In June nineteen eighty six, Newsweek magazine published this cover story that read, if you're a single woman, here are your chances of getting married. The crux of the article was but due to an alleged man shortage, things weren't looking great for women north of thirty five, and in fact, if you were a woman over the age of forty, you are more likely to be killed by a terrorist
than to get married. The article pierced the zeitguy so intensely that even seven years later, it was a plot point in Nora Efron's Oscar nominated romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle.
There are a lot of desperate women out there looking for.
Love, especially over a certain age.
You know what's easier to be killed by a terrorists, and it is to get married over the age of forty.
That's not true. That statistic is not true.
That's right, it's not true, but it feels true.
The terrorism line was indeed not true, and Newsweek would even go on to print a retraction. But nevertheless, that urban myth endo married by forty or end up a sad old maid. I'm Jessica Bennett and I'm Susie Bannacharam. This is in retrospect, where each week we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.
And that we just can't stop thinking about.
Today. We're talking about that sensational nineteen eighties cover story from Newsweek, but we're also talking about the enduring myth it tapped into that of the desperate single woman.
This is part one, So Jess.
We started with a clip from Sleepless in Seattle, which is obviously a classic rom com and Noura Efron movie. And the reason we're talking about that movie is because it references this absurd claim that a woman over forty is more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to get married. So remind me, where did this idea come from?
Right?
Okay, so it didn't come from Nora Afron, and it is not true, by the way, I did. Where it came from was this nineteen eighty six cover story in Newsweek magazine, which was one of the most red and respected magazines of its era. And that story would send American women into a panic.
I mean no wonder I would feel panicked if someone told me I was more likely to get killed than married.
Right, And so the fact that seven years later, when this movie comes out, Meg Ryan and Rosie O'Donnell, those are the voices you hear in the clip are still talking about It. Gives you some sense of just how firmly this idea cemented into the American psyche.
Yeah, I do remember this really being part of the zeitgeist. So what made you choose this moment to talk about? So?
I mean, for starters, I am a woman newly over forty, and while I did ultimately get married, I have a lot of complicated feelings about the subject. Yes, as do I and also, as you know, we both have a personal connection to Newsweek, the magazine where this story ran. This was where I began my career. It's where you and I would meet working a decade later, and it's where when I did start working. Twenty years after this
story ran, people were still talking about it. Like literally in the year two thousand and six, when I was a junior reporter at Newsweek in one of my first jobs, the magazine decided to write another cover story about that now debunked cover story for the twenty geth anniversary of
the cover story. It's wild, but I think also at its core, I'm fascinated by this story because it's a microcosm in a lot of ways, for the way that the media tends to take these subtle or sometimes not so subtle jabs at women, for the way that Hollywood and so much of our popular culture still kind of sends us message that a single woman is something to be afraid of or ashamed of, And ultimately for how that silly little statistic, which was proven wrong in the
nineteen eighties, can still sometimes feel very real or like it has resonans even four decades later.
So where should we begin in terms of breaking this down?
So I think we should start with a little context. To understand the impact of that article, you kind of have to understand the place that Newsweek held in the
culture in the nineteen eighties. Newsweek was one of the classic news magazines, back when people still, you know, paged through magazines physically, and the internet was like a dial up modem that took twenty five minutes to connect and got disconnected every time your mom would like pick up the phone to cost Newsweek was in every dentist in doctor's office. I don't know if you remember that, Yes, I do remember that. It was like in classrooms at schools.
It was displayed on actual newsstands alongside other magazines such as US News and World Report and BusinessWeek and Time and all of these magazines, many of which no longer exists, where you would eagerly go to actually see the week's headlines.
Actually, the crazy thing is when I went to Iran for the first time, where my family is from and my mom has lived until pretty recently, I remember the only English language news I could find, because that was pre internet, was a Newsweek magazine.
That's so interesting, and I mean that's the thing. It held a lot of weight.
And when I was in college, and I think even high school, working at Newsweek was my literal dream job. Like that's where I wanted to work. I wanted to be a journalist. And where would an aspiring, ambitious journalist want to work, They would want to work a Newsweek magazine.
I mean that makes sense. I also grew up loving Newsweek. I remember I used to as a very small child, like eight or nine years old. I used to read it to my parents' friends as a party trick. Like my dad would call me out from bed and be like, show everyone how you read Newsweek, and I honestly, I think I just read the odds, like I didn't really know what I'm reading, but I wanted to be like my dad then he read the magazine, so I would like flip through it and read it too great.
And so Newsweek was always and I don't know if you'd remember this from that time. I think I only learned it later, but it was considered to be like the happier and more progressive of the two. And I remember when I started there that was sort of a point of pride. Newsweek had run a cover story about the AIDS epidemic, long before most people had heard of it.
It was ahead of its time on subjects like gay marriage, and so while Newsweek and Time were known for covering really serious international affairs and politics obviously, they were also known for these kind of splashy covers on social trends, like the kind of stories that for me anyway that I dreamed of writing and so fun fact, you might remember this, I used to run the Newsweek tumbler.
Oh, I do remember that.
So I have this whole collection of Newsweek covers, many of which are just incredible. I have this image of the cover story about Anita Hill, which has this kind of iconic image of her during those hearings, and it says a special report on sexual harassment, and then the headline is why women are so angry?
I mean, maybe they're angry because they're getting sexually harassed. It seems like they answers itself.
There's also another cover I have saved. It has Sally Ride on it with the title Space Woman, when she became the first American woman to go into space. That was kind of this iconic cover that I still remember. I feel a little bit like a superhero name. So there's that, yes completely, and then there are the more hilarious ones. There's one that I post every June for Pride from nineteen eighty three, with this incredible close up image of two women against this kind of like hazy
school photo backdrop. One is wearing a velvet body suit and the other is in pearls and a jean jacket. The cover just says, in giant block letters, lesbians.
With an exclamation point, right, like, it.
Doesn't actually have it. It doesn't.
I just always refer to it as having an exclamation point, but it's like giant block letters. And then I think the subtitle is what are the limits of tolerance? But like, it's just an incredible, incredible cover and says a lot about the nineteen eighty So.
I guess lesbians were coming out of the closet. What else was going on in the world at that time.
Yeah, so the nineteen eighties is key here. Well, feminism had made great strides. This is like the women's liberation movement in the nineteen seventies was in full force. You now have more women in the workforce. Labor participation has risen from forty two percent in the early nineteen seventies to nearly sixty percent by the late nineteen eighties.
So women are dramatically more visible.
There were all of these representations of working women, single women in film and on television. You had examples like Charlie's Angels. You had depictions of single working women like Mary Tyler Moore, and you had magazines like Cosmopolitan and Glamour, sort of the more women's magazines that were starting to kind of elevate or talk about this single woman lifestyle.
That's funny.
It's like the classic image of the working mom in her boxy business suit and her like white sneakers with her heels and her purse, like it feels very much of a certain kind of era where we started to see women emerge in this very public way.
And on the heels of that.
This is three years after that Lesbian's cover came out. The story about women's chances of getting married hits newstands.
Okay, I really want you to get into the article, but can we please talk about this cover.
It's so bad.
It is hideous. It features a full page line graph basically that looks like it was made on kind of like a I don't know, nineteen eighties early Apple computer. It's red, white and blue, and it has this dramatic drop to this graph, and that is what they want you to see. It is going down and down and down along the headline if you're a single woman, here are your chances of getting married.
It's funny because this is kind of like the original clickbait, right, it's like a version of the curiosity gap. Like if you're a woman and you're seeing this cover, you're gonna definitely pick it up. If you're worried in some way, you have some anxiety around getting married, and then you're going to be horrified by the answer, Like it's very clear the answer is not good.
If marriage is in your.
Sights, yes, yes, it's like your odds of finding love are in free fall, and thus, due to the conventional wisdom of the nineteen eighties, your life is in free fall.
Well, also, it's just this idea that like, if marriage is the goal, if you're forty already, there's no recourse. It's not like they're saying there's something you could do differently. So it's just like, all right, pack it in, ladies, you're gonna have to go home without.
A mate, right, And that's exactly what the article did.
It made women seem helpless and the prospect of finding a mate hopeless.
So the article.
Itself opens with a woman who can't stop hearing about this so called man shortage, Like her mom is calling her to warn her about it, her sisters are all talking about it. It's on the news.
I mean, can you just imagine how many women got calls from their mom about this?
Like so many?
And it goes on to explain that there was this study out of Harvard and Yale, So of course this sounds very formal. These are great institutions that quote confirmed what everybody suspected all along that many women who seem to have it all, good looks, good jobs, advanced degrees, and high salaries will never have mates period. End quote.
The whole horror I mean, first of all, is it that they will never have mates or they will never have male mates, because it really does seem to be focused on men.
So their lesbian cover must not have come soon enough.
Oh my god, exactly.
And in fact, there are multiple headlines for this story, but the headline once you open it up and are reading it in the middle of the magazine is is it too late for prince Charming? So clearly we're talking about princes here now. The article itself was written by four women and two men, some of whom were still at Newsweek when I was there two decades later, and as we have mentioned, it was based on data from a Yale and Harvard study which made basically everyone believed.
It that automatically gives it a sense of credibility.
And this is how the data was presented that if you were a white college educated woman over thirty, you had a twenty percent chance of ever getting married for the rest of your life. By age thirty five, your odds would drop to five percent and by forty and this is where the famous infamous line comes in. A woman is quote more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to get married, with her chances of marriage for the rest of her life at two point six percent.
Okay, I have so many questions about this because I just don't believe there was ever a time in this country where the likelihood of getting killed by a terrorist was at two point six percent.
Like, that can't be correct.
No, totally, And you're right it wasn't. It would turn out that this line was meant to be taken humorously, I guess, and to be totally hyperbolic. But like, of course, why would anybody think that coming from this serious, well respected news magazine that had six reporters reporting this.
Yeah, that's interesting because I feel like at that time, especially in the eighties, there was more airplane hijacking, so I guess most people would have been thinking about that versus what we think about now, which is nine to eleven. But back then, I guess the fear of being hijacked was a much more common fear that people had.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And like you said, I don't think you'd ever use that phrasing today, But I think the article was tapping into not only that terrorism anxiety, but this other anxiety that was bubbling up at the time about women's place in the world.
So, Okay, more women are working, but what's going on in their personal lives? Like, I feel like the eighties was still very much a classic hetero family vibe.
Yeah, definitely, like the nuclear family was still intact, but it's also shifting. So in nineteen eighty six, when the Newsweek article comes out, less people are getting married, more people are divorcing. That's becoming more common, and those who still are getting married are doing so at a later age than before.
So that's a good thing though, right, because doesn't research show that every year you wait to get married, the chances of divorce drop.
Yep, it does, which is why getting married later is actually better. And the other thing is, you know, women had more freedom at this time when it came to relationships, Like this was post birth control pill, it was post sexual revolution. Women were in various jobs pushing against traditional expectations.
I mean, honestly, all of this sounds like good news to me, but.
I mean yes and no, like good for women. But the thing was society was getting uncomfortable.
With, right, So I guess people are questioning whether or not having more women in the workforce is a good thing, or does it come at the expense of a nuclear family? Like I guess it really fundamentally gets back to that thing we always talk about, which is like, can women ever quote unquote have it all?
A few more lines from the article that I must note.
It talks about a major shift for the institution of marriage like yes, true. It noted that many women no longer need husbands for economic security also true, and that they no longer need them for sex. Lol. It also mentioned women in their thirties quote facing biologies ticking clock, which side note we will discuss in a future episode of this podcast.
I'm just really trying to figure out how they decided women didn't need men anymore for sex? Is that because like a vibrator? Like it's such a weird thing to put in a magazine.
I'm sorry, I mean this is after the sexual revolution. I think the point is that you didn't need to marry for sex. You could have sex before.
Mary, so you could just have sex freely without You.
Didn't need a husband for sex, not you didn't need men for sense though maybe you all so you also didn't need men for sex, But I don't know that they had discovered.
That at that point. It sounds like they discovered masturbation honestly.
Well, and maybe that is also true to some extent, like I think masturbation was being normalized in the sexual revolution, YadA, yah YadA. So also there's this funny quote from a New York therapist who says that everybody was talking about it and everybody was hysterical. But of course, like then, quoting this therapist in this article makes everyone all the more hysterical because they are making it such a bag.
I mean, you really can picture this, right, like all these women going to their therapists, that's sitting in the therapist's office, sniffling with a tissue, like I'm never gonna meet someone to marry. Like it's such a funny quote, but it really does. It evokes a thing that must really have happened.
So I actually called up Egene Carroll, who, as you probably know, is the woman who successfully sued Donald Trump for sexual assault, which was a case I covered. But I remembered as I was working on this research that she had been dispensing romantic advice at the time this article came out.
I loved ask Egene. She was the longtime advice columnist for Elle magazine.
I read it.
Religiously, and she wrote that column for thirty years.
And when I spoke to her, she told me that even years later, women were writing her letters about that newsweek line.
It had been seared into the brains of what am I about women's brains? It had been branded on the uteruses of every single woman from sea to shining Sea.
By the way, Egen Carroll was forty two at the time this story ran.
Oh, Jessica, I can remember where I was. Where I was when this Newsweek's story hit. I remember I was with my friend Barbara Shaler. Now that name rings a bell with you, because she was one of the twentieth centuries most devastatingly beautiful and charming women. Barbara Shaler was one of the great leaders in the labor movement in this country and fought day and night for women to receive equal pay among machinists. Even Barbara Shaleer was worried
about getting married. Here's the thing I think, Candace Bushnell said, it struck terror in the hearts of women. Of course, I never disagree with Candis, because she's always right about everything. I think what it did was this struck women dumb. It took us decades to figure out that the thing was a lie and that it was stupid, and that why would you worry about getting married anyway? Your whole
life can't be rapped around a man. And also it didn't occur to anybody that, of course, you could marry a woman if you wanted.
Okay, So even smart, cluding successful women like Egen Carroll are shocked but also shaken by this article and study. I can imagine, knowing what I do about the media, that this was probably kind of a feeding frenzy, right.
Oh. Absolutely.
And to be clear, while Newsweek did invent that terrorism line, they were not the first or the last to cover this study itself. Like Phil Donahue, who hosted a popular daytime talk show at that time, had done a whole segment on it before Newsweek. People magazine had put a giant photo of your former boss Susie Award winning broadcaster host Diane Sawyer, along with three other famous women of that era, with the headline got this are these women old maids question.
Mark wild I mean, and also the subhead is a Harvard Yale study says that most single women over thirty five can forget about marriage, which I have to tell you as someone who worked for Diane Sawyer, she is like a very attractive woman. I mean, she's an attractive person, and I don't think her chances of getting married wherever a real problem. But also nineteen eighty six is literally the year she met Mike Nichols, who would go on to be her husband. Mike Nichols was one of the
best filmmakers of our time. He made the graduate like Diane Sawyer was fine.
You know.
In the immediate weeks and months following that Newsweek story, this story was really everywhere, Like it wasn't just People magazine, it was ABC, it was CBS, and even two years later, like this is pretty remarkable. It was a subject of a special report on PBS like the Nightly News, Yeah, which called the study the quote Infamous.
Spinster Reports, otherwise known as the Yale Harvard Study of Marriage Patterns in the United States. It showed that the odds of a college educated woman over thirty five getting married were about the same as being kidnapped by Martians. Suddenly, the women of the post war generation were thrown into
a panic. They'd always intended to marry to have a family, but they wanted to develop their own identities first, to avoid all the traps that had ensnared all those millions of smart women who loved men who hated them for loving them too much. But now the game was over and they'd lost.
The whole thing is amazing and just feels so eighties, But the writing is also just so crazy to me. To be clear, here, your odds of getting kidnapped by martians are zero, So she's basically.
Just saying, ladies, you're out of luck.
Time to like put on your spincer outfits and go like knit in your living room or something.
With your cats, with your cats, Yes, your cats.
So we're talking about this wild cover story from the eighties. The newsweek ran about women being very unlikely to get married if they're not married by the time they're forty. It sounds like the media really ate up the story. But was there pushback?
Were there people who were saying, like this is crazy even at the time.
Yes, there was a great deal of pushback, and memorably one of the greatest bits of pushback came from Susan Feludi. Now Susan Faludi, I think you probably have read her book, her nineteen ninety one blockbuster bestseller, Backlash. It's a feminist classic. But at the time, she was twenty seven years old and a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, and she criticized this article. She was one of the first
earliest and harshest critics of it. And it was actually this article that would inspire her to write that book. I mean, I remember reading Backlash at Barnard. It was a huge book. And what she would do is she dug into the study itself and really damned its methodology. She argued that it was flawed, that it was used to beat women over the head for having pursued education
and jobs. And her broader argument was basically about how women face these competing narratives, like essentially, on the one hand, during this time, women were being told they could have it all. They were being told they'd made it, that the fight for equality had been won, and that, you know, like they were so equal they didn't even need additional rights.
But at the same time they're being depicted by pop culture and the news media as like hysterical, melting down, depressed, learned out, it's desperate to be married and unfortunately facing an infertility epidemic and a man shortage on top of everything else.
I mean, honestly, it feels like for women in this era and maybe in every air, it's sort of like you're if you do and you're damned if you're done. Like you have to pursue a career, but you also have to find a way to get married, Like there's no breaks here.
And you know, here's the thing that terrorism line, the core message that educated, career focused women risk spending their lives alone. It stuck starting in nineteen eighty nine. It is mentioned in When Harry Met Sally. This is also a Nora Efron film. This stars Meg Ryan and you may remember, if you've seen this, the part where she's weeping to Billie Crystal about her ex who didn't want to marry her.
So I drove them away and I'm gonna be forty when someday, someday, like in eight years, it's so crazy.
Right, So again, like that looming dead end, terrifying number of forty. So that's when Harry met Sally. But then four years later you have Sleepless in Seattle. This is nineteen ninety three, and in Sleepless the line is not mentioned only once, but actually twice. First in the scene we Heard at the Top, which is also Meg Ryan, she was in everything in that era, and she's playing a journalist who's talking with her editor played by Rosi o'donald, about basically what story she should do next.
Yeah, I remember this because they're basically talking about this sad widower whose son has called into a radio show saying he needs a new wife, and thousands of women have called into volunteer.
Yes, exactly.
And then one of Megryan and Rosie o'donald's colleagues jumps in to say, there are a lot of.
Desperate women out there looking for love, especially over a certain age. You know what's easy to be killed by terrorists, and it is to get married over the age of forty.
That's not true. That statistic is not true.
That's right, it's not true, but it feels true.
It feels true because it is true. Phrayctically, a whole book about how that statistic is not true. Comtown.
You brought it up, and so then later in the movie, this comes up again. This time Tom Hanks is at home in Seattle having dinner with his sister and her husband, and they're talking about all the women who called into that show, and the husband is sort of adamant that those women must be absolutely desperate.
Just because someone is looking for a nice guy, it doesn't leave them desperate. How about rapacious and love star.
No, it is easier to be killed by a terrorist than to find a husband after they.
Kids were absolutely untrue Nofron.
She's clearly doing something, you know, like she's read Flutie. She's not just recurgitating that line, like she's debunking it again and again. And it's worth noting this is a bit of a deep cut that Nora Afron actually began her career at Newsweek. She was a male girl in the nineteen sixties, but then smartly and quickly quit when she learned that women at the time were not allowed to be writers.
In Okay, I don't want to get off track, because obviously this is something you've told me before, but I feel like you have to explain that women weren't allowed to be writers and news Week in the.
Great Yes, I mean, how much time do you have? But TLDR.
Up until the nineteen seventies, women were told when they started working at Newsweek that they could, you know, be a male girl. They could be a researcher, they could be reporter, but they could not have buy lines because women were not writers at Newsweek. This would lead to a landmark gender discrimination suit in the nineteen seventies by the women who worked at Newsweek against the magazine. This would go on to spark all sorts of similar lawsuits.
It's like, basically changed the way journalism was done. This probably paved the way for us as writers and editor.
That's such an interesting detail.
But we know she's right because now we've established that it was wrong. Like a million Times news We did eventually retract this article.
Right, yes, twenty years later, and so, I mean, there's a few things to note. But the first one is that the study as it was published in the article was not actually a published study. It was a working paper, which yes, sometimes reporters will report on working papers, but that basically means a paper from an academic institution that's in its early stages. It had not yet been put out in a peer revered journal.
I mean that does seem like a very significant detail.
Totally significant.
And also by the time the study was in fact completed and published in an academic journal, it would ultimately become two studies. The first one about black women's marriage rates, which were an are much lower than white women, and this was mentioned in the music article, but like almost as a passing aside.
And then the second.
Study was about educated white women, which is what that terrorism line is actually referring to, and which is what became the focus of the article.
Did the data hold up? Was it actually true?
The data did not hold up. The problem was that they were looking at forty year olds and making predictions for twenty year olds at a time when there were
huge shifts in marital attitudes and behavior. So as a result, the statistics would later be challenged by a separate demographer in the US Census, we wrote, who would ultimately calculate that thirty year olds actually had a much higher likelihood of marrying, and for forty years it was not two point six percent, it was seventeen to twenty three percent.
Well, you know what's funny is I actually read the retraction and didn't The majority of the women who were featured in the original story end up getting married like eighty percent.
Of course they did.
Of course they did, so silly, And then how did the terrorism line get in?
So that's the other part of this. The way that this often worked in news magazines is at that time is that you would have multiple reporters working on a single story. This was like before the Internet. So you would have someone in San Francisco, you would have someone in Los Angeles, you'd have someone in Chicago. They would
all be interviewing women about this story. And then because you weren't emailing and everything wasn't digital, you weren't slacking, you would like pick up the phone and you would.
Just call fax it.
Yeah, you could fax them. Then they probably were sometimes, but you had these people called I think they were called shepherds at the time. We still had them when I began at Newsweek, and their job was to basically like pick up the phone when a correspondent would call from some faraway place and type down their notes, which they would live read to you, and then you would give those notes to whomever the assigned person was in New York who was going to take everything and write
up the article. So what was then revealed was that the terrorism line was basically like a funny aside written down by one of the handful of reporters who worked on the story, and it was sent in some sort of memo from the Newsweek San Francisco bureau to the main office in New York, and the writer in New York inserted the line to the story.
So it was meant to be funny.
What they said in the retraction article was that, yes, they thought it was funny, and they thought it would be clear that it was hyperbole. It wasn't intended to be taken literally, but like, obviously it was taken literally.
Well, so this actually explains why they don't cite any data on how likely you are to be killed by a terrorist, because they thought it was very obvious that it wasn't real data.
That's fascinating.
So, just to recap what you've just told me is that Newsweek had concocted this sensational line and the data behind it.
Was also flawed.
Yes, multiple problems with this start.
It's a good thing they issued a retraction.
I mean, I guess, except like, who remembers any of this? The point is this thing stuck in the zeitgeist. That original flawed statistic and the line about terrorism stuck in the zeitgeist. It stayed there.
It was repeated again and again and again.
And nobody remembers any of these details, except for, of course, the smart people who will be listening to our podcast.
So what's wild about this is that I actually was watching something recently, this show on Netflix called Firefly Lane, which is cheesy, but I watch and they did a whole episode about this newsweek cover. One of the characters, Yeah, one of the characters is an anchor, is a local news anchor, and she needs the nightly news with this statistic. And then someone else on the staff, an older woman, challenges her, and so throughout the episode she realizes that
in fact, the statistic isn't true. But the idea that this stuck with people for so long that a writer on this show that just got made last year remembered it is fascinating.
It's fascinating and it's telling.
I mean, I think part of what it's showing us is that as silly as some of these moments seem now, or as much as they feel like a blip from the nineteen eighties, they're teaching us something really important.
Yeah, really about the time we grew up in.
I mean with this story in particular, as I was doing the research, I started to realize, like, this wasn't even really about marriageable women or quote unquote man shortage or an age of expiration, or even like about undermining magazine articles or sexist editors. This was about women's place in the world more broadly.
Right, it was about putting them in their place exactly.
And I think to understand that you have to look at what was happening in the nineteen eighties, and what was happening in the nineteen eighties is the ton of pushback to all of these societal gains. So you can see it and hear it in this time a lot in the way conservative leaders talked about feminism and working women. This was, of course the Reagan era, so Ronald Reagan who had proclaimed feminism of quote straight jacket for women. He also introduced the term welfare queen as part of
efforts to demonize poor black single mothers. And so you know, while Americans are like navigating the consequences of the baby boom, women's liberation, sexual revolution, Reagan is basically reeling against feminism and so when this Newsweek article comes out in nineteen eighty six, there are some feminists and people at large who see it as part of this backlash. Like taken within the context of all of these other things, it was part of this conservative push against progress. So I
actually called up Susan Douglas. She is a professor of communication and media studies at the University of Michigan. She studies this subject. She looks at gender representation in media. But she also happened to be thirty six at the time that this article came out and recently married, So lucky for her, she didn't have to panic.
You know, no advance in feminism occurs without an almost instantaneous backlash against it. By the nineteen eighties, you had more women in the workforce than ever before. You had women postponing marriage and childbirths because they wanted to get established in their careers. And this was a threat to the patriarchal order. And so you get this ridiculous story, you know, terrorizing women who if they're thirty two and they're not married, you know they are doomed to a
life of loneliness. Let's also remember between nineteen seventy five and nineteen eighty five, you had a revolution in single mothers entering the workforce. They entered the workforce because feminism had give them a permission to do so. And they entered the workforce because they had to, because they had to support their families and they wanted to work. And you know, they did this in the face of nonexistent or utterly crappy childcare, against all kinds of prejudice. They
transformed the American family. And so some of this threat was not just for women who were never married. This was also oh so you divorced your husband because you, a liberated woman, thought that you were unhappy. Well, too bad for you. Good luck finding number two. No advance in feminism occurs without an almost instantaneous against it.
That's Susan Douglas Again. It's interesting to hear her talk about what was happening politically in the eighties as women are gaining more power at work and then knowing that this newsweek cover lands right in the middle.
Of it, right like a ton of bricks.
You know. So you can look at these things as isolated, or you can, as Feluti did, see them as interconnected. You can kind of draw this straight line from that article and the so called man shortage to what you're
seeing in the culture around that time. Susan Fludi talks in her book Backlash about how in film and television we begin to see this shift away from characters that are like scrappy working heroines towards these sort of you know, sad sacks desperate to get married, like she cites Sally Field in the movie Surrender.
You know what, if I'm not married again by the time I'm forty one, there's a twenty seven percent chance I'll end up a lonely alcoholic.
But I'm even thinking of later like the Bridget Jones types.
Yeah, I have two choices to give up and accept permanent state of spinsterhood or not. This time, I choose not.
And then if they aren't sad sacks desperate to get married, these once independent women are depicted as like straight up murderous, bunny boiling sociopaths. Of course, I'm referring to Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction.
I'm just supposed to you won't answer my calls, you change your number.
I I'm not going to be ignored.
Right, Like, it's not enough that the women are pathetic, their career ambitions have to actually turn them into like dangerous and deranged characters.
Yeah, so basically, this myth, this lie about these like desperate, sad single women, has become accepted truth in the culture.
It definitely does.
And you kind of still see that myth, right, this kind of desperate single woman playing it on TV. I mean it makes me think of The Bachelor, right, which has been running on ABC for like twenty years, in which I occasionally still watch, And the whole premise of that show is that it's this group of women who are pretty young, like in their early twenties, and they're so desperate to get married and have the approval of
a man, and god forbid. Occasionally there's one who's like in her thirties and they're so mean to her, like, uh, you're the worst. You're so old and desperate. What are you even doing here? So, like, I don't know how much progress we have made. It's hard to say.
I mean I think we've made some.
Like The Bachelor is a certain kind of televisionhow.
Do you mean, like super trashy?
Because I love it? Like that said, like, I'm still sitting here trying to rack my brain for an example of a show that doesn't end in a relationship. I mean, honestly, like, if those listening can think of anything, feel free to send us your thoughts.
But okay, Susie, I feel like we need to pause.
For a moment and spend a little time talking about us. Okay, because I couldn't help. But wonder are we desperate single women?
Good Carrie Bradshaw reference.
Thank you so much. I've in practicing, but I think this is actually a good spot to pause for our listeners. Before you know, we get real personal. So we'll pick this up again with my bad Carrie Bradshaw impression. But also both of our views are complicated views on marriage.
In part two, this is in retrospect. Thanks for listening.
Is there a cultural moment you can't stop thinking about and want us to explore in a future episode. Email us at inretropod at gmail dot com, or find us on Instagram at in retropod.
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You can also find us on Instagram at Jessica Bennett and at Susie b NYC. Also check out Jessica's books Feminist Fight Club and This Is Eighteen.
In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and the Media. Lauren Hanson is our supervising producer. Derek Clements is our engineer and sound designer. Sharon Attia is our researcher and associate producer.
Our executive producer from the media is Cindy Levy. Our executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stump and Katrina Norbel.
Our artwork is from Pentagrams.
Additional editing help from Mary Doo and Mike Coscarelli. Sound correction and mastering by Amanda Rose Smith.
We are your hosts Susie Vannacarum.
And Jessica Bennett. We're also executive producers.
For even more check out in retropod dot com.
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