Every so often, I hear someone repeat a claim that some study or other “proved” that a woman over 40 is “more likely to be killed by a terrorist than ever to get married.”
Now, I don’t want this to turn into a debate, nor do I really want a statistical refutation of that claim. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, that claim is self-evidently absurd. Women over 40 get married every day, while terrorism is still quite rare.
What I DO want to know is, where did that specific metaphor come from? I KNOW that there have been all kinds of sociological studies showing that women who don’t get married by a certain age usually stay single, but has there EVER been a real study that stated “a 40 year old woman is more likely to be killed by terrorists than to get married”?
If so, WHAT study made that specific (dubious) claim? And if no sociologist ever used those specific words, where did that oft-repeated “statistic” really come from?
“Single women over 40 have less chance to marry than to be taken hostage by a terrorist.” Shock waves of anger, despair and disillusionment swept through the ranks of women beyond the age of 40 in June 1986 when those words appeared in Newsweek magazine as part of a cover story on women and marriage.
If memory serves, the 1987 article was about the sociological ‘flavor of the month’ called the ‘man shortage’, and the author was speaking metaphorically – sort of like an erudite version of ‘a woman over 40 has as much chance of marrying as a snowball in hell’. (And it wasn’t ‘taken hostage by a terrorist’ – the article said ‘killed by a terrorist’ – this is from memory, but I am pretty sure of it).
At least that was how I took it – I mean, come on, I’m guessing in 1987 you could count people killed by terrorists on one hand – there had to be more over-40 brides than that.
It was, nonetheless, completely bogus. While mass media outlets including Time and NewsWeek bought it whole, subsequent studies refuted the story easily and ripped the statistical methods used to shreds.
This even became the subject of an episode of the sitcom Designing Women. IIRC, Jean Smart’s character went into a depressive funk after reading this, and snapped out of it when she learned that this story was not only untrue, but weirdly, wildly untrue.
Of course, it never seems to have occured to the doofus who wrote that, that a woman who was over 40 and never married perhaps never wanted to get married. But I guess some folks still have trouble with the notion that a woman might remain single by choice.
Thanks to those who found the Newsweek piece, which does appear to be the source of the terrorist metaphor.
While I never doubted that the marriage rate among never-married females over 40 was low*, I was always baffled by the suggestion that a 40 year old single woman was more likely to the victim of terrorism than to get married. That just seemed self-evidently ridiculous. It NEVER sounded like something a real sociologist would say- it sounded more like a talk show host’s (or standup comedian’s) oversimplified summary of a real study.
Apparently, it wasn’t a professional comedian- just a Newsweek staff writer trying to be funny. As someone else said, there would have to be a LOT of terrorists running around for that “statistic” to be true.
I get the feeling a Newsweek writer was trying to be flippant, but his/her comical hyperbole got taken literally by waaaay too many people.
Not that this is (necessarily) a crisis- some of the over-40, never-married women are undoubtedly gay, others may have CHOSEN never to marry, and so on.
