Contemporary, unmarried life may have felt—to Roiphe and to many single women who continue to come after her—a lot more complicated, confusing and scary than the simpler single option on offer to women of previous generations. But the wholesale revision of what female life might entail is also, by many measures, the invention of independent female adulthood.
The Single Ladies
This independence can be punishing. Many single women are poor or struggling. Almost 50 percent of the 3.3 million Americans now earning minimum wage or below are unmarried women.8 Many of them live, often with children, in communities where unemployment, racial and class discrimination, and a drug war that puts many young men in prison combine to make the possibilities of stable marriages scarce, making singlehood less of a freeing choice than a socially conscripted necessity. More than half of unmarried young mothers with children under the age of six are likely to live below the poverty line, a rate that is five times the rate of the corresponding population of married women.9
Yes, many single women, across classes and races, would like to marry, or at least form loving, reciprocal, long-term partnerships, but have not found mates who want the same thing, or who can sustain it. Some are lonely.
Many women, unmarried into their thirties, living in geographic, religious, and socio-economic corners of the country where early marriage remains a norm, as well as many women who remain single less by choice than by circumstance, into their forties, fifties, and sixties, do not feel as though they are living in a new, singles-dominated world. They feel ostracized, pressured; they are challenged by family and peers.
However, statistically, across the country, these women are not alone. Their numbers are growing by the year. There were 3.9 million more single adult women in 2014 than there were in 2010.10 Between 2008 and 2011, the rate of new marriage fell by 14 percent for those who had not completed high school and by 10 percent for those with at least a bachelor’s degree.11
In the course of researching this book, I spoke to scores of American women from different backgrounds and classes and faiths and races about their experiences of living singly.
“We all expected to be married at twenty-six,” said Kitty Curtis, a New Jersey hairstylist who is, at twenty-six, not married. “I don’t really know anyone who is married,” she said. “And the ones I do know, there’s a sense that it’s weird, strange. It’s a foreign idea to be married before thirty.” Meaghan Ritchie, a fundamentalist Christian college student from Kentucky, told me that she will not marry before she’s at least twenty-two, because she believes that dropping out of college—as her mother did to marry her father—would not be an economically sound idea. Amanda Neville, a thirty-five-year-old New Yorker, flew to Russia to adopt a daughter, who is deaf, within a year of opening a wine store and beginning a new relationship with a boyfriend. Ada Li, a manicurist from China living in Brooklyn, told me that her decision to wait until her late thirties to marry and have a child was what made her life in the United States happy and free.
Some women actively decided against early marriage, in part out of fear that matrimony would put a stop to their ambitions. “The moment I saw that ring,” wrote Jessica Bennett, a journalist who turned down a proposal at twenty-four, “I saw dirty dishes and suburbia . . . I saw the career I had hardly started as suddenly out of reach . . . the independence I had barely gained felt stifled. I couldn’t breathe.” Some are sad to not yet have found mates, like Elliott Holt, a forty-year-old novelist who told me, “I guess I just had no idea, could never have predicted, how intense the loneliness would be at this juncture of my life.” And others, including Susana Morris, a thirty-two-year-old English professor in Alabama, are less worried about themselves than they are about how concerned everyone else is about them. “What’s anxiety provoking is that every time you open a magazine or a book or turn on the television, there’s someone telling you there’s something wrong with you as a black woman—you’re too fat, too loud, don’t nobody want to marry you. That is anxiety producing!”
These women are not waiting for their real lives to start; they are living their lives, and those lives include as many variations as there are women.
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 hustled 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 combinations of love, sex, partnership, parenthood, work, and friendship, at different speeds.
Single female life is not prescription, but its opposite: liberation.
This liberation is at the heart of our national promise, but that promise of freedom has often been elusive for many of this country’s residents. This makes it all the more important to acknowledge that while the victories of independent life are often emblematized by the country’s most privileged women, the war was fought by many Americans who have always had far fewer options to live free: women of color, poor, and working-class women.
The Epoch of Single Women
When I began writing, I intended this to be a book of mostly contemporary journalism, an account of how generations of single women living at the turn of the twenty-first century were, by delaying or abstaining from marriage, reshaping the nation’s politics and families. In short, while I understood it to be built on political gains made in previous eras, I believed that I was chronicling a mass behavioral revolution staged by women of my era.
What I learned, as I began my research, is that while this moment is unprecedented in terms of its size, thanks to women’s contemporary ability to live more economically and sexually autonomous lives than ever before, it is certainly not without historical precedent. Today’s unmarried and late married women are walking a road toward independence that was paved by generations of American women who lived singly when it was far harder to do so than it is today. Crucially, many of those radically single and late-married women were the ones who were able to devote their unmarried, nonmaternal lives to changing the nation’s power structures in ways that might better support today’s army of free women.
In 1877, the never-married suffragist, abolitionist, and labor activist Susan B. Anthony gave a speech called “The Homes of Single Women.” In it, she prophesied that the journey toward gender equality would necessarily include a period in which women stopped marrying. “In woman’s transition from the position of subject to sovereign, there must needs be an era of self-sustained, self-supported, homes,” said Anthony.12
She continued, clairvoyantly:
As young women become educated in the industries of the world, thereby learning the sweetness of independent bread, it will be more and more impossible for them to accept the . . . marriage limitation that “husband and wife are one, and that one the husband. . . .” Even when man’s intellectual convictions shall be sincerely and fully on the side of Freedom and equality to woman, the force of long existing customs and laws will impel him to exert authority over her, which will be distasteful to the self-sustained, self-respectful woman. . . . Not even amended constitutions and laws can revolutionize the practical relations of men and women, immediately, any more than did the Constitutional freedom and franchise of Black men transform white men into practical recognition of the civil and political rights of those who were but yesterday their legal slaves.
And so, Anthony predicted, logic would lead us, “inevitably, to an epoch of single women.”
Here we are.
Smack in the middle of Anthony’s imagined epoch, an era in which—like the one in which Anthony herself lived—the independence of women is a crucial tool in their long struggle toward a more just and equitable position in the world.
CHAPTER O
NE
Watch Out for That Woman: The Political and Social Power of an Unmarried Nation
The contemporary wave of single women was building in the very same years that I was heading off to college, though I hadn’t realized it. The early 1990s was the period in which reverberations of the social and political revolutions of my mother’s generation were manifesting as swiftly changing marriage and reproductive patterns, which, in turn, would create a current of political possibility for independent women in America.
On October 11, 1991, a thirty-five-year-old law professor, Anita Faye Hill, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify about the sexual harassment she’d experienced while working for Clarence Thomas, a D.C. Circuit Judge nominated by President George H. W. Bush to fill the Supreme Court seat of the retiring civil rights hero, Thurgood Marshall. A native of rural Lone Tree, Oklahoma, Hill was the youngest of thirteen children raised by Baptist farmers; her grandfather and great-grandparents had been slaves in Arkansas. She was valedictorian of her high-school class and attended Yale Law School, worked for Thomas at both the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and taught contract law at the University of Oklahoma. She was not married.
As cameras recorded every second, broadcasting to a rapt and tense nation, Hill sat before the all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Panel and told them in a careful, clear voice of the sexually crude ways in which Thomas had spoken to her during the years she worked for him; she detailed her former boss’s references to pornographic movie stars, penis size, and pubic hair in professional contexts. In turn, she was pilloried by the conservative press, spoken to with skepticism and insult by many on the committee, and portrayed by other witnesses as irrational, sexually loose, and perhaps a sufferer of erotomania,1 a rare psychological disorder that causes women to fantasize sexual relationships with powerful men.
Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson questioned Hill’s “proclivities” (a term that the conservative columnist William Safire suggested was “a code word for homosexuality”2). One pundit, David Brock, called Hill “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” Called in front of the committee after her testimony, John Doggett, a former classmate of Thomas’s and an acquaintance of Hill’s, described Hill as “somewhat unstable” and surmised that she had “fantasized about my being interested in her romantically.” He guessed, based on their brief social interactions, “that she was having a problem with being rejected by men she was attracted to;” at another point, Doggett noted that Hill “seemed to be lonely in this town.”
As Hill would later write of her experience, “Much was made in the press of the fact that I was single, though the relevance of my marital status to the question of sexual harassment was never articulated.”3
The relevance of her single status was how it distinguished her from established expectations of femininity. Hill had no husband to vouch for her virtue, no children to affirm her worth, as women’s worth had been historically understood. Her singleness, Hill felt at the time, allowed her detractors to place her “as far outside the norms of proper behavior as they could.” Members of the Judiciary, she wrote, “could not understand why I was not attached to certain institutions, notably marriage,” and were thus left to surmise that she was single “because I was unmarriageable or opposed to marriage, the fantasizing spinster or the man-hater.”
The lingering assumption—born of the same expectations that I had chafed at as a kid, reading novels—was that the natural state of adult womanhood involved being legally bound to a man. Perhaps especially in the comparatively new world of female professional achievement, in which a woman might be in a position, as an equivalently educated professional peer of a judicial nominee to the Supreme Court, to offer testimony that could imperil his career, marriage remained the familiar institution that might comfortably balance out this new kind of parity, and would offer the official male validation and abrogate her questioners’ ability to depict her as a spinster fantasist.
In raising questions about her marital status and her mental stability, Hill wrote, senators were “attempting to establish a relationship between marriage, values, and credibility” and prompt people to wonder “why I, a thirty-five-year-old Black woman, had chosen to pursue a career and to remain single—an irrelevant shift of focus that contributed to the conclusion that I was not to be believed.”
Indeed, Hill’s testimony was not believed by the members of the committee, at least not enough to make an impact on their decision. Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court days after her appearance before the Judiciary.
But Hill was not some contemporary Hester Prynne, doomed to a life in exile. Instead, her appearance had a lasting impact on the country and its power structures. The term sexual harassment entered the lexicon and the American consciousness, allowing women, married and single, to make sense of and lodge objections to workplace harassment; it offered us a view of how behavior long viewed as harmless was actually a form of discrimination and subjugation that hurt women as a class.
Just as long-lasting was the impact that the vision of Hill’s being grilled by a panel of white men had on America’s representative politics. In 1991, there had been only two women serving in the United States Senate, an embarrassing circumstance that the hearings put in stark national relief. A photograph published by the New York Times showed a group of Congress’s few female representatives, including Patricia Schroeder and Eleanor Holmes Norton, running up the Capitol steps to stop the proceedings to demand that Hill be allowed to testify.
The spectacle of Hill’s treatment by the committee spurred a reckoning with the nation’s monochromatic and male representative body. The year after her testimony, an unprecedented number of women ran for the Senate. Four of them won. One, Washington’s Patty Murray, has repeatedly explained that the Thomas hearings had helped spur her to political action; “I just kept looking at this committee, going ‘God, who’s saying what I would say if I was there,’ ” she’s said. “I mean, all men, not saying what I would say. I just felt so disoriented.”4 Another, Carole Moseley Braun of Illinois, became the first (and, so far, only) African-American woman elected to the Senate. They called 1992 “The Year of the Woman.”
Though Hill’s life and career were certainly upended by the attention (as well as by the death and rape threats) that came in the wake of her testimony, they were not cut short or ended. She was not permanently ostracized, professionally or personally. Today, she teaches law at Brandeis and lives in Boston with her partner of more than a decade.
Part of the reason that Hill was not wholly written off as a social aberration was because by the early 1990s, she wasn’t. A generation of women was, like Hill, living, working, and occupying public space on its own. The percentage of women between the ages of thirty-five and forty-four who were married had fallen from about 87 percent in 1960 and 1970 to 73 percent in 1990.5
“Women began, in the nineties, to embrace their own sexuality and sexual expression in a different way,” Hill told me in 2013. Hill may have looked little like the recent past, but she was very much the face of the future, surely part of what made her discomfiting enough to send senators into paroxysms. As Alan Simpson urged the committee, citing the many warnings he claimed to have received about Hill, “Watch out for this woman!”6
In the early 1990s, there were so many women to watch out for.
The Great Crossover
Less than a year after the Thomas hearings, Vice President Dan Quayle gave a campaign trail speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, during which he offered his theory on what was behind the Los Angeles race riots that had followed the verdict in the Rodney King trial. The “lawless social anarchy that we saw,” Quayle argued, “is directly related to the breakdown of the family structure.” To illustrate this point, Quayle took an unexpected turn, laying into a television character.
The eponymous heroine of CBS’s Murphy Brown, played by Candice Bergen, was about to give
birth to a baby without being married—or romantically attached—to the child’s father. Quayle was concerned that in doing so, Murphy, who he noted “supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman,” was “mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”7 Quayle’s comments would land him, fictional Murphy Brown, and her fictional baby, Avery, on the front of the New York Times, making the character’s unmarried status far more emblematic than it would have been otherwise.
Of course, Quayle’s concern hadn’t really been about Murphy; he had been unspooling some classic conservative rhetoric about how welfare programs discourage marriage when he’d thrown his pop-culture curveball. Quayle’s anxiety over the possibility that new models of motherhood and womanhood, unhooked from marriage, might be taking hold across income brackets was palpable. A new reality was setting in: If women could live independently, many would do so, and as they did, men would become less central to economic security, social standing, sexual life, and, as it turned out, to parenthood.
Though Quayle surely didn’t realize it at the time, 1992 was at the heart of what researchers would later dub “the great crossover.”8 Not only were the early nineties the years during which the marriage age was rising; they were the point at which the marriage age was rising above the age of first birth.
It was the reversal of a very old cultural and religious norm, purportedly a bedrock of female identity and familial formation, though not always a reflection of real life, in which premarital sex and pregnant brides had always existed. However, officially, public codes of respectability had held that marriage was to precede childbearing. Now, that sequence was being scrambled, and amongst the many Americans panicking about it were the men who had long enjoyed relatively unchallenged control of politics.
All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation Page 2