"[T]here are now 1.33 women graduating from college for every man, the best and brightest women will either have to 'marry down' or, more likely, we are told, remain single. Taken together, highly educated women will have either family or career. Half of it all, rather than 'having it all.'

...To know whether a woman sacrificed career for her family, we need to know her employment status over many years. The Mellon Foundation did just that in the mid-1990's, collecting information on more than 10,000 women (and 10,000 men) who entered one of 34 highly selective colleges and universities in 1976 and graduated by 1981. We thus have detailed data about their educational, family and work histories when they were in their late 30's. That gives us enough information to figure out whether many women who graduated from top-ranked schools have left the work force.

Among these women fully 58 percent were never out of the job market for more than six months total in the 15 or so years that followed college or more advanced schooling. On average, the women in the survey spent a total of just 1.6 years out of the labor force, or 11 percent of their potential working years. Just 7 percent spent more than half of their available time away from employment.

... 87 percent of the sample had been married, 79 percent were still married 15 years after graduation and 69 percent had at least one child (statistics that are similar to national ones for this demographic group from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey). Women with at least one child spent a total of 2.1 years on average out of the labor force, or 14 percent of their potential time. Fifty percent of those with children never had a non-employment (non-educational) spell lasting more than 6 months."

""Marriage,' contends Carlson, 'is not just about the couple.  It's not just a matter between two individuals.  It's more than just an erotic friendship.  It's about children and extended families and communities and more."  He calls these other factors 'concentric circles around the marriage,' circles that are affected when the family changes in any way or when it defies certain social traditions."

Demographers have marveled at the remarkable "retreat from marriage" witnessed in recent decades in the United States - and other industrialized countries. However, in a new study published in Population Studies, researchers at Pennsylvania State University conclude that though many young Americans are postponing marriage, relatively few are actually avoiding wedlock.

The Penn State scholars acknowledge that in the fall of the marriage rate during the final decades of the 20th century, many have discerned "a sea change in the social and demographic behaviour of Western populations ... brought about by fundamental shifts towards ideologies that emphasize individual autonomy."  These scholars' own analysis, however, suggests that the retreat from wedlock is actually more pronounced in Europe than in the United States, where almost all young adults still do eventually marry, even though at later ages than in the past.

That Americans are older when marrying than in the past is very clear: the Penn State researchers calculate that in 2000 the average age at first marriage was 28.3 years for grooms, 26.3 years for brides, compared to 23.0 years for grooms and 20.8 years for brides in 1970. However, the Penn State scholars' statistical model indicates that even though Americans coming of age at the turn of the 21st century have postponed wedlock, the overwhelming majority - 89% of men and 91% of women - will eventually marry.

Past generations of Americans, it is true, saw a higher percentage of men and women marry: among Americans who came of age at the end of the Sixties, 97% of men and 97% of women married. Thus, though the data do indicate "a real decline in marriage" in the United States, that decline is "considerably smaller" than it has appeared to demographers who have prematurely misinterpreted numbers indicating delayed marriage as evidence of permanent singleness. Properly adjusted, the numbers still attest to the abiding - if somewhat belated - attraction of marriage for 21st-century American men and women.