Mill challenged the contractual view that entry into marriage was fully voluntary for women, pointing out that their options were so limited that marriage was "only Hobson's choice, 'that or none'" (The Subjection of Women, 1869, 29).
The debate on criminalisation highlights a problem with strategies that focus on entry into marriage and don't address the experiences and needs of those living in or running away from forced marriages.
In fact, among the subgroups of women facing the greatest risk of divorce — poor minority women, women who have had a premarital birth or were raised in single-parent families, and women with a history of numerous sex partners — cohabitation with definite plans to marry at the outset is tied to lower levels of marital instability than direct entry into marriage.
In virtually all countries, school enrollment one of the indicators of uncertainty negatively affected the entry into marriage.
For this reason, I also look at the entry into marriage only (either after being single or after cohabitation).
8 The education of the women is quite strongly predictive of the rate of entry into marriage, showing a U-shaped relationship.
Furthermore, entry into marriage has been associated with decreased physical activity, paralleled with increased social obligations promoting increased food intake and energy consumption [ 52, 53].
For example, in contexts where gender roles are more egalitarian, men's economic situation could be less important for the entry into marriage and cohabitation.
For Romania we also see a bit of a shift toward later ages in the risk of entry into marriage, while in Bulgaria we can see a similar shift in the risk of entry into non-marital cohabitation.
We consider entry into marriage and entry into cohabitation as competing risks and show how the incidence of cohabitation consistently much lower but has increased by some 70% over the 20-odd years of our study, while the marriage rate has dropped by almost as much.
This aggregate result (cohorts pooled) offers support for the view that the decline in fertility commences with lower rates of entry into marriage, in turn, partly driven by women's employment.
