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Essay on Women and Marriage
Relationships are the most important things in life, and marriage is one of the most important relationships. Marriage is a commitment of spending the rest of our life with someone. Over the past four decades there have been substantial changes in the attitudes toward marriage among women in the United States. There have been many factors such as economic factors, rise in feminism, parents' influence, attitudes about sex, educational demand, and divorce rates that have contributed to the overall change in women's roles in marriage. Women in today's society marry much younger than their ancestors due to the social change of today's economy .
So how do these factors contribute to the change in women's roles in marriage and how do the views of marriage differ from the views during the eighteenth, nineteenth century, and the Shakespeare Era? American women are waiting longer than ever to get married. The average women in the 1950s got married at the age of 20 and now the average age for women to be wedded is 24.5 years. While women are waiting longer to get married, the rate of women who never get married also increased. Between 1992 and 2010 women for all age groups under 55 had an increase from 21.4 million to 44.2 million of women who never got married. That's a significant change from the past (Dale, 2003, pg. 54). The timing of a first marriage is related to the attractiveness of the alternatives to marrying.
When women value roles that provide viable alternatives to the role of wife, they delay marriage. The role of women has undergone significant transformation brought by changes in society. Today's families are smaller and live longer, thereby allowing women to devote a smaller part of their lives to raising children than was the case in earlier times. Thus, more time is available for women to exercise their potential......
