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

by Traister, Rebecca

  As Brown writes, neither marriage by itself nor biology by itself is enough to explain the different outcomes for children in different family structures, and that “the task for future research is to develop more nuanced theory and richer data to decipher the mechanisms driving these differentials.” Part of that theory and data is reliant on accepting new family structures, new roles for women and men, and examining how these new roles are supported by or thwarted by the social policy that still treats men and women as if they are all married to each other. What we must do is accept that we are living in a new world, and try to make that world more humane for all kinds of individuals, couples, and children.

  Katie Roiphe, opinion writer and polemicist who, in her late twenties, described how her cohort of perpetual singletons enjoyed casual sex and professional ambition, but harbored not-so-secret longings for Jane Austen’s connubial conclusions, by her early forties found herself the unmarried mother of two children by different men.

  Roiphe now writes regularly, and compellingly, about single motherhood. In one New York Times piece she noted her own economic and educational privileges, acknowledging that while she may not be a “typical single mother . . . there is no typical single mother any more than there is a typical mother.” It’s the persistent ideas that an unmarried mother is one way—an aberrant way—Roiphe argued, “that get in the way of a more rational, open-minded understanding of the variety and richness of different kinds of families.”29

  Roiphe cites Sara McLanahan’s ongoing Fragile Families studies, which show that the chief risks of single motherhood stem from poverty, and to a lesser extent from the introduction of a series of love interests to the family structure (possibly itself a danger worsened by poverty, with its higher risks that those love interests will be depressed, jobless, abusive, or a toll on the family finances), not from the simple setup of having children and not being married. In fact, Roiphe extrapolates from the Fragile Families study, “a two-parent, financially stable home with stress and conflict would be more destructive to children than a one-parent, financially stable home without stress and conflict.”

  “What gets lost in the moralizing conversation,” writes Roiphe, “is that there is a huge, immeasurable variety in households,” and that “no family structure guarantees happiness or ensures misery.”30

  The Next Frontier

  Like in-vitro fertilization, egg freezing was not invented as a panacea for single women. In fact, it was developed in the early 1990s by Italian doctors whose mission was to circumvent the Roman Catholic prohibition on embryo freezing that was preventing married women from using IVF to have kids.31

  Until 2012, egg freezing was considered “experimental” by The American Society for Reproductive Medicine; in a 2012 statement, the society declared that in a series of trials, there seemed to be no marked difference between using fresh or frozen eggs in in-vitro fertilization treatments.

  While egg freezing, in its early years, wasn’t particularly reliable, new flash-freezing technology, called vitrification, which prevents ice crystals from damaging the egg, has raised success rates, which are now around 40 percent.32 And, while the ASRM still does not endorse the procedure “as a means to defer reproductive aging,” clinics are springing up in regions across the nation that are home to high concentrations of single and later-marrying women.

  The freezing of eggs, as opposed to embryos, theoretically would allow women to preserve their eggs in advance of having met, or chosen, a man whose sperm they would use to fertilize them. This makes it the perfect technology for single women who still hope to meet a partner, but who do not want to risk losing their fertility in the process.

  Like most of the technologies being developed to help women exert control over their reproductive lives, egg freezing does not come without costs, starting with the ten to twenty thousand dollars women must pony up for retrieval, freezing, and storage. The procedure involves hormone injections. There is still very little data showing exactly how effective it might be: Sarah Elizabeth Richards, author of Motherhood, Rescheduled, has pointed out that most women freeze eggs as a precaution, not because they are actively planning to use them. As a result, while, by the end of 2013, over ten thousand women had had the procedure, fewer than 1,500 had come back to use their eggs.33

  And even though it’s a tool that will, potentially, extend a woman’s fertile years, it’s also one that doesn’t work nearly as well once you get past your peak fertility. Women over thirty-eight are often discouraged from freezing eggs that may have already declined in quality enough that freezing them would be a waste.34

  That means that, if women are ever to really use egg freezing as a means to reliably extend their fertility, the price has to come down, and it needs to be an option that’s encouraged in the middle of their fertile years, not at the end. That’s a tough sell to young women, most of whom do not have or cannot fathom spending the money; do not necessarily want to go through the medical process, and who also want to believe that sometime down the road, they’ll be in a position to do it the old-fashioned way. For most women, the idea of children remains tied to the idea of partnership. It’s mentally very difficult to pull the two relationships apart in advance of a natural realization that they might not happen along the same timeline.

  However, as egg freezing improves as a practice and shows higher success rates, some doctors—and bosses, including ABC anchor Diane Sawyer, who married for the first time at forty-two, and did not have children of her own—are urging women to consider egg freezing earlier. Nicole Noyes, one of the specialists at the NYU clinic to which Sawyer recommends patients, told Newsweek that three-quarters of her patients come to her because they aren’t ready to have children yet, and that many of them are sent by their parents. One childless woman in her forties told Newsweek, “I want to send Diane a basket of flowers for what she’s doing.” In 2014, some Silicon Valley companies, including Apple and Facebook, announced that they would begin paying for egg freezing as part of their benefits packages.

  Sarah Richards reported in the Wall Street Journal in 2013 that the age of egg-freezing candidates “is slowly coming down;” one study of the 240 women showed that the average age of women who got fertility consultations at a reproductive organization in New York between 2005 and 2011 dropped from thirty-nine to thirty-seven, and, Richards writes, “Several doctors say they are seeing a trickle of women under thirty-five—the turning point when a woman’s fertility goes downhill and she is labeled ‘advanced maternal age’ on medical charts.”35

  It’s an early hint of what a future could look like: It’s not one in which everyone will be freezing eggs for exorbitant amounts of money, but in which our attitudes about the inseparability of childbearing from partnership begin to change. It’s a future in which women might take in a measure of Hewlett’s warning—tick-tock, don’t forget to have a baby—and apply it to their increasingly independent young adult lives; a future in which it will be easier for them to distinguish between their choices about children and the mates who may or may not show up at the time they want them to.

  While writing her book on egg freezing, Richards found that critics of the process for nonmedical reasons claimed that “biological deadlines serve a purpose in life,” and that once removed, women would no longer have an incentive or drive to seek out a partner. But the women Richards interviewed, she wrote, “didn’t use their frozen fertility as an excuse to date their DVRs. In fact, they said that egg freezing motivated them to take charge of their lives. They relaxed. They dated, married and thawed.”

  This Is Not the End of the Story

  In April 2013, my friend Sara turned thirty-nine. Since her return from Boston, she had had a series of jobs, found a new apartment that she loved, and extended and strengthened her social circle. She’d traveled (with me) on a work trip to Africa, visited Iceland and Cuba and celebrated the fortieth birthday of a single girlfriend with a week at surf camp in Costa Rica.

  Sara had b
een in and out of relationships in her eight years back in New York. Some of them were casual, some long-lasting. As she entered her fortieth year, Sara missed some of her exes, but was making peace with being single, continuing to meet people, living the very full life she had built for herself.

  About two months after her thirty-ninth birthday, she and I were on our way home from a dinner when she told me that she was going to see a doctor about having her eggs frozen. I was stunned. We had talked about children, but she had always maintained to me that she would never do it alone, that she was a romantic, that she was determined to hold out for partnership.

  A week later, she called from outside the doctor’s office: She was a good candidate; she was going to start the process immediately. She was giddy, as exhilarated and thrilled as I’d perhaps ever heard her.

  “As soon as I got in there and started talking to the doctor,” she told me in a rush, “I felt so sure, so empowered.” Sara was invigorated. “I just suddenly felt like there was something that was in my control.”

  In fact, though the doctors had explained the timeline and suggested she begin it in a couple of months, Sara, who had gotten her period that very morning and understood that the process began at the start of her cycle, insisted that they start right then and there. By the next day, she was administering shots to herself.

  Sara’s procedure went beautifully. She produced lots of eggs and the doctors rated them as being very healthy. It was hard on her body: the hormones, the trigger shots, the extraction, the swelling of ovaries. She felt awful. And, also, when it was over, a little let down. She’d been through the hormone swings and whizzing excitement of baby-making-related activity, without actually having made the decision to get pregnant. But her eggs were frozen. She’d done something about her future family life that felt right for her.

  In early November, Sara was over, and after dinner, she told me that she was beginning to feel a little lukewarm about a guy she’d been seeing casually. Maybe she still wasn’t over a particular ex, she said. Then she paused and looked at me. “Or maybe,” she went on, “I’m just figuring out that I am who I am, and that’s a single person.”

  After freezing her eggs, she said, she had begun to reckon a little bit more with her own self-sufficiency, the fact that she was at her best when she was acting independently. “Maybe I’m just built to be on my own,” she said, “And maybe that’s really what makes me happy.”

  Ten days later, she phoned and warned me to sit down.

  “I got married,” she said.

  To the guy she’d been seeing casually? I asked, shocked. No. To her ex-boyfriend, the one she’d had a hard time getting over. Their story was complicated, but the short version was that he’d gotten in touch, told her he wanted to spend his life with her. He knew about the eggs. He wanted to have kids. He loved her and didn’t want to live without her. They’d gotten married at City Hall four days later in a dress she’d bought the afternoon before.

  She was really happy.

  Several weeks into her marriage, Sara and her husband were having some trouble adjusting to life together; they were thinking of perhaps keeping separate residences. And, while the notion appealed to them both equally, Sara was having difficulty reconciling it with her ideas of what “marriage” meant, based on the union of her parents, who that summer had celebrated fifty years together.

  “It’s just that we’re both such independent people,” she explained to me. “I’ve lived alone, just by myself; it’s been eleven years since I’ve even had a roommate. Maybe that’s how I like it, even though I love Bryan and want to make a life with him. I just can’t process how different that would be from what I always thought of as marriage.”

  Sara wasn’t sure what would happen: if they’d move in, if they’d have kids, if they’d stay together or decide to end it. She was sure of one thing: “Getting married that way, that quickly and without any fanfare,” she said, “was the most freeing thing I’ve ever done, next to freezing my eggs.”

  Maybe, I said, it was because it best reflected their quirky dynamics as a couple. “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe it’s just that it best reflected me, and what I want and don’t want.”

  Sara wanted me to make clear that her marriage wasn’t some kind of bow that tied her life up tight and happy. Sara was forty, right in the middle of her life. “And it’s just so different from my parents’ life,” she said to me. She has no idea how it will turn out.

  “Just please don’t make it sound like the wedding was the end of my story,” she begged.

  Conclusion

  During the election cycles in the early part of the twenty-first century, much attention was paid, by both Democrats and Republicans, to single female voters, largely because of the dawning realization that they wield enormous electoral power.

  In 2012, Barack Obama’s campaign released a bit of campaign propaganda that featured a cartoon character woman named Julia. It illustrated how Julia was born, got a college degree, had a career and a child thanks, in part, to the aid to of government-sponsored programs. According to Julia’s bare-bones timeline, her life did not include marriage. Conservatives went bananas. One Washington Post op-ed writer called her “Mary Tyler Moore on the government’s dime,” lamented that while single parenthood used to be a disgraceful state, single mothers now present “a new and proud American demographic,” and called a world in which independent women benefit from their government a pitiable “hubby state” in which missing husbands are replaced by Uncle Sam.

  The notion that what the powerful, growing population of unmarried American women needs from its government is a husband is of course problematic. It reduces all relationships women have to marital ones, and suggests that they are, by nature, dependent beings, in search of someone—if not a husband then an elected official or a set of public policies—to support them.

  But putting aside what’s wrong with those implications, both critics and celebrants of single women’s impending union with government are getting it a little bit right. In looking to the government to support their ambitions, choices, and independence through better policy, single women are asserting themselves as citizens—full citizens—in ways that American men have for generations.

  For if single women are looking for government to create a “hubby state” for them, what is certainly true is that their male counterparts have long enjoyed the fruits of a related “wifey state,” in which the nation and its government supported male independence in a variety of ways. Men, and especially married wealthy white men, have long relied on government assistance. It’s the government that has historically supported white men’s home and business ownership through grants, loans, incentives, and tax breaks. It has allowed them to accrue wealth and offered them shortcuts and bonuses for passing it down to their children. Government established white men’s right to vote and thus exert control over the government at the nation’s founding and has protected their enfranchisement since. It has also bolstered the economic and professional prospects of men by depressing the economic prospects of women: by failing to offer women equivalent economic and civic protections, thus helping to create conditions whereby women were forced to be dependent on those men, creating a gendered class of laborers who took low paying or unpaid jobs doing the domestic and childcare work that further enabled men to dominate public spheres.

  But the growth of a massive population of women who are living outside those dependent circumstances puts new pressures on the government: to remake conditions in a way that will be more hospitable to female independence, to a citizenry now made up of plenty of women living economically, professionally, sexually, and socially liberated lives.

  We have to rebuild not just our internalized assumptions about individual freedoms and life paths; we also must revise our social and economic structures to account for, acknowledge, and support women in the same way in which we have supported men for centuries.

  And while previous generations of women ha
ve offered their time and energies to the pursuit of social progress—abolition, suffrage, temperance, labor—today’s single women are applying a more diffuse set of pressures: their very existence pushes us to alter the foundational policies, as well as the cultural and social expectations, that have historically made it difficult for women to thrive outside of marriage. Single women require new sets of protections that support their free lives in ways that will enable them to enjoy opportunities equal to those that their male peers have long enjoyed.

  Of course, the policies that have held up the marriage model as the only model are incredibly varied: They range from the lack of subsidized childcare and school days that end in the mid afternoons (Who, after all, is meant to do the childcare if everyone is working? And who is supposed to pay for it if it is to be done by someone other than a nonworking parent?) to the Hyde Amendment, which prevents poor women from using any federal money to pay for abortions, making it difficult for them to exert control over the size of their families, their careers, their bodies.

  As Anita Hill told me in 2013, the real fear of politicians and society about the increase in numbers of single women is the growing recognition that if women had sexual and professional agency, it would force us, as Hill said, “to think about women’s work experiences differently, about the hours and days in the workplace, about the economic implications, the cultural and political implications” of women being full adults in the world.

  “Single motherhood is not the bogeyman,” Hill told me, by way of example. “The problem really is a lack of support for women who want to raise children. Part of the fear is that politically we have to make different decisions if we are forced to acknowledge that women might have children on their own. . . . There would be economic implications, cultural and political implications which we are still trying to sort through.”