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

by Traister, Rebecca

  Here is a cautionary tale about what happens to relations between the sexes when the scales are unbalanced, when societies fail to adjust to the increased liberty of their female population.

  A similar phenomenon has emerged in Catholic countries, such as Italy, where there are rising cases of so-called mammones: mama’s boys who, dissatisfied with the level of domestic devotion shown by their careerist female peers, continue to live with their cooking and cleaning mothers late into adulthood. The crude marriage rate (i.e., the number of marriages per 1000 inhabitants) fell in Italy from 7.7 in 1960 to just over 3 in 2013.5

  In Germany, where working mothers are referred to, darkly, as rabenmutters or “raven mothers,” and where, according to the Institute for Economic Research, only around 2 percent of senior management jobs were occupied by women,6 the crude marriage rate has dropped by more than half, from 9.5 to 4.6 over the same period.

  Compare those drastic declines in marriage rates to the Scandinavian nations, with more egalitarian social policy and attitudes, where women’s increasing freedoms have been embraced both through social policy and cultural adjustment. In Finland, the crude marriage rate slid only from 7.4 in 1960 to 4.6 in 2013; in Sweden,7 it dipped from 6.7 to just 5.4. Both those nations, in which the median age of first marriage for women is over thirty, used to have lower marriage rates than Italy and Germany; now their marriage rates are the same or higher.

  Scandinavian citizens not only marry more often but form more stable committed unions outside marriage, evidence that progressive attitudes toward gender beget higher levels of heterosexual satisfaction and commitment. Cohabiting couples in Sweden are less likely than Americans to break up, and as sociologist Andrew Cherlin has pointed out, a child living with an unmarried pair of parents in Sweden “has a lower chance that his family will disrupt than does an American kid living with married parents.”8 Amina Sow remembered her most serious relationship, with a Swede. “He asked how much my birth control was so we could split it,” she said. “Oh, my God, people who grow up in countries with equality!”

  The United States, a comparatively youthful nation, born of Enlightenment thinking, with promises of individual liberty at its core, has also seen its marriage rates decline steeply over the past four decades. However, the crude marriage rate, in 2012, was 6.8,9 higher than any other nation in the Americas, and than anywhere in Western Europe.

  There’s an argument to be made that Americans’ continued propensity to marry is evidence of the tenacity of patriarchal expectation in a country whose promises of liberty were false at the start, and in which true parity—for women, for people of color, for gay people—has been hard won and remains elusive.

  I believe the reverse: that, in fact, it is the progressive nature of a nation that permits continuing revisions to its bedrock institutions—its constitution, its electorate, its definition of marriage—that has allowed marriage to evolve, to become more inclusive, more equal, and potentially more appealing to more people.

  At the heart of the long American fight to challenge gender inequity have been the women who have been single by choice or by happenstance, for some protracted period or for the whole of their lives. These women (and the men who are their partners or their allies), through argument or just through their existence, have forced the country to expand to make new space for them.

  Today’s enormous population of single women is still fighting hard for that space, some in the Japanese style: by abstaining from marriages that they imagine might be unjust. One 2013 study found only 66 percent of women, as opposed to 79 percent of men, felt that being married was a necessary component of having it all, and, as journalist Amanda Hess noted, “the proportion of women who don’t prioritize relationships in their definition of success has almost doubled—from 5 percent to 9 percent—since last summer.”10 Similarly, sociologist Kathleen Gerson found, in researching her 2010 book, The Unfinished Revolution, that more than 70 percent of women would rather be unmarried than become housewives.11

  But in Gerson’s book about shifting domestic attitudes and social policy is a statistic that should give those worried about the fate of heterosexual partnership around the world hope for the United States: In addition to the 80 percent of the young American women Gerson sampled who desire egalitarian marriages in which wage earning, domestic duties, and childcare are divided equally, 70 percent of men now want the same thing.

  The women who, for centuries, have been fighting to be able to stay single longer or forever, who have been blasting new paths and new space for themselves in the world, have made an impression on their fellow citizens. In delaying marriage, they have made it more conceivable to riff on it, to do it later, to do it differently, to do it better.

  By demanding more from men and from marriage, it’s single women who have perhaps played as large a part as anyone in saving marriage in America.

  Better Marriages Through Singlehood

  In the United States, demographers continue to predict that eighty percent of Americans will marry12 at some point in their lives. As the New York Times reported, the change in marriage patterns “is more about postponement than abandonment.” While marriage has “declined precipitously among young women, both college graduates and women with less education” most “do eventually marry.”

  But the postponement of marriage has, throughout the country’s history, been one of the chief strategies to get women closer to a better match, ensuring that female adulthood is not defined only by the man to whom a woman binds herself at its start.

  Brittney Cooper, a scholar of black women’s studies, who writes about African-American female public intellectuals of the Progressive Era, pointed out that many of the groundbreaking women she studies, including educator Mary Church Terrell, and activist, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, married late for their eras, delaying unions that might have limited their reach. Cooper said that most of the African-American women in her work wrote pointedly “about having progressive husbands who supported suffrage and supported their careers.”

  Church Terrell, the daughter of slaves who would go on to work as an anti-lynching activist, and a charter member of the NAACP, was among the first African-Americans to earn a college degree, in 1884. Her father wanted her to marry and settle down, and her defiance of his wishes and subsequent pursuit of her master’s degree caused a family rift. Terrell became a Latin teacher and spent two years abroad, turning down a series of European suitors before marrying at twenty-eight. Wells had already toured Europe on an anti-lynching speaking tour and drawn the professional admiration of Frederick Douglass by the time she married at thirty-three. Wells would write of how, after she wed, her longtime friend and colleague Susan B. Anthony would “bite out” her married name, calling her only “Mrs. Barnett,” and snipping to her, “since you have gotten married, agitation seems practically to have ceased.”

  But whatever Anthony’s complaints from outside wedlock, the delay of marriage has often resulted in a building of individual capital for women, which has better allowed some to leverage demands for equity and freedoms within the institution.

  Amelia Earhart was a world-famous aviator who had broken off one engagement, and turned down publisher George P. Putnam multiple times before she finally agreed to marry him, in 1931. In a letter to her husband on the day of their wedding, Earhart, who refused to change her name, wrote, “You must know again my reluctance to marry, my feeling that I shatter thereby chances in work which means most to me . . . Please let us not interfere with the other’s work or play, nor let the world see our private joys or disagreements. In this connection I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself, now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinement of even an attractive cage.”13

  The tensions between public aspiration and wifely compliance that rightly worried Earhart have persisted into eras in which marriage has become more equitable. In 2003, Oprah Winfrey said of her multi-decade relationship with her beau, Stedman Gra
ham, “Had we gotten married we wouldn’t be together now. . . . Stedman’s a traditional Black man, but I’m in no way a traditional woman, so to take on that role just doesn’t fit.”14 The same year, she opined, “Stedman and I have a great relationship that allows me to be me in the fullest sense, with no expectations of wifedom and all that would mean.”15 It’s worth noting that all the same, Winfrey referred to Graham as her fiancé for decades.

  But women who have achieved on their own in advance, or instead, of marrying early are perhaps slightly more likely to find comparatively progressive men who encounter them, and pursue them, as independent, accomplished beings.

  One of pop star Beyoncé’s first interviews after marrying hip-hop star Jay Z, whose given name is Shawn Carter, was to Seventeen Magazine, the type of young women’s publication that fifty years ago advised them as to how to land a husband before getting too old. Beyoncé had a different message, and spoke about how, when she started dating Carter at nineteen, she intentionally postponed marriage. “I really don’t believe that you will love the same thing when you’re twenty, as you do at thirty,” she said. “So, that was my rule: before the age of twenty-five, I would never get married. I feel like you have to get to know yourself, know what you want, spend some time by yourself, and be proud of who you are before you can share that with someone else.” When Beyoncé and Jay Z did marry, in 2008, she was twenty-six, and internationally famous on her own terms.

  There is plenty of evidence today that marriage delay and higher rates of marital abstention seem to have had a positive impact on marriage quality. The states in which couples marry less frequently and at later ages—New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Illinois, and Pennsylvania—tend to boast the country’s lowest divorce rates.16 There is practically reverse symmetry for states where people marry youngest, with the exception of Utah, where Mormonism both encourages youthful unions and discourages divorce.17 In Wyoming, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee, marriage ages are low and divorce rates are high.18

  Among other things, later starts to marriage permit men and women to spend more time together, and in more diverse circumstances than matrimony. Journalist Evelyn Cunningham once said that, “Women are the only oppressed group in our society that lives in intimate association with their oppressors.” Citing that sentiment, blogger Feminist Griote wrote in 2010 of her realization, while “washing dishes in the sink that wasn’t left by me” that “I would not last six months in a marriage to a man who expected me to be his wife, his whore, his cook, his maid, and personal secretary.” In refusing to identify first, at the onset of adulthood, as maids and whores and wifeys, women break Cunningham’s cycle of cohabiting oppression.

  More than that, unmarried women alter assumptions about women by working alongside men who come to see them as colleagues and bosses; by drinking beer and arguing politics with men who come to regard them as friends; by having sex with men who (hopefully) come to understand that sex does not mean ownership. By existing on their own terms in the world, women force men to reckon with them as peers and as human beings, not simply as subordinate helpmates or sexual objects.

  As Susan B. Anthony said, in her interview with Nellie Bly, who had already served as a foreign correspondent and circumnavigated the world in record time before marrying at thirty-one, “Once men were afraid of women with ideas and a desire to vote. Today, our best suffragists are sought in marriage by the best class of men.”19

  More than a century later, Anthony’s argument, that women living independently in ways that once made them unattractive mates will eventually rearrange men’s very tastes, is in tandem with shifts described by marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, who has pointed out that female college graduates and high earners, once the women least likely to find themselves hitched, are now among the most likely to one day become wives and to enjoy long-lasting unions.20

  In part, that’s because when we delay marriage, it’s not just women who become independent. It’s also men, who, like women, learn to clothe and feed themselves, to clean their homes and iron their shirts and pack their own suitcases.

  The possibility of individual competence, leading to greater social parity, was fundamental to Anthony’s vision of how an epoch of single women would work to equalize relations between the sexes. In her single utopia, men, she predicted, would visit the homes of single women not “to count their hostesses’ chances in the matrimonial market,” but rather visit “as they do to their gentlemen’s clubs, to talk of art, science, politics, religion and reform. . . . They go to meet their equals in the proud domain of intellect.”

  It’s what 1904’s Bachelor Maid dreamt of when she wrote that the married life “of which I have permitted myself to dream contains a husband who may be an intellectual companion, who may be willing—even proud—to give me encouragement and inspiration to develop in my chosen field of work as I, in turn, would offer appreciative sympathy to him in his.” But, alas, at the time, she complained, her “various lovers have desired in me [only] a mother for their children.”

  When I married my husband in 2010, I was thirty-five and he was forty-five; we had lived a combined eighty years without each other. There are downsides to this, almost all emotional: We will almost surely have a shorter number of years together than we’d like. I am also sad that, because of our ages and a desire to have children, we didn’t get more time together on our own—to enjoy each other, by ourselves—before we had our children.

  What was undeniably true was that one of us was not simply going to subsume the other. We had our own bank accounts; we had our own dishes; we had our own careers and our own social circles; we each knew how to do laundry and we each knew how to use an electric drill.

  When you come at the work of life from a more equal starting point, tasks and responsibilities may be more appropriately apportioned to the person who is suited to them, not simply to the person who is stuck with them by dint of anatomy. In my marriage, we split the cooking, I do most of the cleaning, he does all of the laundry, we take turns with childcare. I don’t advertise us, or any couple, as an aspirational model for any other couple; one of the freedoms of improving marriage is that the institution can be more easily molded around the particular talents and desires of the particular people entering into it. What I do know is that my life is a hell of a lot better, my daily load unimaginably lighter, my marriage far more equal than either my mother’s or my grandmother’s.

  I’m not alone in this. A 2010 Pew Family Trends Research Center study revealed that 51 percent of respondents who were either married or cohabiting claimed that their relationship was closer than that of their parents. And of those who said that the relationship was better than that of the previous generation, 55 percent of women (as opposed to 46 percent of men) saw the improvement.21

  By engaging in more equitable relationships with women, men have the chance to model more equitable future relationships for their children. Victoria Peng, a twenty-two-year-old, working at a law firm, recalled how she used to rib her self-employed business owner father, whose schedule was more flexible than her corporate mother’s, for getting in touch with his feminine side when he’d pick her up from volleyball practice. Now, she said, “I want to find a man who is like my father.”

  In our epoch of female independence, men can be such kinder people, better friends, and peers. On my first traveling reporting trip after my first daughter was born, I was still breastfeeding. It was a male colleague—a competing reporter, a husband and father of two—who understood how a delayed press event might have an impact on my nursing situation. It was this male colleague who ran around the fish-processing plant where we were following the future senator Elizabeth Warren, finding me bags of ice to help keep the milk I was bringing home cold.

  These are the halting steps of progress: On the one hand, the United States still lacks paid parental leave, anything resembling early maternal support from the government; many workplaces don’t have rooms where new mothers can
breastfeed when they come back to work; and in the House of Representatives, women only got their own ladies’ room in 2011. And yet, the determination of American women to push through toward independence and parity, despite these systemic challenges, has produced an unquantifiable shift in attitude and behavior. We now work with, befriend, and partner with men who help us keep the breast milk cold.

  Between 1965 and 2011, married fathers with children under eighteen went from doing four hours of housework a week to ten; the time they spent caring for their children went from two-and-a-half hours a week to seven.22 And while there are gendered imbalances in how chores are divided—men rake the leaves and take out garbage, women do the dishes and clean bathrooms—the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s Time Use Survey found that, from 2003 to 2014, the share of men who spent time cleaning and cooking increased from 35 percent to 43 percent; in the same span, the share of women doing domestic labor on an average day decreased 54 percent to 49 percent.23 It’s far from fifty-fifty, yet a hell of a lot closer than it’s ever been before.

  Surveys have found that, amongst millennials, the generation that still remains largely unmarried, work-life balance was prioritized above pay for both men and women when they chose a job.24 A New York Times story about the rising number of men entering traditionally female professions like nursing, quoted Adrian Ortiz, who’d traded in his job as a lawyer in Mexico for a job as a bilingual kindergarten teacher in the United States, “My priorities are family, 100 percent.”25 Even some men in the most traditionally masculine-coded power positions are now more comfortable than ever acknowledging their domestic commitments. In 2015, Wisconsin Republican Representative Paul Ryan announced that his interest in taking the job of Speaker of the House—and becoming third in line to the presidency—was diminished by his desire not to “give up my family time.” As a politician, Ryan has opposed childcare subsidies and paid leave legislation that would make spending time with families more realistic for more fathers and mothers, but it marks a fairly remarkable shift in the culture when a man can cite a domestic commitment as one that might stand in the way of a powerful (if also thankless and doomed) job.