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

by Traister, Rebecca

  In a perfect world, Stewart went on, “It wouldn’t even be an issue, it would be like, hey, you do you, I do me, everything’s cool . . . But this world is baffling: you’re meant to make something of yourself, work hard, contribute to society in a meaningful way. And once you fight tooth and nail to establish yourself. . . . you’re chastised: ‘What, no kids?’ ” Maybe, Stewart wondered, “instead of picturing myself as the straggler at the party, it’s important to see beyond all the baby mama drama, recognize that on this side of the fence, there’s plenty of love, good time, late nights, late mornings, travel, shopping, joy, indulgence, pleasure, accomplishment. . . . If I end up staying at this party instead of heading to the other party, it’s still a party, and if we’re not praised, we should praise ourselves.”

  Indeed, even for those who are bereft about childlessness, there can be other unexpected rewards.

  Television commentator Nancy Giles said that throughout her life, she had always envisioned herself being a mother with one little daughter. At thirty-eight, she lost her mother. “After my mother died and I saw mothers and daughters on the street, I was in pieces,” she said. When her mother died, both of her sisters were married with kids. “It was something they could fall back on: I gotta get up, gotta get the kids ready for school. They had a family unit to focus on. I was completely adrift, and I felt so alone.” But, in the wake of her mother’s passing, Giles wound up spending time with her father, something her sisters could not do. She forged a new and improved relationship with him. “For the first time in my life, I’m a daddy’s girl!” she remembered telling her therapist. “Reconnecting with my father and feeling a kind of special love from him was wonderful. It happened late.”

  At no point, Giles said, could she imagine having had children on her own.

  Sisters Doing It for Themselves

  But there are lots of women who do it.

  Pamela, a twenty-four-year-old senior at City College, got pregnant accidentally, when she was seventeen. “I was stigmatized,” she said. “I had all of these people on top of me saying what was I going to do, who was the father, and if he did exist, was I going to get married to him?” She did have a boyfriend, and lots of people, she said, pushed marriage on her, but she didn’t see the benefit. “I wasn’t going to tie him down if I got married,” she said. “There wasn’t going to be anything different if I got married.” She’s glad, in retrospect, that she did not rush to City Hall. Pamela believes that women making decisions about single motherhood need to carefully sift through the reasons they want to have children, with or without a partner. “You don’t want to have kids, and then be financially dependent on somebody,” she said. “You want to be able to sustain a life, even if the person did walk away, even if you didn’t have the father there to help you out. I don’t think there’s a timeline to get married. I don’t think it is necessary to get married.”

  But, she went on, “Society stigmatizes women who don’t have kids.” And it lays complicated traps for them. “People say you’re not ready to have kids when you’re eighteen to twenty-two, because you’re still in school; it’s too difficult. And it’s true. It’s difficult every single day. But, at the same time, later, I may have a career that requires my full attention, so when will I have time to have kids then? So, when am I going to have a kid? So, I don’t know if there’s a certain time frame when people should start trying to have kids.”

  Single motherhood is a norm for women in low-income communities, where early marriage has largely faded, but where parenthood can provide women with meaning and direction. It is also an increasingly accepted and available option for privileged women. For those who are single, but quite sure they want to have kids, and who decide they have the resources to do it, even conceiving of the possibility of having a child on one’s own can be enormously liberating.

  By the time I turned thirty, I’d been single for several years and my fibroids were worse than ever. I knew I was going to have to have surgery to remove them and, that, after the surgery, there would be a window of time before they grew back during which I might be able to get pregnant. In other words, I anticipated a curtailed reproductive window, and I had never been in a romantic relationship that I had ever found sustaining.

  At thirty, I made a plan, determined to address the feeling I’d had when I left my gynecologist’s office three years before: This was my life. What was I going to do?

  I would plan to have a baby on my own. My parents would be supportive; they told me so. I would put away money, begin to prepare. When I turned thirty-four, I would have the operation, with an eye to getting pregnant, perhaps by a sperm donor, or maybe with one of my male friends, when I was thirty-five. A girlfriend and I spoke about the possibility of doing it at the same time, moving into adjacent apartments, helping each other with childcare and meals and companionship.

  Even beginning to consider this scenario was incredibly freeing. It’s not that I relished the idea: I hoped fervently that it wouldn’t come to pass, that some person who was right for me would pop into my life by the appointed moment. But the fact that this other part of what I wanted from life—to make a family—didn’t have to be lashed to that passive hope was exhilarating. The notion of even imaginatively separating the question of partnership from the question of parenthood felt liberating.

  As it turned out, the timeline I’d mapped out as a single person fell into place, except with a partner. I fell in love at thirty-two, had major surgery at thirty-three, a baby at thirty-five and another at thirty-nine. I was unimaginably lucky, timing-wise, love-wise. I cannot say what would have happened in real life had I not been. I make no claim to the bravery that single motherhood entails, only to the fact that the imagined possibility of it enabled me to move forward with energy and optimism and a sense of familial agency.

  Kristina, thirty-five and working in Bismarck, North Dakota, has been thinking about making the same kind of plan I did. She’s begun to divorce the idea of marriage from children, prompted by her father, who suggested that she read an article about how you didn’t necessarily need to do both at the same time. She recently went to a new gynecologist in Bismarck. “I was frightened. I knew I was thirty-five, and I really want kids.” Kristina had an IUD set to expire when she was in her late thirties, and the new doctor remarked that they probably wouldn’t have to fit her with a new one; Kristina freaked out at the implication that she’d be infertile by her late thirties.

  But, to her surprise, her North Dakota doctor said, “You want kids? Well, just do it, Kristina!” It turned out that the doctor herself had had her first child when she was single and in med school. Kristina’s New Year’s resolution, she said, “is to prepare myself for when I hit thirty-six. I’m going to take care of myself, so I can make a baby. I am taking prenatal vitamins, and my nails and hair are awesome.”

  Law professor Patricia Williams was forty when a relationship in which she “most wanted my biological clock to be respected and it didn’t happen” broke up. She said that it was at that moment that she “hit that crossroads where you ask yourself: Do you give up on the idea of having children?” She was fortunate enough, she said, “to have a marvelous career and remarkable parents who communicated to me that my ability to have children was not hooked onto a man, necessarily.”

  Williams had long felt that the boundaries placed around family and race were social constructions, and she was put off by the amount of money charged for in-vitro reproduction, wary of the idea that “a woman isn’t a full woman until she has a baby.” Williams was also interested in “alternative models of family, tribal models, adoptive models, kinship models. There are so many other alternatives to this very econometric model of family and marriage we have now.”

  Just on the cusp of her fortieth birthday, “People were basically saying ‘It’s now or never.’ I didn’t feel it was now or never, but that relationship ending was the moment that I really deeply felt that I could unhook the ability to have a child from the
necessity of having a man.”

  Williams adopted a son.

  The impact on how people viewed her, she felt, was immediate. Prior to adopting, she said, “I was viewed as this strong black woman who was a professional striver, a triumph of the race.” The day she adopted, she said, “I was a single black mother.” When her son was just five weeks old, she recalled, she was attending the Republican National Convention and wound up on a panel with Ralph Reed, of the Christian Coalition. Reed lit into her, upset, she said, that “I could adopt a child without a father. It wasn’t just Ralph Reed. There were members of my family who felt exactly the same way.” Within New York’s private school system, Williams said, “People just assumed that because I was a single mother that I was somebody’s nanny, whose generous family was paying for my son’s education.”

  But the other line she got, she said, “Was that I was Mother Teresa and this child wouldn’t have had a chance in the world. I hate that even more than the black single mother thing. This idea that he was a lost soul. He was a healthy, beautiful baby. I hate the narrative of necessary gratitude that I picked him up from the gutter. His biological parents were college students. But people just assumed that he was a crack baby.”

  Often, single motherhood is less of a consciously planned and considered identity.

  When Letisha Marrero was thirty-five, and in a long-distance relationship that was coming to a close, she allowed herself a final romantic fling and fell pregnant. “At that point, I wanted to be a mother more than I wanted to be a wife,” she said. “That was my purpose in life. And all the depression I’ve gone through, all the ups and downs all melted away once I got pregnant. For the first time in my life it became completely clear what I had to do. I never loved myself more than when I was pregnant. I had natural childbirth because I knew I might not have it again. I wanted to breastfeed as long as humanly possible.”

  When she was pregnant, Letisha was a copy editor for Star magazine. Her maternity leave paid half her salary but, when it was time to return to work, the reality of fifteen-hour workdays with no partner and a breastfeeding newborn hit her. She quit her job, and said that she lost three or four subsequent opportunities for work because of her inability to combine childcare with reasonable work hours. Her daughter’s father has remained present in their lives but, when she lived in New York, he was only able to visit a few times a year, and he, too, struggled financially. After moving around the city, to ever cheaper apartments and rougher neighborhoods, Letisha recently moved to Virginia, where life is more affordable.

  Through it all, Letisha said, “I was just going to forge a way. Forge a way for this little girl to have a life. She’s never known if I had thirty-five dollars in the bank or thirty-five hundred.”

  Baby Panic

  There are a thousand things about the changing familial structures that result in later and fewer marriages for women that have critics on all ends of the ideological spectrum panicking. Some of the concern—Women having babies outside of marriage! And so few of them!—that sound like the Jackie Mason joke about the restaurant with terrible food and small portions. But the levels of nationally voiced anxiety about the damage that single and late-married women are doing to themselves and the nation is not at all funny for the women who find themselves caricatured and chastised by columnists and presidents for their part in altering the marital patterns that had for so long restrained them.

  It is true that, as women marry later and not at all, and spend the non-wifely portions of their lives doing things besides or in addition to having children, there are fewer children being born in the United States. The general fertility rate has fallen, hitting an all-time low in 2013, with just 62.5 live births to 1,000 women of childbearing age, close to half the rate in 1957, when the baby boom hit its peak with nearly 123 births per 1,000 women.23 No matter that that baby boom number was a socially constructed, freakishly high modern anomaly, and not a steady norm by which any of us should wisely measure the health of reproductive life in this nation. . . . some people are nonetheless very concerned.

  Jonathan Last is concerned. His 2013 book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, was subtitled “America’s Coming Demographic Disaster.” In a Wall Street Journal story about the low fertility rate, echoing the arguments Teddy Roosevelt had made about “race suicide” a hundred years earlier, Last wrote, “The root cause of most of our problems is our declining fertility rate,” and that the fertility decline, while tied to wage stagnation, was also largely the doing of women. “Women began attending college in equal (then greater) numbers than men,” wrote Last. “More important, women began branching out into careers beyond teaching and nursing. And the combination of the birth-control pill and the rise of cohabitation broke the iron triangle linking sex, marriage and childbearing.”24 While careful to note that some of these developments were positives, Last was clear that, “even social development that represents a net good can carry a serious cost.” And that white, educated American women, whom he deems “a good proxy for the middle class,” with their fertility rate of 1.6, meant that “America has its very own one-child policy. And we have chosen it for ourselves.” Conservative columnist Megan McCardle is also concerned, and has warned that those who think that declining birth rates are no big whoop should look no further than Greece, to see “what a country looks like when it becomes inevitable that the future will be poorer than the past: social breakdown, political breakdown, economic catastrophe.”

  It’s not just conservatives who are concerned. It’s also our Democratic president, who does not publicly worry as much about population decline as he does the scourge of single-parented households. In a 2008 guest sermon on Father’s Day, Obama framed his argument as a scolding of absent fathers—and specifically black fathers—whom he referred to as “AWOL” and “MIA,” and as “acting like boys.” He blamed absent fathers as being partially responsible for poorer outcomes for black children, for higher dropout and incarceration and teen pregnancy rates.

  Obama was careful to celebrate “heroic” single moms, rightly suggesting that “We need to help all those mothers out there who are raising kids by themselves . . . they need support,” but ultimately concluding that the help they need is “another parent in the home,” because “that’s what keeps the foundation . . . of our country strong.” In this, Obama—himself the son of an absent father, and yet the president—was reductively asserting that there is a single healthy and correct model for family, foundation, support. He affirmed that the two-parent, partnered home is the type of home to which we are all to aspire.

  As Melissa Harris-Perry wrote about Obama’s approach to single-parent homes, “President Obama is right when he points to the importance of loving, involved, financially responsible men in the lives of their children and their communities,” but that he “lacks some imagination when it comes to analyzing the necessary ingredients for childhood success . . . odd given that the recipe is readily apparent in his own biography.” That recipe, Harris-Perry suggested, included “an intergenerational support network, access to quality education, and opportunities for travel and enrichment.”25

  Obama is not alone in his conviction that single mothers are bad for kids. A 2010 Pew study showed that 69 percent of Americans believed the increase in single motherhood was a “bad thing for society” and that 61 percent believe a child needs both a mother and a father to grow up happily.26

  Other liberal critics, including Gloria Steinem, worry that embracing not just single parenthood but single motherhood as a new normal has worrying implications. “It’s really, really, really important that children see men as loving and nurturing parents,” said Steinem, adding that, “It doesn’t have to be your biological parent, not even your relative. But if we don’t grow up knowing that men can be loving parents, or can parent, can nurture, then we’re back in the stew of gender roles where we think only women can be nurturing.”

  Of course, societies need time, and generations, to adapt to
profound changes in family structure. When women are freed from old expectations, new ways of coping or reorganizing the world are not instantly in place. We must work to adjust and change. Kathy Edin’s follow-up work to Promises I Can Keep was a 2013 book on single fathers, Doing the Best I Can, written with Timothy Nelson. Edin spent time with inner-city, economically disadvantaged men who were more determined than the absent fathers of previous generations to forge bonds with and take responsibility for their offspring. Human beings change behaviors and then change again to accommodate new patterns. We cannot now simply look around us and say that this is how things will always be.

  Yet for those women and men and children who are alive now, in today’s conditions, these worriers have a serious—a very serious—point, backed up by research. Social scientists at the Brookings Institute found, in 2014, that kids whose mothers were married were far more likely to fare well economically than those of single parents.27

  And as Bowling Green social scientist Susan Brown has written, roughly half of all children can now expect to spend some of their lives outside of a married parent family. Brown presents a number of studies that suggest that “Children living with two biological married parents experience better educational, social, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes than do other children, on average.” But, in part because single parenthood is more prevalent in low-income communities, it’s difficult to separate how many of the outcomes are influenced by the absence of married parents and how many are influenced by the economic challenges presented by poverty. As Brown writes, “Solo parents (typically mothers) who lack a partner to cooperate and consult with about parenting decisions and stressors tend to exert less control and spend less time with their children although those associations are confounded with socioeconomic disadvantage.”28