Just the Facts Ma'am

Here are a few statistics about single women and marriage in the U.S. I found them interesting and enlightening, I thought you might feel the same way.

As of 2003 there was 147.8 million females in the U.S. I guess that included children as well since the population then was about 295,000,000. Of that number of females 53.5 million were unmarried (including widows, divorcees, and never marrieds), and 62.9 were married. (I think the remaining 31.4 million are under the age of 15).
54% of Single Americans are women and there is an average of 86 unmarried men to every 100 unmarried women in the U.S. That sounds really bad, but also think of all the elderly women that are widowed. There are twice as many women as there are men in the 85 and older category. Also by state the numbers change. Rhode Island has only 79 unmarried men to every 100 women, while Alaska has 114 men to every 100 women. Of course not all these men are really eligible-some are in prison, which skews the real dating numbers!
But I think most interesting are the median ages of first marriages for people in the US in the past 100 or so years. Just remember median age is not the average, but the midpoint of all first marriage ages.
Median age at 1st marriage:
Men Women
1890 26.1 22
(Now things get interesting, the median age drops steadily until 1956 when it begins makes a steady rise.)
1947 23.7 20.5
1950 22.8 20.3
1969 23.2 20.8
1977 24 21.6
1985 25.5 23.3
1999 26.9 25.1
2003 27.1 25.3

So our grandgrandparents were married later in life than our grandparents and parents! The interesting thing will be to see if these ages for women keep rising or if they will level off. Soon maybe the median age for first marriages for women will be 30!

For more stats check out these websites:
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2003/cb03ff03.html
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/002265.html