Echidne On Marriage Through The Ages

Not quite, but I went into my archives to gather together a few posts about the Marriage Panic of Whatever Year you might want to look at. The panic is always about women. Men never panic about marriage, never, but women do. And so does the society in general.

The reasons for this vary. Usually the panic is about women not being able to find husbands because they are too educated or too old or too bossy-bots, but recently this old argument has been replaced by the sky-is-falling-oh-my-god argument about civilization collapsing because women aren't getting married enough.

When statistics showed that more educated women in fact have higher marriage rates, the panic changed into one worrying about the less educated women and how they could ever find or keep husbands! But this naturally has nothing to do with the marital stresses that are more severe when one has less money.

Reading many of my posts on this topic, one after the other, was most fascinating and revealing! The underlying patterns become visible when one does that: The insistent focus on WOMEN in these stories and not on men, the odd underlying smell of panic on behalf of the same women. It was a learning experience.

A few posts picked from the many in my archives:

The Eternal Shortage of Marriageable Men

On Flannel Knickers and Feminism

No More Mrs?

Bucking The Trend

Bad Girls Who Refuse To Wed