Women around the world are avoiding marriage

A new book from explores how women are moving away from traditional marriage arrangements.

Opting Out: Women Messing with Marriage Around the World (Rutgers University Press, 2022) is a collection of 12 essays from anthropologists working around the globe. They chronicle women moving away from “traditional” marital arrangements in societies where marriage is widely considered obligatory. Essays include analyses of young single women in India, extramarital intimacy in Japan, and women enjoying “absent” husbands in Senegal.

The contribution of Joanna Davidson, associate professor of anthropology at Boston University, examines widows who choose not to remarry in Guinea-Bissau, where she’s long done fieldwork.

It’s important to note that Opting Out, which Davidson coedited with Dinah Hannaford of the University of Houston, isn’t a summary dismissal of marriage. Rather, the volume chronicles the subtle ways in which women are “protagonists in moving the needle on marriage around the world,” says Davidson. “It opens up the question, what are they opting out of, and what are they opting back into?”

The answers are as varied as the locales featured in each essay. That’s entirely purposeful, according to the coeditors. “All of the contributors have done really sustained fieldwork in the places they’re writing about,” Davidson says. “[We] really wanted to make this an edited volume in which we were all challenging each other in order to enrich our ideas, experiences, and ways of analyzing what we were encountering in these very different places.”

Davidson speaks here about her new book, her research, and what, exactly, it means to opt out of marriage. (The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)