Young girls used to dream of the day they would don a white dress, clutch a bouquet, and walk down the aisle to wed the love of their life. New data, however, suggests those dreams are scarcer than they were 30 years ago.
A new Pew Research Center analysis of survey data from the University of Michigan found that high schoolers are more reluctant to desire marriage now than they were 30 years ago. Twelfth-grade girls, specifically, are significantly less likely than their male peers to say they want to get married sometime in the future — 61 percent compared to the boys’ 74 percent.
That drop in desire to “get married in the long run” is down more than 20 percentage points from 1993, when 83 percent of girls compared to 76 percent of boys said they planned to tie the knot someday. The itch to have kids is also down approximately 16 percentage points from 1993, when 64 percent of high school seniors expressed hopes of becoming parents compared to today’s 48 percent.
The steep decline in willingness to get hitched and have kids aligns with declining national marriage and fertility trends. Since 1970, women’s marriage rate fell from 76.5 per 1,000 unmarried women to 31.3 in 2020. The fertility rate over the last 50 years, similarly, plummeted from above the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman to 1.6.
While high school girls’ pessimism about saying “I do” and becoming mothers appears to square with the nation’s lack of marriages and births, it does not reconcile well with data suggesting women who are married with children are twice as likely to be “very happy” than unmarried women without kids.
Not only are married women happier, but 41 percent of them also have a stronger sense of purpose compared to the 32 percent of their unmarried counterparts who report the same. Married men, especially those with children, report greater happiness than single, childless men.
Marriage, by all definitions, gives both men and women the financial, physical, and emotional boosts they need to flourish. In fact, a strong society is closely related to the prominence of the indispensable nuclear family. Yet, generations of women in particular have bought the feminist lie that they don’t need a man or kids to be successful.
Feminism isn’t the only culprit here. Abortion, the decline in Christianity, the normalization of cohabitation, and the rise in divorce all played roles in this phenomenon.
As the latest dismal data suggests, the results of such rhetoric have been disastrous both for the females who put girl bossing above their biological clock and for our culture. Women, contrary to popular belief, can never “have it all” without some significant tradeoff. In this case, that tradeoff appears to be both “till death do us part” and parenthood.
The consequences of women’s hyperindependence are not isolated to polls of high school students. They are also reflected in politics, such as in the recent New York City mayoral election. In her article “Sorry, Ladies, Radical Politicians Such As Mamdani Are No Substitute For A Husband,” Federalist contributor Brooke Brandtjen argued Democrat politicians like Zohran Mamdani “want the government to fill a husband-like role, making their constituents dependents of the state — and they’ve been working toward it for years.”
A September NBC News poll found that having children does not rank as a high priority for success among young females, especially the majority of whom voted Democrat in the last election. In fact, both Generation Z men and women said having children was less of a priority than fulfilling job, money, achieving financial independence, using talents to better others, and owning a home.
Just as you can’t pay people to have kids, you can’t finger-wag women into wedding. There must be a cultural shift that, as the Pew analysis begs, reaches far beyond women of marriageable age to school-aged girls.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
