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

by Traister, Rebecca

  Long before I ever considered that I’d one day be writing this book, I tried to make sense of my grief by writing a story called “Girlfriends Are the New Husbands.” In it, I argued that while women no longer necessarily matured in the context of marriages, we did not spend our adult years alone, but instead became each other’s de facto spouses.

  When I sobbed to another, usually Eeyoreish, friend—a mentor about ten years my senior, who had herself been single deep into her thirties—she surprised me by assuring me: “Don’t worry, she’ll come back.” Oh, I know, I said, she’ll be back to visit, but it won’t be the same. “No,” my friend said more firmly. “She’ll come back. Her life is here.”

  I was completely flummoxed by her confidence. Sara wasn’t coming back. You don’t come back. I knew this from way back, from Laura Ingalls and Anne Shirley and Jo March; I knew it in my bones. We might have postponed fate, but marriage remained women’s ultimate destination, the tractor beam that would eventually pull us all in.

  Sara and I were, to some degree, over.

  She Is My Person

  The sadness Amina felt when Ann left didn’t dissipate quickly. She started going to therapy again, since “the one person I would talk to wasn’t there.” Feeling that her social fabric in Washington D.C. had unraveled, Amina began to make plans to leave the city. “Ann was the center,” she said. “And without her, there was not a lot there for me.”

  There was little chance that Ann, who had a big job in Los Angeles and was falling in love with her new city, was going to return east. Amina recalled a road trip they took together out west; Ann had gotten California plates and was glowing with affection for her new-found home. Amina remembered telling her, “It’s stupid beautiful watching you fall in love with California; it’s like watching the Grinch’s heart grow.”

  When a member of a romantic couple gets a great job in another part of the world, there is usually at least discussion of whether the partner will accompany her or him; when a spouse has a yearning to live north and another spouse south, there is, typically, negotiation about where, or if, they will settle as a unit.

  Given the way we’re taught adulthood is supposed to unfold, the idea of figuring friends into life’s trickiest logistical equations sounds silly. You can’t—and aren’t supposed to—build your lives around friendships, but rather around families, marriages, jobs, maybe aging parents . . .

  But for Ann and Amina, the friendship does factor in their ideas about the future. Relocation has been discussed. “I’m getting really tired of this long-distance relationship and soon one of us is going to move for the other person,” said Amina. Ann concurred, but it was hard for Amina to find a job that made the move a realistic option. Amina moved to New York, Ann’s least favorite city, in 2013. They tried not to let six weeks go by without seeing each other. In 2014, Amina took a job in northern California.

  “She’s the person I text all day,” said Ann. “If she didn’t hear from me for a day, you could basically assume I was dead.” When Ann spent a year as a boss, she was careful never to talk to her colleagues about her romantic or her sex life, but, she said, “They all knew Amina was my person.”

  “It’s really important that my coworkers know Ann,” said Amina. “You have to know the place that Ann occupies because people only talk about their significant others; I don’t even think I say she’s my best friend because it’s so much more than that to me. She is the person I talk about every day. She is my person.”

  Though Amina said that there is no connection, this formulation—“She is my person”—echoes language used on the television drama Grey’s Anatomy. The show’s central relationship was the nonsexual but deeply loving friendship between two surgeons, Meredith and Cristina, tough women who argued and competed with each other, shared beds and booze, who disliked hugging and cheap sentiment, and were obsessive about their work and their love lives, and who referred to each other lovingly and possessively as “my person.” It probably matters that Grey’s was the creation of Shonda Rhimes, prolific writer and director of so many television shows about diverse and complicated women that her entertainment empire is often referred to as if it is some fantasized island of female power: Shondaland. Rhimes is the unmarried mother of three.

  Intimacies between women who are each other’s “person” have long played a crucial role in society, especially for women who have lived outside of traditionally married family units. The scholar Sharon Farmer has written that medieval Parisian “single women sometimes found practical, economic, and emotional support in their companionships with other unattached women,”3 and notes that Parisian tax records offer evidence from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of women living, working, and being assessed together.

  The closeness of unmarried women to each other was so recognizable that tight friendship (and often bedfellowship) between maidens was often used as a plot device by Shakespeare, whose heroine, Helena, of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, describes herself and Hermia, with whom she shares an “ancient love” as being, “Two lovely berries moulded on one stem . . . with two seeming bodies, but one heart.” In nineteenth century America, when westward expansion created a dearth of potential husbands on the East Coast, the social and adult domestic partnerships of women proliferated to the point that they became known colloquially as “Boston marriages.”

  As interactions between young women at boarding schools and women’s colleges became more frequent, the tightly cathected relationships they formed as teenagers became so accepted that there was a term for their connection: they were “smashed.” As Betsy Israel writes, “smashed” pairs were thought of by their approving parents as something like “best friends going steady, and, once smashed, they’d learn trust, loyalty, tolerance, patience” from each other. The practicing of these behaviors on each other was all supposed to be in service of their later marital unions, Israel notes, “even if those who wed never felt quite the same about their husbands.”

  The scholar Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues in her 1975 essay, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in 19th Century America,” that 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, creating what she called the “emotional segregation of men and women.”4

  Women often lived together, within multigenerational family housing, or in sex-segregated schools, boarding houses, or in factory dormitories like those in Lowell, Massachusetts. They guided each other through emotional and physical maturation, bonded over their experiences of courtship, marriage, and childbirth and, as Smith-Rosenberg writes, “lived in emotional proximity to one another.” 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.”5 As Smith-Rosenberg writes, “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.”

  Friendships often provided women with attention, affection, and an outlet for intellectual or political exchange in eras when marriage, still chiefly a fiscal and social necessity, wasn’t an institution from which many might reasonably expect to glean sexual or companionate pleasure. Because these relationships played such a different role from marriage in a woman’s life, it was quite realistic for commitments between women to persist as central after the marriages of one or both of them. Even the happiest of married women found something in their associations with other women that they did not have with husbands. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton, devotedly wed and mother of five, once said of her activist partner, Susan B. Anthony, “So closely interwoven have been our lives, our purposes, and experiences that [when] separated, we have a feeling of incompleteness.”

  It was not only women who turned often to their own s
ex for practical and tender fulfillments. In the early male-dominated Southern colonies, some men lived together on tobacco plantations and were referred to as “mates.”6 Abraham Lincoln shared a bed for several years with his friend Joshua Speed, to whom he wrote in 1842, “You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting.”7 And, according to The Atlantic, President James Garfield’s attachment to his college buddy Harry Rhodes was so deeply felt that he once wrote, “I would that we might lie awake in each other’s arms for one long wakeful night.”8

  The language of sentiment between same-sex friends—not to mention references to embracing, touching and snuggling in bed—suggests to many modern readers that the women (and men) in question were engaged in what we’d now understand as homosexual relationships. And some surely were. But the concept of homosexuality as a sexual identity really only emerged in the early twentieth century, making it largely impossible to retrospectively evaluate the nature of many close, even physically expressed, same-sex bonds.

  Certainly, there were women who were both cognizant and vocal about their fealty to other women, in love and in life partnership. In her 1889 autobiography, reformer Frances Willard, who only had committed emotional and domestic relationships with other women, wrote that “The loves of women for each other grow more numerous each day . . . In these days when any capable and careful woman can honorably earn her own support, there is no village that has not its examples of ‘two heads in counsel,’ both of which are feminine.”9

  Others tried to clearly distinguish between carnal and romantic impulses. Margaret Fuller, Transcendentalist writer and literary critic, who had a lengthy epistolary friendship with Caroline Sturgis, and who at the end of her life entered a passionate affair with a man she may have married, wrote, in reference to another intense alliance with a woman, “I loved Anna for a time with as much passion as I was then strong enough to feel . . . This love was a key which unlocked for me many a treasure which I still possess, it was the carbuncle which cast light into many of the darkest caverns of human nature.” But at the same time, Fuller argued that while it is “so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man,” such relations are “purely intellectual and spiritual, unprofaned by any mixture of lower instincts.”10

  Smith-Rosenberg argues that a contemporary preoccupation with individual psycho-sexual dynamics was, for a long time, part of what obscured a larger social and political context in which to examine women’s friendships. While the erotic dimensions of women’s relationships to each other may well have mattered to the women themselves, the official distinction between gay or straight seems hardly crucial to those of us examining the place of women as supports in each other’s lives.

  And what we know today—when gay and lesbian identities are far more recognized than in earlier eras—is that women still form intensely emotional, often physical bonds that might easily be understood from a distance as homosexuality, but which aren’t necessarily sexual.

  When I was in junior high, I had Judy, with whom, a century before, I would have been said to have been “smashed.” And while we never went in much for hugging, hair-braiding, or any of the other fleshy communions common to budding girlfriendships, we certainly experienced a chaste version of puppy love.

  Neither of us had boyfriends (or girlfriends), and there’s a compelling argument that we didn’t precisely because we poured so much of ourselves into each other, but I think the reverse was true: We were adolescents, full of energy and self-interest and the incandescent urge for human connection. When no well-matched romantic interests came along to light us up, we focused our teenaged high beams on one another, composing volumes on our affections in birthday cards and yearbook messages and notebooks traded between classes. We shared inside jokes and argued about the war in the Persian Gulf and watched When Harry Met Sally and nursed jealousies, of interloping friends and even of changing tastes that might lead us to cease to perfectly mirror each other.

  What criteria do we apply to properly designate the nature of “real” partnership? Do two people have to have regular sexual contact and be driven by physical desire in order to rate as a couple? Must they bring each other regular mutual sexual satisfaction? Are they faithful to each other? By those measures, many heterosexual marriages wouldn’t qualify.

  Marriage and its ancillary, committed dating, are simply not the only relationships that sustain and help to give shape, direction, and passion to female life, at least not for all women.

  If there are broad distinctions to be made between the nature of same-sex female pairs versus heterosexual ones, it’s that the same-sex unions have not entailed one of their members being automatically accorded more power, status, or economic worth based entirely on gender.

  Shrieking Sisterhoods

  Bettina Chen and Alice Brooks met at Stanford, where they were both getting master’s degrees in engineering after having been undergraduates at Caltech and at MIT, respectively. “There weren’t many girls around,” said Chen, of how they first came to notice each other. “We had a lot of things in common and we connected, being girls from tech schools. And we wanted to try to make more room for women around us.”

  The women became close and talked a lot about their experiences in male-dominated engineering circles, wondering what they might do about pulling more young women into their field. They began comparing notes about the factors that led them to engineering. Bettina had played with the hand-me-down Legos and Lincoln Logs of her older brothers, boys to whom those building and architectural toys were marketed. Alice, meanwhile, recalled having asked for a Barbie one Christmas, and having received instead, a saw, which she used to make her own toys, including a doll and a dinosaur.

  As their friendship deepened, Brooks said, they vacationed together and realized that they spent time easily in each other’s company; they figured that that meant they could work together. The two women have since created their own company, producing a set of engineering toys, Roominate, marketed directly to young girls. It’s a company born not only out of a collaboration between women, but intended to bring more women into the male-led world in which its founders encountered each other.

  Historically, women have pushed each other into, and supported each other within, intellectual and public realms to which men rarely extended invitations, let alone any promise of equality. It was, after all, pairs of women who tended to found settlement houses and colleges together, who partnered around activism and academia. Female protesters, scholars, scientists, and artists found each other, compared notes, exchanged ideas, and collaborated to become the backbone of the suffrage and temperance movements, and key to abolition. The shared, as opposed to individual, experience of workplace danger and injustice led to women’s collective labor actions and the formations of the earliest women’s unions.

  The power of collaboration and closeness between women has caused no end of anxiety. Nineteenth century antifeminist journalist Eliza Lynn Linton referred to groups of women, especially participants in the suffrage movement, as “shrieking sisterhoods.”

  Perhaps nervousness about the disruptive power of female association is partly why, a couple of decades into the twentieth century—after the massive political 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 1920s, 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,’ ” writes Stephanie Coontz. “Such perversions, they claimed, were a serious threat to normal development and to marriage.” The fix, Coontz writes, was to discourage social unions between women, and to encourage instead m
ore free-wheeling experimentation between the sexes: Dating.11

  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 attentions 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 Betty-and-Veronica 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 twentieth 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.

  Finding a balance between camaraderie, support, and self-interest has remained challenging, especially when we find ourselves, today, working alongside, and becoming close to, women who are also competing with us for raises, for better shifts, for promotions. One woman told me, while I was writing this book, about a falling-out with a close friend in the same field in the wake of a professional triumph; her friend had difficulty containing her jealousy. As this woman observed, sadly, “We have years of practice with women competing over men, but now we find ourselves competing with our girlfriends over jobs.”