When Newsweek ‘Struck Terror in the Hearts of Single Women’ – Bogus Study Said Women Over 40 More Likely To Be Killed By A Terrorist Than to Marry

When Newsweek ‘Struck Terror in the Hearts of Single Women’ – Bogus Study Said Women Over 40 More Likely To Be Killed By A Terrorist Than to Marry

I was maybe a teen or in my 20s when this study came out. I remember at the time thinking it sounded pretty questionable and stupid.

(Link): When Newsweek ‘Struck Terror in the Hearts of Single Women’ by M. Garber

Excerpts:

Thirty years ago, the magazine declared that single women over 40 are more likely to be killed by terrorism than to get married—prompting a nationwide crisis whose anxiety still lingers.
…Thirty years later—the publication date of the article was June 2—it’s easy to forget that the so-pervasive-as-to-be- (Link): Ephroned marriage-and-terrorism stat was plucked from a single piece of journalism that was in turn based on a study that was, at the time of the story’s publication, unpublished. It’s also easy to forget, given its resonance, that the stat comes from an article that has since been so (Link): thoroughly (Link): debunked, by demographers and sociologists and media outlets alike, that Newsweek, 20 years after the fact, (Link): retracted it.

….But what’s perhaps most striking about the story, 30 years later, is how oddly fresh it still feels, how urgent its anxieties still seem. The piece’s core message—panic, ladies, because your professional goals will undermine your personal ones—lives on, in its way, in every current news story about the difficulty educated women face in the “marriage market,” in every blithe reference to the “biological clock,” and indeed in every piece of media that gazes upon women’s bodies and sees, in their fleshy fallibility, some form of social determinism.
….So did the story itself, as it delved into the details that formed the meat of the article: considerations of the consequences of women putting careers before family, insinuations of women waiting too long for their Misters Right, blunt declarations that “super-achieving women set impossibly high standards.”
It framed “white, college-educated women born in the mid-’50s” as Single Women, a nebulous monolith. It came up with the “better chances of getting killed by a terrorist” line, which (Link): had not appeared in the original study. “Too Late for Prince Charming?” was ultimately a proof of (Link): Betteridge’s law: It presented a single and unpublished statistical analysis under the guise of demographic determinism.
Newsweek’s thesis was that women were panicking about some news, and it proved—“proved”—that thesis not by focusing on the news, but by focusing on the panic. And panic, being what it is, has a way of proving itself.
What happened post-publication was a pre-web form of viral spread: The article’s scare-stats were shared and amplified via articles in wire services (UPI (Link): dutifully repeated the story’s “profound crisis of confidence among America’s growing ranks of single women” line) and in other magazines. Its ideas and insinuations made their way to pop culture, whose own products were reckoning with the same phenomena the journalistic media were.
….Because, gah, it felt true! And what’s most jarring, today—30 years after the article was published, and 10 years after it was officially retracted—is how true it feels, still.
Not in terms of the debunked stats themselves, or of the women quoted in the article (many of whom, (Link): the Wall Street Journal reported, went on to get married), but rather in the subtler, stickier elements of the article.
Its vaguely accusatory tone. Its framing of marriage and career as being fundamentally at odds with each other. Its insinuation that single women have been, essentially, undermining their romantic goals by focusing on their professional ones.
The piece, though it made passing reference to women who choose to remain single, pretty much took it for granted that marriage is not just a social institution or an economic arrangement or the atomic bond at the center of the nuclear family, but something broader and more aspirational: a mark of social success. It assumed a cultural attitude that remains with us, today, in news accounts and the products of pop culture: that to be married is not just to love someone or to have a partner or a companion or a co-parent, but also to have unlocked a level in the great game of life. That to be married is to choose, but also to have been chosen. That matrimony is, on top of everything else, a social status that can be conferred only when another person willingly weaves their life to yours.
…All of that amounts to a good, and indeed a liberating, development: The culture is increasingly treating marriage, for so long the default social arrangement, as a choice rather than a fact of life.But: The culture was already doing that in 1986. (“Many women,” the Newsweek piece notes, “have frankly come to terms with staying single—perhaps even preferring it to settling for Mr. Wrong.”)

(( click here to read the rest ))

Regarding that last line: I was engaged to an idiot, a jackass. I am more happy without him and being single than having entered a terrible marriage with him. The selfish douche didn’t even try to meet any of my needs, the whole relationship was focused on him and what he wanted. There was no way in hell I was going to MARRY THAT. It really is better to stay single than settle for Mr. Wrong.

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