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

by Traister, Rebecca

  In a 2012 New York Times story about people who live on their own, Sasha Cagen, founder of a website called Quirkyalone, described making herself dinners of a single sweet potato, while writer Kate Bolick, author of the 2015 book Spinster, confessed that she grazes on nuts and seeds and wears a pair of giant white bloomers. One unmarried woman told the paper, “I’ve been living alone for six years and I’ve gotten quirkier and quirkier,” running in place during commercials, speaking French to herself, and keeping her clothes in the dryer, removing only the items she wants to wear that day. The ability to make unconventional choices about wrinkled wardrobes and seed-scattered pantaloons contribute to what Cagen described as “a freedom to really let loose and be yourself when you live alone that a lot of other people may envy.”2

  Until the worry sets in that you might not be able to undo your own attachment to independence and its attendant eccentricities. In the years I lived alone, I worried, and was regularly warned, that I was growing more intractable in my habits, becoming so set in my ways that I would never be able to make room for another person.

  These anxieties were not entirely misplaced. It is true that when single, I swiftly chased off any men whose threatened disruption of my Saturday mornings, which I set aside for breakfast on my own and a ridiculous apartment-cleaning ritual that involved dancing, I found too irritating to bear. I felt smothered by suitors who called too often, claustrophobic around those who wanted to see me too frequently, and bugged by the ones who didn’t want to try the bars or restaurants I liked to go to, or who pressured me to cut out of work earlier than I wanted to cut out. I got used to doing things my way; I liked doing things my way. These men just mucked it all up. I knew how I sounded, even in my own head: picky, petty, and narcissistic. I worried about the monster of self-interest that I had become.

  In retrospect, however, I see that the fierce protection of my space, schedule, and solitude served as a prophylactic against relationships I didn’t really want to be in. Maybe I was too hard on those guys, but I am also certain that I wasn’t very interested in them. I am certain of that because when, after six years without a relationship that lasted beyond three dates, I met a man I was interested in and didn’t think twice about Saturday mornings, about breaking my weirdo routines or leaving work early; I was happy every single time he called.

  The difficulty that some people have in believing that others might truly relish a life, or even a portion of life, disconnected from traditionally romantic or sexual partnership can merge with a resentment of those who do appear to take pleasure in cultivating their own happiness. As the number of unmarried people steadily rises, threatening the normative supremacy of nuclear family and early bonded hetero patterns, independent life may swiftly get cast as an exercise in selfishness.

  Selfishness and Immaturity

  Alison Turkos, the twenty-four-year-old health activist originally from Vermont, described the desire to absorb herself in her work and her social life, and not in anyone else’s, as the chief argument for remaining single. She spends so much time at the office and out with friends and at evening events that she’s rarely ever at home, she said, and when she is, “I don’t want to hear about your day or talk about your day. I want to put on Parks and Recreation or a random Pandora station, call my best friend, open a bottle of wine and be with myself.”

  As Alison told me this, she paused, hearing how it sounded, and how discordant such admissions are in a world in which we’re told young women are looking for love, or should be looking for love. She laughed and added, “Which is my being selfish, according to other people. Which is why I will always be single.”

  This unforgiving self-diagnosis is amply supported by cultural messages sent to unhitched women who find that they enjoy their independence.

  “If you’re single, chances are you think a lot about you,” begins the “You’re Selfish” chapter of Tracie McMillan’s 2012 book, Why You’re Not Married Yet. “You think about your thighs, your outfits, your nasolabial folds. You think about your career, or if you don’t have one, you think about becoming a yoga teacher . . .” Part of the self-absorption McMillan was diagnosing as ugly and unhealthy stemmed from the audacity of belief that you might not even require partnership: “Sometimes you secretly wonder,” she wrote, “if you even need a spouse. Maybe you’re just fine on your own . . . Other people suck, frankly. They get in the way of eating cereal for dinner . . . They’re always lying on the couch watching something you don’t like on TV and eating something that smells disgusting unless you’re the one eating it.”

  In “Marry Him,” a 2008 blockbuster piece for The Atlantic that urged women to settle for less-than-perfect mates rather than live their adult lives alone, writer Lori Gottlieb leveled a similar, if subtler, charge: A woman in her late thirties, Gottlieb wrote, is discriminating. She has “friends who will know her more intimately and understand her more viscerally than any man she meets in midlife. Her tastes and sense of self are more solidly formed. She says things like ‘He wants me to move downtown, but I love my home at the beach,’ and ‘But he’s just not curious,’ and ‘Can I really spend my life with someone who’s allergic to dogs?’ ”

  McMillan and Gottlieb’s logic was pernicious, absorbing some of the appealing building blocks of independent female adult life—commitment to careers, to friends, to health, pets, homes, and individual desires—and recasting them as itty-bitty personal concerns magnified to silly proportions by cartoonishly drawn examples of feminine self-absorption.

  In fact, there’s nothing so wrong with a woman who longs for a curious partner or who feels ambivalence about giving up a home she loves, nor is there anything petty about an adult who feels a responsibility to a pet. But Gottlieb, who herself has never married, was pathologizing unmarried women as flawed, sneakily laying out her self-interested female subject in comparison to a set of deeply ingrained cultural expectations: that a woman who really wants love and who is worthy of being loved should be willing to put her priorities second to those of a mate.

  The notion that individuals, especially women, might be increasingly unwilling to make such accommodations in order to land husbands and create nuclear families sends some critics outside the self-help genre even further round the bend than McMillan and Gottlieb. In a furious review of Eric Klinenberg’s book, Going Solo, about the record number of Americans now living on their own, critic Benjamin Schwartz sneered at the pursuit of individual fulfillment made more possible by the breakdown of marital and familial obligation.3 The nation’s founders, argued Schwartz, “greatly valued organic community . . . the internalization of civic values being the central bulwark against the deformation of liberty into license and chaos.” Never mind that those civic values and founding communities depended on the disenfranchisement and enforced servility of entire races and genders. Per Schwartz, a society in which so many fail to couple, he complained in conclusion, indulges “the novel conceit that selfishness is a virtue.”

  But Schwartz is wrong that people living alone is equivalent to a breakdown in civic participation in a free society. For one thing, multiple studies have shown that single people behave less selfishly within their communities than their married peers.

  Following in the (rather dispiriting) footsteps of previous generations of unmarried women, a 2011 report conducted by the Council on Contemporary Families showed that 84 percent of never-married women (and 67 percent of never-married men) offer practical help to their own parents, compared to 68 percent of married women (and 38 percent of married men). This higher percentage includes unmarried mothers. As Naomi Gerstel, one of the sociologists behind the study, told The New York Times, “It’s the unmarried, with or without kids, who are more likely to take care of other people . . . It’s not having children that isolates people. It’s marriage.”4

  Never-married women in particular are far more likely to be politically active, signing petitions, volunteering time, and attending rallies. Eric Klinenberg has argued that
people who live alone are more likely to attend lectures and be out in the world, while married adults tend to focus their energies within their own homes, perhaps volunteering for their own children’s schools, but not necessarily for organizations that do not benefit themselves or their kin.

  All of this compensatory energy thrown into the world by unmarried people is laudable and in line with the history of single women powering social movements. It also gets to the heart of an entirely different reason that aspersions of selfishness in women are overblown—because the default expectation of femininity, going back thousands of years has been selflessness.

  In medieval Europe, where the powerful Catholic Church encouraged youthful unions, it also offered one of the only viable off-ramps: the cloister. Before the sixteenth-century reformation, many wealthy families regarded convents as a refuge (or dumping ground) for daughters they could not unload in, or who did not have dowries enough for, marriage.5 But the trade-off, as always, was obvious: If they could not submit to marriage, these women would submit to Christ. In some places in Western Europe, there was an even more radical escape: the possibility of becoming a “beguine,” an uncloistered, semireligious woman. Enough women availed themselves of this option that beguines came to be seen as a threat; in a report to the Council of Lyons in 1274, the Bishop Bruno of Olmutz suggested that beguines were troublesome insofar as they were “fleeing obedience both to priests and husbands.”6

  This objection hammered home the point of women’s lives: they are meant, and have always been meant, to be dedicated to the giving over of self to others, if not to husbands, and kids, then to priests, to god, to parents, to community. Any time women do anything with their lives that is not in service to others, they are readily perceived as acting perversely.

  Historian Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller writes of the nineteenth century that “like their married sisters, many antebellum spinsters experienced debilitating illness, physical frailty, attacks of languor or morbidity, and even insanity.” But, she continues, “There is general agreement that the roots of female distress grew in the barren soil of a culture which demanded great submission and dependence of women, and which encouraged them to find self-actualization in abnegation of self.”7

  It’s this expectation of feminine self-denial that perhaps drives a contemporary obsession with the spending habits and acquisitiveness of contemporary women.

  I myself judged Sex and the City for its reliance on expensive shoes and meals as symbols of female independence. But we are used to the idea of expenditure on familial, domestic trappings. I might have reared back from the scene of Carrie Bradshaw dropping hundreds of dollars on a pair of shoes, but would I have batted an eye at Carol Brady writing out a check for drapes?

  The purchase of goods for oneself, especially if one’s self is female, is a well-worn expression of hard-won liberty. When Susan B. Anthony began earning a salary as an elementary school teacher, at twenty-six, she had already turned down two marriage proposals in her quest to remain unmarried. She purchased for herself a fox-fur muff, a white silk hat, and a purple wool dress and wrote home, wondering if her peers might not “feel rather sad because they are married and can not have nice clothes.”8

  In 1979, the Christian Science Monitor reported on single women buying stereos, art, cookie jars, and furniture for themselves, since “single women deserve nice things too” and “who wants to sit on orange crates until you’ve got a wedding ring on your hand?9” It required some defensive effort to adjust to this new normal; the Monitor explained that if this new generation of unwed consumers was “a bit more self-indulgent than their mothers and grandmothers, it’s because they’ve decided they’re ‘worth it.’ ”

  But, as with many public estimations of female self-worth, a little goes a long way. In 1987, the New York Times, which thirteen years earlier had declared the news that single women were “self-assured, confident, secure,”10 had changed its tune. “There is a single woman in New York, bright and accomplished,” began a macabre mid-eighties story in the newspaper, “who dreads nightfall, when darkness hugs the city and lights go on in warm kitchens.”11 (Apparently, all that furniture the Christian Science Monitor had reported that single women were buying for themselves had not included lamps.)

  Single women, the Times reported, while appearing to live lives full of “hard work and good friends, of stimulating days that end with cultural events, gymnasium workouts or Chinese and a soak in the tub” in fact “complain bitterly about their love lives and their marriage prospects” and are dogged by “nagging dissatisfaction.” Strangely, many of the women interviewed did not seem that bitter or dissatisfied; one thirty-nine-year-old executive averred that she’d grown “increasingly satisfied with her single life.” The Times reporter made reference, in a penultimate paragraph, to “several studies” showing that “single women are happier than their married sisters,” but confidently noted that that research “flies in the face” of the opinion of one hairdresser who claimed that her single clients are very distracted by looking for a man.

  Yes, many women who had pursued careers and not families experienced loneliness. But the question of whether that loneliness would be ameliorated by marriage—any marriage—was one that didn’t get attention, even when another executive explained to the paper that some choices about remaining unmarried were made expressly to escape the unhappiness of an earlier generation of married women: “When you think of your mother as helpless, unable to choose her own life, you become determined never to be vulnerable.”

  The message to women, especially high-achieving women, was that their singleness was their fault: They’d opted for the gymnasiums and Chinese food, and thereby sacrificed the warm, well-lit kitchens. The underlying implication was that women’s responsibility for their marriage-free fates lay in living lives that were too good, too full, and too powerful.

  When people call single women selfish for the act of tending to themselves, it’s important to remember that the very acknowledgment that women have selves that exist independently of others, and especially independent of husbands and children, is revolutionary. A true age of female selfishness, in which women recognized and prioritized their own drives to the same degree to which they have always been trained to tend to the needs of all others, might, in fact, be an enlightened corrective to centuries of self-sacrifice.

  Amina Sow agrees. The advice she gives everyone is “Always choose yourself first. Women are very socialized to choose other people. If you put yourself first, it’s this incredible path you can forge for yourself.” Amina too understood how she sounded as the words were coming out of her mouth. “If you choose yourself people will say you’re selfish,” she said. “But no. You have agency. You have dreams. It takes a lot to qualify a man as selfish.”

  Freakishness

  Single women have never enjoyed a particularly glossy reputation. One Reformation-era proverb, which would be cited in different forms by John Donne and William Shakespeare, proclaimed that women who died unmarried were doomed to “lead apes in hell.”

  Despite the fact that living uncoupled for large portions or all of life has become the new normal, that fewer Americans are marrying and that those who are are doing so at later ages; despite the fact that people who live alone make up almost 30 percent of the population (more than nuclear families12), stigmas about single people, and especially women, as aberrant, weird, stunted, and perhaps especially as immature, persist.

  In 2012, writer Deborah Schoeneman published an essay, “Woman-Child,” about what she perceived as the indulgence of single women in childish extravagances, such as sparkly nail polish. Meanwhile, the conservative columnist Kevin Williamson laid into the HBO show Girls, for which Schoeneman herself had written: “[Lena Dunham] might have gone one better and called it Thumbsuckers,” Williamson wrote, continuing that “The more appropriate title Diapers would terrify her demographic.”13 In not having and taking care of babies, Williamson felt, the unmarried femal
e characters of Girls were themselves the babies.

  In more serious quarters, single young adult life is often called “extended adolescence” or “adultescence;” unattached twentysomethings are sometimes referred to as “kidults.” Psychologist Jeffrey Arnett has suggested that we use the term “emerging adulthood,” acknowledging a new life stage, akin to the formal recognition of “childhood,” “adolescence” itself, and “middle age”: semi-defined periods within the human lifespan that have become recognized, often in response to adjustments in technology, medicine, industrialization, and civil rights. Images of “adultescence” are often summed up with a vision of grown but underemployed children sleeping on their parents’ couches. Journalist Judith Shulevitz has asserted that “the twenties have turned into a lull in the life cycle,” casting single life as a pause in adulthood.

  While it makes sense to consider a period of grown-but-unmarried life as a new phase, the way it is cast as an inherently immature stage isn’t quite right. After all, unmarried life is not a practice round or a staging ground or a suspension of real life. There is nothing automatically adolescent about moving through the world largely on one’s own—working, earning, spending, loving, screwing up, and having sex outside traditional marriage.

  Yes, in a bad economy, grown children live with their parents. However, that’s not a new familial configuration; historically and across classes, adult children have very often lived with their parents. We just didn’t consider them quite so adolescent when they were married and had children dwelling with them in the multigenerational unit.

  There is also a rather rich history of traditionally married adults behaving in childish ways: expecting to remain the center of attention and have their needs met by partners who feed them, entertain them, and do their laundry. Yet there has been little equivalent agonizing over the scourge of infantile husbands throughout history.