Throughout America's history, the start of adult life for women - whatever else it might have been destined to include - had been typically marked by marriage.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Since the late 19th century, the median age of first marriage for women had fluctuated between 20 and 22. This had been the shape, pattern and definition of female life.
It is a mistake for women to think that life begins only with marriage. A woman can and must have an identity and feel useful, valued, and needed whether she is single or married. She must feel that she can do something for someone else that no one else ever born can do.
Marriage was coined at a time when people died when they were 30. That stability would be nice, and I am definitely open-minded about it, but I don't need it in that way some women do.
For so many generations, a woman's only career path was to marry well and to marry up. Those days have changed.
Up until 1920, women couldn't vote. Until 1974, married women couldn't get their own credit cards or, in some cases, their own loans. Basically, the husband's professional, social, and economic identity covered the individual identity of the wife.
Women in the post-Fifties world were appendages. They existed to serve men. Their lives and concerns didn't matter, except insofar as they impinged on Important Male Things.
The sum and substance of female education in America, as in England, is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life, and to pretend that they do not think so.
Marriage has historically, as long as there's been human history, meant a man and a woman in a relationship for life. Once we change that definition, then where does it go from there?
Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
Women today are dealing with both their independence and also the fact that their lives are built around finding and satisfying the romantic models we grew up with.
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