Speaker 1: In June nineteen eighty six, Newsweek magazine published this cover
Speaker 1: story that read, if you're a single woman, here are
Speaker 1: your chances of getting married. The crux of the article
Speaker 1: was but due to an alleged man shortage, things weren't
Speaker 1: looking great for women north of thirty five, and in fact,
Speaker 1: if you were a woman over the age of forty,
Speaker 1: you are more likely to be killed by a terrorist
Speaker 1: than to get married. The article pierced the zeitguy so
Speaker 1: intensely that even seven years later, it was a plot
Speaker 1: point in Nora Efron's Oscar nominated romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle.
Speaker 2: There are a lot of desperate women out there looking for.
Speaker 3: Love, especially over a certain age.
Speaker 4: You know what's easier to be killed by a terrorists,
Speaker 4: and it is to get married over the age of forty.
Speaker 3: That's not true. That statistic is not true.
Speaker 5: That's right, it's not true, but it feels true.
Speaker 1: The terrorism line was indeed not true, and Newsweek would
Speaker 1: even go on to print a retraction. But nevertheless, that
Speaker 1: urban myth endo married by forty or end up a
Speaker 1: sad old maid. I'm Jessica Bennett and I'm Susie Bannacharam.
Speaker 1: This is in retrospect, where each week we revisit a
Speaker 1: cultural moment from the past that shaped us.
Speaker 2: And that we just can't stop thinking about.
Speaker 1: Today. We're talking about that sensational nineteen eighties cover story
Speaker 1: from Newsweek, but we're also talking about the enduring myth
Speaker 1: it tapped into that of the desperate single woman.
Speaker 6: This is part one, So Jess.
Speaker 5: We started with a clip from Sleepless in Seattle, which
Speaker 5: is obviously a classic rom com and Noura Efron movie.
Speaker 5: And the reason we're talking about that movie is because
Speaker 5: it references this absurd claim that a woman over forty
Speaker 5: is more likely to be killed by a terrorist than
Speaker 5: to get married. So remind me, where did this idea
Speaker 5: come from?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 1: Okay, so it didn't come from Nora Afron, and it
Speaker 1: is not true, by the way, I did. Where it
Speaker 1: came from was this nineteen eighty six cover story in
Speaker 1: Newsweek magazine, which was one of the most red and
Speaker 1: respected magazines of its era. And that story would send
Speaker 1: American women into a panic.
Speaker 5: I mean no wonder I would feel panicked if someone
Speaker 5: told me I was more likely to get killed than married.
Speaker 1: Right, And so the fact that seven years later, when
Speaker 1: this movie comes out, Meg Ryan and Rosie O'Donnell, those
Speaker 1: are the voices you hear in the clip are still
Speaker 1: talking about It. Gives you some sense of just how
Speaker 1: firmly this idea cemented into the American psyche.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I do remember this really being part of the zeitgeist.
Speaker 5: So what made you choose this moment to talk about? So?
Speaker 1: I mean, for starters, I am a woman newly over forty,
Speaker 1: and while I did ultimately get married, I have a
Speaker 1: lot of complicated feelings about the subject. Yes, as do
Speaker 1: I and also, as you know, we both have a
Speaker 1: personal connection to Newsweek, the magazine where this story ran.
Speaker 1: This was where I began my career. It's where you
Speaker 1: and I would meet working a decade later, and it's
Speaker 1: where when I did start working. Twenty years after this
Speaker 1: story ran, people were still talking about it. Like literally
Speaker 1: in the year two thousand and six, when I was
Speaker 1: a junior reporter at Newsweek in one of my first jobs,
Speaker 1: the magazine decided to write another cover story about that
Speaker 1: now debunked cover story for the twenty geth anniversary of
Speaker 1: the cover story. It's wild, but I think also at
Speaker 1: its core, I'm fascinated by this story because it's a
Speaker 1: microcosm in a lot of ways, for the way that
Speaker 1: the media tends to take these subtle or sometimes not
Speaker 1: so subtle jabs at women, for the way that Hollywood
Speaker 1: and so much of our popular culture still kind of
Speaker 1: sends us message that a single woman is something to
Speaker 1: be afraid of or ashamed of, And ultimately for how
Speaker 1: that silly little statistic, which was proven wrong in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, can still sometimes feel very real or like
Speaker 1: it has resonans even four decades later.
Speaker 2: So where should we begin in terms of breaking this down?
Speaker 1: So I think we should start with a little context.
Speaker 1: To understand the impact of that article, you kind of
Speaker 1: have to understand the place that Newsweek held in the
Speaker 1: culture in the nineteen eighties. Newsweek was one of the
Speaker 1: classic news magazines, back when people still, you know, paged
Speaker 1: through magazines physically, and the internet was like a dial
Speaker 1: up modem that took twenty five minutes to connect and
Speaker 1: got disconnected every time your mom would like pick up
Speaker 1: the phone to cost Newsweek was in every dentist in
Speaker 1: doctor's office. I don't know if you remember that, Yes,
Speaker 1: I do remember that. It was like in classrooms at schools.
Speaker 1: It was displayed on actual newsstands alongside other magazines such
Speaker 1: as US News and World Report and BusinessWeek and Time
Speaker 1: and all of these magazines, many of which no longer exists,
Speaker 1: where you would eagerly go to actually see the week's headlines.
Speaker 5: Actually, the crazy thing is when I went to Iran
Speaker 5: for the first time, where my family is from and
Speaker 5: my mom has lived until pretty recently, I remember the
Speaker 5: only English language news I could find, because that was
Speaker 5: pre internet, was a Newsweek magazine.
Speaker 6: That's so interesting, and I mean that's the thing. It
Speaker 6: held a lot of weight.
Speaker 1: And when I was in college, and I think even
Speaker 1: high school, working at Newsweek was my literal dream job.
Speaker 1: Like that's where I wanted to work. I wanted to
Speaker 1: be a journalist. And where would an aspiring, ambitious journalist
Speaker 1: want to work, They would want to work a Newsweek magazine.
Speaker 5: I mean that makes sense. I also grew up loving Newsweek.
Speaker 5: I remember I used to as a very small child,
Speaker 5: like eight or nine years old. I used to read
Speaker 5: it to my parents' friends as a party trick. Like
Speaker 5: my dad would call me out from bed and be like,
Speaker 5: show everyone how you read Newsweek, and I honestly, I
Speaker 5: think I just read the odds, like I didn't really
Speaker 5: know what I'm reading, but I wanted to be like
Speaker 5: my dad then he read the magazine, so I would
Speaker 5: like flip through it and read it too great.
Speaker 1: And so Newsweek was always and I don't know if
Speaker 1: you'd remember this from that time. I think I only
Speaker 1: learned it later, but it was considered to be like
Speaker 1: the happier and more progressive of the two. And I
Speaker 1: remember when I started there that was sort of a
Speaker 1: point of pride. Newsweek had run a cover story about
Speaker 1: the AIDS epidemic, long before most people had heard of it.
Speaker 1: It was ahead of its time on subjects like gay marriage,
Speaker 1: and so while Newsweek and Time were known for covering
Speaker 1: really serious international affairs and politics obviously, they were also
Speaker 1: known for these kind of splashy covers on social trends,
Speaker 1: like the kind of stories that for me anyway that
Speaker 1: I dreamed of writing and so fun fact, you might
Speaker 1: remember this, I used to run the Newsweek tumbler.
Speaker 2: Oh, I do remember that.
Speaker 1: So I have this whole collection of Newsweek covers, many
Speaker 1: of which are just incredible. I have this image of
Speaker 1: the cover story about Anita Hill, which has this kind
Speaker 1: of iconic image of her during those hearings, and it
Speaker 1: says a special report on sexual harassment, and then the
Speaker 1: headline is why women are so angry?
Speaker 5: I mean, maybe they're angry because they're getting sexually harassed.
Speaker 5: It seems like they answers itself.
Speaker 1: There's also another cover I have saved. It has Sally
Speaker 1: Ride on it with the title Space Woman, when she
Speaker 1: became the first American woman to go into space. That
Speaker 1: was kind of this iconic cover that I still remember.
Speaker 1: I feel a little bit like a superhero name. So
Speaker 1: there's that, yes completely, and then there are the more
Speaker 1: hilarious ones. There's one that I post every June for
Speaker 1: Pride from nineteen eighty three, with this incredible close up
Speaker 1: image of two women against this kind of like hazy
Speaker 1: school photo backdrop. One is wearing a velvet body suit
Speaker 1: and the other is in pearls and a jean jacket.
Speaker 1: The cover just says, in giant block letters, lesbians.
Speaker 2: With an exclamation point, right, like, it.
Speaker 6: Doesn't actually have it. It doesn't.
Speaker 1: I just always refer to it as having an exclamation point,
Speaker 1: but it's like giant block letters. And then I think
Speaker 1: the subtitle is what are the limits of tolerance? But like,
Speaker 1: it's just an incredible, incredible cover and says a lot
Speaker 1: about the nineteen eighty So.
Speaker 5: I guess lesbians were coming out of the closet. What
Speaker 5: else was going on in the world at that time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so the nineteen eighties is key here. Well, feminism
Speaker 1: had made great strides. This is like the women's liberation
Speaker 1: movement in the nineteen seventies was in full force. You
Speaker 1: now have more women in the workforce. Labor participation has
Speaker 1: risen from forty two percent in the early nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: to nearly sixty percent by the late nineteen eighties.
Speaker 6: So women are dramatically more visible.
Speaker 1: There were all of these representations of working women, single
Speaker 1: women in film and on television. You had examples like
Speaker 1: Charlie's Angels. You had depictions of single working women like
Speaker 1: Mary Tyler Moore, and you had magazines like Cosmopolitan and Glamour,
Speaker 1: sort of the more women's magazines that were starting to
Speaker 1: kind of elevate or talk about this single woman lifestyle.
Speaker 2: That's funny.
Speaker 5: It's like the classic image of the working mom in
Speaker 5: her boxy business suit and her like white sneakers with
Speaker 5: her heels and her purse, like it feels very much
Speaker 5: of a certain kind of era where we started to
Speaker 5: see women emerge in this very public way.
Speaker 6: And on the heels of that.
Speaker 1: This is three years after that Lesbian's cover came out.
Speaker 1: The story about women's chances of getting married hits newstands.
Speaker 5: Okay, I really want you to get into the article,
Speaker 5: but can we please talk about this cover.
Speaker 2: It's so bad.
Speaker 1: It is hideous. It features a full page line graph
Speaker 1: basically that looks like it was made on kind of
Speaker 1: like a I don't know, nineteen eighties early Apple computer.
Speaker 1: It's red, white and blue, and it has this dramatic
Speaker 1: drop to this graph, and that is what they want
Speaker 1: you to see. It is going down and down and
Speaker 1: down along the headline if you're a single woman, here
Speaker 1: are your chances of getting married.
Speaker 5: It's funny because this is kind of like the original clickbait, right,
Speaker 5: it's like a version of the curiosity gap. Like if
Speaker 5: you're a woman and you're seeing this cover, you're gonna
Speaker 5: definitely pick it up. If you're worried in some way,
Speaker 5: you have some anxiety around getting married, and then you're
Speaker 5: going to be horrified by the answer, Like it's very
Speaker 5: clear the answer is not good.
Speaker 2: If marriage is in your.
Speaker 1: Sights, yes, yes, it's like your odds of finding love
Speaker 1: are in free fall, and thus, due to the conventional
Speaker 1: wisdom of the nineteen eighties, your life is in free fall.
Speaker 5: Well, also, it's just this idea that like, if marriage
Speaker 5: is the goal, if you're forty already, there's no recourse.
Speaker 5: It's not like they're saying there's something you could do differently.
Speaker 5: So it's just like, all right, pack it in, ladies,
Speaker 5: you're gonna have to go home without.
Speaker 6: A mate, right, And that's exactly what the article did.
Speaker 1: It made women seem helpless and the prospect of finding
Speaker 1: a mate hopeless.
Speaker 6: So the article.
Speaker 1: Itself opens with a woman who can't stop hearing about
Speaker 1: this so called man shortage, Like her mom is calling
Speaker 1: her to warn her about it, her sisters are all
Speaker 1: talking about it. It's on the news.
Speaker 5: I mean, can you just imagine how many women got
Speaker 5: calls from their mom about this?
Speaker 2: Like so many?
Speaker 1: And it goes on to explain that there was this
Speaker 1: study out of Harvard and Yale, So of course this
Speaker 1: sounds very formal. These are great institutions that quote confirmed
Speaker 1: what everybody suspected all along that many women who seem
Speaker 1: to have it all, good looks, good jobs, advanced degrees,
Speaker 1: and high salaries will never have mates period. End quote.
Speaker 5: The whole horror I mean, first of all, is it
Speaker 5: that they will never have mates or they will never
Speaker 5: have male mates, because it really does seem to be
Speaker 5: focused on men.
Speaker 2: So their lesbian cover must not have come soon enough.
Speaker 6: Oh my god, exactly.
Speaker 1: And in fact, there are multiple headlines for this story,
Speaker 1: but the headline once you open it up and are
Speaker 1: reading it in the middle of the magazine is is
Speaker 1: it too late for prince Charming? So clearly we're talking
Speaker 1: about princes here now. The article itself was written by
Speaker 1: four women and two men, some of whom were still
Speaker 1: at Newsweek when I was there two decades later, and
Speaker 1: as we have mentioned, it was based on data from
Speaker 1: a Yale and Harvard study which made basically everyone believed.
Speaker 2: It that automatically gives it a sense of credibility.
Speaker 1: And this is how the data was presented that if
Speaker 1: you were a white college educated woman over thirty, you
Speaker 1: had a twenty percent chance of ever getting married for
Speaker 1: the rest of your life. By age thirty five, your
Speaker 1: odds would drop to five percent and by forty and
Speaker 1: this is where the famous infamous line comes in. A
Speaker 1: woman is quote more likely to be killed by a
Speaker 1: terrorist than to get married, with her chances of marriage
Speaker 1: for the rest of her life at two point six percent.
Speaker 5: Okay, I have so many questions about this because I
Speaker 5: just don't believe there was ever a time in this
Speaker 5: country where the likelihood of getting killed by a terrorist
Speaker 5: was at two point six percent.
Speaker 2: Like, that can't be correct.
Speaker 1: No, totally, And you're right it wasn't. It would turn
Speaker 1: out that this line was meant to be taken humorously,
Speaker 1: I guess, and to be totally hyperbolic. But like, of course,
Speaker 1: why would anybody think that coming from this serious, well
Speaker 1: respected news magazine that had six reporters reporting this.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's interesting because I feel like at that time,
Speaker 5: especially in the eighties, there was more airplane hijacking, so
Speaker 5: I guess most people would have been thinking about that
Speaker 5: versus what we think about now, which is nine to eleven.
Speaker 5: But back then, I guess the fear of being hijacked
Speaker 5: was a much more common fear that people had.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, And like you said, I don't think you'd ever
Speaker 1: use that phrasing today, But I think the article was
Speaker 1: tapping into not only that terrorism anxiety, but this other
Speaker 1: anxiety that was bubbling up at the time about women's
Speaker 1: place in the world.
Speaker 5: So, Okay, more women are working, but what's going on
Speaker 5: in their personal lives? Like, I feel like the eighties
Speaker 5: was still very much a classic hetero family vibe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, like the nuclear family was still intact, but
Speaker 1: it's also shifting. So in nineteen eighty six, when the
Speaker 1: Newsweek article comes out, less people are getting married, more
Speaker 1: people are divorcing. That's becoming more common, and those who
Speaker 1: still are getting married are doing so at a later
Speaker 1: age than before.
Speaker 5: So that's a good thing though, right, because doesn't research
Speaker 5: show that every year you wait to get married, the
Speaker 5: chances of divorce drop.
Speaker 1: Yep, it does, which is why getting married later is
Speaker 1: actually better. And the other thing is, you know, women
Speaker 1: had more freedom at this time when it came to relationships,
Speaker 1: Like this was post birth control pill, it was post
Speaker 1: sexual revolution. Women were in various jobs pushing against traditional expectations.
Speaker 2: I mean, honestly, all of this sounds like good news
Speaker 2: to me, but.
Speaker 1: I mean yes and no, like good for women. But
Speaker 1: the thing was society was getting uncomfortable.
Speaker 5: With, right, So I guess people are questioning whether or
Speaker 5: not having more women in the workforce is a good thing,
Speaker 5: or does it come at the expense of a nuclear family?
Speaker 5: Like I guess it really fundamentally gets back to that
Speaker 5: thing we always talk about, which is like, can women
Speaker 5: ever quote unquote have it all?
Speaker 6: A few more lines from the article that I must note.
Speaker 1: It talks about a major shift for the institution of
Speaker 1: marriage like yes, true. It noted that many women no
Speaker 1: longer need husbands for economic security also true, and that
Speaker 1: they no longer need them for sex. Lol. It also
Speaker 1: mentioned women in their thirties quote facing biologies ticking clock,
Speaker 1: which side note we will discuss in a future episode
Speaker 1: of this podcast.
Speaker 5: I'm just really trying to figure out how they decided
Speaker 5: women didn't need men anymore for sex? Is that because
Speaker 5: like a vibrator? Like it's such a weird thing to
Speaker 5: put in a magazine.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I mean this is after the sexual revolution.
Speaker 1: I think the point is that you didn't need to
Speaker 1: marry for sex. You could have sex before.
Speaker 2: Mary, so you could just have sex freely without You.
Speaker 1: Didn't need a husband for sex, not you didn't need
Speaker 1: men for sense though maybe you all so you also
Speaker 1: didn't need men for sex, But I don't know that
Speaker 1: they had discovered.
Speaker 5: That at that point. It sounds like they discovered masturbation honestly.
Speaker 1: Well, and maybe that is also true to some extent,
Speaker 1: like I think masturbation was being normalized in the sexual revolution, YadA,
Speaker 1: yah YadA. So also there's this funny quote from a
Speaker 1: New York therapist who says that everybody was talking about
Speaker 1: it and everybody was hysterical. But of course, like then,
Speaker 1: quoting this therapist in this article makes everyone all the
Speaker 1: more hysterical because they are making it such a bag.
Speaker 5: I mean, you really can picture this, right, like all
Speaker 5: these women going to their therapists, that's sitting in the
Speaker 5: therapist's office, sniffling with a tissue, like I'm never gonna
Speaker 5: meet someone to marry. Like it's such a funny quote,
Speaker 5: but it really does. It evokes a thing that must
Speaker 5: really have happened.
Speaker 1: So I actually called up Egene Carroll, who, as you
Speaker 1: probably know, is the woman who successfully sued Donald Trump
Speaker 1: for sexual assault, which was a case I covered. But
Speaker 1: I remembered as I was working on this research that
Speaker 1: she had been dispensing romantic advice at the time this
Speaker 1: article came out.
Speaker 5: I loved ask Egene. She was the longtime advice columnist
Speaker 5: for Elle magazine.
Speaker 2: I read it.
Speaker 6: Religiously, and she wrote that column for thirty years.
Speaker 1: And when I spoke to her, she told me that
Speaker 1: even years later, women were writing her letters about that
Speaker 1: newsweek line.
Speaker 7: It had been seared into the brains of what am
Speaker 7: I about women's brains? It had been branded on the
Speaker 7: uteruses of every single woman from sea to shining Sea.
Speaker 6: By the way, Egen Carroll was forty two at the
Speaker 6: time this story ran.
Speaker 7: Oh, Jessica, I can remember where I was. Where I
Speaker 7: was when this Newsweek's story hit. I remember I was
Speaker 7: with my friend Barbara Shaler. Now that name rings a
Speaker 7: bell with you, because she was one of the twentieth
Speaker 7: centuries most devastatingly beautiful and charming women. Barbara Shaler was
Speaker 7: one of the great leaders in the labor movement in
Speaker 7: this country and fought day and night for women to
Speaker 7: receive equal pay among machinists. Even Barbara Shaleer was worried
Speaker 7: about getting married. Here's the thing I think, Candace Bushnell said,
Speaker 7: it struck terror in the hearts of women. Of course,
Speaker 7: I never disagree with Candis, because she's always right about everything.
Speaker 7: I think what it did was this struck women dumb.
Speaker 7: It took us decades to figure out that the thing
Speaker 7: was a lie and that it was stupid, and that
Speaker 7: why would you worry about getting married anyway? Your whole
Speaker 7: life can't be rapped around a man. And also it
Speaker 7: didn't occur to anybody that, of course, you could marry
Speaker 7: a woman if you wanted.
Speaker 5: Okay, So even smart, cluding successful women like Egen Carroll
Speaker 5: are shocked but also shaken by this article and study.
Speaker 5: I can imagine, knowing what I do about the media,
Speaker 5: that this was probably kind of a feeding frenzy, right.
Speaker 6: Oh. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: And to be clear, while Newsweek did invent that terrorism line,
Speaker 1: they were not the first or the last to cover
Speaker 1: this study itself. Like Phil Donahue, who hosted a popular
Speaker 1: daytime talk show at that time, had done a whole
Speaker 1: segment on it before Newsweek. People magazine had put a
Speaker 1: giant photo of your former boss Susie Award winning broadcaster
Speaker 1: host Diane Sawyer, along with three other famous women of
Speaker 1: that era, with the headline got this are these women
Speaker 1: old maids question.
Speaker 5: Mark wild I mean, and also the subhead is a
Speaker 5: Harvard Yale study says that most single women over thirty
Speaker 5: five can forget about marriage, which I have to tell
Speaker 5: you as someone who worked for Diane Sawyer, she is
Speaker 5: like a very attractive woman. I mean, she's an attractive person,
Speaker 5: and I don't think her chances of getting married wherever
Speaker 5: a real problem. But also nineteen eighty six is literally
Speaker 5: the year she met Mike Nichols, who would go on
Speaker 5: to be her husband. Mike Nichols was one of the
Speaker 5: best filmmakers of our time. He made the graduate like
Speaker 5: Diane Sawyer was fine.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 1: In the immediate weeks and months following that Newsweek story,
Speaker 1: this story was really everywhere, Like it wasn't just People magazine,
Speaker 1: it was ABC, it was CBS, and even two years later,
Speaker 1: like this is pretty remarkable. It was a subject of
Speaker 1: a special report on PBS like the Nightly News, Yeah,
Speaker 1: which called the study the quote Infamous.
Speaker 8: Spinster Reports, otherwise known as the Yale Harvard Study of
Speaker 8: Marriage Patterns in the United States. It showed that the
Speaker 8: odds of a college educated woman over thirty five getting
Speaker 8: married were about the same as being kidnapped by Martians. Suddenly,
Speaker 8: the women of the post war generation were thrown into
Speaker 8: a panic. They'd always intended to marry to have a family,
Speaker 8: but they wanted to develop their own identities first, to
Speaker 8: avoid all the traps that had ensnared all those millions
Speaker 8: of smart women who loved men who hated them for
Speaker 8: loving them too much. But now the game was over
Speaker 8: and they'd lost.
Speaker 5: The whole thing is amazing and just feels so eighties,
Speaker 5: But the writing is also just so crazy to me.
Speaker 5: To be clear, here, your odds of getting kidnapped by
Speaker 5: martians are zero, So she's basically.
Speaker 2: Just saying, ladies, you're out of luck.
Speaker 5: Time to like put on your spincer outfits and go
Speaker 5: like knit in your living room or something.
Speaker 1: With your cats, with your cats, Yes, your cats.
Speaker 5: So we're talking about this wild cover story from the eighties.
Speaker 5: The newsweek ran about women being very unlikely to get
Speaker 5: married if they're not married by the time they're forty.
Speaker 5: It sounds like the media really ate up the story.
Speaker 5: But was there pushback?
Speaker 2: Were there people who were saying, like this is crazy
Speaker 2: even at the time.
Speaker 1: Yes, there was a great deal of pushback, and memorably
Speaker 1: one of the greatest bits of pushback came from Susan Feludi.
Speaker 1: Now Susan Faludi, I think you probably have read her book,
Speaker 1: her nineteen ninety one blockbuster bestseller, Backlash. It's a feminist classic.
Speaker 1: But at the time, she was twenty seven years old
Speaker 1: and a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, and
Speaker 1: she criticized this article. She was one of the first
Speaker 1: earliest and harshest critics of it. And it was actually
Speaker 1: this article that would inspire her to write that book.
Speaker 1: I mean, I remember reading Backlash at Barnard. It was
Speaker 1: a huge book. And what she would do is she
Speaker 1: dug into the study itself and really damned its methodology.
Speaker 1: She argued that it was flawed, that it was used
Speaker 1: to beat women over the head for having pursued education
Speaker 1: and jobs. And her broader argument was basically about how
Speaker 1: women face these competing narratives, like essentially, on the one hand,
Speaker 1: during this time, women were being told they could have
Speaker 1: it all. They were being told they'd made it, that
Speaker 1: the fight for equality had been won, and that, you know,
Speaker 1: like they were so equal they didn't even need additional rights.
Speaker 1: But at the same time they're being depicted by pop
Speaker 1: culture and the news media as like hysterical, melting down, depressed,
Speaker 1: learned out, it's desperate to be married and unfortunately facing
Speaker 1: an infertility epidemic and a man shortage on top of
Speaker 1: everything else.
Speaker 5: I mean, honestly, it feels like for women in this
Speaker 5: era and maybe in every air, it's sort of like
Speaker 5: you're if you do and you're damned if you're done.
Speaker 5: Like you have to pursue a career, but you also
Speaker 5: have to find a way to get married, Like there's
Speaker 5: no breaks here.
Speaker 1: And you know, here's the thing that terrorism line, the
Speaker 1: core message that educated, career focused women risk spending their
Speaker 1: lives alone. It stuck starting in nineteen eighty nine. It
Speaker 1: is mentioned in When Harry Met Sally. This is also
Speaker 1: a Nora Efron film. This stars Meg Ryan and you
Speaker 1: may remember, if you've seen this, the part where she's
Speaker 1: weeping to Billie Crystal about her ex who didn't want
Speaker 1: to marry her.
Speaker 9: So I drove them away and I'm gonna be forty
Speaker 9: when someday, someday, like in eight years, it's so crazy.
Speaker 1: Right, So again, like that looming dead end, terrifying number
Speaker 1: of forty. So that's when Harry met Sally. But then
Speaker 1: four years later you have Sleepless in Seattle. This is
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three, and in Sleepless the line is not
Speaker 1: mentioned only once, but actually twice. First in the scene
Speaker 1: we Heard at the Top, which is also Meg Ryan,
Speaker 1: she was in everything in that era, and she's playing
Speaker 1: a journalist who's talking with her editor played by Rosi o'donald,
Speaker 1: about basically what story she should do next.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I remember this because they're basically talking about this
Speaker 5: sad widower whose son has called into a radio show
Speaker 5: saying he needs a new wife, and thousands of women
Speaker 5: have called into volunteer.
Speaker 6: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: And then one of Megryan and Rosie o'donald's colleagues jumps
Speaker 1: in to say, there are a lot of.
Speaker 4: Desperate women out there looking for love, especially over a
Speaker 4: certain age. You know what's easy to be killed by terrorists,
Speaker 4: and it is to get married over the age of forty.
Speaker 3: That's not true. That statistic is not true.
Speaker 1: That's right, it's not true, but it feels true.
Speaker 3: It feels true because it is true. Phrayctically, a whole
Speaker 3: book about how that statistic is not true. Comtown.
Speaker 1: You brought it up, and so then later in the movie,
Speaker 1: this comes up again. This time Tom Hanks is at
Speaker 1: home in Seattle having dinner with his sister and her husband,
Speaker 1: and they're talking about all the women who called into
Speaker 1: that show, and the husband is sort of adamant that
Speaker 1: those women must be absolutely desperate.
Speaker 3: Just because someone is looking for a nice guy, it
Speaker 3: doesn't leave them desperate. How about rapacious and love star.
Speaker 4: No, it is easier to be killed by a terrorist
Speaker 4: than to find a husband after they.
Speaker 6: Kids were absolutely untrue Nofron.
Speaker 1: She's clearly doing something, you know, like she's read Flutie.
Speaker 1: She's not just recurgitating that line, like she's debunking it
Speaker 1: again and again. And it's worth noting this is a
Speaker 1: bit of a deep cut that Nora Afron actually began
Speaker 1: her career at Newsweek. She was a male girl in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, but then smartly and quickly quit when
Speaker 1: she learned that women at the time were not allowed
Speaker 1: to be writers.
Speaker 5: In Okay, I don't want to get off track, because
Speaker 5: obviously this is something you've told me before, but I
Speaker 5: feel like you have to explain that women weren't allowed
Speaker 5: to be writers and news Week in the.
Speaker 6: Great Yes, I mean, how much time do you have?
Speaker 6: But TLDR.
Speaker 1: Up until the nineteen seventies, women were told when they
Speaker 1: started working at Newsweek that they could, you know, be
Speaker 1: a male girl. They could be a researcher, they could
Speaker 1: be reporter, but they could not have buy lines because
Speaker 1: women were not writers at Newsweek. This would lead to
Speaker 1: a landmark gender discrimination suit in the nineteen seventies by
Speaker 1: the women who worked at Newsweek against the magazine. This
Speaker 1: would go on to spark all sorts of similar lawsuits.
Speaker 1: It's like, basically changed the way journalism was done. This
Speaker 1: probably paved the way for us as writers and editor.
Speaker 2: That's such an interesting detail.
Speaker 5: But we know she's right because now we've established that
Speaker 5: it was wrong. Like a million Times news We did
Speaker 5: eventually retract this article.
Speaker 1: Right, yes, twenty years later, and so, I mean, there's
Speaker 1: a few things to note. But the first one is
Speaker 1: that the study as it was published in the article
Speaker 1: was not actually a published study. It was a working paper,
Speaker 1: which yes, sometimes reporters will report on working papers, but
Speaker 1: that basically means a paper from an academic institution that's
Speaker 1: in its early stages. It had not yet been put
Speaker 1: out in a peer revered journal.
Speaker 2: I mean that does seem like a very significant detail.
Speaker 6: Totally significant.
Speaker 1: And also by the time the study was in fact
Speaker 1: completed and published in an academic journal, it would ultimately
Speaker 1: become two studies. The first one about black women's marriage rates,
Speaker 1: which were an are much lower than white women, and
Speaker 1: this was mentioned in the music article, but like almost
Speaker 1: as a passing aside.
Speaker 6: And then the second.
Speaker 1: Study was about educated white women, which is what that
Speaker 1: terrorism line is actually referring to, and which is what
Speaker 1: became the focus of the article.
Speaker 2: Did the data hold up? Was it actually true?
Speaker 1: The data did not hold up. The problem was that
Speaker 1: they were looking at forty year olds and making predictions
Speaker 1: for twenty year olds at a time when there were
Speaker 1: huge shifts in marital attitudes and behavior. So as a result,
Speaker 1: the statistics would later be challenged by a separate demographer
Speaker 1: in the US Census, we wrote, who would ultimately calculate
Speaker 1: that thirty year olds actually had a much higher likelihood
Speaker 1: of marrying, and for forty years it was not two
Speaker 1: point six percent, it was seventeen to twenty three percent.
Speaker 5: Well, you know what's funny is I actually read the
Speaker 5: retraction and didn't The majority of the women who were
Speaker 5: featured in the original story end up getting married like
Speaker 5: eighty percent.
Speaker 1: Of course they did.
Speaker 2: Of course they did, so silly, And then how did
Speaker 2: the terrorism line get in?
Speaker 1: So that's the other part of this. The way that
Speaker 1: this often worked in news magazines is at that time
Speaker 1: is that you would have multiple reporters working on a
Speaker 1: single story. This was like before the Internet. So you
Speaker 1: would have someone in San Francisco, you would have someone
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles, you'd have someone in Chicago. They would
Speaker 1: all be interviewing women about this story. And then because
Speaker 1: you weren't emailing and everything wasn't digital, you weren't slacking,
Speaker 1: you would like pick up the phone and you would.
Speaker 2: Just call fax it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you could fax them. Then they probably were sometimes,
Speaker 1: but you had these people called I think they were
Speaker 1: called shepherds at the time. We still had them when
Speaker 1: I began at Newsweek, and their job was to basically
Speaker 1: like pick up the phone when a correspondent would call
Speaker 1: from some faraway place and type down their notes, which
Speaker 1: they would live read to you, and then you would
Speaker 1: give those notes to whomever the assigned person was in
Speaker 1: New York who was going to take everything and write
Speaker 1: up the article. So what was then revealed was that
Speaker 1: the terrorism line was basically like a funny aside written
Speaker 1: down by one of the handful of reporters who worked
Speaker 1: on the story, and it was sent in some sort
Speaker 1: of memo from the Newsweek San Francisco bureau to the
Speaker 1: main office in New York, and the writer in New
Speaker 1: York inserted the line to the story.
Speaker 2: So it was meant to be funny.
Speaker 1: What they said in the retraction article was that, yes,
Speaker 1: they thought it was funny, and they thought it would
Speaker 1: be clear that it was hyperbole. It wasn't intended to
Speaker 1: be taken literally, but like, obviously it was taken literally.
Speaker 5: Well, so this actually explains why they don't cite any
Speaker 5: data on how likely you are to be killed by
Speaker 5: a terrorist, because they thought it was very obvious that
Speaker 5: it wasn't real data.
Speaker 2: That's fascinating.
Speaker 5: So, just to recap what you've just told me is
Speaker 5: that Newsweek had concocted this sensational line and the data
Speaker 5: behind it.
Speaker 2: Was also flawed.
Speaker 6: Yes, multiple problems with this start.
Speaker 2: It's a good thing they issued a retraction.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess, except like, who remembers any of this?
Speaker 1: The point is this thing stuck in the zeitgeist. That
Speaker 1: original flawed statistic and the line about terrorism stuck in
Speaker 1: the zeitgeist. It stayed there.
Speaker 6: It was repeated again and again and again.
Speaker 1: And nobody remembers any of these details, except for, of course,
Speaker 1: the smart people who will be listening to our podcast.
Speaker 5: So what's wild about this is that I actually was
Speaker 5: watching something recently, this show on Netflix called Firefly Lane,
Speaker 5: which is cheesy, but I watch and they did a
Speaker 5: whole episode about this newsweek cover. One of the characters, Yeah,
Speaker 5: one of the characters is an anchor, is a local
Speaker 5: news anchor, and she needs the nightly news with this statistic.
Speaker 5: And then someone else on the staff, an older woman,
Speaker 5: challenges her, and so throughout the episode she realizes that
Speaker 5: in fact, the statistic isn't true. But the idea that
Speaker 5: this stuck with people for so long that a writer
Speaker 5: on this show that just got made last year remembered
Speaker 5: it is fascinating.
Speaker 6: It's fascinating and it's telling.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think part of what it's showing us
Speaker 1: is that as silly as some of these moments seem now,
Speaker 1: or as much as they feel like a blip from
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties, they're teaching us something really important.
Speaker 2: Yeah, really about the time we grew up in.
Speaker 1: I mean with this story in particular, as I was
Speaker 1: doing the research, I started to realize, like, this wasn't
Speaker 1: even really about marriageable women or quote unquote man shortage
Speaker 1: or an age of expiration, or even like about undermining
Speaker 1: magazine articles or sexist editors. This was about women's place
Speaker 1: in the world more broadly.
Speaker 2: Right, it was about putting them in their place exactly.
Speaker 1: And I think to understand that you have to look
Speaker 1: at what was happening in the nineteen eighties, and what
Speaker 1: was happening in the nineteen eighties is the ton of
Speaker 1: pushback to all of these societal gains. So you can
Speaker 1: see it and hear it in this time a lot
Speaker 1: in the way conservative leaders talked about feminism and working women.
Speaker 1: This was, of course the Reagan era, so Ronald Reagan
Speaker 1: who had proclaimed feminism of quote straight jacket for women.
Speaker 1: He also introduced the term welfare queen as part of
Speaker 1: efforts to demonize poor black single mothers. And so you know,
Speaker 1: while Americans are like navigating the consequences of the baby boom,
Speaker 1: women's liberation, sexual revolution, Reagan is basically reeling against feminism
Speaker 1: and so when this Newsweek article comes out in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty six, there are some feminists and people at large
Speaker 1: who see it as part of this backlash. Like taken
Speaker 1: within the context of all of these other things, it
Speaker 1: was part of this conservative push against progress. So I
Speaker 1: actually called up Susan Douglas. She is a professor of
Speaker 1: communication and media studies at the University of Michigan. She
Speaker 1: studies this subject. She looks at gender representation in media.
Speaker 1: But she also happened to be thirty six at the
Speaker 1: time that this article came out and recently married, So
Speaker 1: lucky for her, she didn't have to panic.
Speaker 10: You know, no advance in feminism occurs without an almost
Speaker 10: instantaneous backlash against it. By the nineteen eighties, you had
Speaker 10: more women in the workforce than ever before. You had
Speaker 10: women postponing marriage and childbirths because they wanted to get
Speaker 10: established in their careers. And this was a threat to
Speaker 10: the patriarchal order. And so you get this ridiculous story,
Speaker 10: you know, terrorizing women who if they're thirty two and
Speaker 10: they're not married, you know they are doomed to a
Speaker 10: life of loneliness. Let's also remember between nineteen seventy five
Speaker 10: and nineteen eighty five, you had a revolution in single
Speaker 10: mothers entering the workforce. They entered the workforce because feminism
Speaker 10: had give them a permission to do so. And they
Speaker 10: entered the workforce because they had to, because they had
Speaker 10: to support their families and they wanted to work. And
Speaker 10: you know, they did this in the face of nonexistent
Speaker 10: or utterly crappy childcare, against all kinds of prejudice. They
Speaker 10: transformed the American family. And so some of this threat
Speaker 10: was not just for women who were never married. This
Speaker 10: was also oh so you divorced your husband because you,
Speaker 10: a liberated woman, thought that you were unhappy. Well, too
Speaker 10: bad for you. Good luck finding number two. No advance
Speaker 10: in feminism occurs without an almost instantaneous against it.
Speaker 1: That's Susan Douglas Again. It's interesting to hear her talk
Speaker 1: about what was happening politically in the eighties as women
Speaker 1: are gaining more power at work and then knowing that
Speaker 1: this newsweek cover lands right in the middle.
Speaker 2: Of it, right like a ton of bricks.
Speaker 1: You know. So you can look at these things as isolated,
Speaker 1: or you can, as Feluti did, see them as interconnected.
Speaker 1: You can kind of draw this straight line from that
Speaker 1: article and the so called man shortage to what you're
Speaker 1: seeing in the culture around that time. Susan Fludi talks
Speaker 1: in her book Backlash about how in film and television
Speaker 1: we begin to see this shift away from characters that
Speaker 1: are like scrappy working heroines towards these sort of you know,
Speaker 1: sad sacks desperate to get married, like she cites Sally
Speaker 1: Field in the movie Surrender.
Speaker 4: You know what, if I'm not married again by the
Speaker 4: time I'm forty one, there's a twenty seven percent chance
Speaker 4: I'll end up a lonely alcoholic.
Speaker 1: But I'm even thinking of later like the Bridget Jones types.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I have two choices to give up and accept
Speaker 3: permanent state of spinsterhood or not. This time, I choose not.
Speaker 1: And then if they aren't sad sacks desperate to get married,
Speaker 1: these once independent women are depicted as like straight up murderous,
Speaker 1: bunny boiling sociopaths. Of course, I'm referring to Glenn Close's
Speaker 1: character in Fatal Attraction.
Speaker 3: I'm just supposed to you won't answer my calls, you
Speaker 3: change your number.
Speaker 6: I I'm not going to be ignored.
Speaker 5: Right, Like, it's not enough that the women are pathetic,
Speaker 5: their career ambitions have to actually turn them into like
Speaker 5: dangerous and deranged characters.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so basically, this myth, this lie about these like desperate,
Speaker 1: sad single women, has become accepted truth in the culture.
Speaker 2: It definitely does.
Speaker 5: And you kind of still see that myth, right, this
Speaker 5: kind of desperate single woman playing it on TV. I
Speaker 5: mean it makes me think of The Bachelor, right, which
Speaker 5: has been running on ABC for like twenty years, in
Speaker 5: which I occasionally still watch, And the whole premise of
Speaker 5: that show is that it's this group of women who
Speaker 5: are pretty young, like in their early twenties, and they're
Speaker 5: so desperate to get married and have the approval of
Speaker 5: a man, and god forbid. Occasionally there's one who's like
Speaker 5: in her thirties and they're so mean to her, like, uh,
Speaker 5: you're the worst. You're so old and desperate. What are
Speaker 5: you even doing here? So, like, I don't know how
Speaker 5: much progress we have made. It's hard to say.
Speaker 6: I mean I think we've made some.
Speaker 1: Like The Bachelor is a certain kind of televisionhow.
Speaker 2: Do you mean, like super trashy?
Speaker 1: Because I love it? Like that said, like, I'm still
Speaker 1: sitting here trying to rack my brain for an example
Speaker 1: of a show that doesn't end in a relationship. I mean, honestly, like,
Speaker 1: if those listening can think of anything, feel free to
Speaker 1: send us your thoughts.
Speaker 6: But okay, Susie, I feel like we need to pause.
Speaker 1: For a moment and spend a little time talking about us. Okay,
Speaker 1: because I couldn't help. But wonder are we desperate single women?
Speaker 2: Good Carrie Bradshaw reference.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. I've in practicing, but I think
Speaker 1: this is actually a good spot to pause for our listeners.
Speaker 1: Before you know, we get real personal. So we'll pick
Speaker 1: this up again with my bad Carrie Bradshaw impression. But
Speaker 1: also both of our views are complicated views on marriage.
Speaker 2: In part two, this is in retrospect. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 5: Is there a cultural moment you can't stop thinking about
Speaker 5: and want us to explore in a future episode. Email
Speaker 5: us at inretropod at gmail dot com, or find us
Speaker 5: on Instagram at in retropod.
Speaker 1: If you love this podcast, please rate and review us
Speaker 1: on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you
Speaker 1: hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram,
Speaker 1: which we may or may not delete.
Speaker 5: You can also find us on Instagram at Jessica Bennett
Speaker 5: and at Susie b NYC. Also check out Jessica's books
Speaker 5: Feminist Fight Club and This Is Eighteen.
Speaker 1: In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and the Media.
Speaker 1: Lauren Hanson is our supervising producer. Derek Clements is our
Speaker 1: engineer and sound designer. Sharon Attia is our researcher and
Speaker 1: associate producer.
Speaker 5: Our executive producer from the media is Cindy Levy. Our
Speaker 5: executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stump and Katrina Norbel.
Speaker 1: Our artwork is from Pentagrams.
Speaker 5: Additional editing help from Mary Doo and Mike Coscarelli. Sound
Speaker 5: correction and mastering by Amanda Rose Smith.
Speaker 2: We are your hosts Susie Vannacarum.
Speaker 6: And Jessica Bennett. We're also executive producers.
Speaker 1: For even more check out in retropod dot com.
Speaker 6: See you next week.