Girls Gone Mild

But it took decades to erase the stigma of spinsterhood, and it never completely vanished. Despite the best efforts of some defiant, bohemian women, being single has usually been seen as a pitiable state, and sexually active singles have been cast as harlots. In 1957, 80 percent of Americans told pollsters that people who were single by choice were "sick," "neurotic" or "immoral." But at the end of the 20th century, armed with the pill, an education and a job, more women chose to wait before becoming a wife. By the 1990s, unprecedented numbers of women in Western countries were delaying marriage and childbirth. In 1998, when the show first aired, there were 21 million American women over the age of 18 who had never married. More than one in four households contained only one person. Yet even though there were more single women than ever, the assumption that "spinsters" were tearful, tragic and lonely was still widespread, an image boosted by such neurotic heroines as Bridget Jones, whose "diaries" sold millions of copies.

This is why, when "Sex and the City" arrived, so many women in their 20s and 30s clustered around their TV screens and cheered. They had been waiting almost 200 years for it. The spindly-limbed, dirty-talking, loyal friends were thinner, wealthier and better dressed than most of us, but in their clumsy, often difficult relationships, their honest searching for love, their fear of suburban drudgery, their discomfort with conventional ways of living with and relating to men, we saw ourselves. They were redefining what it meant to be single. When Carrie—contemplating marriage to the handsome but not heart-stopping Aidan—tried on big, puffy wedding dresses with Miranda, she started choking and broke out in a rash. She complained that she was "missing the bride gene. I should be put in a test tube and studied." She wrote later in one of her trademark voice-over sex-column entries, "As progressive as our society claims to be, there are still certain life targets we are all supposed to hit: marriage, babies and a home to call your own. But what if instead of breaking out into a smile, you break out into a rash? Is something wrong with the system, or is it you?"

This is what "Sex and the City" was about—the system and how we did or didn't fit into it. What is forgotten now is how radical a suggestion it was to refuse to settle, to wait until you find love—big love. As Carrie called it, "Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can't-live-without-each-other love." Later she wrote, "Some people are settling down, some are settling and some people refuse to settle for anything less—than butterflies."

Yet it's one thing to want that kind of love—and another thing entirely to wait for it for decades. For all their exploration of the topic, the show and the film never really resolved the question of what to do if waiting means gambling with your fertility. That's the anxiety that has emerged in the new millennium, with the stomach-tightening cautionary tales of Women Who Waited Too Long. In 2002, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, president of the Center for Work-Life Policy (formed by the National Parenting Association), provoked a debate with her book "Baby Hunger," in which she warned that after 35, a woman's fertility "drops off a cliff." Today Hewlett points out the discrepancy between the lives of Carrie Bradshaw and the actress who played her. "Sarah Jessica Parker in her own real life absolutely was very clear that she wanted both things. She wanted success, but she totally sought and made happen a marriage and a child," says Hewlett. "It is interesting that Carrie Bradshaw makes different decisions—and that real women in really successful lives in this city do tend to want both things." When Carrie wondered if she should marry Aidan, in her late 30s, she did not ponder the state of her eggs. In the film it is not discussed when she considers marriage to Big in her 40s. "In real life," says Hewlett, "a woman would be weighing that."

Just six years ago, suggesting that women consider their eggs before rejecting suitors was controversial. Today, it's so commonplace that the very un-Carrie notion of "settling" is no longer taboo. This March, author Lori Gottlieb wrote a much-discussed piece titled "Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough" for The Atlantic. She advised women to settle: "That's right. Don't worry about passion or intense connection. Don't nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling 'Bravo!' in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics." Settling will make you happier, she said, because those who marry with high expectations are only disappointed. This could have been written in the 1950s. The whole idea of settling remains depressing—and offensive, especially if you imagine people might be settling for you.

Perhaps younger women—the well educated, ambitious "millennials"—will think more strategically about the choices they make. At least that's the impression I get when talking to younger women, such as my 26-year-old NEWSWEEK colleague Jessica Bennett. To Bennett, 35 is the critical number ingrained in the consciousness of her generation if you want to have children. "We know we can't cross it," she says, "but we want to get damn near as close as we can." Her friend Tara Kane, a 26-year-old New Jersey teacher, says that while "SATC" "made married life with children seem like a prison sentence," she is keenly conscious of timing: "We are bombarded with stories of infertility and couples that 'waited too long' and now can't get pregnant. We are all aware of this magic age of 35 and the exponential increase of things that can go wrong after that. Infertility, Down syndrome …" Cheerful stuff. Surely, though, if young women have decided that they should have children by 35, then the message of the show—or the times—have fundamentally changed. Women still worried about it 10 years ago—but our fictional heroines did not. The "SATC" characters were 35 and older for more than half the series. They were rolling the dice on love—and on babies.