In the year 2000, 62 percent of married American women, or 35 million, were in the labor force.  Almost 63 percent (62.8%) of these women had children less than six years of age.

(Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin 2340; and unpublished data, in U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2001 [121st edition], Washington, DC, 2001, p. 373.)

"The end result: here we are, supposedly "having it all" as we edge 40; excellent education; good qualifications; great jobs; fast-moving careers; good incomes; and many of us own the trendy little inner-city pad we live in. It's a nice caffe-latte kind of life, really.

But the truth is - for me at least - the career is no longer a challenge, the lifestyle trappings are joyless (the latest Collette Dinnigan frock looks pretty silly on a near-40-year-old), and the point of it all seems, well, pointless.

I am childless and I am angry. Angry that I was so foolish to take the word of my feminist mothers as gospel. Angry that I was daft enough to believe female fulfilment came with a leather briefcase.

It was wrong. It was crap. And Malcolm Turnbull has a point. God forbid!"

(Source: Virginia Haussegger, "The sins of our feminist mothers," The Age [Melbourne, Australia], July 23 2002, http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/07/22/1026898972150.html.)

How have radical feminists improved women's lives by attacking marriage?  The question forces itself upon readers of a recent study of women's health appearing in Social Science & Medicine.  Written by a team of sociologists at York and McMaster Universities in Canada, this new study assesses physical and psychological health information collected for a nationally representative sample of Canadian women ages 25 to 64.  The data substantiate a number of clear advantages for married women over unmarried women. 

"Married women reported the best health," write the Canadian researchers, "and formerly married women the worst."  The reported health status of never-married women fell in between that of these two groups.  The researchers trace the advantageous self-reported health status of the married to their superior "socioeconomic position."

The advantage enjoyed by married women over unmarried women appeared even more pronounced when the focus shifts to psychological stress.   Generally, the researchers found that "currently married women fared better (i.e., had less stress) than the never-married women."  Although the measures for married women did, predictably, run somewhat higher than those for the unmarried in "social life stress" and "family health stress," the measures for the married came in much lower than those for the unmarried for "job stress," "environment stress," "child stress," "financial stress," and "relationship stress."  "Marital status," the researchers point out, "mattered the most for financial strain and relationship stress," two categories in which the married were clearly favored over the unmarried.

(Source: Peggy McDonough, Vivienne Walters, and Lisa Strohschein, "Chronic stress and the social patterning of women's health in Canada," Social Science & Medicine 54[2002]: 767-782.)