While marriage has been held out as the ideal, especially for women, society also has benefited from single women--"spinsters" and widows. I'm not talking about the past 20 years or so, but historically through the ages.
Some families designated one daughter to remain single and care for the parents in their old age. Many "maiden aunts" lived with married siblings and provided childcare, extra help during harvest time, an extra pair of hands to cook and sew and clean in the times when all of that had to be done by hand.
Single women often were the bedrock of church volunteers, when the church was an integral part of the community.
Now, I'm not saying all these single women were happy about being single. And society certainly looked down on many of them for being single. But it is because they were single that they could provide the extra help that families needed to survive.