All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

by Traister, Rebecca

  Steinem’s most powerful gift was her ability to synthesize radical sentiments into appealingly pithy, era-defining sound bites.

  “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry,” she said, 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 Dunn19). 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.

  Not everyone was charmed.

  “I guess [she] gave some comfort to the singles,” Betty Friedan would later say of Steinem. “But really, Gloria was a phony. She always had a man. And I used to catch her hiding behind a Vogue magazine at Kenneth’s having her hair streaked.”20

  Steinem herself made the same point to me in 2012, noting that she had been “somewhat protected” from certain kinds of man-hating caricature and denigration because “I always had a man in my life.” However, that was part of what made her so useful when it came to offering 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 seventies.

  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 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 from unwarranted governmental 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. As the historian Nancy Cott writes, by “refusing to deny single persons the privacy that married couples were granted, [Eisenstadt] moved toward displacing marriage from the seat of official morality.”21

  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.”22 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 1970s, there were simply more ways to valorize female existence: more jobs to apply for, flings 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 percent through the late 1970s and 1980s. 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 1970s 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. As legal scholar Rachel Moran writes, “One of the great ironies of second-wave feminism is that it ignored single women as a distinct constituency while creating the conditions that increasingly enabled women to forego marriage.”23

  At the conclusion of the 1970s, the number of never-married persons was at its lowest24 ever (mostly because the calculation included the enormous swell of married, now divorcing, Baby Boomers), but the rate of women who were getting married was beginning to slow noticeably, and the median age of first marriage had inched up to twenty-two.

  In 1981, Ronald Reagan cruised into the Oval Office on a wave of aspersions cast on women he depicted as relying on government assistance in place of husbands, or in his parlance, “welfare queens.” His ascension had come on the back of, and in tandem with, the rise of the New Right, an alliance of fiscal and social conservatives aligned around a commitment to religious righteousness and reversing the victories of twentieth-century social progressives. He struck the Equal Rights Amendment from the Republican Party’s platform, where it had remained since 1940; he supported the so-called Human Life Amendment, which would have banned almost all abortions, and defined life as beginning at fertilization.

  It was morning in post-feminist America, and the backlash, against the women’s movement and the single women whose swelling numbers seemed to emblematize its success most uncomfortably, was in full force.

  In 1985, a study conducted by male researchers from Harvard and Yale concluded that a never-married, university-educated forty-year-old woman had only a 2.6 percent chance of ever marrying. It spurred Newsweek to publish its infamous cover story “The Marriage Crunch,” in which it made the famously inaccurate claim that single women at age forty were more likely to be killed by terrorists than to marry. People published photos of unmarried celebrities under the headline “Are These Old Maids?”25 and warned that “most single women over thirty-five can forget about marriage.” The social and cultural resistance to the spurning of marriage was evident.

  And yet, women kept right on not marrying. In 1990, the median age for first marriage for women jumped to nearly twenty-four, the highest it had been in the century in which it had been recorded.

  The future had arrived. With it had come echoes of the past advances of unmarried women, this time threatening the status quo with the sexual and economic power won for them by previous generations. Rising to meet them would be new iterations of old political and cultural opposition, figures anxious to corral these Amazons back into the marital fold.

  Now

  Abstention from or delay of marriage may have been a conscious choice for some women in the 1970s and 1980s, but it has now simply become a mass behavior. The most radical of feminist ideas—the disestablishment of marriage—has, terrifyingly for many conservatives,
been so widely embraced as to have become habit, drained of its political intent, but ever more potent insofar as it has refashioned the course of average female life. The independence of women from marriage decried by Moynihan as a pathology at odds with the nation’s patriarchal order is now a norm.

  By 2013, about half of first-time births were to unmarried women; for women under thirty, it was almost 60 percent.26 The same year, the National Center for Family and Marriage Research released a study that revealed the marriage rate to be the lowest it had been in over a century.27 “Marriage is no longer compulsory,” the co-director of the NCFMR said in a statement about the study. “It’s just one of an array of options.”

  That 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 do 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 dismantling 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.

  Single Women Voters

  In 2012, unmarried women made up a remarkable 23 percent of the electorate. Almost a quarter of votes were cast by women without husbands, up three points from just four years earlier. According to Page Gardner, founder of the Voter Participation Center, in the 2012 presidential election, unmarried women, who have a vested stake in their own economic and reproductive rights, drove turnout in practically every demographic, making up “almost 40 percent of the African-American population, close to 30 percent of the Latino population, and about a third of all young voters.”

  Single women helped put Barack Obama back in the White House; they voted for him by 67 to 31 percent, while married women voted for Romney. In the 2013 Virginia race for governor, the Democratic candidate beat his Republican rival, carrying women by nine points, but single women by what the New York Times called28 “a staggering 42 percentage points.” Unmarried women’s political leanings are not, as has been surmised in some quarters, attributable solely to their racial diversity. According to polling firm Lake Research Partners, while white women as a whole voted for Romney over Obama, unmarried white women chose Obama over Romney by a margin of 49.4 percent to 38.9 percent.29 In 2013, columnist Jonathan Last wrote about a study of how women aged twenty-five to thirty voted in the 2000 election. “It turned out,” Last wrote in the Weekly Standard, “that the marriage rate for these women was a greater influence on vote choice than any other variable” measured.30

  The connection between single female life and electoral engagement is no wonky secret. As one 2014 New York Times story began, “The decline of marriage over the last generation has helped create an emerging voting bloc of unmarried women that is profoundly reshaping the American electorate.”

  Conservatives are so aware of this that antifeminist pundit Phyllis Schlafly claimed in 2012 that President Obama was working to keep women unmarried by giving away so many social services to them. “President Obama is simply trying to promote more dependency on government hand-outs because he knows that is his constituency,”31 Schlafly said. This is how scary single women are today, and how badly Republican politicians want to lash out at them: During the October 2012 presidential debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, when the candidates were asked about how they might stem the tide of gun violence, Romney replied that a major step in curbing “the culture of violence” in the United States was to “tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone.” Apparently, anyone (of the opposite sex) will do.

  As the second decade of the twenty-first century has worn on, politicians of all stripes, aware of the political power of the unmarried woman yet seemingly incapable of understanding female life outside of a marital context, have come to rely on a metaphor in which American women, no longer bound to men, are binding themselves to government. During the lead-up to the 2014 midterms, Fox News pundit Jesse Watters, referring to unmarried women as “Beyoncé Voters,” alleged that “they depend on government because they’re not depending on their husbands. They need things like contraception, health care, and they love to talk about equal pay.” Meanwhile, some young conservatives at the College Republican National Committee took a less scolding approach, cutting a series of television ads that imagined a single female voter trying on wedding dresses in the spirit of TLC’s reality show “Say Yes to the Dress,” except in the ads, the dress was actually a Republican gubernatorial candidate to whom this would-be-bride was pledging herself. Meanwhile, the liberal leaning Cosmopolitan Magazine launched a Get Out the Vote initiative that included a social-media–spread “Save the Date” notice for November 4, Election Day. It came with the unsubtle message, “You and the polls are getting hitched.”

  Joel Kotkin, a professor of urban development, argued in The Daily Beast that the power of the single voter is destined to fade, since single people “by definition . . . have no heirs,”32 while their religious, conservative, counterparts will repopulate the nation with children who will replicate their parents’ politics, ensuring that “conservative, more familial-oriented values inevitably prevail.” Kotkin’s error, of course, is both in assuming that unmarried people do not reproduce—in fact, they are doing so in ever greater numbers—but also in failing to consider whence the gravitation away from married norms derived. A move toward independent life did not simply emerge from a clamshell: It was born of generations of dissatisfaction with the inequities of religious, conservative, social practice. Why should we believe that children born to social conservatives will not tread a similar path, away from conservative values, as the one walked by generations of traditionally raised citizens before them? The impulse toward liberation isn’t inoculated against by strict conservative backgrounds; it’s often inculcated by them.

  What all the electoral hand-wringing reveals is the seriousness of anxieties about how, exactly, independent women might wield their unprecedented influence, if only they came out to vote in full numbers, which they too often fail to do.

  Unmarried women are among the voters who are hardest to pull to the polls. In part because they are often poor, many of them overworked single mothers with multiple commitments, low-paying jobs that don’t permit them time to stand in line at the voting booth, or women for whom social policy has already failed so badly that they might not even see the point of voting. According to Page Gardner, in 2016, “For the first time in history, a majority of women voters are projected to be unmarried.” Yet going into the last presidential election season, nearly 40 percent of them had not registered to vote.33

  And yet, even with only a relatively small percentage of them voting, these single American women have already shown that they have the power to change America, in ways that make many people extremely uncomfortable.

  Co-eds, Sluts, and Marriage Cures

  In 2012, a then-unmarried Georgetown law student, Sandra Fluke, testified about the insurance regulations being proposed for women buying birth control. Fluke’s argument barely touched on issues of sexual freedom; it was instead about mone
y, wages, education, about the rights that women have to live multi-faceted lives—the kinds that are now more possible, since marriage has become decentralized as the defining experience of female adulthood—without being taxed extra to control their reproduction.

  When he tore into Fluke’s testimony in a lengthy on-air rant, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh couldn’t seem to get past his spluttering fury at the fact that she was arguing for her rights to a product that would enable her to have unmonitored amounts of sex. Limbaugh turned promptly to eroticized denigration of the independent woman in a way that recalled the treatment of Anita Hill twenty years earlier. On his syndicated radio show, Limbaugh called Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute;” “so much sex,” “so much sex,” “so much sex,” he repeated, extending his condemnation to envelop Fluke’s generational cohort, the “co-eds” who hook up “with as many partners as they want . . . Whatever, no limits on this.” Limbaugh said “unlimited” repeatedly, conveying his unmistakable fury that women had successfully conspired to evade the restraints that marriage and custom used to provide.

  Fluke, and the growing power of other independent women she seemed to represent, was an irritant to these conservatives. More than that, they feared, she might be contagious . . . positively pestilential.

  A writer at The American Spectator called Fluke, whom he took care to refer to as Mizz, “the model Welfare Queen for the 21st Century;” and warned of “how many thousands of” her ilk “are graduating this year to enter government jobs or political campaigns. They will be spreading their ideas to all within hearing.”34

  Less than a week after his Fluke attack, Limbaugh was tearing into a book on food politics written by another young woman when he paused to ask on air: “What is it with all these young, single, white women?”