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

by Traister, Rebecca

  What’s more, many of the same studies that turn up increased happiness and good health for married people also show unmarried people to be just as happy, and both groups to be far happier and healthier than those who are divorced, separated, or widowed—all states that derive directly from the condition of having been married. The claim that marriage—just marriage, as opposed to a good marriage—is a boon to general emotional and physical well-being is probably precarious at best.

  But when it comes to chronic physical illness, there does seem to be persuasive evidence that being partnered helps. In 2013, a study published in The Journal of Clinical Oncology found that cancer patients who were married had better outcomes than those who were single,17 noting that single patients, without partners to nudge them to get to doctors sooner, were 17 percent more likely to already have advanced stage cancer by the time they were diagnosed. Single cancer sufferers were also 53 percent less likely to get the therapy they needed than married patients, a statistic that likely speaks to the staggering logistical commitments of medical treatment: Having a person to support and love you may be salubrious; having a person to take care of children or earn money while you get chemotherapy or to drive you to that chemotherapy is definitely so.

  This is part of what made Lori Gottlieb’s paean to settling for someone, anyone, so compelling. In that original Atlantic piece, Gottlieb wrote, even of her less than blissfully married friends, “They, like me, would rather feel alone in a marriage than actually be alone, because they, like me, realize that marriage ultimately isn’t about cosmic connection—it’s about how having a teammate, even if he’s not the love of your life, is better than not having one at all.”18

  Frances Kissling, who loves solitude and loathes the prospect of marriage more than almost anyone I spoke to while writing this book, spoke of the moment, in her late fifties, when she was caring for her mother, then dying of lung cancer. One day, Kissling was helping her feeble mother get dressed to go the doctor, Kissling recalled, “When she suddenly looked at me and said, ‘Who. Is. Going. To. Do. This. For. You?’ ”

  “It knocked me on my ass,” Frances said. “Oh my god. Who is going to do this for me?”

  Several years after her mother died, Kissling was diagnosed with kidney disease. “It was a crisis for me because my mortality was before me,” she said. “Sickness is something you really deal with in a different way if you’re alone.” Kissling returned to therapy, wanting to revisit the decisions she’d made. “We talked about singleness and how there was now a deeper aspect of it to deal with: I am alone.”

  Of course, the cruel truth is that neither marriage nor children guarantee a different outcome. Those who take comfort that, in getting married, they are evading a future of lonely decline do not, often, consider the very realistic possibilities of divorce, abandonment, or the early death of a partner. We don’t often consider that even in the very best case scenario, in which we bind ourselves to someone we love madly and reciprocally forever and ever—we are making a sad bet when it comes to the end of our lives. Because short of simultaneous expiration, marrying even happily leaves us with a fifty-fifty chance of dying last. For women, who have statistically longer life spans and are more likely to partner with men who are older than they, chances are higher than that. The average age of widowhood for women in the United States is around fifty-nine, and 2009 figures19 showed that over 50 percent of women over seventy were widowed, more than double the percentage of men who were widowers. For the happiest wives, that means both suffering through the passing of our beloved and then, once again, facing the world—and our own ends—on our own.

  Yes, perhaps we have children, whether we’re single or married. Children, after all, provide another source of comfort, connection, and care. But, as anyone who has logged time in a nursing home or dementia unit can tell you, counting on offspring to be in a financial, professional, or emotional position to be there in one’s final days, or months, or years is a gamble. This is especially true in a nation with widening class inequality and no structural support or compensation for those who, in the middle of life (and work and relationships and parenthood of their own) take time off to care for an aging parent or grandparent.

  In 2013, the New York Times ran a story by a recent widow addressing how alone she felt. She had children, but reported that they could not understand her grief. She had no friends, she wrote. She was so consumed by her solitude that, one day, she became literally paralyzed, unable to move, while driving her car. This was a woman who had chosen to marry and have children. But, in her dotage, she nonetheless found herself alone and physiologically undone by the loss of the person to whom she had been wed.

  “We’re all alone, no matter,” Frances agreed, but, noting that I am married and she is not, “You’re alone in a different way from my aloneness. I have lots of friends, and very deep friendships. But essentially, I’m alone.”

  Barbarous Institutions

  One thing that seems certain not to provide a sure solution to the problems of solitude is a reinstatement of marriage as the norm to which all should aspire. In a society that has built an enormously lavish wedding industry, and in which women are far more likely to forego marriage than ever before, it’s awfully easy to see marriage as the elusive solution, the institution where loneliness is ameliorated and solutions to personal challenges can be found.

  And, indeed, when we fall in love, find companionship and support, and when our friends do, there is often a lot to celebrate, to be thrilled about, to feel grateful for. But it’s an error to assume all marriages are good marriages, and to fall into the narrative trap laid by Disney and Shakespeare, the one in which a wedding is the satisfying conclusion of a story.

  We have to remember that among the reasons that there are now so many unmarried women is that for hundreds of years, when marriage was practically compulsory, plenty of married women were miserable.

  In the early twentieth century, Emma Goldman wrote of how marriage exacted from a woman the cost of “her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life ‘until death doth part.’ ” Goldman alleged that marital expectation doomed women from the start. “From infancy, almost,” she wrote, “the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal. . . . Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that.”

  Pioneering English nurse and statistician Florence Nightingale wondered, “Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity . . . and a place in society where no one of the three may be exercised?” A woman who turned down multiple marriage proposals, Nightingale vowed to avoid marriage at all costs and considered the institution “an initiation20 into the meaning of that inexorable word never . . . which brings in reality the end of our lives, and the chill of death with it.”

  Nineteenth-century author George Sand, pen name of Amandine Lucille Dupin, wrote that “there is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved,” and famously partnered with the composer Frederic Chopin, but she called marriage, which she exited in her twenties with two children in tow, “a barbarous institution.” And when Susan B. Anthony was in boarding school and received word that a friend from her youth was newly married to a middle-aged widower with six children, she wrote in her diary that “I should think any female would rather live and die an old maid.”21

  Even some men acknowledged the institution’s drawbacks for women. George Burnap, a Unitarian minister and author of a series of lectures on the “Sphere and Duties of Women,” wrote that “Marriage comes as the great crisis of a woman’s existence . . . Perhaps if she knew what life has in store for her, she would shrink back.”22 He went on, even more darkly, to observe that “there is ever an undertone of sadness in the wedding’s mirth; and when that bright being approaches, upon whom every eye centers and for whom every heart palpitates, I can almost fancy her bridal attire transformed to mourning, and her blushes changed to tears.”23

  Some nineteenth-century women reluctant or unable to find husbands tur
ned for refuge, as others had for centuries before them, to the church. Membership in the celibate Shaker community rose in the years between 1810 and 1860, largely on the participation of women. And Quakers, who permitted women both to minister and to organize around the abolition of slavery from the early nineteenth century, drew a high proportion of single women.24 By the mid-nineteenth century, 40 percent of Quaker women in Philadelphia were never married.25

  In 1904, the Independent published a piece by “a Bachelor Maid” entitled “Why I Do Not Marry,” which the paper claimed was an attempt “to explain the reluctance to enter into the matrimonial state so often manifested by intelligent and cultured women of today.” The author, described by editors as “an attractive and able” young university professor, explained that her disinclination to wed stemmed from the fact “that I have been appalled by the hideous inequality of the conditions which marriage offers to the man and to me, when we have come up to the wedding point essentially alike in our past training and our ideals for the future.” For men, in her view, marriage meant “the gaining of a home life which is an incentive to help his chosen profession rather than an obstacle;” but for herself, “[I]f I would have love and a home, the alternative presented is the renunciation of every other dear ambition.”

  The Bachelor Maid cited the case of a professor who left teaching to marry and have three children, prompting the question of why an accomplished woman should be “imprisoned in a nursery, her mental activity perpetually hampered by endless domestic burdens and bodily pain, while her brilliant and attractive husband . . . is lionized in every literary and social circle.” The piece’s tone reflected a brassy, almost profane, confidence not only in the normality, but the superiority of unmarried female life.

  Critics hit back in tones that will be familiar to modern readers who have heard so much about selfishness, and about the tolls of too-high standards. In a 1907 piece in the Atlantic on the topic of why American marriage was in trouble, journalist Anna Rogers anticipated by one hundred years the pathologizing of pickiness that would make Lori Gottlieb and Tracie McMillan’s work so popular. Rogers sneered at women who held out for a man who “must be a god physically . . . must have wealth, brains, education, position, a perfect temper, and a limitless capacity to adore her, kneeling.” Rogers saw in new women’s reluctance to settle “the latter-day cult of individualism; the worship of the brazen calf of Self.”26

  And, while marriage has improved dramatically from its nineteenth- and early twentieth-century form and feel, the conviction that it is the cure for unhappiness remains wholly unproven.

  Psychologist Ty Tashiro suggested in a 2014 book that only three in ten married people enjoy happy and healthy marriages, and that being in an unhappy partnership can increase your chances of getting sick by about 35 percent.27 Another researcher, John Gottman, has found that being in an unhappy union could shorten your life by four years.28 Residual suspicion of the institution seeps into pop culture and media: the Website Jezebel’s section about weddings and marriage is titled “I Thee Dread.” And, as critic Elif Batuman pointed out in 2014, the best-selling book and blockbuster movie Gone Girl got its hook in part from the acknowledgment that marriage itself is an abduction and that “wives are people who disappear.” The distressing message laid out allegorically in Gone Girl, Batuman wrote, was “the revelation lying in wait for women when they hit the ages of marriageability and childbirth: that their carefully created and manicured identities were never the point; the point was for it all to be sacrificed to children and to men.”

  In short, while there may be all sorts of negative dimensions to life on one’s own, there are certainly as many to marriage. Finding a strong marriage, a rewarding partnership, is hard and rare. And, ending up in a bad one remains a reasonably terrifying fate for many of us, yet we rarely read panicked pieces about the abundance of unhappy wives; we have rarely been treated to studies comparing the probabilities of them ever having great sex or satisfying careers to the probability of them getting killed by terrorists.

  We are still wired to see marriages as the (happy) endings to women’s stories, the resolution to their quests. We simply don’t ask the same questions about the fates of women who marry, don’t consider the crises (or even simply the fears, dissatisfactions, loneliness) that they may face within their unions as circumstances symptomatic of or particular to marriage; yet we easily and always consider single women’s equivalent states as tied tightly to their unwed status.

  And that’s too bad. Because, as Karen Durbin wrote in her 1976 Village Voice piece “On Being a Woman Alone,” “there are worse things than losing a man, alright; there’s losing yourself.”

  Reckoning

  In 1950, one in ten Americans over sixty-five lived alone. Today, thanks to stretching life spans and high divorce rates, one in three do.29 It’s both a terrifying and a hopeful statistic. Because the increased pressure on a society in which human beings are not necessarily living, thriving, and dying within traditional family units anymore could force a more communal approach to healthcare, domestic cooperation, and to helping each other out of this world. Women’s relationships with each other have long provided an imperfect but real alternative. As Frances Power Cobbe wrote in 1869, “Nor does the old maid contemplate a solitary age as the bachelor must usually do. It will go hard. But she will find a woman ready to share it.”30

  For her part, Frances Kissling, a believer in euthanasia, said that she and her like-minded friends have made agreements to help each other die in peace. “Had I been in the condition my mother was in, those agreements with others would have come into play,” she said. And, in fact, there is no reason that we should assume that reliance on a spouse or child should be any greater than reliance on friends, or even, perhaps, neighbors.

  The forced dependence of increasing numbers of single people on each other may hearken back to a lost feminist project: the socialization of care and domestic duty. There’s also the building social recognition of relationships besides traditional heterosexual marriage, a fight that has been central to the gay rights, and specifically, to the gay-marriage movement. The ability to assign friends and nontraditional partners roles as next of kin, to permit them into hospital rooms and give them medical advocacy and end-of-life rights is key to the expansion of end-of-life care options for a population that will ever more frequently die unmarried. But, as singles advocate Bella DePaulo has argued, that’s part of why the victories of the gay-marriage movement, with its emphasis on marriage as the ratifying union, remains incomplete. Even as gays and lesbians gain true, federally mandated marriage equality, DePaulo has written, “all those people who are single—whether gay or straight or any other status—will still remain second class citizens.”

  And some women seek more official stamps on their female partnerships.

  Amina spoke to me of a “non-cheesy way to celebrate single people,” noting that she’s been taking care of herself since she was eighteen. “Everything I own I buy for myself. But there’s nothing in society that celebrates me; in the eyes of my family I’m a failure because at this point I’m not partnered.” She said that she and Ann have a running joke about doing a TED Talk about “how we should get married to each other for the benefits of marriage. The romantic stuff we’re not interested in, but the economic reality of being single, man . . . You need to have a single person starter kit.”

  We also, of course, need to have affordable health care and housing, alongside stable social security and welfare systems. The state must play its role in supporting a population that no longer lives and dies within family units. Alongside social policy must come social recognition of the independent women turning to each other and relying on each other throughout their lives.

  Imagined covenants of care, whether between women who want to parent, or enjoy tax benefits, or seek support in old age or with the onset of illness, may seem unwieldy, dependent on the circumstances, fortunes, and reliability of those who enter into
them. But, in this, they are not so radically different from traditional marriages, in which the promise of shared care for children is regularly shattered by divorce, by illness, by death, and the responsibility for caretaking through sickness and in health tends to be shouldered more heavily by one member of the pair, leaving the other alone.

  Perhaps, if a future included more communal care between women, and if we saw models that flourished, those communal agreements could become more reliable and grow to contain more people, creating an expansive and resilient shield, in many ways more flexible than marriage, against the brutal realities of life and death, alone and together.

  CHAPTER SIX

  For Richer: Work, Money, and Independence

  “I truly believe that women should be financially independent from their men . . . Money gives men the power to run the show. It gives men the power to define value. They define what’s sexy. And men define what’s feminine. It’s ridiculous.”

  —Beyoncé, 2013

  Biological Determinism

  Eleanor Ross was born in 1916, the daughter of a New England Telephone & Telegraph employee and a mother who stayed home and later worked in a bank. Eleanor grew up a lover of animals, the outdoors, and science. She wanted very much to be a doctor. By the time she attended Colby College in Maine, it was clear that there was not money to get her to medical school; she won a research fellowship at the University of Iowa, and took a train through the New England hurricane of 1838 to the Midwest, where she would earn an advanced degree in biology.

  During her graduate-school summers, Eleanor worked at the Jackson Laboratory on Mount Desert Island in Maine, on a study conducted by a pioneering female scientist, Elizabeth Shull Russell, and published in the August 1940 Journal of Experimental Zoology, called “A Comparison of Benign and ‘Malignant’ Tumors in Drosophila Melanogaster.” After completing her degree, Eleanor moved to Houlton, Maine, where her father had been transferred by the telephone company. In 1940, she took a job at Ricker Classical Institute, a local liberal arts college and its partner high school; she became the founding professor of Ricker’s Biology Department.