Backlash

Abstract

On Valentine’s Day 1986, American journalist Lisa Marie Petersen was looking for a fresh angle on contemporary romance and heard about the Yale sociology department’s new marriage study. Sociologist Neil Bennett told Petersen that the Yale-Harvard research on women’s marital patterns had produced astounding results; a single, university-educated woman at thirty now had only a 20 per cent chance of ever walking down the aisle and the odds on a woman marrying past the age of thirty-five were a paltry 5 per cent. Once the Stamford Advocate had splashed Petersen’s story across the front page, and Associated Press had picked it up, the crisis of professional single women had been born. The story ran world-wide. The only problem with Bennett’s statistics, however, was that they were simply not true. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.