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

The preliminaries

• Throughout U.S. history, the start of adult life for women was typically marked by marriage, in part because there weren’t many appealing models of other kinds of female life.
• From 1890 to 1980, the median age of first marriage was between 20 and 22. In the 2010s, the median age of first marriage is 27, and is higher in cities.
  • In the 1960s, nearly 60% of Americans were wed by age 29.
  • These days, the number of adults younger than 34 who had never married was up to 46%, rising 12% in less than a decade. 
  • For the first time in American history, single women (including those who were never married, widowed, divorced, or separated) outnumber married women.

A brief history of marriage

• Marriage, in its traditional form, took women out of the public world–it is very effective at containing women and limiting their power, and outside forces have made life outside marriage difficult.
• In the early colonial U.S., lack of an established government led to a preoccupation with the family structure as the primary form of social control.
  • That is, unmarried women were expected to play a servile, domestic role, and never engage with the world in a way that conveyed independence.
  • This mirrored the English common law doctrine of coverture, where a woman’s legal, economic, and social identity was subsumed by the identity of the man she married.

Industrialization and education

• The advent of industrialization in the 1800s meant that many children did not need to work fields and could attend school and stay longer.
  • It also meant the proliferation of mills, many of which were staffed by young unmarried women. Domestic service was difficult and undesirable and usually left to the poorest, often women of color.
• At the same time, literacy rates increased dramatically and the expansion of schools created a need for educators.
  • In 1800, 90% of U.S. school teachers were men.
  • In 1900, 75% of them were women, and more than half of them were single.
    • Schools soon set “marriage bars,” which allowed schools to fire married women, making it largely impossible for women to continue teaching after marriage.

The Progressive Era

• This era, from about 1890 to 1920, included fights for fair labor practices and reform of the tax code and public education, and a campaign against lynching. 
• In 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment, which declared that female citizens could vote–this was an enormous victory that would change the country’s gender politics forever.
• The Depression and WWII in the 1930s and 40s drove many women into the workforce. But when soldiers returned, there was a new brand of enforced domesticity.
  • Meanwhile, the federal government underwrote loans and built a suburban infrastructure that would house millions of new families.
  • There was a mid-twentieth century push for white women not just to marry, but to marry early, before gaining a taste for independent life. 
    • By the end of the 1950s, around 60% of female students dropped out of college. 
    • In the 1960s, around half of the brides were younger than 20, and 14 million women were engaged by the time they were 17.
• While marriage rates for mid-class white women soared, for black women, mid-twentieth century conditions were very different. 
  • Since emancipation, black women had married earlier and more often than their white counterparts. After WWII, black marriage rates briefly increased.
  • While one of the foundations of expanding the middle class was the reassignment of white women to domestic roles, another was the exclusion of black women from the opportunities and communities that permitted those families to flourish.
  • Discriminatory hiring practices, low percentages of black workers in labor unions, the racial wage gap, and other questionable practices by the Veterans Administration also meant that returning black servicemen had a much harder time taking advantage of the GI BIll’s promise of college education.
  • And then there’s housing. Urban Historian Thomas Sugrue reported that, in Philadelphia, between the end of the war and 1953, only 347 of 120,000 new homes built were open to blacks.
  • Ultimately, black residents were crammed into old and run-down housing.
• All of this and other racially discriminatory practices hardened a cycle of disadvantage that made marriage less practical.
  • If black women were working all day, it was impossible to also fulfill the at-home responsibilities for which white women were celebrated. 
  • And if black men had a harder time getting education and jobs, it was harder for them to provide.
• And later, in the 1970s, the Supreme Court of the United States, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, struck down a law that prohibited selling contraception to unmarried persons.
  • This affirmed an individual’s right, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into incredibly personal matters, such as the decision whether to bear a child.

The invention of independent female adulthood

• If women could live independently, men would become less central to economic security, social standing, sexual life, and parenthood. 
• In the 1990s, not only was the marriage age rising; the marriage age was actually rising above the age of first birth.
  • Women’s ability to slow the rush of marriage was built on political, economic, and social victories won by the previous generation, during the Second Wave of the women’s movement.
• The Second Wave was not built on opposition to marriage, but rather a desire to address its suffocating circumstances.
  • Gloria Steinem
    • Gloria Steinem came to NY from Toledo, and began a successful career as a writer. By the late 1960s, she was the emblem of the era’s new possibilities for women: she was unmarried, widely traveled, professionally successful, and open about her sexual appetites.
    • “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry,” she had said, clarifying that an opposition to marriage wasn’t about rejecting men, but rather the filling out and equaling up of female life.
    • She soon became an emblem of the era, and a leader of the Second Wave.
• But, the possibility of more comfortable lives for some women came at a cost to others.
  • In the nineteenth century, industrialization alleviated white, middle-class women’s responsibilities for in-home production of food and textiles, which was grueling and incredibly difficult work.
  • Instead of community engagement, the emphasis was on family cohesion.
  • This meant the wealthy could spend less time worrying about others less fortunate than they, and blame their impoverishment on the failure to achieve the same domestic or familial sanctity.
  • Meanwhile, the cleanliness of middle-class homes, and any other time cleared for privileged women, was made possible by new waves of working women. Without servants to haul clean water and the house, or without female factory workers to produce goods, middle class homemakers wouldn’t have had time to “uplift” their homes.
  • So, while the Second Wave arrived to free many middle-class white women, many of those women continued to rely further on the low-paid labor of poorer women of color as nannies and housekeepers, rather than striking more equitable domestic bargains with their male partners.

Political power

• The expanded presence of women as independent entities also meant a redistribution of political power, which had generally been wielded by men.
• In 2012, unmarried women made up 23% of the electorate.
  • Single women helped put Barack Obama back in the White House–they voted for him by 67% to 31%, while married women voted for Mitt Romney. While white women as a whole voted for Romney over Obama, unmarried white women chose Obama over Romney by 49.4% to 38.9%.
• Politicians of all kinds are aware of the political power of the unmarried woman yet seemingly unable to understand female life outside of a marital context, and relied on a metaphor in which American women, no longer bound to men, bind themselves to government.
  • The idea that the decline in marriage–as opposed to broken social safety networks and economic policies that benefit the wealthy over the poor–is the source of inequality, has lit a fire under Republicans.
  • Yet people living alone is not the equivalent to a breakdown in civic participation in a free society. Multiple studies have shown that single people behave less selfishly within their communities than their married peers.
  • Never-married women in particular are far more likely to be politically active, signing petitions, volunteering time, and attending rallies.
  • Married adults tend to do things like volunteer for their own children’s schools, but not necessarily for organizations that don’t benefit themselves or their kin.

Cities

• Throughout history, cities typically mean jobs, and thus draw in many single people.
  • In cities, women gained a whiff of liberation and the chance to postpone their futures as economically dependent wives and mothers
• Cities also physically force people of different classes, genders, races, and religions to mix and to meet in the public spaces, which make it harder to immediately assign women with rigid class identities, which means an increased potential for personal reinvention and flexibility.
  • And for single women, with or without children, cities offer domestic infrastructure.
  • The city provides for single women the kind of services that women have, for generations, provided men. (Male participation in the public sphere has long been enabled by wives who cooked, mended, did laundry and housekeeping.)

Paid employment

• Work that permits economic autonomy, or even just an identity outside a family, is just as crucial for women as it is for men.
• Sometimes the only class of women who can be comfortably understood as being ambitious or powerful are those who are unmarried and without children.
  • For example, Oprah Winfrey, Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elea Kagan, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
  • This is in spite of the fact that men with wives and litters of children have always held powerful positions–for women, the assumption that a family must come first persists strongly.
  • The other traditionally acceptable pattern for ambitious women has been to enter the professional fray after children are grown.
• It’s difficult to discern whether academic degrees and the professional opportunities that came with them made women less desirable to men looking for submissive wives; whether education broadened hopes and ambitions, and perhaps raised the romantic standards of female students, or whether universities and careers provided escape for those already leery about entering early marriages.
• Remaining unmarried through some portion of early adulthood is closely linked with an increased ability to make more money.
  • In 2013, a college educated woman who delayed marriage until her thirties will earn $18,000 more per year than an equivalently educated woman who marries in her twenties.
    • The opposite pattern is true for men. Both college-educated and non-college-educated men earn more money if they marry early.
  • Having children enhances men’s professional standing and has the opposite impact on women’s.
    • From 1979 to 2006, men saw a 6% increase in earnings after becoming fathers; in contrast, women’s wages decreased 4% for every child.
    • The gap narrows for women in upper echelon professions, also the population that tends to marry later.
  • That women are entering universities and the workforce in large numbers doesn’t mean that they’re earning or achieving at the same pace as the men alongside them.
  • Structural impediments, from the lack of paid family leave and pay gaps, to negative attitudes about female leadership, mean that women fall behind men when it comes to earning, promotions, status, and reputation.

Moving forward

• The author believes that it is the nation’s progressive nature that pushes us to revise bedrock institutions, which is how marriage has evolved to become more inclusive, more equal, and potentially more appealing to more people.
  • 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, clean their homes, iron their shirts, and pack their own suitcases.
• And ultimately, if people think single women are looking for government to create a “hubby” state, it is worth bearing in mind that men have long enjoyed the fruits of a related “wifey state” where the government supported male independence in a variety of ways. Historically, the government has:
  • Supported white men’s home and business ownership through grants, loans, incentives, and tax breaks;
  • Allowed them to accrue wealth and offered them shortcuts and bonuses for passing it down to their children;
  • Established white men’s right to vote and thus exert control over the government and has protected their enfranchisement;
  • Bolstered the economic and professional prospects of men by depressing the economic prospects of women, thereby creating conditions where women were forced to be dependent, which in turn creates 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.
• This new independence can be punishing. 
  • Many single women are poor or struggling. Almost 50% of the 3.3 million Americans now earning minimum wage or below are unmarried women. 
    • Many of them live, often with children, in areas where unemployment, racial and class discrimination, and a drug war put many young men in prison–this makes singlehood less of a freeing choice than a necessity. 
    • More than half of unmarried young mothers with children under the age of six are likely to live below the poverty line, a rate that is five times the rate of the corresponding population of married women.
  • The following are a list of policies that must be readjusted for unmarried women to move forward into the world:
    • Stronger equal pay protections;
    • A higher federally mandated minimum wage;
    • National healthcare system;
    • More housing for single people;
    • Government-subsidized or fully funded daycare programs;
    • Mandate and subsidize paid family leave for women and men who have new children;
    • University paid sick compensation, regardless of gender, circumstance, or profession;
    • Increase, rather than decrease, welfare benefits for all Americans, acknowledging that government assistance has always been fundamental;
    • Economically supported leave time;
    • Protect reproductive rights, access to birth control, and sex education;
    • Support alternate family structures.

• The intersections of slave and marital law, and how they illustrate the ways in which political, social, and sexual power over a population can be enforced by both pressing marriage and forbidding it
• Sisterhoods and ways in which women have pushed each other into, and supported each other within, intellectual and public realms to which men rarely extended invitations, let alone equality
• The high price of motherhood–specifically, the economic ramifications, the difficulties of single motherhood, and the logical reasons for women who aren’t wealthy to have children while they’re young
• Anita Hill’s testimony about Clarence Thomas, and how the press made much of the fact that she was single
• How the journey toward legal marriage for gays and lesbians are part of the same project as women abstaining from heterosexual unions–a dismantling of the institution as it once existed, as a rigid means by which one sex could exert power over another–and a reimagining of it as a flexible union, to be entered on equal terms