either by circumstances or their own career ambitions to continue working at demanding careers even when their children were young, the results, in terms of observable outcomes in their offspring’s development, were not encouraging.) Does psychology not demonstrate the preferability of a child having the active presence of both a mother and a father in their life? And as for the effect of reliance on full-time day care, as Norwegian psychiatrist Hannah Spiere reports in an essay titled “When Science Became a Weapon Against Mothers” in Commentary, December, 2025, a landmark 1991 study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development” that followed over a thousand children through adolescence found that “longer hours away from mothers consistently predicted stress, … impulsivity, hyperactivity, [and] aggression” in both sexes. This finding was subsequently “laundered” by government authorities, Spiere reports, for ideological reasons, over following decades, so as “to relieve maternal guiit.”
America’s declining fertility rate, like that of other nations, is a matter of serious concern. So is the increasing distancing between many men and women. But perhaps the launching of an unprecedented demographic future, when a substantial portion of the population will have grown up with only a mother (in defiance of nature’s dictates) is most worrisome of all.
Professor Emeritus of Political Science, College of the Holy Cross
