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

by Traister, Rebecca

  She married David Bale, a South African environmental and animal-rights activist, in rural Oklahoma.

  As Steinem tells the story of her long single life before Bale, “I had realized at about the time that feminism entered my life that a) I didn’t have to get married,” that “people (even women) could choose different lives and b) I couldn’t marry anyway because I would be giving up my civil rights (credit rating, legal residence, name—etc. etc.)” Her adulthood was filled with relationships she entered “without imagining that they could or should lead to marriage, all the more so because I had discovered I was happy without children.”

  The same would have held true with her relationship with Bale, she said. “We loved each other and were together, but at our age—he was 59 and I was 65 when we met—there seemed to be no reason on earth for us to get legally married.”

  Except for all those pesky benefits.

  Bale had been in the United States on a type of visa recently eliminated by Congress. He was concerned about immigration. The pair consulted with lawyers and was told that the surest way for Bale to secure a green card was through marriage.

  Steinem said that she spent time considering how the women’s movement had worked to improve marriage laws. She felt she would no longer lose her civil rights by marrying. She consulted with her close friend, Wilma Mankiller, former principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, who considered the question overnight, under the stars, and then advised Steinem to do it.

  Steinem and Bale were already scheduled to travel to the Cherokee National Holiday powwow in Oklahoma. Once there, they drove to a small Oklahoma courthouse to get their marriage license. Steinem said that she was given a bag of detergent and various household cleaning samples that local merchants gave with each license. One of Bale’s daughters, along with a couple of Steinem’s friends who were already present for the Cherokee Reunion, were able to be there.

  At dawn, Mankiller’s husband, Charlie Soap, performed the marriage ceremony in Cherokee around an outdoor sage fire. Then a female judge and friend of Mankiller’s did the legal ceremony. “We had a wonderful breakfast,” said Steinem, “and that was it!”

  Steinem said she was surprised by how quickly the press found out about their rural nuptials. Within a day, there was a lot of coverage, including a few bleats of disappointment from women who had wanted her to hold out, and a couple of hearty exclamations of victory that she had succumbed to the institution she had worked so hard to resist and alter. Mostly, though, reaction was warm; there was no anxiety that, at sixty-six, Steinem had forsaken any part of her independence, and people seemed happy that, for whatever reason, she had decided to do this thing she had not previously wanted to do.

  When O, The Oprah Magazine, asked to print a wedding photo, she even sent a few in. “I got a message back: No, we want a wedding photo—you’re wearing jeans in these.” But, Steinem explained, “They were my best jeans!”

  Before and during her marriage to Bale, Steinem recounted, he would attend campus events and speeches with her, and always wound up talking to the students for hours afterward. Steinem noticed how eager these students, mostly young women, were to “talk to a man who—because of our relationship and also because of who he was—showed [them] that you could be loved by a man without giving up yourself.” Steinem hadn’t realized, she said, “just how deep that hunger was, and how few the examples to feed it.”

  As it turned out, getting married was the right decision for Steinem and for Bale. “If we had not been married, David would not have been covered by my health insurance,” she pointed out. “When he became ill with what was finally diagnosed as brain lymphoma about two years later—and was hospitalized or in a nursing home for almost a year—it would have financially broken everyone, including his children.”

  Bale died three years after marrying Steinem.

  Retrospectively, Steinem said that, “the intensity of that time profoundly changed all of us.” In a way, she continued, Bale’s illness made her realize “what people mean when they say about a painful and tragic event: But I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I think I was sent into his life to help him enjoy it more before leaving it. He was sent into mine to help me live intensely in the present.”

  Steinem’s experience with marriage, she said, made her understand what she feels to be “the biggest remnant of old thinking” about the institution: idealizing and valuing it above all other types of loving relationships.

  “Some people still assume that, because we got legally married, he was the love of my life—and I was his,” said Steinem. “That’s such a misunderstanding of human uniqueness. He had been married twice before and he had wonderful grown children. I had been happily in love with men who are still my friends and chosen family. Some people have one partner for life, but most don’t—and each of our loves is crucial and unique.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Then Comes What? And When? Independence and Parenthood

  Amanda Neville is a brand-and-content strategist, who was raised in Germany and Virginia, and now lives in New York City. In her early thirties, she got out of a serious relationship. Amanda had been interested in adoption ever since she’d seen a 2003 CBS special about older kids who needed homes, struck by the children’s descriptions of what it felt like to go to adoption fairs, hoping that somebody picks you. “It broke my heart and planted a seed,” she said. “I couldn’t stand the thought of somebody not having a family or feeling like they have to do something to make somebody love them.” Married very briefly to her college sweetheart in her early twenties, Amanda had discussed the possibility of adoption with her husband, but they had split before the plan grew serious.

  She and the boyfriend she’d had into her thirties had already started the process of looking into adoption. She didn’t intend to let a breakup stop her. “I haven’t made any decisions in my life based on having a partner or not having a partner. Why would I make this one? It makes no sense.” Single in her thirties, and eager not to let the absence of a partner derail her, she continued the adoption application process for Ethiopia, which permitted single-parent adoption at the time. While waiting for a match, she received a message from her adoption agent, telling her of a special child in Russia. Amanda visited Russia three times. She was thirty-five when she brought four-year-old Nina, who is deaf, home to New York with her.

  “She is an amazing kid, loving and sweet and funny and I’m so glad the universe put us together,” said Amanda. “But she is also a handful; it’s been really hard.” Nina, five, has new cochlear implants and is slowly learning to interpret sounds and some language; she and Amanda communicate by signing. Money is tight; Amanda runs her own consulting business; in 2013, she opened a wine shop. Childcare, even with Nina in public school every day until three, costs at least a thousand dollars per month. And because Nina sometimes has tantrums—a symptom, Amanda feels, of having spent so long in an orphanage where it was her only route to attention—they don’t go out much. Amanda said the experience “has been really, really isolating.”

  Among the oft-cited trepidations of single women who are increasingly free to decide whether to have children on their own is this social isolation, and the accompanying fear that they will be putting romance on hold. But, soon after Nina came home, Amanda got an email from a man she’d met some months before, offering to help her. “He wrote and said ‘I can’t even imagine what you’re going through, I don’t know where I can even start, but I know how to cook and I can fix things and if there’s anything you need, let me know.’ ” Amanda invited the man over. They soon began dating. At the end of 2013, he moved in with Amanda and Nina.

  In reproductive biology, female liberty meets limits. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of the size, strength, and determination of America’s single women to preserve their independence is the lengths to which they have gone, over the past four decades, to push right up against, bypass, and even alter, the deadlines set upon them by their bodies and rep
roductive systems. Contemporary women are redefining whether, when, and how they become mothers.

  However, easy alternatives to the cold equations of child-bearing are not plentiful. Here is the math: There are a limited number of years during which most women’s bodies can easily bear children. When most women got married and started families in their late teens and early twenties, the window of reproductive opportunity matched the window of marital expectation, binding the conjugal and the marital in a way that seemed, for a long time, inextricable. But those windows no longer overlap so neatly.

  Chicken or Frozen Egg

  One of the big questions of changed marriage patterns for women and, with them, the delay of childbearing, is whether the mass movement toward later partnership and parenthood is what kick-started the explosive, enormously profitable field of fertility technology, or whether the development of new ways for women to extend their fertility created space and hope that allowed women to feel more comfortable postponing marriage and motherhood. It’s impossible to say for certain which development caused the other, but they have blossomed coterminously.

  The technology that now allows women to have babies later in life was not developed with single or late-partnered women in mind, but it was born in the same decade that would give rise to the professional, political, and sexual liberations on which today’s single women have built full early adulthoods.

  The first successful human product of in-vitro fertilization was born in 1978. Louise Joy Brown was referred to by a breathless press as a “test-tube baby;” she was the daughter of thirty-year-old Lesley Brown, who had married in her early twenties, and had been trying unsuccessfully to conceive for nine years. Two British doctors, Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, had been thinking about how to fertilize an egg outside the human body since the 1950s, and had been working in earnest for over a decade on methods for how to achieve their futuristic goal. Before it was even successful, word of the work had leaked and inspired doomsday fears in the scientific community and popular press. James Watson, a Nobel Prize–winning biologist who in 1953 co-discovered DNA, told a 1974 congressional committee that the practice of making babies in Petri dishes would lead to “all sorts of bad scenarios” and that “all hell will break loose, politically and morally, all over the world.”1

  Watson was correct. When it comes to who can make babies, and how and when they do, all hell has broken loose; the rules and limitations that governed and shaped family life for generations have come apart. Today, around five million babies have been born thanks to in-vitro fertilization. In 2010, Robert Edwards, who had outlived his partner Steptoe, was awarded a Nobel Prize himself for pioneering IVF technology and changing the world.

  The impact of what IVF makes possible for some women is truly astounding, and can be unsettling. In 2012, a sixty-one-year-old Brazilian woman gave birth to twins. The number of Australian women who gave birth after age fifty, has risen from eleven in 1996 to twenty-two in 2006 to fifty-three in 2011.2 In England in 2010, 1,758 babies were born to mothers forty-five and older, compared to 663 in 2000.3

  Fertility technology has changed the scope of reproductive possibility for single women who wish to have a baby without a partner and can now do so via sperm donor; it’s changed the world for women who, for any number of reasons, find themselves wanting to have a baby deeper into their thirties, forties, and, yes, fifties, and for same-sex couples who want children. It has also remade the landscape for the women for whom it was invented: traditionally heterosexually partnered young women who might even have married young, but who experience fertility challenges and now have a better chance of having children.

  The ability to fertilize an egg outside of a woman’s body, without sexual congress between two human beings, has led to a host of other advances and reproductive improvisations that can extend and expand the scope of possibility for when and with whom (if anyone) we can have our children. Women and men now turn to egg donation, create a variety of surrogacy plans, freeze eggs for later use, and test the health and viability of embryos before even implanting them in uteruses.

  Make no mistake: Fertility technology is no unalloyed good. It is prohibitively expensive for most people, costing thousands of dollars, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the technology in question and the number of rounds it takes before success. It involves pumping hormones into bodies. And it often doesn’t work, creating cycles of pain and loss and regret: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that only 22 percent of medically assisted reproductive cycles lead to live births for forty-year-old women, and that number plummets to five percent by age forty-four,4 though success rates change all the time, and new technologies, including egg donation and freezing, continue to alter the likelihood of success with every passing year.

  Despite these drawbacks, the push of increasingly independent women against the barrier of their own fertility has not relented. The market that has been created for extended reproductive possibility is huge: Americans now spend around $5 billion on fertility treatments each year.5 And, as marriage recedes decades deeper into female adulthood, the startling advances in fertility technology have helped make the worst fears of social conservatives more real: IVF has helped to make the heterosexual, nuclear family structure far less of a cultural, social, or biological imperative. It is no longer the only approved mechanism through which American society might reproduce itself. The world now brims with an infinite variety of familial configurations.

  Old Mamas

  Among the most striking results of protracted female independence is that women are having babies later than ever before. The average age of first motherhood in the United States has shot from 21.4 in 1970 to 26 in 2013. More than four in ten births in 2010 were to women over the age of thirty, and one in seven was to women over thirty-five.6 More than that: Of first births, eight percent in 2009 were to women over thirty-five, compared to just one percent in 1970.7 The number of women giving birth after age thirty-five rose by 64 percent between just 1990 and 2008.8

  The postponement of parenthood has brought its own set of challenges and peculiarities, among them the likelihood that if you are an unmarried woman over the age of twenty-four, you’ve read, heard, or been told something that has made you quite certain that your ovaries are withering and your eggs are going bad. Right now. This second. As you’re reading this and still not doing anything about getting pregnant.

  I was twenty-six in 2001, when the American Society for Reproductive Medicine put up ads all over New York City featuring an image of a baby bottle shaped like an hourglass, running out of milk. Tick-tock, tick-tock. “Advancing age decreases your ability to have children,” read the copy. I remember watching a bus pass by me bearing this chilling message, followed directly by a bus plastered with an image of Carrie Bradshaw.

  I was twenty-seven the next year, when economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett published her blockbuster book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, in which she warned that ambitious women were making a mistake by not marrying and gearing up to have babies in their twenties, because their egg quality began declining at twenty-seven, and plummeted at thirty-five. We were all deluding ourselves, she warned; we didn’t know about our fast-fading fertility. Tick-tock.

  The Hewlett book was a sensation. 60 Minutes ran a segment on it. Time published a cover story called “Baby vs. Career;” it was either/or. Tick-tock, tick-tock. “Baby Panic” was the headline at New York magazine, where journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis interviewed one twenty-nine-year-old who described seeing the 60 Minutes episode, then waking up the next morning, “and it’s on the cover of Time magazine and The View. Everywhere I go, everyone’s talking about the baby panic. It’s like an epidemic! It’s as though a disease broke out in New York and everyone’s trying to alert you. ‘Stay indoors! Emergency Broadcasting System: Your eggs are declining!’ ”

  Grigoriadis, then twenty-eight herself, confessed her own fears. Through
her twenties, she wrote, she had concentrated on her own plans, which “were about conquest and adventure: becoming a better writer, traveling the world, experimenting as much as I could before settling down at the last possible moment to start the perfect family, the one that I was sure to get if I lived life as I wanted to. . . . These days, the independence that seemed so fabulous—at least to those of us who tend to use that word a lot—doesn’t anymore.”9 Tick-tock.

  The egg-panickers’ concern was not intended to be malevolent; it was intended to prevent young women from accidentally becoming the woman from that spoof of a Lichtenstein cartoon, the woman who cries “Oh, my God, I forgot to have a baby!”

  But the intensity of this anxiety had its roots in other eras—truly. Writer Jean Twenge, who wrote a story about her own early thirties post-Hewlett meltdown about dwindling fertility, dug around and discovered that the oft-cited claim that only 30 percent of women between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine will get pregnant after a year of trying—a claim that was published in 2004 in the science journal Human Reproduction—was actually based on French birth records from 1670 to 1830. As Twenge pointed out, millions of women were being told when to get pregnant “based on statistics from a time before electricity, antibiotics, or fertility treatment.”

  Then there was more recent history: the post-Second-Wave generation who had hoed harder rows than we, their descendants. They had existed in smaller numbers, had more limited choices and harsher judgments imposed upon them, been bound more tightly by ideas about traditional family structure and timing. As a result, the birth rates for the paltry number of women who had had high-powered corporate careers were low.