Careers and plane crashes

I’m of a certain age. The age to have heard as a teen that “An unmarried college educated woman over the age of 40 has a better chance of dying in a plane crash than of getting married.”

Put aside, if you can, that marriage equality was a distant dream at that time, and think about the message. The message which, we can assume, was intended for White women who could afford to go to college. The message that we were making a tradeoff. Romantic relationships vs. education. Love vs. career. Marriage vs. financial independence. Family vs. a profession. Having the second makes it less likely that a man will want you for the former.

So much was wrong about the way this study was conducted, so it’s no surprise that the prediction was also proved wrong. And the study didn’t anticipate the rapid changes in societal norms around cohabitation, single motherhood and divorce. But the message stuck with many of us, because it spoke to an uneasiness we had about how to reconcile the roles of wife/partner, mother, daughter and breadwinner.

Women across the US had been figuring this out for generations, but many White women didn’t have access to these histories which came from communities of color where women often worked outside the home for pay. And queer stories — of the kind that didn’t involve loneliness, misery and death — weren’t being told to us, either, unless we were very lucky.

Where are these stories now? Where are the stories about committing and loving outside of legal sanction? Stories where the durability of the relationship isn’t evaluated based on how it creates a way for wealth to be accumulated? Where unequal pay associated with gender identity looks very different from the hetero norm? Where is this study of love?

Thank you to Brainpickings for the inspiration for this meditation.