It may be hard to believe in the midst of another contentious election cycle, but the next quarter century in the United States promises to be a period of increasing moderation and stability—at least according to a little-known but compelling theory about how the ratio of available men to available women alters our lives.
Ups and Downs of America's Sex Ratio
Harvard social psychologist Marcia Guttentag began formulating her theory in 1975, after watching Mozart’s The Magic Flute with her second husband, psychologist Paul Secord, and her two children, Lisa, 16, and Michael, 14. “Nothing is more noble than wife and man, man and wife, and wife and man … [reaching] to the height of Godliness,” sang Papageno and Pamina onstage. Hearing them extoll the virtues of marriage so extravagantly put Guttentag into a kind of “cultural shock,” she later wrote. These were the 1970s, after all, when millions of marriages—including both Guttentag’s and Secord’s first marriages—had collapsed in the chaos of the free love movement spawned during the previous decade.
