Top Quotes: “All The Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and The Rise of an Independent Nation” — Rebecca Traister
Background: Traister writes about what an astoundingly new concept female singlehood is and explores the connection between singlehood and achievement, the reasons why more women are staying single, and how society needs to change to accommodate this dramatically growing demographic. I learned so much history and really enjoyed her perspective.
Intro
“Simone de Beauvoir’s observation about real life women, which I would also, eventually, uncover, was by definition, we ‘are married, or have been, or plan to be, or suffer from not being.’”
“Throughout America’s history, the start of adult life for women — whatever else it might have been destined to include — had been typically marked by marriage. As long as there had been such records kept in the U.S., since the late 19th century, the median age of first marriage for women had fluctuated between 20 and 22. This had been the shape, pattern, and definition of female life.”
“In 2009, the proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50%. And that median age of first marriage that had remained between 20 and 22 from 1890 to 1980? Today, the median age of first marriage for women is around 27, and much higher than that in many cities.”
“During the years in which I had come of age, American women had pioneered an entirely new kind of adulthood, one that was not kicked off by marriage, but by years and, in many cases, whole lives, lived on their own, outside matrimony. Those independent women were no longer aberrations, less stigmatized than ever before. Society had changed, permitting this revolution further: remapping the lifespan of women, redefining marriage and family, reimagining what wifeliness and motherhood entail, and, in short, altering the scope of possibility for over half the country’s population.”
“For the first time in American history, single women (including those who were never married, widowed, divorced, or separated) outnumbered married women. Perhaps even more strikingly, the number of adults < 34 who had never married was up to 46%, rising 12 percentage points in less than a decade. For women under thirty, the likelihood of being married had become astonishingly small: Today, only around 20% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 are wed, compared to the nearly 60% in 1960.”
“Former President George W. Bush, then running for governor in Florida, said that women on welfare ‘should be able to get their life together and find a husband’ and, soon after, published a book in which he argued that the reason young women have babies outside of wedlock is because ‘there is no longer a stigma attached to this behavior,’ suggesting that maybe the stigma should return.”
“In 1993, Bill Clinton appointed Jocelyn Elders, an outspoken advocate of humane drug laws and abortion rights, as Surgeon General. The following year, at a UN conference on AIDS, Elders caused a scandal by voicing her support of teaching masturbation as part of sex education. It was a perfectly sane message, especially in the context of the AIDS epidemic. But so freighted was Elders’ simple advocacy of independent sexual pleasure, achievable without a partner and with no chance of procreation, that the president who had appointed her asked her to resign.”
“To be clear, the vast increase in the number of single women is to be celebrated not because singleness is in and of itself a better or more desirable state than coupledom. The revolution is in the expansion of options, the lifting of the imperative that for centuries hurtled nearly all (non-enslaved) women, regardless of their individual desires, ambitions, circumstances, or the quality of available matches, down a single highway toward early heterosexual marriage and motherhood. There are now an infinite number of alternate routes open; they wind around combos of love, sex, partnership, parenthood, work, and friendship, at different speeds. Single female life is not a prescription, but its opposite: liberation.”
Second Wave Feminism
“The Feminine Mystique would sell 1.4 million copies of its first paperback printing. Early marriage and domestic confinement were so pervasive for middle-class white women in the middle of the 20th century that the nation’s most mass, conscious move to emancipate women erupted directly in response to it. Yet, funnily enough, as the legal scholar Rachel Moran argues, while the feminist movement of the 1970s was in part a ‘direct response to these conditions of early and pervasive marriage,’ the ironic side effect was that single women had almost no place in the underpinnings of the movement. As much as The Feminine Mystique was a cry against the limitations that early marriage and motherhood imposed on women, it did not assume (or even consider) that marriage itself was the problematic element, or that it might ever be optional for women. Friedan’s vision of female empowerment entailed the expansion of activity outside the domestic sphere, but it did not question the primacy of that sphere itself. Friedan’s reflective connections between male attention and female fulfillment — as well as the rather dim regard in which she held most single women — are evident throughout her book. ‘Strangely, a number of psychiatrists state that, in their expertise, unmarried women were happier than married women,’ writes Friedan with obvious perplexity. Elsewhere, she cities Susan B. Anthony as the early feminist who most closely resembled the myth of the ‘embittered shrew,’ conceding (generously, she must have thought) that while Anthony ‘felt betrayed when the other [suffragists] started to marry and have babies,’ she did not end up some ‘bitter spinster with a cat.’ When Freidan, who would co-found and become the first president of the National Organization for Women in 1966, was asked about NOW’s mission in a TV interview, she replied that the group’s message was about revising the ‘conditions that prevent women from easily combining marriage and motherhood and work.’ The group’s mission statement amplified this intention, nothing that NOW did ‘not accept the traditional assumption that a woman has to choose between marriage and motherhood, on the one hand, and a serious participation in industry or the professions on the other…We believe that a true partnership between the sexes demands a different concept of marriage, an equitable sharing of the responsibilities.’ It was (and remains!) a revolutionary vision, but the organization was not the National Organization of Married Women, and yet there was no hint of recognition that not every woman’s life would (or should) include marriage and children.”
“In the burgeoning feminist movement, the voices of figures more radical than Friedan began to get more notice for their arguments that women should not simply move toward the workforce, but away from marriage as the ratifying stamp of female worth.”
“In 1969, University of Chicago sociology professor Marlene Dixon wrote that ‘the institution of marriage is the chief vehicle for the perpetuation of the oppression of women…In a very real way the role of wife has been the genesis of women’s rebellion throughout history.’ The next year, feminist Sheila Cronan wrote, ‘Since marriage constitutes slavery for women…Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.’ Radical feminist writer Andrea Dworkin famously commented that ‘Marriage was an institution developed from rape as a practice.’”
“In 1970, the median age of first marriage for women remained under 21, and 69% of Americans over the age of 18 were married. This is remarkable, because of other social and political upheavals already well underway. In 1960, the FDA had approved the birth control pill for contraceptive use, an early step toward (or symptom of) what would become the sexual revolution. And in 1969, the Stonewall riots had kicked off a gay rights movement that would be driven explicitly by the fight for acceptance by women and men who had no desire to partner with members of the opposite sex.”
“Steinem said, ‘We are becoming the men we want to marry,’ clarifying that an opposition to marriage need not be about the rejection of men or love, but rather about the filling out and equaling up of female life. ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,’ she was often credited with coining (actually, the phrase came from Australian educator Irina Dunn). More sharply, Steinem argued that marriage rendered women ‘half people,’ and once explained that she had not married, and would not marry, because ‘I can’t mate in captivity.’ It was a funny line, borne of deep dissatisfactions and anger over the way life had been until now.”
“Steinem was a more fetching vision of unmarried life than had previously been available. Steinem’s beauty, her independence, her unapologetic heterosexual appetites, and her steady stream of suitors could not easily be written off as froideur, as man-hating, as homosexuality. What was so disruptive about Steinem, and other women who were living like her, whether or not they had men on their arms, was that it seemed she just really enjoyed being free.”
“More young unmarried women were about to join her, thanks to two landmark cases decided in the early 70s. The Supreme Court had made birth control legal for married couples in the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, basing its decision on the opinion that a ban violated the privacy of the marital bedroom’s ‘innermost sanctum.’ But for single women, the relevant decision came down seven years later. In 1972’s Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Court struck down a law that prohibited the sale of contraception to unmarried persons, thus affirming ‘the right of the individual, married or single, to be free for unwarranted government intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child. The decision affirmed both parties within a heterosexual union as individual entities with rights, a break from some long-standing principles of marital law, which had, in various forms over two centuries, meant that women forfeited many elements of their identities and their liberties upon marrying. ‘The marital couple is not an independent entity with a mind and heart of its own,’ wrote Justice William Brennan in his decision, ‘but an association of two individuals each with a separate intellectual and emotional make-up.’ It was like a legal equivalent of Ms. Magazine: the recognition that Americans’ rights should neither be circumscribed nor made more expansive based simply on whether they were wed.”
“One year later, the court ruled in Roe v. Wade that abortion was legal. The decision affected married and single women equally. But, for the unmarried, legal abortion provided yet another tool to protect their ability to live outside of marriage.”
“By 1973, the idea of independent womanhood was worming its way into the national imagination persistently enough that Newsweek published a cover story that fulsomely asserted that ‘singlehood has emerged as an intensely ritualized — and newly respectable — style of American life…It is finally becoming possible to be both single and whole.’ And in 1974, Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, making it easier for women to secure credit cards, bank loans, and mortgages, and to buy their own homes.”
“While the women’s movement had not been explicitly driven by efforts to advocate for single women, what it had succeeded at doing, via its impact on politics, economics, and the law, was to create options besides, or in advance of marriage. With every passing year in the 70s, there were simply more ways to valorize female existence: more jobs to apply for, filings to have, money to earn. As these new temptations clashed with the retro realities of marriages begun in a pre-feminist era, the divorce rate skyrocketed, hitting close to 50% through the late 70s and 80s. The divorce boom had a huge impact on never or not yet married women. First, it created more single people, helping to slowly destigmatize the figure of the woman without a ring on her finger. It also forced a very public reckoning with marriage as an institution of variable quality. The realization that a bad marriage might be bad enough to cause a painful split provided ammunition to those women who preferred to abstain from marriage than to enter a flawed one.”
“What the women’s movement of the 70s did, ultimately, was not to shrink marriage, or the desire for male companionship, as a reality for many women, but rather to enlarge the rest of the world to such an extent that marriage’s shadow became far less likely to blot out the sun of other possibilities.”
“By 2013, about half of first-time births were to unmarried women; for women under thirty, it was almost 60%. The same year, the National Center for Family and Marriage Research revealed the marriage rate to be the lowest it had been in over a century.”
“The array of options is pretty stunning compared to the narrow chute of hetero marriage and maternity into which most women were herded just a few decades ago. Millions of women now live with, but not marry, long-term partners; others move in and out of sequential monogamous relationships; live sexually diverse lives; live outside of romantic or sexual relationships altogether, both with and without children; marry or enter civil unions with members of the same sex; or combine some of these options.”
“The journey toward legal marriage for gays and lesbians may seem at odds with what looks like a flight from marriage by heterosexuals. But in fact, they are part of the same project: a demantling of the institution as it once existed — as a rigidly patrolled means by which one sex could exert legal, economic, and sexual power over another — and a reimagining of it as a flexible union to be entered, ideally, on equal terms.”
“Taken together, these shifts, by many measures, embody the worst nightmare of social conservatives: a complete rethinking of who women are and who men are and, therefore, also of what family is and who holds dominion within it…and outside it. The expanded presence of women as independent entities means a redistribution of all kinds of power, including electoral power, that has, until recently, been wielded mostly by men.”
“In 2012, unmarried women made up a remarkable 23% of the electorate. Almost a quarter of votes were cast by women without husbands, up three points from just four years earlier.”
The 19th Century and Prior
“For most women, there were simply not other routes, besides marriage, to economic stability, to a socially sanctioned sexual and reproductive life, to standing within communities. But it was simultaneously true that to have a husband (and, in turn, children, sometimes scads of them) was to be subsumed by wifeliness and matrimony. More than that, it was a way to lose autonomy, legal rights, and the capacity for public achievement. Of the few women who managed to leave a historical trace, usually from wealthier castes, a great number turn out to have been single or, at the very least, single for the period during which they carved out space for themselves in the remembered world.”
“Writers and artists, including painter Mary Cassatt, poets Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, novelists Anne and Emily Bronte, Willa Cather, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and prolific African-American writer Pauline Hopkins, never married. Many of the women who broke barriers in medicine, including doctors Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell and nurses Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, and Dorothea Dix, remained single. Social reformers including Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, Frances Willard, Alice Paul, Mary Grew, and Dorothy Height, and educators like Catharine Beecher and Mary Lyon — none had husbands.”
“In the early colonial U.S., an absence of established European government led to a preoccupation with the family as the locus of social control. In Plymouth, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Connecticut, and New Haven during the 17th century, unmarried people were required to live with families that were “well-governed” by a church-going, land-owning man. New Haven decreed in the 1650s that persons ‘who live not in service, nor in any Family Relation’ could become a source of ‘inconvenience, and disorder’ and that each family’s ‘Governor’ would be licensed to ‘duly observe the course, carriage, and behavior, of every such single person.’ Unmarried women were expected to maintain a servile domestic identity and never enter the world in a way that might convey independence.”
“In Salem, town fathers very briefly allowed unmarried women their own property until the governor amended the oversight by noting that in the future, it would be best to avoid ‘all presidents and evil events of graunting lotts unto single maidens not disposed of.’ Because, as historian Alice Kessler-Harris has observed, the possibility of land ownership created a path to existence outside of marriage, other colonies ‘began to recognize that giving land to women undermined their dependent role’ and thus took measures to curtail the option. In 1634, a bill was introduced to the House of Delegates in Maryland proposing that land owned by a spinster must be forfeited, should she fail to marry within seven years.”
“Mostly, unmarried women were considered a drain on society and on the families with whom they were forced to find refuge.”
“The term spinster was derived from the word spinner, which since the 13th century in Europe, had been used to refer to women, often the widows and orphans of the Crusades, who spun cotton, wool, and silk. By the 16th century, spinster referred to unmarried women, many of whom made themselves valuable in households by taking on the ceaseless, thankless work of textile manufacture into old age.”
“In the New World, ‘spinster’ gained a more precise meaning: in colonial parlance, it indicated an unmarried woman over the age of 23 and under the age of 26. At 26, women without spouses became thornbacks, a reference to a sea-skate with sharp spines covering its back and tail. It was not a compliment.”
“The early American attitude toward marriage, and men’s and women’s roles within it, corresponded to a doctrine of English common law known as coverture. Coverture meant that a woman’s legal, economic, and social identity was ‘covered’ by the legal, economic, and social identity of the man she married. William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England interpreted coverture as meaning that ‘the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of her husband, under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing…A man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would only to be covenant with himself.’
“Coverture encompassed what legal historian Ariela Dubler has called ‘a stunning array of status-defining legal restrictions’ that prevented wives from keeping their own wages, entering contracts, or bringing legal action. ‘In its strictly economic aspect the traditional marriage contract resembled an indenture between master and servant,’ writes historian Nancy Cott. And while scholars have shown that many women in Europe and the New World found ways to exert agency, both within their homes and in the outside world, the foundational inequities of marital law made it a battle.”
“In 1865, the governor of Massachusetts proposed the transport of some of the 38,000 ‘excess’ women in his state to Oregon and California, where women were in short supply. The state legislature demurred, revealing how swiftly society had come to rely on the labors of unmarried women. Should all the damsels of New England be deported, the legislature argued, ‘the whirring music of millions of spindles would be silent as a sepulchre, while the mistresses of more than 100,000 dwellings would be in consternation from the catastrophe of such a withdrawal of one, two, or three or more domestics from their premises.”
“For middle-class reformers in the years after the Civil War, new ideas about how ‘women should not be dependent on men,’ began to take hold, while for working-class women, there was a new consciousness about how — with husbands, fathers, and brothers at war or out west — they ‘could not’ be dependent on men. These women went to work in ever greater numbers, and that wage-earning in turn awakened in them an awareness of gendered and class injustices.”
“A former teacher, Virginia Penny, wrote an 1869 book, Think and Act, about the challenges of income inequality facing working women who were increasingly living independent of men. She pushed for equal pay protections from the government, and even suggested taxing better-compensated single men to help support unmarried women. Around the same time, Aurora Phelps of the Boston Working Women’s League petitioned for ‘Garden Homesteads,’ government-subsidized tracts of land near Boston to be given to unmarried women willing to work them; an imagined East Coast equivalent to the land being given away in the west as part of the Homestead Act. These proposals certainly weren’t going anywhere. But single women were beginning to enter policy debates about how to make room for them in the world.”
“Some women went west themselves. Prior to 1900, around 10% of land claims in two Colorado counties were filed by unmarried women, some of whom — like South Dakota homemaker ‘Bachelor Bess’ Corey — were more interested in the land-grab than the man-grab. When Oklahoma’s Cherokee Strip was opened to homesteaders in 1893, Laura Crews raced her horse seventeen miles in under an hour to claim the piece of land that she would tend herself for years before oil was discovered on the property. Crews would be the last participant of the Cherokee land run to die, in 1976, at age 105, unmarried.”
“This small but nearly unprecedented opportunity for independent women to buy property and keep it wasn’t simply a real estate issue; land ownership had been long linked to political enfranchisement. America’s first voters were not just white men, but white men who owned property; in England in 1869, unmarried women with property had been granted the right to vote in local elections. And the first women to petition for the franchise were women who had managed to acquire property: unmarried Margaret Brent was Maryland’s first female landowner and, in the 1640s, requested two votes in local civil proceedings.”
“Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the Western territories in which women staked out land were places in which women suffrage would precede passage of the 19th amendment. Women could vote in Wyoming, Utah, Washington, Montana, Colorado, Idaho, California, Arizona, Kansas, Oregon, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan, and Alaska before 1920, while women in the more urban, established Eastern states (save for New York) had to wait for the Constitution to change.”
“The social crusades of the 19th century were made possible by the changing nature of female engagement with the world and new ideas about identity and dependence. The rate of American spinsterhood hit its first peak at 11% for American women born between 1865 and 1875.”
“Young women, many forced by financial crises in 1873 and 1893 to seek employment, arrived in cities looking for professional opportunities that were rapidly becoming more diverse. The retail market for factory-made goods, alongside inventions such as the typewriter and telephone, created jobs for women as shop girls, typists, telephone operators, and secretaries. In 1870, professional women accounted for less than 7% of the nonagricultural female workforce; that percentage would more than double by 1920.”
“Many women, especially poor immigrant women who labored in factories, worked long hours, seven days a week, in terrifying, unregulated firetraps. The deplorable conditions experienced by millions of female workers were at the roots of the labor struggle, which would be spurred forward in large part by unconventionally wed, or unwed, women. ‘The first industrial strikes in the U.S. [were] led and peopled by women,’ writes historian Nancy Corr, reporting on the account from a Boston newspaper of one of the first ‘turnout’ strikes in Lowell, MA, in the 1830s, in which ‘One of the leaders mounted a pump and made a flaming Mary Woolstonecraft speech on the rights of women.’”
“Most of the women who were working in factories were young and unmarried. 4/5s of the 343,000 women working for wages in NYC in 1900 were unmarried. ‘The Uprising of 20,000’ was a 1909 walkout of female factory workers who made blouses called ‘shirtwaists.’ The Uprising was organized by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and kicked off by 23-year-old Ukrainian immigrant Clara Lemlich, then unmarried, who told a crowd of shirtwaist workers: ‘I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions.’ That campaign lasted 12 weeks and resulted in union agreements with nearly all shirtwaist manufacturers save a few, including the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where two years later, 146 workers, all but 17 of them women, and most younger than 30 and unmarried, would perish in a fire, unable to escape the building, which was locked to keep workers inside and prevent them from stealing.”
The Early 20th Century
“Over a century in which women had exercised increasing independence, living more singly in the world than ever before, the movements that independent women had helped to power had resulted in the passage of the 14th, 15th, 18th, and 19th Amendments to the Constitution. They had reshaped the nation.”
“As the twentieth century dawned, electric street lamps had come to cities around the country, creating ‘white ways’ that made it feel safer for women to be on the streets at night. This development changed the kinds of jobs women could work, as well as the ways in which they could spend money and leisure time. Working-class young women in cities may have struggled economically, but the lit streets, Nickelodeons, Vaudeville homes, bowling alleys, music and dance halls that began to proliferate meant that these young women (and men) ‘spent much of their leisure apart from their families and enjoyed greater social freedom than their parents or married siblings, especially married women.’ Young women ‘putting on finery, promendating the streets, and staying late at amusement resorts became an important cultural style for many working women.’ Some working-class women became driven toward increased social and sexual freedom — single working women ‘were among those who flocked to the streets in pursuit of pleasure and amusement, using public spaces for flamboyant assertion.’ Although these so-called ‘rowdy girls’ were vulnerable to public censure for immorality, ‘young women continued to seek the streets to search for men, have a good time, and display their clothes and style in a public arena.’”
“In 1914, as courtship rituals moved away from family homes or closely watched community dance halls, the Ladies’ Home Journal used the term ‘dating’ in its modern sense.”
“Margaret Sanger, a married mother whose own mother had been pregnant eighteen times in 22 years and had died early of cervical cancer and tuberculosis, began writing pieces about sexual education for the socialist magazine New York Call in 1912. The next year she began work at the Henry Street Settlement and soon separated from her husband. In 1914, she published a newsletter called The Woman Rebel, which proclaimed that every woman should be ‘absolute mistress of her own body’ and as such, should avail herself of contraception, which Sanger referred to as ‘birth control.’”
“In 1916, Sanger opened a family planning clinic in Brooklyn. It was raided by police after ten days and Sanger spent thirty days in prison. Five years later, the same year that Sanger and her husband finally divorced, she would found The American Birth Control League, which would later be renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942.”
“Suffragists had often staged political ‘pageants’ in which they wore sashes emblazoned ‘Votes for Women.’ But 1921, the year following the ratification of the 19th Amendment, brought a perversion of this display: the debut of the Miss America pageant, in which unmarried women showed off their decidedly apolitical attributes in contribution against, as opposed to collaboration with, each other.”
The 1950s
“It was a neat, elliptical system. Advertisers sold women and men on an old, cult-of-domesticity-era ideal that the highest female calling was the maintenance of a domestic sanctuary for men on whom they would depend economically. In order to care for the home, these women would rely on new products, like vacuums and washing machines, sales of which would in turn line the pockets of the husbands who ran the companies and worked in the factories that produced these goods.”
“The consumerist cycle both depended on and strengthened capitalism, and thus worked to allay other postwar anxieties about nuclear attack and Communism, both of which had become linked to fears about the power of women’s sexuality run amok. Elaine Tyler May reports that ‘non-marital sexual behavior in all its forms became a national obsession after the war’ and marriage, in tandem with the repudiation of women’s recent advances, was the cure.”
“The mid-20th century path for white women was not simply to marry, but to marry early, before getting a taste for the independent life. A 1948 American Social Hygiene Association pamphlet advised, 60 years in advance of Mitt Romney’s touting of youthful wedlock, that ‘Marriage is better late than never. But early marriage gives more opportunity for happy companionship…for having and training children…promoting family life as a community asset, and observing one’s grandchildren start their careers.’”
“By the end of the 1950s, around 60% of female students were dropping out of college, either to marry or because the media blitz and realignment of expectations led them to believe that further education would inhibit their chances of finding a husband. Secondary education, which had expedited women’s autonomy in the previous century, now worked, in part, to abrogate it. In his 1957 Harpers piece, ‘American Youth Goes Monogamous,’ Dr. Charles Cole, president of Amherst College, wrote that ‘a girl who gets as far as her junior year in college without having acquired a man is thought to be in grave danger of becoming an old maid.’”
“In Barnard’s graduating class of 1960, two-thirds of seniors were engaged before graduation, and at pregraduation parties, betrothed students were given corsages while singles were offered lemons. In these years, around half of brides were younger than 20.”
“Pregnant by the time she earned her degree, Blume recalled the dismay with which she ‘hung [her] diploma over the washing machine.’ And as writer Nora Ephron explained in a 1994 commencement address at her alma mater Wellesley about her own graduating class of 1962: ‘We weren’t meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren’t meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions or lives, we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect.’”
“The domesticity of the 1950s has long been understood both as a reaction to the Depression and the World Wars, especially WWII, and the flooding into the working world of women in wartime. But it wasn’t just about nudging women off factory floors and selling them blenders; it was also about forcing marriage back down the throats of women who had spent a century purging it as the central element of their identity. Or, rather, it was about forcing marriage back down the throats of some women.”
“While marriage rates for middle-class white women soared through the 40s and 50s, for black women, mid-20th century conditions were very different. Since emancipation, black women had married earlier and more often than their white counterparts. In the years directly after WWII, thanks to the return of soldiers, black marriage rates briefly increased further. However, as white women kept marrying in bigger numbers and at younger ages throughout the 50s, black marriage rates began to decrease, and the age of first marriage to climb. By 1970, there had been a sharp reversal: Black women were not marrying nearly as often or as early as their white counterparts. It was nothing as benign as coincidence. While one of the bedrocks of the expansion of the middle class was the aggressive reassignment of white women to domestic roles within the idealized nuclear family, another was the exclusion of blacks from the opportunities and communities that permitted those nuclear families to flourish. Put more plainly, the economic benefits extended to the white middle class, both during the New Deal and in the post-WWII years, did not extend to blacks. Social Security, created in 1935, didn’t apply to either domestic laborers or agricultural workers, who tended to be blacks, or Asian or Mexican immigrants. Discriminatory hiring practices, the low percentages of black workers in the country’s newly strengthened labor unions, and the persistent (if slightly narrowed) racial wage gap, along with questionable practices by the Veterans Administration, and the reality that many colleges barred the admission of black students, also meant that returning black servicemen had a far harder time taking advantage of the GI Bill’s promise of college education.”
“In William Levitt’s four enormous ‘Levittowns,’ suburban developments which, thanks to government guarantees from the VA and the Federal Housing Association, provided low-cost housing to qualified veterans, there was not one black resident. Between 1934 and 1962, the government subsidized $120 billion in new housing, 98% of it for white families. This disparity created a demand for housing that exceeded the supply, prices shot up for black buyers, and black residents were forced to live ‘crammed into old and run-down housing, mainly in dense central neighborhoods’ that had been abandoned by white residents moving out to the suburbs. Banks routinely refused mortgages to residents of minority neighborhoods, or offered loans at prohibitively usurious rates meant to reflect the imagined risk of lending to blacks.”
“The new freeways that threaded the suburbs to the urban centers where residents made their livings were often built by razing black neighborhoods; those roads regularly cut off black residents from business districts and the public transit that might connect them to jobs and public services. Postwar ‘urban renewal’ projects purportedly intended to create public housing for poor Americans often involved the dismantling of non-white communities and the relocation of minorities to poorly-served areas.”
“When blacks were able to compete with whites by gaining employment that might otherwise have gone to whites, buying homes near white enclaves, attempting to vote, or enroll in white schools or interact with white women, the response, especially in the postwar Jim Crow South, was often violent. It was an era of voter intimidation, lynching, cross burning, and property destruction by the Klan.”
“These maneuvers cemented a cycle of economic disadvantage that made marriage — especially the kinds of traditionally patriarchal marriages that white women were being shooed into — less practical. If black women were working all day (often scrubbing the homes of white women), it was impossible for them also to fulfill the at-home maternal ideal for which white women were being celebrated. If black men had a harder time getting educations and jobs, earning competitive wages, or securing loans, it was harder for them to play the role of provider. If there was no government-subsidized split-levels to fill with publicly educated children, then the nuclear family chute into which white women were being funneled was not open to most black women. There simply weren’t the same incentives to marrying early or at all; there were fewer places to safely put down roots and fewer resources with which to nourish them. It’s not that black women simply happened not to experience mid-1950s domesticity, they were actively barred from it, trapped in another way: walled off in underserved neighborhoods by highways that shuttled fairly remunerated white husbands back to wives who themselves had been walled off in well-manicured, stultifying suburbs.”
Cities
“Cities have long provided safer harbor for, and have in turn been shaped by, single women. Cities are chock-full of single people, male and female: never married, divorced, widowed, and separated. While more than 25% of people across the U.S. live alone, metros like Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Denver boast single-dwelling households that comprise more than 40% of their total population. According to Census data, Atlanta has the highest share of residents living alone, at 44%; DC and its suburbs clock in at about the same. In Manhattan, the percentage of solo-dwellers climbs to around 50%.”
“In early modern Europe, as soon as any kind of nonagricultural opportunity materialized, women would decamp from the countryside to villages and towns where they could find jobs lace-making or spinning. In these more populated areas, there was the possibility of socializing with other women, earning wages, meeting a wider variety of potential mates, and living, even briefly, outside the power of a husband or a father.”
“In turn, these migrations of women would precipitate a rise in the marriage age, an increase in the % of women who never married at all, and a drop in reproduction. Higher concentrations of women skewed the gender ratio and made husbands harder to find. However, it was also true that by leaving the rural areas where they were more closely watched by fathers and local clergy, women gained a minuscule whiff of liberation: the chance to postpone, if only for a short time, their inevitable futures as economically dependent wives and mothers. In early modern Europe, even women working apparently thankless jobs as servants in cities ‘may actually have preferred to remain single because of the security and independence a life in service offered them.’”
“In an 1896 interview with Nellie Bly, Susan B. Anthony kvelled about the habit of women bicycling. ‘I think it has done more to emancipate women than about anything else in the world,’ she said, ‘I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent.”
“Women began promenading without shame, publicly socializing and visiting the parks erected to be the lungs of industrialized cities. The outdoors offered opportunities to push social and sexual boundaries, and young people ‘used the streets as a place to meet the other sex, to explore nascent sexual feelings, and carry on flirtations, all outside the watchful eyes and admonitions of parents.’ So liberating was a life lived in the urban wild that the WYCA worried about how ‘young girls…in this unconventional out-of-door life, are so apt to grow noisy and bold.’”
“By the turn of the 20th century, ‘so many single girls were visibly out there — working, eating in restaurants, dancing — that it became harder to immediately categorize them.’ This inability to immediately affix women with rigid class identity or expectation meant an increased potential for personal reinvention and flexibility amidst crowds of new people.”
“It’s not such a bad thing to always have something to do, someone to meet, work to complete, trains to catch, beers to drink, marathons to run, classes to attend. By the time some women find someone to whom they’d like to commit, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing that they will have, if they were lucky, soaked in their cities and been wrung dry by them, that those who marry later, after a life lived single, may experience it as the relief of slipping between cool sheets after having been out all night. These same women might have greeted entry into the same institution, had they been pressured to enter it earlier, with the indignation of a child being made to go to bed early.”
“And if marriage never happens, or before it happens, what’s also true is that some women simply want to stay and keep playing. ‘Our status as single, independent, financially solvent women…has us sitting on a mountain of unprecendented options. Options: Those are exciting. So we want all the options, bigger and better and faster and shinier, or taller or sexier or stronger or smarter, and yet somehow also different.”
“In 1832, New York’s Magdalene Society issued the (possibly false) alarm that ‘We have satisfactorily ascertained the fact that the numbers of females in this city who abandon themselves to prostitution is not less than TEN THOUSAND!!!!! In Chicago, women who lived in the cheapest and most transient parts of town, the ‘furnished room districts,’ were expected to augment their income through hooking. One observer of such a neighborhood in the early 20th century said, ‘an attractive woman who does not ‘cash in’ is likely to be considered a fool by her neighbors.’”
Female Friendship
“Among the largely unacknowledged truths of female life is that woman’s primary, foundational, formative relationships are as likely to be with each other as they are with the men we’ve been told since childhood are supposed to be the people who complete us.”
“Female friendship has been the bedrock of women’s lives for as long as there have been women. In earlier eras, when there was less chance that a marriage, entered early, often for practical economic and social reasons, would provide emotional or intellectual succor, female friends offered intimate ballast.”
“Now, when marriages may ideally offer far more in the way of soulful satisfaction but increasingly tend to begin later in life, if at all, women find themselves growing into themselves, developing their identities, dreams and goals not necessarily in tandem with a man or within a traditional family structure, but instead alongside other women. Their friends.”
“[Some] women believe in what they call ‘chosen families.’ Ann clarified, ‘I mean that if you choose to invest in people, the people you invest in heavily invest in you, and that is emotionally sustaining.’ It’s an idea that’s gaining some ground in scientific circles. After years of anthropologists dismissing nonblood familial ties as ‘fictive kin,’ researchers have ‘recently pushed back against the distinction, arguing that self-constructed families are no less real or meaningful than conventional ones,’ and are beginning to refer to them as ‘voluntary kin.’ The distinction between voluntary kin and what we think of as regular friendship is that the relationships ‘often became central to one’s identity [and] may serve important life functions. They may provide a sense of belonging, as well as financial and emotional relief.’”
“Friendships provided the core of what I wanted from adulthood — connection, shared sensibilities, enjoyment — and a big part of what I’d wanted from romantic and sexual relationships with men, but had not yet experienced. Unlike my few romances, which had mostly depleted me, my female friendships were replenishing, and their salubrious effect expanded into other layers of my life. They made other things I yearned for, like better work, fairer renumeration, increased self-assurance, and even just fun seem more attainable.”
“Female friendship was not some consolation prize, some romance also-ran. Women who find affinity with each other are not settling. In fact, they may be doing the opposite, finding something vital that was lacking in their romantic entanglements, and thus setting their standards healthily higher.”
“I didn’t want to think of our friendship, our multi-textured life together, as some stand-in or placeholder for ‘realer’ relationships with partners, but it was undeniable that part of what we did for each other was about practicing and preserving intimacy in our lives — remembering how to share and bicker and compromise and connect, how to work through jealousy and be bored together — even during years when we did not have traditionally romantic partners with whom to learn these human skills.”
“We pushed each other to become hardier versions of ourselves, more able (and, I suspected, more likely) to form healthy, happy alliances with partners.”
“In 19th century America, the centrality of women’s relationships with each other was determined in part by the rigidly patrolled divide between the male and female spheres in earlier centuries, the ‘emotional segregation of men and women.’ Women often lived together within multigenerational family housing, or in sex-segregated schools, boarding houses, or in factory dorms like those in Lowell, MA. They guided each other through emotional and physical maturation, bonded over their experiences of courtship, marriage, and childbirth, and ‘lived in emotional proximity to each other.’ Marriage between these women and men who had been raised separately and educated and trained for public life, meant that ‘both women and men had to adjust to life with a person who was, in essence, a member of an alien group. ‘While closeness, freedom of emotional expression, and uninhibited physical contact characterized women’s relations with one another, the opposite was frequently true of male-female relationships.’”
“Perhaps nervousness about the disruptive power of female association is partly why, a couple decades into the 20th century — after the massive physical and sexual upheavals of the progressive era — the efforts to re-center women’s lives around marriage included a new level of public suspicion and aspersion cast upon female friendships. In the 1920s, perhaps not coincidentally around the time of the passage of the 19th Amendment, the term ‘lesbian’ began to be used popularly to indicate a class of single women with close bonds to each other. By the end of the 20s, American psychoanalysts ‘were warning that one of the most common ‘perversions of the libido’ was the tendency of teenage girls to fix their ‘affections on members of the same sex. Such perversions, they claimed, were a serious threat to normal development and to marriage.’ The fix was to discourage social unions between women, and to encourage instead more free-wheeling experimentation between the sexes: Dating.’”
“Instead of pairing off with each other and causing trouble, women were prodded, from a young age, to pursue men. Men had their own responsibility in securing the exclusive attentions of young women: Beaus were increasingly supposed to provide not just money and status, but companionship and sociability that women had in previous decades found with female friends, friends with whom they were now in competition for the attention of these men.”
“Caricatures of young women’s relationships with each other began to change: No longer sentimental sweethearts who might collude and commiserate dangerously, they were portrayed in popular culture as being in perpetual hair-pulls with each other over coveted male attention. This view of women as competitors has extended beyond the prize of romantic affirmation. As new, but too few, public avenues for professional advancement began to open later in the 20th century, the idea of factory workers laboring shoulder to shoulder gave way to popular visions of shoulder-padded professional dragon ladies eager to get in good with male bosses and dispatch with the female colleagues or underlings who might challenge them for the meager crumbs of power on offer. And backstabbing stereotypes weren’t always so far removed from reality: Power structures have long been built, in part, on the energies of disempowered people vying with each other for the scant chance of advancement.”
“When we meet other women who seem happier, more successful, and more confident than we are, it’s all too easy to them for it, because we understand that to mean that ‘There’s less for us.’ The solution is when you meet a woman who is intimidatingly witty, stylish, beautiful, and professionally accomplished, befriend her. Surrounding yourself with the best people doesn’t make you look worse by comparison. It makes you look better.”
“Questioned about her life as a woman who has never permanently settled with a romantic partner, Stevie Nicks replied, ‘I don’t feel aone. I feel very un-alone. I feel very sparkly and excited about everything. I know women who are going, like, ‘I don’t want to grow old alone.’ and I’m like, ‘See, that doesn’t scare me…I’ll always be surrounded by people. I’m like the crystal ball and these are all the rings of Saturn around me.’”
“I saw more people every day when I was single than I do as a married person. I went out more. I talked on the phone with more people, knew more about other people’s lives. I attended more baseball games and concerts; I spent more time at work, and certainly engaged more with colleagues and peers. When I met my husband, we turned in toward each other and our worlds got smaller.”
Selflessness
“Never-married women are far more likely to be politically active, signing petitions, volunteering time, and attending rallies. Married adults tend to focus their energies within their own homes, perhaps volunteering for their own children’s schools, but not necessarily for orgs that do not benefit themselves or their kin. All of this compensatory energy thrown into the world by unmarried people is laudable and is line with the history of single women powering social movements. It also gets to the heart of an entirely different reason that aspersions of selfishness in women are overblown — because the default expectation of femininity, going back thousands of years has been selflessness.”
“In medieval Europe, where the powerful Catholic Church encouraged youthful unions, it also offered one of the only viable off-ramps: the cloister. Before the 16th century reformation, many wealthy families regarded convents as a refuge (or dumping ground) for daughters they could not unload in, or who did not have dowries enough for, marriage. But the trade-off, as always, was obvious: If they could not submit to marriage, these women would submit to Christ. In some places in Western Europe, there was an even more radical escape: the possibility of becoming a ‘beguine,’ an uncloistered, semireligious woman. Enough women availed themselves of this option that beguines came to be seen as a threat; in a report to the Council of Lyons in 1274, the Bishop Bruno of Olmutz suggested that beguines were troublesome insofar as they were ‘fleeing obedience both to priests and husbands.’ The objection hammered home the point of women’s lives: they are meant, and have always been meant, to be dedicated to the giving over of self to others, if not to husbands, and kids, then to priests, to god, to parents, to community. Any time women do anything with their lives that is not in service to others, they are readily perceived as acting perversely.”
“The ‘Knot Yet Report,’ published in 2013, reported that a college educated woman who delays marriage until her thirties will earn $18k more per year than an equivalently educated woman who married in her twenties. Women without college degrees also gain a wage premium if they delay marriage into their thirties, though only an average of $4k a year more. An even more powerful suggestion of exactly why it’s so important for pundits to convince women that power is in the kitchen: the report also revealed the exact opposite pattern for men. Both college-educated and non-college-educated men earn more money if they marry early, and thus conform to the marriage model that has always supported their economic dominance and the resulting dependency of women on them.”
“Men don’t just earn more by tying women down early. They do better at work. A 2010 survey by the American Historical Association showed that it took, on average, a married female historian 7.8 years to get tenure, compared to the 6.7 years it took a single woman to get the same promotion. For men, the pattern was reversed: Unmarried men became full professors in 6.4 years, compared to the 5.9 years it took men with wives at home. For men, marriage, and presumably the domestic support derived from wives, boosted professional focus. For women, the lack of marriage and its attendant responsibilities is what allowed them to move ahead at a faster clip.”
“Maddeningly, having children enhances men’s professional standing and has the opposite impact on women’s. Sociologist Michelle Budig has been studying the gendered wage grap between parents for years, and in 2014 found — based on data from 1979 to 2006 — that, on average, men saw a 6% increase in earnings after becoming fathers; in contrast, women’s wages decreased 4% for every child. The gap narrows significantly for women in the upper echelon professions — also the population that tends to marry later, after careers have become more established — but another 2014 study of Harvard Business School grads found that even well-renumerated, super-educated wives weren’t meeting their professional or economic goals, largely because, despite having comparable educations and ambitions, those women were allowing husbands’ careers to come before their own. Only 7% of Gen X Harvard Business School grads (and, less surprisingly 3% of Baby Boomer women) said that they expected their careers to take precedence over their husbands’. More than 60% of Gen X men surveyed said they expected their careers to be the top priority. 86% of Gen X and Baby Boomer men said their wives did most of the childcare.”
“A 2013 study revealed that men whose wives don’t work are likely to treat female coworkers poorly.”
“When women work less, it reinforces ideas about a gender-divided world that, in turn, encourage and, in fact, force men to turn more of their attention to work. Choices made by individuals have an effect on circumstances beyond individual or familial experience.”
“Single-girl parties are not unheard of. Some high-earning unmarried women are reclaiming their fortieth birthdays — the event that is supposed to signal the symbolic ticking out of the biological clock, the turning point at which we’re told that our youthful appeal begins to ebb, the storied entrance not into adulthood but into middle age — as celebrations of the lives they have lived and the futures in front of them. That is, at least in part, what we celebrate at weddings.”
“Author Kate Bolick threw a lavish joint fortieth birthday party with a (married) best friend, an event she and her friend referred to as their ‘Platonic Lesbian Birthday Wedding.’ Bolick wrote, ‘for me, this party actually was a bit like a wedding — it was the first time I’d asked my family and friends to gather together on my behalf, not to mention spend their money to get there…Did I get points for sparing them the added expenditures of a bridal shower, bachelorette party, reception dinner, day-after brunch, and a gift, plus the bonus of knowing that, unlike nearly half of the weddings they go to, this celebration wouldn’t end in divorce? If there was one thing I could assure my guests, it was that I’d be around until I was dead.’”
Race, Privilege, & Poverty
“When the Second Wave arrived to free many middle-class white women from their domestic prisons, many of those women continued to rely further on the low-paid labor of poorer women of color as nannies and housekeepers, rather than striking more equitable domestic bargains with their male partners.”
“As Kimberle Crenshaw reported in 2014, the median wealth, defined as the total value of one’s assets minus one’s debts, of single black women was $100; for single Latina women it was $120; those figures compared to $41,500 for single white women. And for married white couples? A startling $167,500.”
“Marital privilege pervades nearly every facet of our lives. Atlantic writers Christina Campbell and Lisa Arnold found that health, life, home, and car insurance all cost more for single people, and report that ‘it is not a federal crime for landlords to discriminate against potential renters based on their marital status.’ Looking at income tax policy, Social Security, healthcare, and housing costs, Campbell and Arnold found that ‘in each category, the singles paid or lost more than the marrieds.’ At some point in their calculations, the authors confess, ‘We each wanted to run and get a husband, stat.’”
“Even within wealthy populations, the economic advantages of solo working life for women begin to melt when those women have children, both with partners and on their own: When they are forced to take time away from work and divide their attention in ways that are both physically and emotionally demanding, in ways that society still doesn’t expect parenthood to be demanding of men.”
“Women who are pregnant or have young children find it harder than childless workers to switch jobs, harder to get hired. Sociologist Shelley Correll did a study in which she submitted fake resumes for high-status jobs. When the resumes included clues that the female applicant was a parent, the applicant was only half as likely to receive a call back about the job. Correll has found that women earn approximately 5% less per hour, per child, than their childless peers with comparable experience, while sociologist Joya Misra argues that motherhood is now a greater predictor of wage inequality than gender on its own.”
“The economic ramifications of having children are of course felt most keenly by unmarried mothers; a staggering 42% of people in families headed by single mothers live below the poverty line.”
“The splintering of the American economy over the past forty years has diversified poverty, as well as the middle income working classes, in which the incidence of unmarried motherhood is becoming most common. In 2000, around 22% of white households were run by single parents, the same percentage of black households that were single parented when Daniel Moynihan published his report.”
“In the eyes of some social conservatives, economists, and libertarians, an aversion to marriage has, over the past forty years, spread from blacks to whites like some kind of sickness. Economist Isabel Sawhill has written that, ‘What we are seeing is alternative living arrangements that have spread from the poor, and especially poor blacks, to the rest of society. The consequences for children and for society have been far from benign.’ As with so many social developments for women that first stemmed from economic necessity — from working for wages to walking on the street unaccompanied to wearing shorter, lighter clothing — the possibility of not marrying, and of having children out of wedlock, developed amongst people for whom marriage was no longer the most economically beneficial option.”
“None of this makes much sense given that, in developed countries outside the U.S., rates of poverty for single mothers are much lower than they are in the U.S., and that this country’s high child poverty rates extend across the board and include children living in married households. As Matt Bruenig at Demos wrote in 2014, ‘high child poverty in the U.S. is not caused by some overwhelming crush of single mother parenting. The lowest of the low-poverty countries manage to get along in the world with similar levels of single mother parenting just fine…We plunge more than 1 in 5 of our nation’s children into poverty because we choose to.”
“The only public policy approaches that have ever shown signs of boosting marriage rates and marital longevity haven’t had anything to do with promoting marriage as an institution, but rather with providing people better financial resources in advance of, and to better facilitate, marriage. Among them was an expansion of welfare, from 1994 to 1998, when the Minnesota Family Investment Program allowed people to keep their welfare benefits, as opposed to cutting them off, even after they found work. With the added economic security, the divorce rate for black women fell by 70%. In approximately the same years, the New Hope project was implemented in Milwaukee. An antipoverty program, New Hope provided full-time workers whose earnings were below 150% of the federal poverty level with income supplements, offered those unable to find work community service jobs and subsidized health and childcare. In a study of marriage rates, researchers found that 21% of never married women who participated in the New Hope Project were married five years later, compared to 12% of never-married women who did not participate. Income and wage growth also rose for participants, while depression decreased.”
“It seems clear that a government address of poverty is likely to make marriage more accessible to those who want it, while programs designed to shove marriage down the throats of Americans least equipped to enter it stably have little impact. If politicians are concerned about dropping marriage rates, they should increase welfare benefits. It’s that simple. If they’re concerned about poverty rates? They should increase welfare benefits. When asked what the single biggest step the country needs to take to address the needs of poor single mothers, Tim Casey from Legal Momentum said, ‘Step one: reforming welfare reform. Step two: reforming welfare reform. Step three: reforming welfare reform.’”
“In North Carolina in 2013, Republican state senators proposed a bill that would require couples to submit to a two-year waiting period before divorcing. And in 2012 Republican State Senator Glenn Grothman, from Wisconsin, tried to pass a bill that cited single parenthood as a factor that contributed to child abuse. Happily, these legislative attempts have failed, but they showcase what’s particularly dangerous about the combination of malevolence toward single women and a policy-enforced class chasm that leaves poor unmarried women vulnerable.”
“The irony is that conservatives are entirely maddest at and most threatened by powerful single women — the privileged, well-positioned women who earn money, wield influence, enjoy national visibility, and have big voices: Anita Hill, Murphy Brown, Sandra Fluke, Lena Dunham. But there’s only so much they can do to stop the surging power of those women, while there remain plenty of terrifying ways for them to take their aggressions out on poorer populations. While Republicans may not be able to stuff threatening wealthy women back in the kitchen, they can make life even harder for the single mother working two jobs who lives next door.”
“There are very logical reasons for women who aren’t wealthy to have children while they are young. In youth, women with fewer financial resources have advantages that are likely to disappear as they age: good health, living and able parents and aunts and uncles and siblings who can help with childcare and possibly a place to live. For young women born in difficult circumstances in today’s economically striated America, there is not the sense of an infinite future, but rather a very difficult one, in which work, good food, and quality healthcare will only get scarcer, not only for the woman in question, but for her network of friends and family. ‘Until poor young women have more access to jobs that lead to financial independence,’ Edin and Kefalas have argued, ‘until there is reason to hope for the rewarding life pathways that their privileged peers pursue — the poor will continue to have children far sooner than most Americans think they should, while still deferring marriage.’ We certainly don’t promise our citizens childcare, housing, or quality healthcare; we don’t ensure them educational paths that can lead to advancement. And thus, there’s logic in acting on the few advantages — youth, family — that life does offer. Having a baby is its own way of exerting control over the future.”
“Edin and Kefalas argue persuasively in Promises I Can Keep that, based on their studies, across races, motherhood is an organizing and often stabilizing factor in unmarried female life: the thing that prompts women to get up in the morning, to take better care of themselves, to settle down, to perhaps stop using drugs or staying out late, or to return to school or form closer bonds with other family members. Their interview subjects told them of the benefits, including ‘My child saved me.’”
“Poor women are working the hardest and earning the most in their families but can’t take the credit for being the breadwinners. Women do the emotional work for their families, while men reap the most benefits from marriage.”
“Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have explained that ‘money is related to love. Those with more household income are slightly more likely to experience that feeling. Roughly speaking, doubling your income is associated with being about 4% more likely to be loved.’ Perhaps, Stevenson and Wolfers guessed, having money makes it easier to find time to date, or maybe there are correlative reasons: ‘It’s possible,’ the economists continue in a Valentine’s Day editorial, ‘that other factors correlated with income, such as height or appearance, are the real source of attraction. Or maybe being loved gives you a boost in the labor market.’ It’s also possible that not having money distracts a person from her personal life, or puts her in a dating pool with others who are also distracted by not having money. Financial tension makes marriages far more unstable. Impoverished communities have higher rates of depression, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and gun violence.”
“When (white) men had union-protected jobs at manufacturing plants and could get a good rate on a loan for a three bedroom house and had a pension plan, marrying one of them — especially when women didn’t have those kinds of opportunities — made sense. But when men are struggling and women are more capable than ever of economic, social, sexual, and parental independence, marriage doesn’t just become unnecessary; bad versions of it can become burdensome and deleterious to women.”
Sexuality
“Sexual women have, in America’s past, been viewed as such a threat that, in the mid-20th century, the language of female sexuality was tied to both pugilism and war. As Elaine Tyler May writes, physically violent words, including knockout and bombshell, began to be used in reference to sexual women; a photograph of pinup Rita Hayworth was attached to the hydrogen bomb dropped on the Bikini Islands. And those islands, site of explosive military action, gave their name to the two-piece bathing suit.”
“Despite the strides that women have made, they still wield less sexual power than men, are still more likely to feel commodified, to feel pressured into encounters that don’t satisfy them physically or emotionally, to still sometimes feel bad about their sexual boldness, or their sexual acquiescence, then blame themselves for feeling bad.”
“As members of the gender that still holds most of the power, men remain the ones who get to dictate punishing sexual standards to which women are held. Male sexuality is considered normal, healthy; female sexuality is still liable to be viewed as immoral. Heterosexual male abstention from sex, meanwhile, is still often understood as a judgment passed on the desirability of a woman in question, while female abstention from sex is regarded as a symptom of prudishness, perversion, or lack of femininity.”
“Ambivalence about romantic commitment may be more evident today, but what it reveals is not necessarily a brand-new set of impulses, but rather a broader array of romantic and sexual preferences and metabolisms than have previously been on display. Now that we have greater freedom to consider doing other things with our lives, some individuals, women and men, might find they enjoy coupling cozily; others might enjoy sleeping around or being celibate. As with most developed preferences, it’s hard for many of us to imagine desires that diverge from ours. Why do some people love opera and others love Nicki Minaj? Some people want to try every new restaurant and others want to stay home and watch NASCAR. Class, race, age, identity, opportunity, and community figure into these preferences; they shape the options we have available to us and the way people around us behave; that’s also true of relationship patterns.”
“But even given these contextual identities, what today’s world allows is a diversity of romantic and sexual behaviors that we are still tempted to diagnose as aberrant or immature because they are not what we used to expect (or demand) of adults. But what we used to expect and demand is that everyone would get herded into the same conjugal channel. Quite suddenly, people are freer to take off in a number of directions, and they’re taking advantage of that freedom.”
“That diversity of behavior is startling. It’s different, uncharted, and admittedly a little scary. It certainly doesn’t end well for everyone. But it’s a grave mistake to argue that the single, narrow sexual chute into which most of us were once packed led more people to a greater number of happy endings.”
Global Trends
“The majority of Americans will wind up married, or seriously committed to another person for some portion of their lives. And, right now, that sets the U.S. apart from many countries around the world.”
“In Japan, a nation with a downard-spiraling marriage rate, in competition with Germany for the lowest birthrate in the world, (with fewer babies born in 2014 than any other year on record) citizens have begun to abandon not just wedlock, but heterosexual sex itself, a trend the Japanese press refers to as celibacy syndrome. One study found that over 60% of men and almost half of unmarried Japanese women between the ages of 18–24 are not engaged in any sort of romantic relationship, numbers that are 10% higher than they were just five years ago. Yet another study, commissioned by the Japanese Family Planning Association, showed that 45% of women under 24 claimed that they ‘were not interested in or despised sexual contact.’ According to the Japanese magazine Joshi Spa!, 33.5% of Japanese people polled believe that marriage is ‘pointless.’”
“The rejection of straight coupling is closely linked to the inflexibility of gender roles in Japan. Japanese women are getting educations and making money, but find domestic expectations unadjusted. The Japanese workweek, designed for a man with a domestically submissive helpmeet at home, is strenuous, impossible to sustain for a woman who has a husband or children she is still supposed to tend with undivided attention. In Japan, working wives are referred to as ‘devil wives.’ Ans so, according to The Guardian, 90% of young Japanese women said, in a survey performed by Japan’s Institute of Population and Social Security, that they would prefer to stay single than to enter into ‘what they imagine marriage to be like.’ Guardian writer Abigail Howarth reported that an old Japanese saying ‘Marriage is a woman’s grave’ has today been repurposed to indicate that marriage ‘is the grave of [women’s] hard-won careers.’ As one 32-year-old woman told Howarth, ‘You have to resign. You end up being a housewife with no independent income.’”
“Here’s a cautionary tale about what happens to relations between the sexes when the scales are unbalanced, when societies fail to adjust to the increased liberty of their female population.”
“A similar phenomenon has emerged in Catholic countries, such as Italy, where there are rising cases of so-called mammones; mama’s boys who, dissatisfied with the level of domestic devotion shown by their careerist female peers, continue to live with their cooking and cleaning mothers late into adulthood. The crude marriage rate (the # of marriages per 1,000 inhabitants) fell in Italy from 7.7 in 1960 to just over 3 in 2013.”
“In Germany, where working mothers are referred to, darkly, as ‘raven mothers,’ and where, according to the Institute for Economic Research, only around 2% of senior management jobs were occupied by women, the crude marriage rate has dropped by more than half, from 9.5 to 4.6 over the same period.”
“Compare those drastic declines in marriage rates to the Scandinavian nations, with more egalitarian social policy and attitudes, where women’s increasing freedoms have been embraced both through social policy and cultural adjustment. In Finland, the crude marriage rate slid only from 7.4 in 1960 to 4.6 in 2013; in Sweden, it dipped from 6.7 to 5.4. Both those nations, in which the median age of first marriage for women is over 30, used to have lower marriage rates than Italy and Germany; now their marriage rates are the same or higher.”
“Scandinavian citizens not only marry more often but form more stable committed unions outside marriage; evidence that progressive attitudes toward gender beget higher levels of heterosexual satisfaction and commitment. Cohabitating couples in Sweden are less likely than Americans to break up, and as sociologist Andrew Cherlin has pointed out, a child living with an unmarried pair of parents in Sweden ‘has a lower chance that his family will disrupt than does an American kid living with married parents.’ Amina Sow remembered her most serious relationship, with a Swede. ‘He asked how much my birth control was so we could split it.’”
“The U.S., a comparatively youthful nation, born of Enlightenment thinking, with promises of individual liberty at its core, has also seen its marriage rates decline steeply over the past four decades. However, the crude marriage rate, in 2012, was 6.8, higher than any other nation in the Americas, and than anywhere in Western Europe. There’s an argument to be made that American’s continued propensity to marry is evidence of the tenacity of patriarchal expectations in a country where promises of liberty were false at the start, and in which true parity — for women, for people of color, for gay people — has been hard won and remains elusive. I believe the reverse: that, in fact, it is the progressive nature of a nation that permits continuing revisions to its bedrock institutions — its constitution, its electorate, its definition of marriage — that has allowed marriage to evolve, to become more inclusive, more equal, and potentially more appealing to more people.”
Conclusion
“At the heart of the long American fight to challenge gender inequity have been the women who have been single by choice or by happenstance, for some protracted period or for the whole of their lives. These women (and the men who are their partners or their allies), through argument or just through their existence, have forced the country to expand to make new space for them.”
“In the New York Times, Angela Stanley, writing about how ‘few things are more irritating than the unsolicited comments I get that black women, like me, are unlikely to marry,’ refuted the popular claim that 70% of black women have never married by pointing out that the percentage only applied to women 25–29 and that, by the time black women turned 55, only 13% of them had never married. ‘Black women marry later,’ wrote Stanley, ‘But they do marry.’”
“Another impact of older parenthood is that parents often wind up with fewer children than they would have otherwise. According to Lauren Sandler, whose book, One and Only, documents the rising number of only-child households, the % of women who have only a single kid has more than doubled between 1990, when it was just 10% and 2010, to 23% in 2013. In part, that’s because when you start late, there’s less time to keep going, and chances of secondary infertility are higher. But it’s also true that many women who have delayed childbearing have done so for a reason: because of other commitments or hesitations, economic concerns or responsibilities against which they weighed the desire to have children. For these women, fewer children is not necessarily a negative outcome. In a country that continues to make it difficult for women to balance domestic and professional life, having one child can be a strategy to preserve financial stability, a good marriage, a robust sex life, a satisfying career.”
“The realizations just beginning to dawn on America’s women and men, thanks in large part to the number of them living independently for longer, is that while the world is full of people who love their children and are crazy about being parents, for many of them, parenthood is simply not the only, or the primary role from which they derive meaning and identity.”
“In the 1970s, 1 in 10 American women concluded her childbearing years without having a kid. In 2010, it was almost 1 in 5. Some of the increase in childless women — around half, in fact — can be attributed to the number of women who want children, but do not find a path to having them before their clocks tick out. The other half represents a population of women who, with alternate models of female life more visible and available to them than ever before, conclude they do not want to have children, at least not as much as they want to do other things.”
“Like in-vitro fertilization, egg-freezing was not invented as a panacea for single women. In fact, it was developed in the early 90s by Italian doctors whose mission was to circumvent the Roman Catholic prohibition on embryo freezing that was preventing married women from using IVF to have kids.”
“In 2014, some Silicon Valley companies, including Apple and Facebook, announced that they would begin paying for egg freezing as part of their benefits packages.”
“Single women’s male counterparts have long enjoyed the fruits of a ‘wifey state,’ in which the nation and its government supported male independence in a variety of ways. Men, and especially married wealthy white men, have long relied on government assistance. It’s the government that has historically supported white men’s home and business ownership through grants, loans, incentives, and tax breaks. It has allowed them to accrue wealth and offered them shortcuts and bonuses for passing it down to their children. Government established white men’s right to vote and thus exert control over the government at the nation’s founding and has protected their enfranchisement since. It has also bolstered the economic and professional prospects of men by depressing the economic prospects of women: by failing to offer women equivalent economic and civil protections, thus helping to create conditions whereby women were forced to be dependent on those men, creating a gendered class of laborers who took low paying or unpaid jobs doing the domestic and childcare work that further enabled men to dominate public spheres.”
“But the growth of a massive population of women who are living outside those dependent circumstances puts new pressures on the government to remake conditions in a way that will be more hospitable to female independence, to a citizenry now made up of women living economically, professionally, sexually, and socially liberated lives.”
“We have to rebuild not just our internalized assumptions about individual freedoms and life paths; we also must revise our social and economic structures to account for, acknowledge, and support women in the same way in which we have supported men for centuries.”
“And while previous generations of women have offered their time and energies to the pursuit of social progress-abolition, suffrage, temperance, labor — today’s single women are applying a more diffuse set of pressures: their very existence pushes us to alter the fundamental policies, as well as the cultural and social expectations, that have historically made it difficult for women to thrive outside of marriage. Single women require new sets of protections that support their free lives in ways that will enable them to enjoy opportunities equal to those that their male peers have long enjoyed.”
“Of course, the policies that have held up the marriage model as the only model are incredibly varied: They range from the lack of subsidized childcare and school days that end in the mid afternoons (Who, after all, is meant to do childcare if everyone is working? And who is supposed to pay for it if it is to be done by someone other than a nonworking parent?) to the Hyde Amendment, which prevents poor women from using any federal money to pay for abortions, making it difficult for them to exert control over the size of their families, their careers, their bodies.”
“Single women are taking up space in a world that was not build for them. We are a new republic, with a new category of citizen. If we are to flourish, we must make room for free women, must adjust our economic and social systems, the ones that are built around the presumption that no woman really counts unless she is married.”
“In short, it is time to greet the epoch of single women that’s upon us with open eyes and curious minds. If we do, we will travel the progressive path that Susan B. Anthony imagined winding away in front of her, the path that is now in front of us. By truly reckoning with woman as both equal and independent entity, we can make our families, our institutions, and our social contract stronger.”
“If our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and their unmarried counterparts, could envision the radical future in which we are now living, it is incumbent on us to honor the work they did and walls they broke down by adjusting their own lenses. It’s time to rebuild the world for the diverse women who live in it now, more freely, than ever before.”
