That social and cultural change is in large part thanks to the feminist movement. In the 1960s and ‘70s, marriage laws still contained some vestiges of coverture — the idea that once a woman got married, her entire legal identity was subsumed by her husband’s. “[In the 1960s], there was still the assumption that when you got married, your husband was the primary breadwinner , and any money women made was an addition, so it was very difficult for women to be financially independent,” Dr. Celello says. “Marriage circumscribed what their role in society was. The feminist movement recognized there were real problems in that regard and worked to try to fix that.” By 2000, women’s rights had changed so much that Gloria Steinem felt safe to get married — and she did, tying the knot for the first and only time at age 66. "By that point, the women's movement had worked for 30 years to equalize the marriage laws," she said on the podcast Death, Sex and Money in 2016 . "So no longer would I lose my name and my credit rating and my legal domicile and all my civil rights, as I would have had I got married when I was ‘supposed’ to.”