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

by Traister, Rebecca

  Watch out for these women, these men were saying. They are everywhere.

  And for those unmarried women who are not privileged white law students like Fluke, the ones over whom lawmakers can more easily exert punishing power, there is no end to the rhetorical and policy attempts to stuff them back inside a marital box and lock them there.

  The idea that the decline in marriage—as opposed to broken social safety networks and economic policies that benefit the wealthy, the white, and the educated over the poor—is the source of inequality in our still fundamentally unequal world has lit a fire under Republicans in the early decades of the twenty-first century. As Florida Republican Marco Rubio has opined, “the greatest tool to lift children and families from poverty . . . isn’t a government spending program. It’s called marriage.”35 Rubio’s early competitors for the 2016 Republican nomination included Rick Santorum and Jeb Bush, politicians who have been campaigning on the denigration of single women since the Great Crossover of the mid-1990s.

  In 2013, Mitt Romney’s tone on the subject of early marriage became almost mournful, as he reported to graduates of Southern Virginia University during a commencement address there that “[S]ome people could marry, but choose to take more time, they say, for themselves. Others plan to wait until they’re well into their thirties or forties before they think about getting married. They’re going to miss so much of living, I’m afraid.”36

  This edged toward another arm of sociopolitical and economic anxiety about the growth in population of single women: the failure of these women to have enough babies.

  “The root cause of most of our problems is our declining fertility rate,” wrote columnist Jonathan Last, perhaps not coincidentally the same man who has studied marital status as the biggest determining factor in partisan affiliation, in a Wall Street Journal column pegged to his 2012 book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting.

  The warning reverberated in many venues, and critics fretted that women’s increasing ability to devote portions of their adulthood to things other than marriage and motherhood is diminishing our national prospects. The New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote a piece entitled, “More Babies, Please” in which he called “the retreat from child rearing” a “decadence” and “a spirit that privileges the present over the future” and “embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.” Douthat was not specific about whose sacrifices had been so central to the steady repopulation of the nation, but Last himself was much more direct. Detailing the reasons for the falling number of babies, some of which he took care to call “clearly positive,” Last wrote of how “Women began attending college in equal (and then greater) numbers than men” and how “more important, women began branching out into careers beyond teaching and nursing.” Finally, he wrote, “the combination of the birth-control pill and the rise of cohabitation broke the iron triangle linking sex, marriage and childbearing.”37

  Economist Nancy Folbre, responding to demographic Chicken Littles in the New York Times, wrote that she knew “of no historical evidence that either the productivity or the creativity of a society is determined by the age structure of its population.”38 But the anxiety may not have stemmed from historical evidence as much as it did from historical yearning: for a time before what Last described as “the iron triangle” linking women, marriage, and reproduction had been dismantled.

  Whether those who worried were concerned about too many babies or too few babies, women living in poverty or women enjoying power, they all seemed to return to the same conclusion: Marriage must be reestablished as the norm, the marker and measure of female existence, against which all other categories of success are weighed.

  The Story of Single Women Is the Story of the Country

  The funny thing is that all these warnings, diagnoses, and panics—even the most fevered of them—aren’t wholly unwarranted. Single women are upending everything; their growing presence has an impact on how economic, political, and sexual power is distributed between the genders. The ability for women to live unmarried is having an impact on our electoral politics. The vast numbers of single women living in the United States are changing our definitions of family, and, in turn, will have an impact on our social policies.

  The intensity of the resistance to these women is rooted in the (perhaps unconscious) comprehension that their expanded power signals a social and political rupture as profound as the invention of birth control, as the sexual revolution, as the abolition of slavery, as women’s suffrage and the feminist, civil rights, gay rights, and labor movements.

  Crucially, single women played a huge part in all of those earlier ruptures. Though it may feel as though the growing numbers of unmarried women and the influence they wield have shaken the nation only in the past five decades, in fact, the story of single women’s nation-shaping power is threaded into the story of the nation itself.

  Women, perhaps especially those who have lived untethered from the energy-sucking and identity-sapping institution of marriage in its older forms, have helped to drive social progress of this country since its founding.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Single Women Have Often Made History: Unmarried in America

  In 1563, England’s House of Lords petitioned its Queen: “That it please your Majesty to dispose yourself to marry, where you will, with whom you will, and as shortly as you will.” The monarch was Elizabeth Tudor, England’s “Virgin Queen,” who ruled from 1558 to 1603 and refused, to her death, to marry. Elizabeth considered several marriage proposals, some of which would have forged valuable international alliances, but remained independent, proclaiming after Parliament’s first entreaty to her in 1558 “I have long since made choice of a husband, the kingdom of England,” explaining in another instance her desire to remain unencumbered: “I will have here but one mistress and no master.” She is reported to have said to a foreign emissary, “If I am to disclose to you what I should prefer if I follow the inclination of my nature, it is this: beggar-woman and single, rather than queen and married.”1

  The truth was that it would have been much harder for a beggar woman to have remained single than it was for Elizabeth. As historians Judith Bennett and Amy Froide observed in their study of single women in early Europe, “Women almost never found occupations that paid as well as the work of men,” making life outside of marriage almost impossible, but, among elites, “wealthy heiresses who controlled their own destinies were better able than other women to forego marriage.” They cite Elizabeth as “an obvious example of the link between female control of property and singleness.”2

  If Elizabeth is an example of how rare it was for centuries of women to flourish outside of marriage, she’s also an example of the degree to which those women who contrived to remain single often found themselves better able than their married counterparts to exercise some control over their own fates, and, in extraordinary cases, to leave their marks on the world.

  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 maternity. 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 Brontë, 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, Cl
ara 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.

  That doesn’t mean that many of these women didn’t have sexual or domestic entanglements, or long-term, loving commitments to men or to other women, though some of them did not. It’s that they did not match society’s expectations by entering an institution built around male authority and female obeisance.

  As Anthony would tell the journalist Nellie Bly, “I’ve been in love a thousand times! . . . But I never loved any one so much that I thought it would last. . . . I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man’s housekeeper. When I was young, if a girl married poor, she became a housekeeper and a drudge. If she married wealth, she became a pet and a doll. Just think, had I married at twenty, I would have been a drudge or a doll for fifty-five years.”3

  Of course, some married women also enjoyed successes unusual for their gender and their time: writers Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriett Beecher Stowe were not only married; they were great proselytizers of the institution’s benefits for women. But many married women could, and did, acknowledge that wedlock, in its traditional form, took women out of the public world. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, nineteenth-century women’s rights reformer and married mother of seven, was wry about the tolls of home life; she joked in a letter after not having heard from Anthony for a while: “Where are you, Susan, and what are you doing? Your silence is truly appalling. Are you dead or married?”4

  Common amongst prominent women who did wed, including activists such as Ida B. Wells, Angelina Grimké and Pauli Murray; writers including George Elliot, Margaret Fuller, and Zora Neale Hurston; artists Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keefe; actress Sarah Bernhard; and aviator Brave Bessie Coleman were alliances that were unconventional for their times: open, childless, brief, or entered into late, after the women had established themselves economically or professionally, and thus could find partners more willing to accept them as peers, not appendages.

  However, creative paths to evading the onerous limitations of traditional wifedom were not plentiful. Marriage, in the varied ways in which it has been legally constructed over centuries, has been extremely useful in containing women and limiting their power. That usefulness has meant that social, political, medical, and cultural forces have often worked to make life outside marriage difficult. So, while women who have remained single, on purpose or by accident, may have retained some power and self-determination, they rarely, in the past, escaped social censure or enjoyed economic independence.

  To trace their difficult paths through the history of the United States is to recognize challenges and resistance to single female life that will be uncannily familiar to today’s single women: Women, it turns out, have been fighting their own battle for independence, against politicians, preachers, and the popular press, since our founding. Not only that: Women living singly in America over the past two centuries have been partly responsible for the social and economic upheavals that have made the possibility of independent life for today’s single women so much more plausible.

  (Marital) Independence and the New World

  In the early colonial United States, 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 seventeenth 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 behaviour, 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.5

  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 presedents & evil events of graunting lotts unto single maidens not disposed of.”6 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.7

  Almost the only kind of woman who might assert individual power was the wealthy widow, afforded social standing since she’d been married and was a legal inheritor of money or property, but left without master. This was rare. Most widows were poor, with no means to support themselves or their dependents, and lived at the mercy of their communities for help in feeding and housing themselves and their families.

  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 thirteenth 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 sixteenth 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.8

  In the New World, “spinster” gained a more precise meaning: in colonial parlance, it indicated an unmarried woman over the age of twenty-three and under the age of twenty-six. At twenty-six, women without spouses became thornbacks, a reference to a sea-skate with sharp spines covering its back and tail. It was not a compliment.

  Boston bookseller John Dunton wrote in 1686 that “an old (or Superannuated) Maid, in Boston, is thought such a curse as nothing can exceed it, and look’d on as a dismal spectacle.”9 But in fact, the “dismal spectacle” of unmarried womanhood was quite rare in the colonies. Many more men than women were settlers, creating a high sex ratio, in which men outnumber women, a dynamic that usually results in high marriage rates and low marriage ages. As Benjamin Franklin noted in 1755, “Hence, marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe.”

  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. A married woman was a feme covert and a single woman was a feme sole. 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 the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the 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 be only to 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.10 “In its strictly economic aspect the traditional marriage contract resembled an indenture between master and servant,” writes historian Nancy Cott.11 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.

  For those feme soles who escaped coverture, there were other impediments to thriving. Puritan women enjoyed no sexual liberty; the legendary preacher Cotton Mather railed against those who displayed “sensual lusts, wantonness and impurity, boldness and rud
eness, in Look, Word or Gesture.”12 There were a few poorly paid professions at which they could earn a subsistence; they might be midwives, seamstresses, caretakers, governesses, or tutors, all jobs that mirrored broader ideas about women’s nature.

  The colonies’ violent break from England, the American Revolution, on which the nation was officially founded and its rules encoded, complicated gender relations. For one thing, it drained households of their able-bodied men, who fought the British in the 1770s, the 1780s, and in the War of 1812. These conflicts, followed by an era defined by the idea of Manifest Destiny, which would draw men west and leave tens of thousands of women back east, upended sex ratios across the country.

  But the rethinking of women’s relationship to marriage wasn’t just about numbers. The end of the eighteenth century was a time of political instability; the War of American Independence was followed by the French Revolution, which helped spawn the Saint Domingue revolution that freed slaves and established the Republic of Haiti in 1804. Power structures were crumbling under the weight of Enlightenment-era notions about liberty, personal freedom, and representation. In England, author Mary Wollstonecraft (who would herself marry late and have one child out of wedlock) challenged the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s vision of women as submissive to their husbands, declaring war in 1792’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman on “the sensibility that led [Rousseau] to degrade woman by making her the slave of love” and instead pushing for female education and independence.

  “The egalitarian rhetoric of the Revolution provided the women’s rights movement with its earliest vocabulary,” historian Mary Beth Norton argues,13 while Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller describes how, “beginning in about 1780 women in the middle and upper classes . . . manifested a dramatic new form of female independence. In increasing numbers, the daughters of northeastern manufacturers, merchants, farmers, and ‘poor professionals’ rejected the ‘tie that binds.’ ”14