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

by Traister, Rebecca

  As writer Dodai Stewart told me, “There are resentments that crop up between friends who have been independent together, about the kinds of celebrations that happen around marriage ceremonies and not around single life.” Dodai recalled an instance in which she lost her patience with a friend, after having made a bachelorette trip and gone to the wedding. “I was just done,” she said. “Not with our friendship, just with showering her with presents. I’d much rather be spending money on myself. If these women are living in a dual income household, why am I buying them a present? What about single girl-showers?”

  In fact, single-girl parties are not unheard of. Some high-earning unmarried women are reclaiming their fortieth birthdays—the event that is supposed to signal the symbolic ticking out of the biological clock, the turning point at which we’re told that our youthful appeal begins to ebb, the storied entrance not into adulthood but into middle age—as celebrations of the lives they have lived and the future in front of them. That is, at least in part, what we celebrate at weddings.

  Kate Bolick, author of the 2015 book, Spinster, threw a lavish joint fortieth birthday party with a (married) best friend, an event she and her friend referred to as their “Platonic Lesbian Birthday Wedding.” Bolick wrote about the event in Elle, acknowledging that “for me, this party actually was a bit like a wedding—it was the first time I’d asked my family and friends to take considerable trouble to gather together on my behalf, not to mention spend their money to get there. . . . Did I get points for sparing them the added expenditures of a bridal shower, bachelorette party, reception dinner, day-after brunch, and a gift, plus the bonus of knowing that, unlike nearly half of the weddings they go to, this celebration wouldn’t end in divorce? If there was one thing I could assure my guests, it was that I’d be around until I was dead.”

  High Costs

  It’s possible to acknowledge the economic leaps of the privileged as breakthroughs, but also crucial not to forget that the possibility of more comfortable vistas for some women has often, historically, come at a cost to others.

  In the nineteenth century, industrialization alleviated white, middle-class women’s responsibilities for grueling in-home production of food and textiles, and the Cult of Domesticity worked in tandem with expectations of Republican Motherhood (in which women’s obligation was the instilling of civic virtue in offspring and the moral maintenance of husbands) to keep privileged women enclosed in their homes. Instead of community engagement, the emphasis came to be on family cohesion as the crucial moral and patriotic responsibility.39 This enabled the wealthy to spend less time worrying about those less fortunate than they and, in a pattern that has remained steady, to suggest that blame for impoverishment might lie with the impoverished’s failure to achieve domestic or familial sanctity.

  Meanwhile, the cleanliness of middle-class homes, as well as the time cleared so that wives might spend it raising good citizens and offering moral succor to their husbands, was made possible by the new phalanxes of working women. Without servants to haul clean water and scrub a house, without female factory workers to produce the goods on which the family survived, historian Stephanie Coontz points out, “middle class homemakers would have had scant time to ‘uplift’ their homes and minister to the emotional needs of their husbands and children.”40

  Similar configurations existed in the midst of the twentieth century, as the postwar benefits that created the circumstances for an expanded white middle class meant the contraction of possibility for poor, working Americans, many of them Americans of color. Tending to home and hearth was held up as the feminine, familial ideal, but the actual scrubbing of the hearth was often done by poorer women, immigrants, and African-Americans who were in no economic position to depart the work force and attend to the cleaning and uplift of their own homes.

  And, of course, when the Second Wave arrived to free many middle-class white women from their domestic prisons, many of those women continued to rely further on the low-paid labor of poorer women of color as nannies and housekeepers, rather than striking more equitable domestic bargains with their male partners.

  Now, slowly but seriously improving economic circumstances of certain classes of privileged independent women—who earn and spend more freely than ever before—should not eclipse the grave economic realities faced by millions of other single women: the ones who continue to labor for low wages, making the goods and providing the services for the wealthy. Working-class and poor women are also living outside of marriage, at even higher rates than their more privileged peers. When it comes to unmarried women and money, the unprecedented economic opportunity enjoyed by a few is a small fraction of a far more complicated story.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  For Poorer: Single Women and Sexism, Racism, and Poverty

  Ada Li was thirty when she moved to the United States from China in 2001, just before the terrorist attacks of September 11, and found that, in their aftermath, especially for immigrants, life was hard: people were scared, suspicious; she sensed there were no jobs for her. She considered returning to China. Her friends in the United States urged her to stay, offering to help find her a husband who could support her.

  Ada was not interested in finding a husband, but decided to stick it out and keep looking for work. A family friend hired her to make clothing on a sewing machine on Thirteenth Avenue in Brooklyn. After a year, she enrolled in manicure school. In these years, Ada recalled, she was “always busy, not a lot of time to go out or talk with friends. I was not taking English classes because I had no time. Just work.” Ada worked six days a week from seven in the morning until nine at night, and on her day off, she took her manicure classes, returning to the sewing machine at night if there were still clothes to be made. “Hard life,” she said, remembering how little money she made, how difficult it was for her to pay the rent.

  For many women, the pursuit of work and money has far less to do with fulfillment, excitement, or identity than it does with subsistence. And, for many single women, scraping by is as hard as it has ever been. For most Americans, work is the center of life, not because they yearn for it to be, but because it has to be.

  Beneath all the statistics about women spilling into colleges and universities and boardrooms—statistics that are important and unprecedented, and compiled adroitly in such books as Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men and Liza Mundy’s The Richer Sex, which both proclaim that women are overtaking men in economic and professional realms—are piles and piles of asterisks. These asterisks reveal that while some women are enjoying more educational, professional, sexual, and social freedom than ever before, many more of them are struggling, living in a world marked by inequity, disadvantage, discrimination, and poverty.

  It’s crucial to unpack what’s true and what’s not true about female advancement—and single female advancement—across classes, rich, poor, and in between. When it comes to female liberty and opportunity, history sets an extremely low bar.

  Old Patterns

  For centuries, women who did not find economic shelter with husbands often discovered themselves nonetheless reliant on men, such as their fathers, brothers, or brothers-in-law, for support. Jane Austen, who came from comparative comfort, once accepted and then rescinded her acceptance of a marriage proposal, from a suitor to whom she did not wish to yoke herself. She lived her life in her family home, and then in her brother’s homes. She wrote famously, “Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor.”

  One “element of continuity in women’s work (as in their lives,)” writes historian Nancy Cott, “was its constant orientation toward the needs of others, especially men.” As professional opportunity expanded for women, much of it was in service of male-run households as domestics, or working for male bosses: as secretaries, stenographers, retail clerks. Teaching and nursing, two historically female-dominated professions that did not necessarily entail answering to male superiors, involved the replication of subservient female behaviors, the tending of children a
nd sick people. And none of the professions in which women have managed to thrive, so many of which mimic the unpaid labors assigned to women historically, have been known for being well paid.

  Certainly, circumstances are improved compared to what they were two-hundred years ago, or fifty years ago (Women can open their own bank accounts! Get their own mortgages! Marital rape is less legal!). But men’s economic and professional dominance has not in fact come to an end. In the United States, they are still very much on top. Men are the CEOs and the heads of universities, the scientists, and the acclaimed novelists; they dominate the world’s most explosive field, technology; they are the firefighters and cops, the bankers and doctors; they are, for now, all the presidents and all the vice presidents ever to have been elected; they are 80 percent of Congress.

  Men earn, on average, a dollar to women’s 78 cents. That gap is far wider for women of color; it has remained mostly unchanged for more than a decade. The history of gendered and racial discrimination is not past; it has accrued, and often meant that money has not accrued, to women and especially to women of color. As Kimberlé Crenshaw reported1 in 2014, the median wealth, defined as the total value of one’s assets minus one’s debts, of single black women is $100; for single Latina women it is $120; those figures are compared to $41,500 for single white women. And for married white couples? A startling $167,500.2

  Women made up only 4.8 percent of Fortune’s top CEOs in 2014.3 Only twenty of the nation’s thousand largest companies were run by female CEOs in 2012 (that’s four percent) and, as Forbes reported, that number is a record; eleven of those CEOs were hired between 2011 and 2012.4 Journalism professor Caryl Rivers wrote in 2010, “Nearly all American billionaires are male, or widows of males, with the exception of Oprah Winfrey.”5

  The study6 showing that single childless urban women under thirty make eight percent more than men in their same age bracket is astonishing. But as Stephanie Coontz points out, the appearance of single urban female success can sometimes reflect the fact that (often predominantly white) educated women tend to cluster in the very same cities that are home to large populations of low-earning (often nonwhite) men without college educations. As discussed, some of the very services that make privileged, educated, single female life attractive and possible in cities—the restaurants and takeout and laundry and home maintenance that allow women who are not wives to live as if they had wives—are often provided, at criminally low wages, by poorer, often immigrant, women and men. If studies were done comparing women only to men with similar educational backgrounds, Coontz writes, “[M]ales out-earn females in every category.” She also points to a 2010 survey showing that “female M.B.A.s were paid an average of $4,600 less than men in starting salaries and continue to be outpaced by men in rank and salary growth throughout their careers, even if they remain childless.”7

  That women are entering universities and the workforce in large numbers does not mean that they are earning or achieving throughout their lives at the same pace as the men who enter those universities and workplaces alongside them. Structural impediments, from the lack of paid family leave and pay gaps, to lingering and systemically reinforced negative attitudes about female leadership, combine to mean that, at some point, women fall behind men when it comes to earning, promotions, status, and reputation. These inequities can be obscured by the lavish coverage of increasingly abundant educational opportunities and the messages we send to young women about their potential achievement. Those messages may be righteous, but they are not the whole story.

  A 2012 report by a compensation research firm found that, while amongst college graduates, pay growth remains about equal for men and women throughout their twenties, at age thirty, the growth in women’s earnings slows while men’s stays steady.8 That’s because it’s in their thirties that many college educated women are now having their first children. But Cornell economics and labor professor Francine Blau has offered a further explanation: that men still remain more likely to work in high-paying fields, like business and law, that offer more opportunities to advance, while women are still more likely to work in low-paying fields built around service and care, including nursing and teaching, and these fields continue to have lower salary caps.

  While the period immediately following Second-Wave feminism saw a change in the gender segregation of some professions, for example, women working as electrical engineers, that rearrangement has again reversed. And low-paying, traditionally feminized fields, including teaching and social work, have in fact become more female since 1980.9 The expansion of other female-dominated professions, such as childcare and home health care, mean that more jobs may be becoming available to women, but they are the kind of jobs with few protections and reliably low salaries. Women make up about 90 percent of the home health business, among the fastest-growing industries in the nation, in which median pay hovers at about ten dollars an hour.10 When California passed landmark paid sick-day legislation in 2014, home health care workers, disproportionately female and women of color, were exempted from receiving benefits.

  The impact of all this persistent inequity on the economic (in)stability of unmarried women is profound. The question of what’s to be done about it is at the heart of a fierce argument being waged between social scientists, politicians, and journalists.

  Divided by “I Do”

  In an extensive 2012 feature in the New York Times, “Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do,’ ”11 reporter Jason DeParle contrasted the circumstances of two white women in Michigan, colleagues at a day care facility, each with children and comparable salaries. One of them, Jessica Schairer, spent over half her income on rent, relied on food stamps, could not afford to enroll her children in extracurricular activities, or to take time off from work after surgery for cervical cancer. The other, Chris Faulkner, enjoyed a comparatively high household income, lived in a nice home, took vacations, and enrolled her kids for swimming lessons and Scouts.

  “What most separates them” DeParle asserted, is “a six-foot-eight-inch man named Kevin.” In other words, the fact that the more secure woman in the story was married to Kevin, a kind, involved, and employed husband. The single thing that DeParle was asserting would have helped Schairer make a more comfortable life for herself and her children was a husband.

  But there is another thing that would have helped her situation: money. Money. And federal policy mandating paid medical leave. Despite being in management at the day-care center where she works alongside her slightly better paid counterpart, Schairer was paid just $12.35 an hour. After a surgery for cervical cancer, she returned to work, against doctors’ orders that she take six weeks off, after just one week, because, as she told DeParle, “I can’t have six weeks with no pay.”

  Higher wages would help Schairer. So would guaranteed paid leave.

  The lack of adequate pay protections and social policies that disproportionately make an impact on women are symptomatic of systemic gendered economic inequality. As welfare expert Shawn Fremstad wrote in response to DeParle’s story, “Why is it OK to pay the mostly female workers who take care of other people’s children and of seniors and people with disabilities so little? . . . Why is it OK to not provide the vast majority of care workers with basic employment benefits like paid sick and disability leave?” Noting that even Faulkner, the wealthier woman in the set-up, didn’t make much more than Schairer and, in fact, was so much better off only because her husband, a computer programmer with a comparable college degree and demographic background, made so much more, Fremstad asked, “Why does he, a computer programmer, earn more than twice as much as she does as a manager/director of a childcare center?” It wasn’t simply that the married woman was married; it was that she was married to a man whose background was similar but whose wages were higher, in part because he worked in a male, and thus better paid, industry.

  The problems of wage stagnation, pay inequality, unemployment, and social policies that presume women not to be breadwinners are often obscur
ed beneath the persistent social and political calls to partner. Marriage, we are told repeatedly by our political leaders and pastors, will make it all okay.

  Perhaps that’s because this officially cheerful solution—going to the chapel and all that—is easier to talk about than the present stagnant economic climate and widening economic divide. In the decade prior to the economic collapse of 2008, the median family income dropped from $61,000 a year to $60,500;12 even the privileged were graduating from college with mountains of debt and entering a parched job market. By 2012, two and a half million jobless adults were living with their parents.13

  These are the financial circumstances faced by the unprecedented number of unmarried women now making their financial way in the world. And while it is not true that marriage is the answer, it is true that by simply living independently, they face an additional set of challenges in a world that remains designed with married Americans in mind. Single women foot more of their own bills, be they necessities like food and housing, or luxuries like cable and vacations; they pay for their own transportation. They do not enjoy the tax breaks or insurance benefits available to married couples. Sociologist Bella DePaulo has repeatedly pointed out that there are more than one thousand laws that benefit married people over single people.