The high age at first marriage for Western women has been shown by many parish reconstruction studies to be a traditional Western marriage pattern that dates back at least as early as the mid-16th century. Contemporary status
In the 20th century, the role of the wife in Western marriage changed in two major ways; the first was the breakthrough from an "institution to companionate marriage"; for the first time since the Middle Ages, wives became distinct legal entities, and were allowed their own property and allowed to sue. Until then, partners were a single legal entity, but only a husband was allowed to exercise this right, called coverture. The second change was the drastic alteration of middle and upper-class family life, when in the 1960s these wives began to work outside their home, and with the social acceptance of divorces the single-parent family, and stepfamily or "blended family" as a more "individualized marriage".Today, some women may wear a wedding ring in order to show her status as a wife.In Western countries today, married women usually have an education, a profession and they (or their husbands) can take time off from their work in a legally procured system of ante-natal care, statutory maternity leave, and they may get maternity pay or a maternity allowance.
The situation was assessed by the English conservative moralist Sir William Blackstone: "The husband and wife are one, and the husband is the one." Married womens property rights in the English-speaking world improved with the Married Womens Property Act 1882 and similar legal changes, which allowed wives with living husbands to own property in their own names. Until late in the 20th century, women could in some regions or times sue a man for wreath money when he took her virginity without taking her as his wife.If a woman did not want to marry, another option was entering a convent as a nun. to become a "bride of Christ", a state in which her chastity and economic survival would be protected. Both a wife and a nun wore Christian headcovering, which proclaimed their state of protection by the rights of marriage. Much more significant than the option of becoming a nun, was the option of non-religious spinsterhood in the West. An unmarried woman, a feme sole, had the right to own property and make contracts in her own name. As first demonstrated quantitatively by John Hajnal, in the 19th and early 20th centuries the percentage of non-clerical Western women who never married was typically as high as 10–15%, a prevalence of female celibacy never yet documented for any other major traditional civilization. In addition, early modern Western women married at quite high ages (typically mid to late 20s) relative to other major traditional cultures.