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

by Traister, Rebecca

  © ELIZA BROWN

  REBECCA TRAISTER is writer at large for New York magazine and a contributing editor at Elle. A National Magazine Award finalist, she has written about women in politics, media, and entertainment from a feminist perspective for The New Republic and Salon and has also contributed to The Nation, The New York Observer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, Glamour, and Marie Claire. Traister’s first book, Big Girls Don’t Cry, about women and the 2008 election, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and the winner of the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. She lives in New York with her family.

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  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Mather, Mark and Diana Lavery, “In U.S. Proportion Married at Lowest Recorded Levels,” Population Reference Bureau, 2010 http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2010/usmarriagedecline.aspx.

  2. According to Robert B. Bernstein at the Census Bureau, in 1979, the median age rose to 22.1.

  3. Mather and Lavery, “In U.S., Proportion Married at Lowest Recorded Levels,” 2010.

  4. Cohn, D’vera, Jeffery S. Passel, Wendy Wang and Gretchen Livingston, “Barely Half of U.S. Adults Are Married—A Record Low,” Pew Research Center, December 14, 2011, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/12/14/barely-half-of-u-s-adults-are-married-a-record-low/.

  5. Mather and Lavery, “In U.S., Proportion Married at Lowest Recorded Levels,” 2010.

  6. Betts, Hannah, “Being Single by Choice Is Liberating,” The Telegraph, March 21, 2013.

  7. Roiphe, Katie, Last Night in Paradise, via New York Times excerpt, 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/r/roiphe-paradise.html.

  8. Gardner, Page, “Equal Pay Day: Unmarried Women Bear the Brunt of the Pay Gap,” The Voter Participation Center, August 13, 2015, http://www.voterparticipation.org/equal-pay-day-2015/.

  9. Mather, Mark and Beth Jarosz, “Women Making Progress in U.S. But Gaps Remain,” Population Reference Bureau, 2014, http://www.prb.org/Publications/Reports/2014/us-inequality-women-progress.aspx.

  10. “America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2014: Adults” (Table 1A), United States Census Bureau http://www.census.gov/hhes/families/data/cps2014A.html via Lake Research Partners, “The Power of Unmarried Women,” The Voter Participation Center, March 2012.

  11. Fry, Richard, “No Reversal in the Decline of Marriage,” Pew Research Center, November 20, 2012, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/11/20/no-reversal-in-decline-of-marriage/#src=prc-newsletter.

  12. Anthony, Susan B., “The Homes of Single Women,” October, 1877. Anthony’s essay is cited in many texts, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, with critical commentary by Ellen Carol DuBois and a foreward by Gerda Lerner (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 148–149.

  Chapter One: Watch Out for That Woman

  1. See also, “drapetpomania” a purported mental illness reported by physician Samuel Cartwight to be suffered by slaves fleeing captivity. Here is the imagination of disease when someone who has been disempowered becomes empowered. Cited by Melissa Harris-Perry on “Melissa Harris-Perry,” MSNBC, April 7, 2014.

  2. Safire, William, “The Plot to Savage Thomas,” New York Times, October 14, 1991 http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/14/opinion/essay-the-plot-to-savage-thomas.html.

  3. Hill, Anita Faye, “Marriage and Patronage in the Empowerment and Disempowerment of African American Women,” in Race, Gender and Power in America, 283.

  4. Patty Murray in conversation with Karen Finney at The Atlantic’s “Women in Washington” event, September 25, 2013.http://www.murray.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/newsreleases?ContentRecord_id=bc16d80a-aca9-43cc-864a-c645ab30c2cd.

  5. “Social Indicators of Marital Health and Well-Being,” State of Our Unions Report, 2011, http://www.stateofourunions.org/2011/.social_indicators.php.

  6. Anita: Speaking Truth to Power, directed by Frieda Mock, Goldwyn Films, 2013.

  7. Quayle, Dan, “The Murphy Brown Speech,” May 19, 1992 via Michael A. Cohen’s Live From the Campaign Trail, 2008, http://livefromthetrail.com/about-the-book/speeches/chapter-18/vice-president-dan-quayle.

  8. Hymowitz, Kay, Jason S. Carroll, W. Bradford Wilcox, Kelleen Kaye, “Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delaying Marriage in America,” The National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, and the Relate Institute, 2013, http://twentysomethingmarriage.org/summary/.

  9. Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, 1963/1983, 1.

  10. “1.4 million copies . . .” Menand, Louis, “Books as Bombs: Why the Women’s Movement Needed The Feminine Mystique,” The New Yorker, January 24 2011. “Credited with having kicked off . . .” attributed to, among other places, Nora Ephron’s “Miami,” published in Crazy Salad, 37–46.

  11. Henry, Astrid, Not My Mother’s Sister, 64.

  12. Episode One, Makers: Women Who Make America, PBS, February 26, 2013.

  13. Friedan, Betty, “The National Organization for Women’s 1966 Statement of Purpose,” October 29, 1966.

  14. Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, Words of Fire, 97. Via Coontz, A Strange Stirring.

  15. “In 1970 . . .” from “Median Age at First Marriage: 1890 to the Present,” U.S. Census Bureau, Decennial Censuses, 1890 to 1940, and Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplements, 1947 to 2014 and via The U.S. Census Bureau.

  16. Friedan, Betty, “Up From the Kitchen Floor,” The New York Times Magazine, March 4, 1973.

  17. Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, 18–19.

  18. “Gloria Steinem ‘Irons Out’ a Few Things with Moses Znaimer,” CBC, November 4, 1968, http://www.cbc.ca/player/Digital+Archives/CBC+Programs/Television/The+Way+It+Is/ID/2575079962/.

  19. Steinem, Gloria, letter to Time, September 16, 2000.

  20. Moran, Rachel F., “How Second Wave Femi
nism Forgot the Single Woman,” Hofstra Law Review, vol.33, issue 1, article 5, 2004.

  21. Cott, Public Vows, 199.

  22. Faludi, Backlash, 108.

  23. Moran, Rachel F., “How Second Wave Feminism Forgot the Single Woman,” Hofstra Law Review, vol. 33, issue 1, article 5, 2004.

  24. “Percent Never Married Among Those Aged 35 and older by Sex: 1890–2010” from Elliott, Diana B, Kristy Krivickas, Matthew W. Brault, and Rose M. Kreider, “Historical Marriage Trends from 1890–2010: A Focus on Race,” 2012. U.S. Decennial Census (1890–2000) American Community Survey (2010), http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/marriage/data/acs/ElliottetalPAA2012figs.pdf.

  25. Rivers, Caryl, “Newsweek’s Apology Comes 20 Years Too Late,” Women’s eNews, June 14, 2006, http://womensenews.org/story/uncovering-gender/060614/newsweeks-apology-comes-20-years-too-late.

  26. This exact figure is 57.5 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

  27. “Marriage, More than a Century of Change,” National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University, July 18, 2013.

  28. Martin, Jonathan, “A New Firm Sets Out to Secure Women’s Votes for a Vulnerable G.O.P.,” New York Times,” November 11, 2013.

  29. Lake Research Partners Election Eve Omnibus, November 4–6, 2012.

  30. Last, Jonathan V., “Start a Family . . . And Before You Know It, You’ll be Voting for the GOP,” Weekly Standard, April 22, 2013.

  31. Stan, Adele M., “After a Generation of Extremism, Phyllis Schlafly Still a Leading General in the War on Women,” Alternet, April 22, 2012.

  32. Kotkin, Joel, ““Demographic Dead End?” Barack Obama’s Single Nation,” The Daily Beast, October 18, 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/18/demographic-dead-end-barack-obama-s-single-nation.html.