While demographers haven’t charted historical changes in single women’s psychological status, they have collected a vast amount of data comparing the mental health of single and married women. None of it supports the thesis that single women are causing the “age of melancholy”: study after study shows single women enjoying far better mental health than their married sisters (and, in a not unrelated phenomenon, making more money). The warning issued by family sociologist Jessie Bernard in 1972 still holds true: “Marriage may be hazardous to women’s health.”
The psychological indicators are numerous and they all point in the same direction. Married women in these studies report about 20 percent more depression than single women and three times the rate of severe neurosis. Married women have more nervous breakdowns, nervousness, heart palpitations, and inertia. Still other afflictions disproportionately plague married women: insomnia, trembling hands, dizzy spells, nightmares, hypochondria, passivity, agoraphobia and other phobias, unhappiness with their physical appearance, and overwhelming feelings of guilt and shame. A twenty-five-year longitudinal study of college-educated women found that wives had the lowest self-esteem, felt the least attractive, reported the most loneliness, and considered themselves the least competent at almost every task–even child care. A 1980 study found single women were more assertive, independent, and proud of their accomplishments. The Mills Longitudinal Study, which tracked women for more than three decades, reported in 1990 that “traditional” married women ran a higher risk of developing mental and physical ailments in their lifetime than single women–from depression to migraines, from high blood pressure to colitis. A Cosmopolitan survey of 106,000 women found that not only do single women make more money than their married counterparts, they have better health and are more likely to have regular sex. Finally, when noted mental health researchers Gerald Klerman and Myrna Weissman reviewed all the depression literature on women and tested for factors ranging from genetics to PMS to birth control pills, they could find only two prime causes for female depression: low social status and marriage.
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