Thing about early-hetero-married-parental model isn't that it is inherently bad or good; that depends on individuals & circumstances. It's that over centuries it has functioned both as an oppressive norm & been held punishingly out of reach (depending on race & class position).

Early marriage model organized power & distributed labor along gendered lines, created dependency & determined legitimacy. That's not a critique of many happily married couples! Just what the institution in its most traditional form has done, historically.

Because of gendered differentials re earning, education, social & sexual power, relative burdens of child-bearing/rearing, the way it historically worked to organize power was to ensure that women had less of it & were made dependent on men from start of adulthood.

When I wrote All the Single Ladies, it wasn't an argument that unmarried or later-married life was inherently better than early hetero-married life. It was intended as opposite of prescription, rather about lifting a single constrictive model for female life & its legitimization.

If we were to shed early hetero-married norm (to be clear we have not) & redistribute resources via strong social & economic policy, there'd be more varied paths for all sorts of adult flourishing that would wind around love, sex, family, friends, work, home at different paces.

Some paths would take some to early married parenthood & that's great. It's when that path is held up as inherently superior norm-more moral, fulfilling, civic-minded-& then made elusive via econ & racial manipulation & because life & love are complex, that it becomes oppressive.

Anyway, I was thinking about all this watching people argue about early marriage/motherhood on Twitter. My book about this: https://bookshop.org/books/all-the-single-ladies-unmarried-women-and-the-rise-of-an-independent-nation-9781476716572/9781476716572