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

by Traister, Rebecca

  It’s important to remember that, while poverty certainly makes single life harder, it also makes married life harder, so much harder that single life might be preferable. The number of married parents living below the poverty line increased by almost 40 percent between 2000 and 2012.55 In his 2014 book, Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America, sociologist Andrew Cherlin points out that while the median income for dual-earning couples rose by 30 percent between 1980 and 2012, and the median income for single mothers rose by 11 percent, the median income for married but single-earning configurations did not rise at all. Marriage by itself did not automatically improve economic prospects; having two earners did.

  Of course, single mothers in tricky financial circumstances might well benefit from a partner in non-economic capacities. Many women yearn for, and their lives might be significantly improved by, mates with whom they are in love, who offer them emotional support, who share the domestic labors, care for children, split the emotional burdens of life and family, whether or not they provide second incomes. But those good, well-matched, mates aren’t simply available for the asking, and bad marriages—as well as the divorces that are often their conclusion—are economically and emotionally devastating, especially for women, and most especially for women who are already economically vulnerable.

  Future Weddings

  Emmalee works as a customer service representative in Brooklyn. Twenty-four, she is the mother of a toddler and lives with, but is not married to, the father of her child. “With marriage comes divorce,” she said. “I just feel like you’re probably a bit more separated from each other.” Emmalee likes the way things are now. “I like being together with someone but not married,” she said, but by the time she’s thirty-five, “I can see myself pushing [for it]: Like, okay, I’m getting old, maybe I should get married, especially if I’m still with him. In another ten years or so, I would look into that.”

  Because it is now possible for women to live without marriage, because they are more able than ever before to have independent professional, economic, sexual, and maternal lives, marriage has become potentially more meaningful than ever before. As Edin and others have argued, the lack of correlation between childbearing and marriage leads marriage to have a “high symbolic value;” it’s something that women and men feel is worth holding out for, waiting for, being prepared to enter responsibly.

  The problem is, once again, that, in low-income communities, the opportunities to gain that steady footing are far fewer than they are for those with access to good educations and good jobs.

  One favorite spin on these structural inequities, frequently put forth by conservatives, including Phyllis Schlafly, is that economically disadvantaged people don’t marry because combining incomes can push family earnings too high to qualify for help from the government. And because of the way welfare laws are structured, this is true for some.

  In addition to her earnings as a customer service representative, Emmalee receives food stamps, Medicaid, and help from the Women, Infants, Children program (WIC), which provides supplemental nutrition for low-income women and children up to five years old. “I make ends meet,” she said. “I’m able to survive. I get a little help from the government without being married. If I was married, I probably wouldn’t get that extra help from them.” Emmalee lives with her boyfriend, the father of her child. She said that the question of government aid wasn’t wholly behind their decision not to marry. “Not my end result,” she said, “but kind of, yeah.”

  So, there are logical reasons why economic need might have an impact on choices women make about marriage. But it certainly doesn’t have enough of an impact to account for the number of unmarried women out there. As Tim Casey from Legal Momentum pointed out, “Welfare has such a negative image in society; it has such a stigma attached to it. Nobody wants to be on welfare.” People accept government help because they really need government help, not because it is a rewarding alternative to marriage. Welfare benefits, contra Schlafly, have never been “lavish”—far from it—and their value has only diminished over the decades.

  Those who blame the rise of the welfare state for falling marriage rates, write Edin and Kefalas, fail to take this into account: “The expansion of the welfare-state could not have been responsible for the growth in non-marital childbearing during the 1980s and 1990s for the simple reason that in the mid 1970s, all states but California stopped adjusting their cash welfare benefits for inflation. By the early 1990s a welfare check’s real value had fallen nearly 30 percent. Meanwhile, marriage rates continued to decline while the rate of unmarried childbearing showed persistent growth.”56

  And then there’s the fact that most struggling women are just as attached to the idea of their own financial independence and future stability as their more educated and privileged peers.

  The Fragile Families study found that the factors most likely to influence whether a couple married within a year after the birth of a child were not only the man’s employment and annual earnings, but also the woman’s education and wage rate, showing that economic stability—coming from both partners in the relationship—is one of the keys to romantic stability.

  Emmalee, who has an associate’s degree, is determined to get more secure in coming years. “I would see myself in more of a career,” she said, “Because [being a customer service representative] is not a career, this is just a job.” Emmalee wants to be in law enforcement, she said, “Because I want a better life for my son. I want more for him.” As a cop, she said, she’d have benefits and get pay raises. “I could probably get a house one day, and a car. The good stuff. And plus, I did go to college for something. What’s really important to me right now that I can think of is more stability, definitely more stability, more certainty with my future.”

  Edin and Kefalas contend that work and economic ambition are keys to low-income women’s vision of the future. The single mothers Edin spoke to, she said in a lecture at the University of Michigan, “believed it was vitally important and emphasized to us over and over again that both they and their partners are economically ‘set’ prior to marriage.” Many of these women, Edin continued, “have a strong aversion to economic dependence on a man.” They see their own economic stability, their jobs, as a “defense against patriarchal sex role expectations and a defense against bad behaviors,” including substance abuse, cheating, and domestic violence, as well as “insurance” in case of a break up. “They’re worried,” said Edin, “that if they don’t earn money they won’t have the power to negotiate for equal say in the relationship.”

  For the hardest-working and lowest-paid Americans, it’s easy to imagine that the dream might be not working, but staying home instead. But many of these economically challenged women feel that working for money is good for them and for their marriages. Adrianne Frech and Sarah Damaske did a study that showed that women who worked after having children were healthier physically and mentally by the time they hit forty than their peers who had not done paid work.57 And, even for lower-earning women, who are far more likely to be exhausted, depressed, and hamstrung by inflexible shift work, not working did not provide relief. Stephanie Coontz cites a Gallup poll from 2012 revealing that women from low-income families who did not work outside the home were less likely than working mothers from the same income brackets to report having “smiled, laughed, or enjoyed themselves ‘yesterday.’ ”58

  “My family, they believe that the woman is supposed to take care of the children and even if they work, still their primary focus is on the children and the man really doesn’t play a big role in that,” said Pamela. “The man is just the moneymaker. The woman is supposed to cook and clean. I don’t believe in that. I think the man should take a huge step in being involved in the child’s life and being involved in the housekeeping.” Pamela said that when she considers the gendered power dynamics of marriage, she thinks of “what my mother would take from my dad.” Pamela described her father as “c
onstantly abusive.” She insisted that it’s a situation she would never tolerate in her own life. “I’d be ready to walk away after the person doesn’t change,” she said. “You should be independent enough to not be treated that way.”

  Pamela wants to be a lawyer. “I feel pressure not to conform to gender roles because I don’t want to be like my mom,” she said. “My mom is stuck, and women [of her generation] who are like her are stuck. I honestly don’t know why they feel that they’re forced to stay with the man. . . .” Except, as she notes, that “If they are working, they’re working as home-nursing aids or at a store; I don’t see them taking more independent roles, like being a businesswoman or a teacher. That may be because they don’t have the education to go ahead and fulfill those careers. But I do see most of them in the home.”

  The increased number of single mothers—and the fire in their bellies—is visible on a national stage. Even with the comparatively few women in positions of power, a number of them, including former Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Wisconsin Congresswoman Gwen Moore, and Maryland Senate candidate Donna Edwards, have lived and worked toward their professional goals as single mothers.

  This presents another wrinkle. As one nurse wondered, in a marriage class attended by journalist Katherine Boo in “The Marriage Cure,” her 2003 story on pro-marriage initiatives in Oklahoma, “How do you tell if he wants to marry you for the right reasons . . . ? When I wear my white uniform, guys around here know I’m working and chase me down the street to get their hands on my paycheck.”59

  Poor women are not rejecting marriage. They, like their wealthier peers, are delaying it until it’s something they can be sure of, until they feel stable and self-assured enough to hitch themselves to someone else, without fear of losing themselves or their power to marriage. Rich, middle-class, and poor women all share an interest in avoiding the dangerous pitfalls of dependency that made marriage such an inhibiting institution for decades. They all want to steer clear of the painful divorces that are the results of bad marriages; they view marriage as desirable only as an enhancement in life, not a ratifying requirement.

  The difference is that wealthier women have other avenues in which to direct their ambitions, have more hope of attaining economic independence, have the luxury of time and flexibility to delay childbearing and marriage while they pursue interests that, ironically, will put them in closer proximity to potential mates who share those interests and who themselves enjoy some stability. Thus, privilege replicates itself; the likelihood that better-off women will remain better-off on their own increases, as does the reality that many of them will eventually marry, and that, in turn, the marriages they enter into will further enhance their social, economic, and emotional lives.

  But, critically, while they may be benefitting most publicly from the deferment of marriage, it’s crucial to remember that privileged women no more invented liberation from marriage than they invented the idea of working to earn wages. These were all behaviors developed, out of economic necessity, by poor working women. When imitated by richer women who have more power to start with, they can be understood as beneficial; they can be seen as social progress and perhaps part of a movement, or at least a glamorized trend.

  But in the disadvantaged communities in which they were born, these same shifts in behavior are read as vulnerability and victimhood and, yes, as pathology; they are cast as immoral, irresponsible, dangerous to communities and families, and as burdensome to the state. So, while it is true that we must address the cycle of poverty faced by single women and single mothers in low-income communities, it must begin with an understanding and acknowledgment that the high rates of singlehood in low-income communities are not accidental, and more crucially, that they do not signal a flaw in reasoning or morality.

  As journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has sensibly observed, “human beings are pretty logical and generally savvy about identifying their interests. Despite what we’ve heard, women tend to be human beings and if they are less likely to marry today, it is probably that they have decided that marriage doesn’t advance their interests as much as it once did.”60

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sex and the Single Girls: Virginity to Promiscuity and Beyond

  Kristina, a lawyer and archeologist who works in Bismarck, North Dakota, is a brassy, open thirty-five-year-old who refers to herself as an “archaeological crime-fighting machine.” Kristina was raised by liberal parents whose loving marriage was the second for each of them. They were very open with her about the unhappinesses of their first unions, and encouraged her to remain independent. When Kristina was in college and told her mother that she was going to move to Texas to be with a man, her mother was horrified. “You can’t do that; you haven’t had enough sex yet,” Kristina remembered her saying.

  Ultimately, Kristina agreed: She hadn’t had enough sex yet. In her twenties, she said, she paid no attention to married culture and instead just enjoyed her single life. Her goal was “to make it to thirty single.” Thus, she moved in and out of a series of monogamous relationships, and enjoyed a thriving casual sex life in between partners. Kristina said that she had sex with people who were interesting to her; “anyone who twirls me on a dance floor usually gets me going,” she said. For her, sexual appetite was just one facet of what she called her “super passionate” personality. “I have a love for dogs,” she said, “a love for my job, a love of running, a love of kids, and a love of physical contact. I love sex.”

  Kristina was shocked, she said, when she saw so many of her law-school classmates pair off, seemingly at random, “Men and women I never saw partying together or hanging out just got together and got married out of the blue,” she said. This hasty coupling didn’t appeal to her.

  But, as she got older, she knew that she wanted children, and became increasingly interested in finding a partner with whom she might have some. She moved in with one boyfriend who turned out to have problems with alcohol and unreliability. She loved him, she said, “But there was no way I was making babies with him, because if I sent him out for milk and he didn’t show up for two days, there was no way I was dealing with that.” She moved to New Mexico and lived on the border of a Navajo reservation where poverty, racism, and lack of opportunity commingled to create an explosive, often unhealthy, social and sexual atmosphere.

  “I entered a scene with people far younger and wilder than I am,” she said. “I’d thought my twenties were wild, but my early thirties were the wildest time of my life sexually. There were orgies, multiple partners, threesomes, women, men.”

  Kristina enjoyed this sybaritic period, but realized, in retrospect, that it was accompanied by regular migraines and physical signs of overindulgence. Her father, with whom she maintains a very frank relationship, told her that he was glad she was having fun, but that she should perhaps consider that “running around with twenty-four-year-old death-metal musicians” wasn’t making her very happy. Her next stop was Missoula, Montana, where she got a master’s degree in archaeology, and where she fell in love with a man who was a devout Southern Baptist. Uncomfortable, having never lived with a woman before, Kristina’s boyfriend turned more deeply to his faith. “This was a guy who said, ‘Let’s get married and make babies,’ ” said Kristina. “And I loved him and quickly jumped on board. But, suddenly, Jesus kept coming up. And I’m really not comfortable with Jesus.”

  Now in Bismarck, Kristina is single and, for the first time in her life, consciously trying to have less sex, instead of more. She says that it has to do with the sadness she’s felt since breaking up with the Baptist, and a little bit with her increasing desire to have kids soon. “For one or all of those reasons,” she told me, “today I choose not to have as much casual sex.” She paused.

  “I do sometimes,” she went on, “because I can’t help it if a pretty man approaches me. But a one-night stand is about all I’ll do.”

  Kristina’s only regret about her life of promis
cuity is the people she may have hurt along the way. When she was younger, she considered herself “more of a muscle-myself-through-life kind of lady,” she said. “Now, I’m a little bit more gentle, more thoughtful.” She turned situations to her benefit in a style that popular culture mostly associates with men. “I’d say to a guy, ‘Just so you know, I’m not looking for a relationship now, in fact I’m seeing someone else,’ ” she recalled. “And because they were guys, they were like ‘Great! I don’t like commitment!’ ” But then, they’d have a good time. Such a good time that it would continue to happen. “And then the guys would begin to make an assumption that I wasn’t doing it with anyone else. But I was.”

  “I used to think that getting laid was the goal, and now it’s not the goal anymore,” said Kristina. “But I firmly believe everything I did put me where I am right now and I really, really love my life.” She has noticed that both her sponsor at Al-Anon, where she goes to address issues of family alcohol dependence, and her therapist are sure that her youthful excesses were motivated by a lack of self-respect. But she strenuously disagrees. “I had a fucking blast,” she said. “My whole life was a reckless, fun party. And I wasn’t drunk driving or shooting heroin, I just always enjoyed myself.”

  Juicy Stories

  As I was writing this book, a respected professional mentor advised me to include “lots of juicy stories,” since, he assured me, that would be the principal interest of any man who picked up a book about single women. His take was neither unfriendly nor censorious, but in a funny way, it reminded me of Rush Limbaugh’s tirade against Sandra Fluke after her testimony on behalf of contraception coverage, in which he assuredly asserted that Fluke was fighting for her continued ability to have “so much sex.”