By the time Eleanor began to teach, there had been generations’ worth of arguments waged within the press and between friends about the possibility that women might feel professional aspirations or commitments that were comparable to men’s. As “The Bachelor Maid” had written in 1904 of her impulse toward intellectual pursuits, “so far as I can discover . . . it is just the same sort of ambition that a man feels; not a thirst for a little cheap publicity as an ‘intellectual woman,’ much less the desire for a pseudo ‘independence’ and an individual bank account, but an honest love for the studies of which my school-days gave me a glimpse.”
But wrapped up with “The Bachelor Maid’s” very raison d’être was the fact that these ambitions were not, then, compatible with wifeliness and motherhood.
In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan quotes the groundbreaking, never-married nineteenth-century doctor Elizabeth Blackwell as saying, “I am woman as well as physician . . . I understand now why this life has never been lived before. It is hard, with no support but a high purpose, to live against every species of social opposition . . . I should like a little fun now and then. Life is altogether too sober.”1
The culturally enforced weighing of femininity (love, marriage, motherhood) against profession (intellectual engagement, money, public recognition) so fascinated writers and readers that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, three separate novels chronicled the pull between medicine and emotional life for women. William Dean Howells published Dr. Breen’s Practice in 1881; in it, the doctor heroine realizes the error of her medical ambition and gives up her career for marriage. The next year, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who advocated the burning of corsets, wrote about unfair labor practices for women and the unjust financial dependency of marriage, and married in her early forties a man seventeen years her junior, published Doctor Zay, in which the heroine suggests a contract with her future husband, ensuring that she’ll be able to continue practicing medicine after their marriage. In 1884, Sarah Orne Jewett, herself a Mainer who never married, wrote A Country Doctor, in which the heroine sends her besotted suitor packing in favor of remaining a physician.
By Eleanor’s lifetime, the turn-of-the-century tide of educated women pushing into the upper echelons of the professional world was already receding toward its midcentury low; even the most popular progressive calls for women to join the workforce were tempered by the promise that no amount of work could knock family from its primary perch within the female consciousness. Mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, writing in The Ladies’ Home Journal in 1921, made the scorching proposition that “Every young girl in the country today should be taught to be self-supporting, to do one thing well enough to earn by it when the necessity comes.” And yet, she followed up, even the most avid professional, “if she is born woman . . . is born mate and childbearer,” and must realize that her home “must be first.”2
Eleanor did not marry at the age that many of her peers did. The year that she got her master’s degree, finished work on the Drosophilia study, and became a biology teacher, the median age for first marriage for women in the United States was about twenty-one and a half;3 she was twenty-four. But at the college where she taught, she met a political science teacher who also coached basketball, a potato farmer’s son. They married in 1942, when she was twenty-six. There was no question but that she’d give up her job and move to the Air Force base in Arkansas where her husband would learn to fly before his World War II service in the Pacific. By 1943, he was based in Guam and Eleanor was back in Maine, expecting their first child, my mother.
In 1945, my grandfather returned and took over his parents’ farm. He did not believe that mothers should work outside the home. Eleanor became a farm wife: a zealous homemaker, churner of butter, obsessive cleaner of dirt brought in from the potato fields, and a great cook who, during the harvest, brought enormous baskets of hot stews and pies out to the men and children for lunch. But as my mother remembered, “She was always sick, had headaches, back problems. She was obsessive about the floor; she scrubbed it three times a week on her hands and knees. She was not a happy lady; it was clear, even to me, as a kid.”
In 1958, twenty years after Eleanor braved the hurricane to go get her biology degree, she had three children, aged four to fourteen. She had just lugged one of those hot lunches to the field, when the treasurer at the local college drove up, jumped out of his car, and explained that the school’s biology teacher had just died. There was no one in the small town qualified to replace her. Could my grandmother fill in, just for a few weeks, until a replacement could be found?
My mother, a young teen who’d been working in the field that day, and remembered the conversation vividly, recalled that my grandmother looked for permission to her husband. He nodded; she should help out for a few weeks.
Eleanor retired twenty-two years later, after having been awarded an honorary doctorate.
My mother remembered, “When she went back to work, it was like night and day. She was busy; she didn’t have to scrub the floor three times a week. She dressed up. She took more care with her appearance. She was happier. Everything about her changed.”
I’m quite certain that my grandmother, who died in 2012, would have said that the most important role in her life was as a mother and wife and, later, as a grandmother. But I also know that, when I was young, the gifts I’d receive from her in the mail included the clipped wings of a dead blue jay and sea creatures preserved in jars of formaldehyde; she taught me how to gut fish and identify their internal organs; she’d walk me up the hill behind the farm and tell me the names of every wildflower; the photograph we had of her in our house showed her dissecting a cat. Even as a Nana, she was a scientist.
One Christmas, when she was in her early nineties and slipping into dementia so severe that she no longer recognized her children or grandchildren, my cousins and I heard her talking loudly—practically bellowing—from the guest bedroom where she was asleep. Curious and concerned, we gathered outside her door to listen to what she was yelling about.
She was teaching a lengthy and perfectly lucid biology class.
Work
Work—in lucky cases, work that is engaging, but even in other less fortunate circumstances, work that permits economic autonomy or simply an identity outside a family—is just as crucial and as defining a pillar of adult life for women as it is for men. Which is to say: lots of women, like lots of men, find passion and fulfillment in work, just as lots of men, like lots of women, find passion and fulfillment in their personal lives.
But the assumption that a woman who works cannot really be a full and functional wife, remains so pervasive that, as Bella DePaulo recounts in her book, Singled Out, when television journalist Barbara Walters was stepping down from 20/20 in 2004, she gave a parting interview to her friend, journalist Ted Koppel, and proclaimed that one of the reasons that she was dialing back after forty years in the news business was to enjoy her personal life. Koppel reminded her that she had been twice divorced. He then asked, “Was it the job? If it had not been for the job, would you still be married to one of those men?”4 Walters replied that she wasn’t sure.
Sometimes, even today, the only class of women who can be comfortably understood as being ambitious or publicly powerful are those who are unmarried and childfree. Take, for example, Oprah Winfrey, Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, the longest-serving female senator Barbara Mikulski, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. They are all women whose unusual power and positions made sense, both because, yes, structurally and strategically, they had not been forced to divide their educational and professional attentions, but also because, without families, it could be assumed that their lives were otherwise empty. Never mind that men with wives and litters of children have held positions of enormous influence and responsibility since the beginning of time. For women, the assumption that a family must come first persists so strongly that, when Barack Obama nominated unmarried Janet Napolitano to b
e head of Homeland Security in 2008, former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell said that she’d be great for the job because “you have to have no life. Janet has no family. Perfect. She can devote, literally, nineteen to twenty hours a day to it.”5 (Napolitano’s predecessors, Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff, were each married, with two children).
The other traditionally acceptable pattern for ambitious women has been to enter the professional fray after children are grown. The fact of having had children renders this genus of women comprehensibly female, but doesn’t scramble anyone’s brain by suggesting that domestic and personal commitments might have existed equally and coterminously within the female brain. Ann Richards, the great Texas governor, didn’t go into politics until after having had four children; she gave her career-highlight speech at the Democratic National Convention when she was fifty-four years old.
But this pattern of delay can gravely hobble women’s ability to accrue power. In 2012, Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker, highest-ranking woman in Congressional history and a mother of five, was asked by Luke Russert, a twenty-seven-year-old reporter who got his first network job at twenty-three, whether her decision to remain at the head of her party at age seventy-two inhibited younger people from participation. Pelosi explained to Russert that her “male colleagues . . . had a jump on me because they didn’t have children to stay home [with]. You’ve got to take off about fourteen years from me because I was home raising a family.” Pelosi also said, “I want women to be here in greater numbers at an earlier age so that their seniority would start to count much sooner.”
This is where the expanding generation of unmarried and later-married women comes in. When adulthood is not kicked off by marriage and motherhood, women can begin to accrue professional power earlier. This is true not only in politics and government—where female stars like Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar, and Loretta Lynch, the first African-American attorney general, all dug their teeth into careers in law and politics before marrying or starting families, making it harder for those families to derail trajectories—but in the rest of the world.
Delaying marriage in order to set down professional roots, to build a solid reputation and an economic base, is an old tactic. Singer Marian Anderson turned down a marriage proposal in high school from suitor Orpheus Fisher for fear that marriage would wreck her career ambitions. She went on to become famous in Europe, befriending composer Jean Sibelius and scientist Albert Einstein, and had already sung her historic rendition of “My Country ’Tis of Thee” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 when she finally agreed to marry Fisher in 1943, at age forty-six.
The benefit to women of marriage postponement is so reflexively understood that, as former president Bill Clinton told the story in 2015, he had to ask his girlfriend to marry him, and come to Arkansas where he was pursuing a political career, three times before she said yes. He recalled telling Hillary Rodham, “I want you to marry me, but you shouldn’t do it.” Instead, he urged her to go to Chicago or New York to begin a political career of her own. “Oh, my God,” he remembered Hillary responding at one point. “I’ll never run for office. I’m too aggressive, and nobody will ever vote for me.” She moved to Arkansas and married him, working as a lawyer, law professor, and for the Children’s Defense Fund. She didn’t put the gas on her own political career until after her husband left the White House and their daughter was in college.
Today, marriage delay is a move that women are making across the country and across classes, in both unconscious and very conscious ways, and the economic impact is clear. In 2013, Pew released census data revealing that, in the words of the report, “today’s young women are the first in modern history to start their work lives at near parity with men. In 2012, among workers ages twenty-five to thirty-four, women’s hourly earnings were 93 percent of those of men.”6 Those workers represent the very same generation of women who are remaining unmarried for longer than ever before. Between 2000 and 2009, the percentage of never-married adults in that same age bracket rose from 34 percent to 46 percent.
The millions of women who are staying single, whether for life or for some chunk of adulthood, play a transformative role in the way we perceive women’s relationship to work. As universities and workplaces fill with more women who support themselves through wage-earning work, our eyes are slowly beginning to adjust. We’re getting better equipped to discern and digest the reality of female ambition.
Single women are helping the world get used to working women.
All About Our Mothers
In 2005, I watched from the audience as the usually flinty comedian, Tina Fey, began to cry, while accepting an award, as she described how her “brilliant” mother had been told by Fey’s grandfather that she would not be going to college because “that was for boys.” When it was Tina’s turn for college, Fey recounted, her mother had taken an additional job in order to pay for it. Fey added that she hoped her mother derived satisfaction from the fact that her daughter had “found some success in [professions] that were just for boys.”
Every generation has struggled to overcome the gendered obstacles set before the previous one and, often, eliminate those obstacles for the next. It’s striking, when talking to women about their personal and professional choices, how deeply the experiences of mothers and grandmothers influence the decisions and strategies of daughters and granddaughters. It’s easy to presume that each generation of women corrects in opposition to the last, with mothers and daughters ping-ponging back and forth between prioritizing work and wifeliness, engaging in feminism or antifeminist backlash. The truer story is that even the most intense waves of backlash have rarely fully undone the progress made previously. The story of women in America has moved slowly and sometimes circularly, but largely in one direction: toward more freedom to participate in public, professional, and intellectual life.
My mother has always said that watching her mother’s transformation from thwarted scientist to reborn teacher inculcated in her a commitment to never stopping working. “When I saw that when she was working she stopped being so unhappy,” my mother told me, shortly before retiring after almost five decades as an English professor, “That’s when I knew I was never going to be a stay-at-home person.” Eleanor’s work, my mother went on, “was how she defined herself. And to be honest, it’s one of the reasons I’ve looked at retirement with certain trepidation. Work is how I define myself. I mean, I love being everybody’s grandmother and mother and wife and all of that—that’s wonderful. But basically, there’s got to be something that’s me, and that’s been my [working] life.”
Columbia law professor Patricia Williams spoke with pride of a photograph of her own mother, marching in the procession to receive her Masters degree in 1951, visibly pregnant with Williams. Williams’s mother was married. Williams’s mother “didn’t ever think that she should marry instead of getting an education. She always thought that you should never become dependent on anyone, including a man.” Williams’s grandmother also had a career, as the executive secretary to the president of a photography studio. Three generations of Williams women—descended from a slave-and-master union—had some college education.
A similar familial legacy was passed on to reproductive health activist Alison Turkos, raised by a mother who worked for the IRS and a father who worked for IBM. When Alison was a child, her father had more flexibility when it came to vacations and sick days, so he stayed home with her when she was ill, took her to doctors’ appointments, and accompanied her on class trips. Her mother, meanwhile, remained intent on letting Alison and her sister know, from a young age, that one should never “enter a marriage or a relationship unless you could financially support yourself; you always had to have a job.” Alison opened up a Roth IRA when she was twenty-two, after her first job as a nanny.
Turkos’s and Williams’s maternal models stand in stark contrast to Gloria Steinem’s, yet had a similar impact. Steinem’s mother, Ruth Nuneviller, had been a pio
neering journalist in Toledo, Ohio, but stopped working entirely after becoming mired in an unhappy marriage to Steinem’s father, and experiencing a series of mental health crises that left her nearly paralyzed by depression, cared for for most of her adult life by her daughters. Ruth’s circumstances created in her younger daughter a very strong “desire to separate myself from my mother, so I wouldn’t have the same fate,” Steinem said. She also recalled how, when she briefly became engaged as an undergraduate, her mother offered this backhanded and ultimately prophetic observation: “It’s a good thing that you’re getting engaged early, because if you got a taste of being single, you’d never get married.”
The eldest of five daughters, Carmen Wong Ulrich, president of a financial services firm, understood her Dominican mother to be a “renegade,” because of her determination that all her daughters get college educations. Wong Ulrich explained that her mother had cultivated this obsession as a girl growing up in the 1950s and 60s, without any hope of pursuing a degree of her own. Pregnant and married at nineteen, Wong Ulrich’s mother spent her life conscious of her dependence on her husband, a condition that turned her into a “super feminist,” her daughter said. Wong Ulrich, a forty-one-year-old (divorced) single mother, gives financial advice on television and in magazines, regularly encouraging women to get their own credit cards and bank accounts, “so you can leave,” she said.
All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation Page 19