When blacks were able to compete with whites by gaining employment that might otherwise have gone to whites, buying houses near white enclaves, attempting to vote or enroll in white schools or interact with white women, the response, especially in the postwar Jim Crow South, was often violent. It was an era of voter intimidation, lynching, cross burning, and property destruction by the Klan.
These maneuvers cemented a cycle of economic disadvantage that made marriage—especially the kinds of traditionally patriarchal marriages that white women were being shooed into—less practical. If black women were working all day (often scrubbing the homes of white women), it was impossible for them also to fulfill the at-home maternal ideal for which white women were being celebrated. If black men had a harder time getting educations and jobs, earning competitive wages or securing loans, it was harder for them to play the role of provider. If there were no government-subsidized split-levels to fill with publicly educated children, then the nuclear family chute into which white women were being funneled was not open to most black women. There simply weren’t the same incentives to marrying early or at all; there were fewer places to safely put down roots and fewer resources with which to nourish them.
It’s not that black women simply happened not to experience mid-1950s domesticity; they were actively barred from it, trapped in another way: walled off in underserved neighborhoods by highways that shuttled fairly remunerated white husbands back to wives who themselves had been walled off in well-manicured, stultifying suburbs.
As progress and regress tend to work, these double-edged recontainment efforts quelled the emerging power of women and African-Americans, two historically marginalized populations who had seen enormous gains at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. As the country stitched itself back together after Depression and war, threatening upstarts were being cleared from the field so that America’s white men might reclaim their grip on power.
But the funny thing about backlash is that, sometimes, it backfires.
The stuffing of middle-class American women back into the box of early marital expectation and domestic confinement—a box that chafed all the more thanks to the revolutionary opportunities that had so recently been made available to their mothers and grandmothers—by the 1960s had created a world so airless that it was nearly destined to combust, more forcefully than ever before.
“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women . . . ’Is this all?’ ” began The Feminine Mystique, two years before Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan bemoaned the fact that “almost one-fourth of Negro families are headed by females.”
The winding road that America’s women had taken around and outside marriage had led them to emancipation, to suffrage, to fairer labor practices, and higher education. The stifling resistance that they met in the midst of the twentieth century in fact set the stage for the social movements that eventually landed us here, edging toward the middle of the twenty-first century, with more than fifty percent of women unmarried.
Today’s free women, as Gloria Steinem might say, are reshaping the world once again, creating space for themselves and, in turn, for the independent women who will come after them.
This is the epoch of the single women, made possible by the single women who preceded it.
CHAPTER THREE
The Sex of the Cities: Urban Life and Female Independence
Susana Morris is an English professor at Auburn University in Alabama. Born in 1980, and raised in Connecticut and Ft. Lauderdale, she attended college at Mt. Holyoke, in Massachusetts. Afterward, she considered getting her PhD in Boston, Chicago, and at Notre Dame, before finally settling on Emory University in Atlanta. The reasons were partly practical—Emory had offered her a good deal—but they were also geographic. Morris had loved her time as an undergraduate in rural New England, where she’d discovered Emily Dickinson and enjoyed the crisp autumns. But, in her twenties, she said, heading into the next phase of her adulthood, she craved something else. “I consciously moved to Atlanta to move to a chocolate city,” she told me.
Atlanta was by no means a perfect place when she arrived there in 2002, she said, recalling its class contrasts, how mansions sometimes sat next door to crack houses. But it was also going through what Morris called its “Renaissance as black Hollywood.” The city, with a high concentration of historically black colleges and big universities, drew young, ambitious students and was cementing itself as a center for African-American entrepreneurs, artists, activists, and educators. “There were black people everywhere,” said Morris, “and they were doing big things, and no one was surprised.” Morris’s life soon filled with friends, museums, theater, clubs where women got in free before eleven. Very few of her fellow graduate students were married, she recalled. “We were young, single, having a good time,” she continued. “There was just something about being in a city of fierce, single black women.”
That something reminded her of Sex and the City, a show she had watched in syndication with her Dominican, lesbian Mt. Holyoke roommate, both of them understanding that the women on screen did not represent them at all, yet enjoying it nonetheless. The vivid energy of Sex and the City, for all its broad, white strokes, was what Morris found in Atlanta. “There is this thing,” Morris said of that energy. “It’s having friends, going on the town, living it up, finding a network of women.” She paused. “I just can’t speak highly enough of my young independent life, my youth, in Atlanta.”
I can name the moment that I first felt—or recognized—what Morris described: I was thirty, eating in a casual restaurant in Manhattan with one of my colleagues and closest friends. We were exchanging stories about work and men, about friends and our families. A male-female couple nearby got into a nasty fight—someone overturned a plate of food onto someone else—and the hubbub prompted us to look around the restaurant. Aside from the tussling duo, the rest of the tables, probably twenty in all, were filled with women.
There were women in pairs, women in groups, women in their twenties, thirties, forties; there were white women, black women, Latina and Asian women. A few looked fancy, a few like they had stepped out of the L.L. Bean outlet; most were dressed as if they had simply come from an office, as we had. What struck me, as I scanned the tables, almost not believing that there could be so few men around me, was that until I’d looked up because of the romantic kerfuffle, the scene had struck me as so average, so unremarkable, that I hadn’t even noticed that I was dining in an apparently Amazonian enclave.
It was the city in which I had lived for almost a decade, and the straight romantic couple was the aberration, not the norm. All around me were women drinking, laughing, telling each other stories. They were spending money, talking, maybe making decisions in consultation with each other: about jobs, family, life, sex and love, about where to eat, drink and dance, what movies to see, what books to read. They—we, actually—were sucking up every bit of energy from this city’s sidewalks, populating its streets and its theaters and its office buildings and apartments, giving the city its character and its rhythm and its beauty and its speed.
Big cities, with their phallic, skyscraping tributes to man’s triumphs over nature and free markets, are designed to make us think of masculinity. But the glinting glass pinnacles and flashing stock tickers obscure the fact that most cities gain their hard edges and steely characters from the women who have long inhabited them.
More than just any women: Cities have long provided safer harbor for, and have in turn been shaped by, single women.
Cities are chock-full of single people, male and female: never married, divorced, widowed, and separated. While more than 25 percent of people across the United States live alone, metropolises like Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Denver boast single-dwelling households that comprise more than 40 percent of their total populations. According to Census data,1 Susana’s Atlanta has the highest share of residents living alone, at 44 percen
t; Washington D.C. and its surrounding suburbs clock in at about the same. According to sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s book, Going Solo, in Manhattan, the percentage of solo-dwellers climbs to around 50 percent.2
Never-married women made up 41.7 percent of the New York City’s female population in 2010, up from 38.7 percent in 2006.3 Consider what that means: More than four in ten women living in the five boroughs have never married. In Boston, more than half of women (55 percent) have never been wed, a statistic that reflects the city’s huge population of students, but is not wholly explained by it. The median age for first marriage for Boston’s women is around thirty, among the highest in the country.4
The correlation between cities and comparatively high numbers of single female residents is long-standing and worldwide. As historians Judith Bennett and Amy Froide have written, approximately twenty percent of the women in Florence in the early fifteenth century were single women and, in Zurich by the end of the fifteenth century, “nearly half of all women had never taken a husband.”5
Why are there, why have there always been, so many single people in cities? Mostly because, throughout history, cities have meant jobs.
In early modern Europe, as soon as any kind of nonagricultural opportunity materialized, women would decamp from the countryside to villages and towns where they could find jobs lace-making or spinning. In these more populated areas, there was the possibility of socializing with other women, earning wages, meeting a wider variety of potential mates, and living, even briefly, outside the power of a husband or a father.
In turn, these migrations of women would precipitate a rise in the marriage age, an increase in the percentage of women who never married at all, and a drop in reproduction. Higher concentrations of women skewed the gender ratio and made husbands harder to find. However, it was also true that by leaving the rural areas where they were more closely watched by fathers and local clergy, women gained a minuscule whiff of liberation: the chance to postpone, if often only for a short time, their inevitable futures as economically dependent wives and mothers. Historian Maryanne Kowaleski cites scholars who report that, in early modern Europe, even women working apparently thankless jobs as servants in cities including Rotterdam and London “may actually have preferred to remain single because of the security and independence a life in service offered them.”6
These patterns of migration and behavior were repeated on larger scales as agrarian economies gave way to industrialized ones. In the nineteenth century United States, new mills and factories, especially in New England, actively recruited young women as cheap labor. Improvements in infrastructure—better roads, canals, and the railroad boom—made it easier for women to leave rural homes and head to growing cities to work as seamstresses and milliners, governesses and laundresses. Many of the poorest women, including free blacks in the north and south, worked in domestic service for the growing class of urban industrialists.
These female laborers were far from carefree. Poorly remunerated and overworked, their behaviors were monitored by bosses, neighbors, clergy, and boardinghouse mistresses. But the concentration of them within cities, where they could encounter a wider variety of potential partners and friends and earn even scant wages, meant that for the first time in the United States, single women were taking up space in economic, public spheres.
The work that drew women was often unrewarding and physically difficult. In City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789–1860, historian Christine Stansell looks at the 1805 New York census and finds a few women working as grocers, fruit sellers, tavern and shopkeepers; many more held jobs as seamstresses. Laundering, Stansell writes, was always needed in a filthy city, but was work often left to black women, since it involved physically demanding, scalding, freezing labor.7
Still, hundreds of unmarried women and girls arrived8 in New York every week in the mid-nineteenth century, as immigrants from the countryside and from across oceans. Both white and black women experienced the professional shifts into urban spaces, but their circumstances differed. In her 1925 essay “The Double Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation,” writer Elise McDougald focused on women in Harlem because, she felt that, in the predominantly black northern Manhattan neighborhood, “more than anywhere else, the Negro woman is free from the cruder handicaps of primitive household hardships and the grosser forms of sex and race subjugation. Here, she has considerable opportunity to measure her powers in the intellectual and industrial fields of the great city.” McDougald describes Harlem women working in previously impenetrably white, male fields: as probation and corrections officers, in libraries and bacteriology labs, in the garment industries and branches of the public health system. But McDougald notes, “. . . even in New York, the general attitude of mind causes the Negro woman serious difficulty. She is conscious that what is left of chivalry is not directed toward her. She realizes that the ideals of beauty, built up in the fine arts, have excluded her almost entirely.”9
Noisy and Bold
Letty Cottin Pogrebin graduated from Brandeis in 1959, and came to Manhattan in search of a bohemian life, settling into an apartment across the street from playwright Edward Albee. When her car was stolen, she bought a motor scooter. One of her boyfriends bought her a pet duck, whom she named “Moses,” and then, because she took to it so quickly, a pet rabbit, Buckety. In her teens and early twenties, Pogrebin worked her way up in the publicity and subsidiary rights departments of the publishing industry, eventually earning a salary that was “unheard of” for a young woman, and in charge of promoting Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, among other best sellers.
She was a Jewish girl from Queens whose mother had left an abusive first marriage, worked in the garment industry, and then had become a middle-class housewife before dying of cancer when Pogrebin was a teen. Yet in Manhattan, Pogrebin didn’t have to be defined by her family or personal history. She could reinvent herself, tool around with ducks and rabbits and motor scooters, have lots of sex, and move ahead in a job that allowed her to tape pill capsules to press releases for The Valley of the Dolls. “I just had the most magical sixties,” Pogrebin said of her days as a young single woman in the city. “Quite simply, I wanted to be Holly Golightly. And I felt I was doing really well at it.”
Today, as always, women arrive in cities in search of work and money. But they also come, then stay, for the fun.
In metropolises, women are more likely to find a deep and diverse pool of romantic and sexual prospects, and to encounter a combination of community and anonymity that unburdens them of centuries of behavioral expectations. Cities have come to stand, in the cultural imagination, for sex and excitement and power. That they draw women toward these things makes them a catalyst for women’s liberation, and for a reimagining of what it might mean for women to have full lives.
Urban landscapes often physically force people of different classes, genders, races, and religions to mix and to meet in the public spaces that they share with each other. At the end of the nineteenth and turn of the twentieth century, crammed tenements often became so fetid with disease that healthy residents exploded out of them by necessity, gathering on sidewalks, hanging out of windows and on stoops, socializing in public thoroughfares. Young people, often living with multiple generations in a single flat, sought relief from airless rooms by meeting up with each other in large groups on the Bowery.
Kathy Peiss writes of the working-class leisure activities and marketplaces of early twentieth century New York, noting that “Streets served as the center of social life in the working-class districts . . . Lower East Side streets teemed with sights of interest and penny pleasures: organ grinders and buskers played favorite airs, itinerant acrobats performed tricks, and baked-potato vendors, hot-corn stands, and soda dispensers vied for customers.”10 Working women had to traverse streets to get to jobs, early morning and late-night shifts. As the sight of them became more common, less freighted with sexual hang-ups and musty expectations of
propriety, the more acceptable the notion of women as part of the urban fabric became.
In an 1896 interview with Nellie Bly, Susan B. Anthony kvelled about the habit of women bicycling. “I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world,” she said, “I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent.”11
Women began promenading without shame, publicly socializing and visiting the parks erected to be the lungs of industrialized cities. The outdoors offered opportunities to push social and sexual boundaries, and young people, writes Peiss, “used the streets as a place to meet the other sex, to explore nascent sexual feelings, and carry on flirtations, all outside the watchful eyes and admonitions of parents.”12 So liberating was a life lived in the urban wild that the YWCA worried, Peiss reports, about how “young girls . . . in this unconventional out-of-door life, are so apt to grow noisy and bold.”
By the turn of the twentieth century, writes Betsy Israel in her book Bachelor Girl, “so many single girls were visibly out there—working, eating in restaurants, dancing—that it became harder to immediately categorize them.”13 This inability to immediately affix women with rigid class identity or expectation meant an increased potential for personal reinvention and flexibility amidst crowds of new people.
Urban Drawbacks
Alison Turkos was born in 1988 in Underhill, Vermont, a town with fewer than 3,000 residents and zero traffic lights. In high school and college, she said, she didn’t have much of a romantic life; she was working through questions about her identity and sexuality. When she moved to New York City to work in reproductive health activism, she said, “I discovered this incredible community of queer men and women and this whole genderqueer population.” It was so freeing, she said, that it allowed her to feel more confident about who she was, and to come out as queer, first to her family, then to the people in her hometown.
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