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

by Traister, Rebecca

  What’s true is that women (and men) are marrying later all over the nation, not just in the cities, even though it can sometimes feel that way. The conscious embrace of unmarried life—or at least a gimlet-eyed critique of the early marriage model as opposed to a romanticizing of it—is far from exclusively urban. In 2013, twenty-four-year-old Kacey Musgraves from Golden, Texas, was nominated for an American Country Music Award for Best Female Vocalist. Her song, “Merry Go ’Round,” begins: “If you ain’t got two kids by twenty-one/You’re probably gonna die alone/Least that’s what tradition told you,” and then continues to convey doubt about what that tradition gets you: “We get bored, so, we get married, Just like dust, we settle in this town . . . We think the first time’s good enough/ So, we hold on to high school love.”

  Rooms of Their Own

  For poor women, communal living, no matter your marital status, has long been a necessity. In 1855, of four hundred single women on a New York City census sampled by historian Christine Stansell, only eleven lived alone.17 Piled into tight rooms in narrow tenements with siblings, cousins, parents, and grandparents is how most working women lived in cities until relatively recently, and how many poor and immigrant families still live around the country.

  Even those who were forced to, or longed to, break from the multigenerational living arrangement could not easily set up house on their own. Fears about controlling sexuality, enforcing moral codes, and keeping women safe meant that for generations, many wage-earning girls lived in boarding houses; activist Virginia Penny wrote in 1863, “Many of these shop girls sleep half a dozen to a garret.”18 That garret was usually closely monitored by older women who kept strict curfews and policed the virtue of their lessees with parental zeal.

  Historian Joanne Meyerowitz writes of how, in 1891 Chicago, the matron of the Home for Self-Supporting Women contacted the Illinois Humane Society, who, in turn, contacted a young female resident’s stepmother to get permission for the young woman to go out with a man from her South Dakota hometown. The stepmother thanked the organizations for protecting her stepdaughter from “the many traps and snares of the city.”19

  But the primal urge for women to carve out some space to call their own is familiar to anyone who has read Virginia Woolf.

  Nineteenth century physician Harriot Hunt, who lived contentedly with her parents, and then a married sister, said, “It cripples one not to have a home of one’s own.”20 And Louisa May Alcott wrote longingly, at age twelve, of a seemingly impossible fantasy: “I have been thinking about my little room, which I suppose I shall never have. I should want to be there about all the time, and I should go there and sing and think.” Alcott was one of the few women eventually able to afford her own space, and would later describe herself, as a kind of spider, needing “to be alone to spin.”21

  While poor men, like their working-class sisters, also crowded into tenement spaces with families or coworkers, more affluent single gentlemen, whose rights to inherit property and earn rent money were less tenuous, had a wider array of options. They could live in apartment houses and in clubs, their domestic (and presumably sexual) needs attended to by paid help. In Manhattan, by the end of the nineteenth century, between a third and a half of men over age fifteen were unmarried, and many lived on their own. One bachelor wrote of his accommodations in a gentlemen’s club: “Each member is as much at home as if he were in his own castle; the building . . . is kept with the same neatness, exactness, and comfort as a private dwelling. Every member is a master, without any of the cares or troubles of a master.”22

  It sounds nice! And, for a long time, there was simply no female equivalent. But as more women came to cities not simply to work as domestics, but in the newly developing female professions, there had to be space for them to live.

  Built in 1903, the twelve-story Martha Washington Hotel was one of the first complexes designed to individually house women who were arriving in New York to find work.23 When the building was landmarked in 2012, the New York Times described the era as one in which “single professional women had a difficult time finding places to live in which they were free from the suspicion of immoral behavior.” Even in the Martha Washington, which first admitted five hundred residents, and would go on to house stenographers, editors, and a lawyer who would become the first woman appointed a magistrate in New York, there were strict rules: Men were not permitted beyond the first floor and, at first, male bellhops were required to carry all heavy luggage; in 1904, fourteen women replaced those bellhops.

  In 1906 the Trowmart Inn was built to house single women in Greenwich Village, and erected for “the class who labors for a small wage, and whose parents have no home within the city.” The Trowmart had no curfew, and was in fact expressly designed as a way station on the path to the altar. Its founder told the New York Times that he intended to create a place where men could court women, since an inability to live independently also meant structural obstacles when it came to dating, romance, and sex. As the Times described it, “Girls of gentleness and refinement do not care to be courted upon the open highway, nor in public parks, and thus the world is filling with spinsters who . . . had they a proper place in which to entertain their admirers, would develop into happy, excellent wives and still happier mothers.” The Trowmart’s founder said that he’d be pleased, in the Times’s words, “if the girls have a happy home, and if a number of marriages accrue each year from the Trowmart Inn.”

  These establishments helped create a path for women who wanted to live on their own, giving way to slightly more glamorous options, like The Barbizon, a “Club Residence for Professional Woman” built in 1927, which, while featuring tiny, Spartan rooms, also began to provide some of the services of older gentlemen’s quarters. The Chicago Tribune reported of the Barbizon as it was being built that it was “especially designed for business and professional women with such unique features as a gymnasium, swimming pool, studios and other conveniences usually found only in men’s clubs.” Two years later, the Times reported on the “modern Amazons” who were enjoying the Barbizon’s athletic facilities, and noted that “it has been said that in their clubs women have more liberty than men.”

  By the middle of the twentieth century, it was far easier for women to find their own apartments, with roommates chosen through newspaper ads. But the possibility of living alone remained such a passionate fantasy that Betsy Israel described how to her, even in the 1980s, the phrase “rent-stabilized” was “a lot more exciting, filled with more possibility and the hint of adulthood, than ‘marry me.’ ”24

  Just before I graduated from college, a friend and I visited New York, where I was already planning to live, and met up with her sister, a successful woman several years older than we, who rented a studio on the city’s Upper West Side. When I arrived to meet my friend and her sister, my friend explained apologetically that I could not come into her sister’s apartment; she had a rule that no one but blood relations or lovers could enter the space. It was one room, it was all the privacy she had in the world, and she guarded it with what, to my young mind, was almost incomprehensible ferocity.

  The growing number of women looking for a few square feet of their own has had an impact on urban planning. In 2013, the Museum of the City of New York presented an exhibition, in partnership with the Citizens Housing & Planning Council and the Architectural League of New York, called “Making Room,” whose mission was to showcase design solutions “to better accommodate New York City’s changing, and sometimes surprising, demographics, including a rising number of single people.” The exhibit featured the designs of 325-square-foot apartments, roughly the size of the spaces that former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg touted as part of his encouragement of new “micro-apartments” designed to house the city’s growing number of single people.

  In Washington, D.C., a DuPont Circle mansion is being converted into ninety-two apartments averaging about 350 square feet each;25 a 2012 cluster of tiny 150 to 250 square-foot houses i
n an alleyway was designed to demonstrate how small living can provide a model for the future.26 Meanwhile, the boom in micro-apartments in Seattle, where demand is so great that older, larger homes are being demolished to make room for 200 square-foot units with shared kitchens, has been dramatic enough to draw protest. One resident told The Seattle Times, “We’re not concerned with who these people [renting micro-apartments] are, but with how many there are. This is a massive increase in density.”27

  In Dolores Hayden’s classic book, The Grand Domestic Revolution, the urban historian looks at how the architecture of familial homes worked to separate women from each other and confine them to individual duties. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of the feminist utopian novel Herland, dreamt of kitchen-free homes for women who would be cooked for by paid staff, while the nineteenth century reformer and feminist Melusina Fay Peirce led a cooperative housing movement that argued that the segregation of women as cooks and mothers in separate houses was an impediment to equality.28

  As increasing numbers of contemporary women enjoy lives untied from the kitchens and nurseries that once confined their forerunners, they are accidentally fulfilling these older activist fantasies, in which cooking and leisure spaces are shared, and independent adults are engaging in communal experiments in domestic life, no spouses required.

  Cautionary Tales

  With liberty comes risk. Anonymity and freedom may be sweet relief, but they also create space for danger: sexual vulnerability, higher incidences of violent crimes, greater proximity to illegal activity.

  In earlier eras, one of the greatest risks run by women who lived on their own in cities, or who roomed with other women, was the possibility of being taken for a prostitute. Or of being forced, by a combination of poverty and the urban market, to become a prostitute.

  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!!!!”29 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 twentieth century, said, “an attractive woman who does not ‘cash in’ is likely to be considered a fool by her neighbors.”30

  But the varied mores of cities also provided women the shelter of forgiveness and redemption and reinvention, possibilities that were often lacking in smaller, rural environs. It was the city’s permissiveness, the room it made for varied choices and self-correction, Christine Stansell argues, that made it such a crucial organ for the expansion of female potential. “Therein lies the importance of its tenements, sweatshops, promenades and streets for the history of American women.”31

  In discussions about femininity and urban life, there are entrenched arguments about whether it’s cities that lead women astray, or the women themselves who bring temptation to metropolises. As cities teem with more single, increasingly powerful, women, the occasional tales of their sad ends get set up by the press as emblematic, and in them it is often easy to find the suggestion that in daring to live confidently and independently, women have overreached.

  In the 1890s, the poster child for the phenomenon was a young Texan, Ada Baeker, who’d traveled to New York at the urging of a female relative, only to find herself so cut off from human connection in the cold metropolis that she tried twice to kill herself. Her story was covered breathlessly by tabloid newspapers of the time, trotted out as a cautionary tale of what happens to women who veer perilously into lonely and unmonitored urban waters.32

  About a hundred years later, a female jogger in Central Park was raped and beaten nearly to death. The victim was later revealed to be Trisha Meili, a white, unmarried twenty-eight-year-old investment banker who had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley, and had graduate degrees in art and business from Yale. She was a near-perfect embodiment of the expensively educated, high-earning independent women beginning to populate New York at the tail end of the 1980s. She’d been using the park, part of the internal infrastructure that makes cities so livable, to exercise: She was fully engaged in the symbiosis between single women and their cities when she was assaulted. The crime (for which five young black men were wrongly imprisoned) was among the most widely covered stories of that year.

  In 1999, Kendra Webdale, a thirty-two-year-old from upstate New York, who was reported to have thrived on New York City’s “parks and museums, on its mix of people and possibilities,” was killed in one of the places where people mix, pushed in front of a subway by a schizophrenic man with a history of attacking women.33 In 2006 came the murder of a woman in the top 5 percent of her graduate school class in criminal justice, Imette St. Guillen; she’d been out drinking late with her best friend, insisted on staying out on her own late into the night, and was raped and killed by a bar bouncer.

  The media messages about these crimes—always more breathless than coverage of tragedies that befall poor women or women of color, which is often nonexistent—have been clear. The women for whom cities increase economic and social empowerment are put at risk in these metropolises. The things these threatening women come to cities to enjoy on their own: the fun, the freedom, the sexuality, the trains that carry them to work, and the sidewalks on which they gather and the parks in which they run; the very places that support their independence and in which they are free also make them vulnerable. The power that women gain from their degrees or salaries will not protect them from the brutal attacks to which their gender—and their aloneness—makes them prey.

  One Great Love

  I moved to New York in 1997, settling against my will in then-unfashionable Brooklyn, because I could not afford to live in Manhattan. Rudolph Giuliani, who at that point had been mayor for three years, was fascistically scrubbing New York of its porn theaters, homeless people, and the men who washed car windows with squeegees. New York City’s police force grew by 35 percent in the 1990s and, under Giuliani’s tenure, cops developed a reputation for violent aggression, especially against black men. His policies, alongside a reduction of urban crime across the country, combined with the steady deregulation of Wall Street and a booming tech industry to bring a wealthier population to New York. Cheap, left-leaning gay enclaves became the gut-renovated playgrounds of investment bankers; former meat-packing districts that had once housed single women at the Trowmart and, within recent memory, been prostitution hubs, were now home to cavernous clubs that served stratospherically priced drinks. I could only afford Brooklyn.

  When, in those early years, I read Joan Didion’s postmarital Dear John letter to the city, “Goodbye to All That,” I felt not an iota of recognition. Didion writes of the feeling that she “could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of them would count,” and of how her love for New York was not some colloquial affection, but rather that “I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.”

  Far from confident that my mistakes would not count against me, when I arrived in New York City after college, I felt constantly on the verge of losing my place there, fearful that one wrong turn would get me kicked out. If I saw the city as a partner in those early days, it was as a chilly and slightly abusive one. Strapped and lonely, my roommate—a friend from Eastern Tennessee who had challenged her family’s assumptions by coming to the big city—and I spent that first year eating two-dollar spicy dumplings and drinking beer on our couch, watching old episodes of The X-Files, and asking each other how we’d ever make friends.

  In addition to my resentment at being forced to live in Brooklyn, I also, in my first years there, nursed a seething grudge against Sex and the City, which had just started its run on HBO. The network would regularly paper the entire metropolis with ads featuring its quirky heroine in her tutu, getting splashed by street water. I didn’t hate the show because I thought it
was bad; in fact, I had barely even seen it. And I didn’t object to its message; I understood, from afar, that it stood, imperfectly, for a new era of female possibility.

  What I didn’t appreciate was that Sex and the City fast became the measure by which every urban-dwelling unmarried woman would be sized up and written off by friends and family. I stopped being able to count the number of people who confidently informed me that my life was “just like Sex and the City.”

  Never mind that, for large portions of my twenties, I was having exactly no sex. Never mind that while the show relied on expansive closets and sky-high heels as metaphors for the more meaningful spaces and heights now occupied by contemporary women, I spent the years that it aired broke (not poor . . . but broke); in fact, the reason I rarely watched Sex and the City was that I could not afford cable.

  Even if I had been better-paid, better-shod and more frequently laid, I likely would have still resented the comparisons. In part, because I knew how limited this vision of modern femininity was—so many white women with so much money—but mostly because I suspected that when people told me that my life was like Sex and the City, it was likely that they didn’t intend it as a kindness.

  Television critic Emily Nussbaum, who was also a single woman in New York during Sex and the City’s run, told me that she was always “very excited by people saying ‘your life is like Sex and the City.’ ” Before that, she remembered, they’d just say, “ ‘Your life is like a ‘Cathy’ cartoon.” Cathy was a newspaper comic strip, written by Cathy Guisewhite, that ran from 1976 to 2010, and chronicled its protagonist’s diets, dull boyfriend, and unrewarding job. And, yes, it had for a long time provided one of the nation’s only popular models of what unmarried life for women might entail. As Nussbaum would write in a New Yorker piece about Sex in the City, shortly after our conversation, “better that one’s life should be viewed as glamorously threatening than as sad and lonely.”34