In rural America, more women are saying ‘I don’t’ | Many Americans still imagine rural areas as bastions of traditional families. That’s no longer the case

> The Trump administration recently issued new guidelines for the Transportation Department, surprisingly prioritizing spending and infrastructure for “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” In other words, communities with large traditional families. We know what you’re probably thinking: That means rural and small-town America — presumably President Donald Trump’s core constituency — will disproportionately benefit from these funds.

> But you could very well be wrong.

> Many Americans still imagine rural communities as bastions of tradition, where marriage is widespread and families with lots of children abound. A quarter-century ago, these perceptions would have been largely correct. They no longer are.

> Our research shows that over the past three decades, among women ages 15 to 44, marriage rates have fallen much faster for rural women than for their urban counterparts. Between 1988 and 2018, the proportion of rural women who were married fell from (55 percent to 33 percent. Marriage among urban women also declined, but to a lesser degree.

> At the same time, cohabitation has risen more sharply and divorce has declined more slowly in rural America. By 2018, rural women were more likely than urban women to be in an unmarried cohabiting partnership (19 percent vs. 14 percent). The proportion of women who have never married has also increased steadily for both rural and urban women. And although the proportion of urban women who never marry remains slightly higher, this is mainly because urban women marry at older ages.

> These changes in marriage and childbearing shape the family structures children are raised in, which has implications for their well-being. In a forthcoming study, we show that between 2005 and 2022, the proportion of rural children living with two married parents declined at more than twice the rate of urban children. White, Black and Hispanic children in rural areas were all affected by this decline, while at the same time the proportion of urban White children living with married parents remained stable and the proportion of urban Black children living with married parents actually rose. There are now sizable rural-urban gaps in the percentage of White children living with married parents across all regions, ranging from 5.7 percentage points in the Midwest to 12.3 percentage points in the Northeast.

Yikes

It’s the suburbs who cosplay as country folk that are “traditional”, getting married and building families – it’s not actually country folk; they are who tend to be worse off in most metrics.