Women's eNews (https://womensenews.org/author/melissa-ludtke/)
Melissa Ludtke is an award-winning journalist and author of "On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America" (Random House). She began her career reporting for Sports Illustrated, and then was a correspondent for Time and editor of Nieman Reports, an international magazine about journalism published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. She is co-producing the digital iBooks series "Touching Home in China: in search of missing girlhoods" with Boston-based documentary filmmaker Julie Mallozzi. The first in this six-iBooks series, "Abandoned Baby," was published in May; the second, "Touching Home," in June; and the remaining four iBooks will be published within the next year.
As children, these young women were more valued by their families than daughters in the past generations and they’ve achieved more than women who came before them in their towns. But pressures on them to get married remain strong.